God Had My Money, But He Didn't Have Me

By 2010 I'd crossed the million-dollar mark.

Five years earlier God had told me plainly: if you do what I tell you to do, you'll be a millionaire in five years. And He did it. Right on schedule. The business grew, the net worth climbed, and I could stand there and point at the number.

Here's what else was true in 2010.

I was drunk every night. I'd been drunk every night for five years. I smoked constantly. I weighed over two hundred and sixty pounds and I was tired all the time. I had a thought life I wouldn't have let anybody see. And I avoided my wife.

Cara couldn't have people over, because I always smelled like the inside of a bar mat — beer, cigars, and regret. Not that I wanted company. What I wanted was to disappear into the garage after supper, crack a dozen cold ones, and stay out there until bedtime.

I was a miserable husband. It was a lonely marriage. And I did that to her.

So how does a man obey God carefully in one area of his life and run a train wreck through every other one?

I've thought about it for years and I still don't have a tidy answer. The only thing I know for sure is this: God had my money, but He didn't have me. Money was the one thing I'd surrendered, and money was the one part of my life that was working. Everything else was a disaster.

Looking back, I can see He was blessing what I'd handed over while He got ready to deal with what I hadn't.

Things improved a little between 2010 and 2014. I got the drinking under control, mostly to prove to myself I wasn't an alcoholic. Every year was slightly better than the one before it. Churches started asking me to preach again, and I said yes, and I'd preach and pray and prophesy and drive out of town thinking I'd probably helped somebody.

Then, once I was well out of sight, I'd light up a smoke and peace like a river would flood my soul.

I told myself I was doing fine.

In July of 2014 our family went to a camp meeting in Red Deer. Four kids under seven, good children's ministry, a decent lineup of speakers. That's the whole reason we went.

My life has a before and an after, and that week is the line between them.

It was there I first heard Bobby Conner preach. I'd been told he was larger than life and the half hadn't been told. One minute the room was laughing until it hurt and the next we were all wiping our eyes. He never used a note. The Word just came out of him — verse after verse, story after story — and I had never in my life seen the Bible come alive in a man like that.

I sat there with a full-blown case of holy jealousy, praying, Lord, whatever he's eating, I'll take two servings.

And while I was watching him, I had a vision. Or the most anointed daydream a man ever had — I'm not going to argue about the terminology.

I saw Bobby Conner as a tower. A hundred feet tall, built out of thousands of red bricks. And carved into the face of every single brick was a verse of Scripture.

And I understood what I was looking at. That's why he preaches like that. He didn't stumble into it. He didn't get handed it. He'd spent decades putting the Word into himself one verse at a time, and the man I was watching had been built out of them, brick by brick.

Then came a whisper.

You can do that too, Steve.

And something in me shouted back before I had time to be sensible about it: Yes I can! And yes I will!

Bobby hadn't said one word about memorizing Scripture that day. Didn't matter. I walked out of that room knowing exactly what God was after.

That same week, He also finally dealt with the smoking — but that's a story for another day, and it cost me a good deal more than a notebook. 

I went to a Chapters bookstore that very day and bought a little pocket notebook. Three hundred blank pages.

I called it my Marinade.

I started filling it with Scripture. A few verses, then dozens, then hundreds. And with each one I made the same promise: I will memorize this, and I will meditate on it for the rest of my life.

Not a Bible reading plan. A Bible devouring plan. The goal was never to get through it — it was to get it through me.

This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success. — Joshua 1:8

But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and in His law he meditates day and night. He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither; and in whatever he does, he prospers. — Psalm 1:2-3

Once I had a verse memorized, I'd marinate in it. Chew on it for hours while I drove, while I worked, while I ate my lunch. Day and night was the goal — always something simmering.

And that's what a marinade does, isn't it. It doesn't sit on the outside. It gets in and changes the flavor of the thing.

Here's what I did not expect.

Within a few weeks it dawned on me that I wasn't struggling with lust anymore. Not a flicker. The thoughts that had been part of my furniture for years were just gone, and here's the strange part — I don't remember trying. It was like somebody quietly shut the tap off while I wasn't looking.

Then I noticed I'd started liking my family again. Actually noticing them. The sound of the kids laughing. The way Cara smiled when she wasn't carrying the weight of my nonsense. Kindness started coming out of me, and I wasn't manufacturing it.

The Word didn't just wash my brain. It rewired my heart.

And yes — the business doubled that year. Millions more than the year before. No new strategy, no extra hours. I didn't start meditating to get rich and I'd be careful about telling you to. But I'd be lying if I left it out.

Now here's the part I feel strongly about.

There's a message going around that says don't focus on your sin, focus on God's love, and once you really understand how much the Father loves you, the sin will sort itself out on its own.,

It sounds beautiful. I don't believe it, and I don't think the fruit backs it up.

I want to be careful here, because I'm not talking about people who doubt God's love. I'm talking about me. Even in my worst years in that garage, I never once doubted that God loved me. I felt His acceptance the whole time. And it did not make me holy. It made me comfortable.

What changed me was the Word getting into me and staying there.

Wisdom and stewardship took me a long way — those were stairs, and I climbed a lot of them. But what happened after that summer felt like stepping into an elevator.

The best thing about the marinade is that there's nothing special about it and anybody can do it.

You don't need a degree, or a gifting, or somebody's hands on your head. You need a cheap notebook and one verse you're willing to carry around with you until you've stopped reading it and started thinking it.

Write it down today. Say it in the truck tomorrow. That's a brick.

The tower takes a while.

This is one chapter of my book Dependently Wealthy — the story of how a broke, insecure preacher who knew nothing about business found breakthrough by learning to stop negotiating with God. Available in paperback and audio on Amazon.