The Man Who Kept His Wallet Dry

A few years ago I was in my prayer cabin at The Altar — the place where I spend my mornings — when a picture opened up in my spirit.

I saw a Christian businessman. Sharp suit, nice watch, the whole package. He loved the Lord. He'd given his life to Christ, and now it was time to be baptized. He was stepping down into the water where I was standing, waiting to baptize him in the name of the Lord.

I started lowering him into the water.

And halfway down, he remembered his wallet was still in his pocket.

His eyes went wide. He panicked, reached into his suit jacket, yanked the wallet out, and shot his arm straight up over his head — and down he went. Whole body under. Wallet held high and perfectly dry.

I brought him back up. And I heard the Holy Spirit say:

Dunk him again — and make sure I get his money this time.

I've thought about that man for years now, and I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read this as a story about a greedy fellow who wouldn't part with his cash.

That's not what I saw.

He wasn't a hypocrite. He genuinely loved Jesus. He was in the water on purpose — nobody dragged him in there. He'd said yes to everything he understood himself to be saying yes to.

He just had one hand out of it.

And he didn't even plan it that way. It was reflex. He remembered on the way down, and his arm went up before he had time to think about it, because that's what your body does with the thing you've decided is yours.

That's the part that ought to bother us. Because a man who decides in advance to hold something back is at least being honest with himself. This fellow found out what he was holding back on the way underwater.

Here's what I've come to believe about baptism.

We treat it as a ceremony. A public declaration. Something we do once, in front of people, usually in a nice shirt, and then we've done it.

But baptism is a burial. That's the whole picture. You go down as one thing and you come up as another, and what makes it a burial is that everything goes under. That's what the word means — full submersion. Not a sprinkle. Not a symbolic dab on the forehead. Under.

So the question isn't whether you got baptized. Plenty of people did.

The question is what came up dry.

For that man it was his wallet. It's not always money. For some it's a career they've never once put on the table. For some it's a relationship they know isn't right and have quietly filed under "not up for discussion." For some it's a plan for their life they've been running since they were nineteen and have never actually surrendered — they've just asked God to bless it.

I had areas of my life that stayed dry for years while I called myself a surrendered man. I wasn't lying. I just hadn't gotten wet all the way through yet.

Now here's why this matters for money in particular, and it's not the reason you think.

I'm not writing to guilt anybody into giving. God doesn't need your money and neither do I.

It's this: the man in the water was about to miss what was on the other side.

There's a way of living where you own your resources and you give God a portion — a good and biblical portion — and He blesses you regularly for it. That's a real thing and there's nothing wrong with it.

And there's another way, where you own nothing at all, you manage everything on His behalf, and you go where He points, dollar by dollar. That's not the same life. It's a harder one. It's also the one where things start happening that you can't explain and can't take credit for.

You can't get to the second one with your arm out of the water.

I'll be honest with you about how I know this.

My wife and I are not clever with money. We own an oilfield service company that does millions of dollars a year and we have other investments besides, and I'd love to tell you we got there by running spreadsheets and reading the market. We didn't. I admire the people who do — I make my kids listen to Dave Ramsey because the man is full of wisdom — but my financial strategy would make Dave's head explode.

Jesus has been our financial planner. He's very good at it. And His plan has always been the same five words: just do what I say.

That's not me being cute or spiritual. It's just what happened. We didn't have what it took to succeed financially without supernatural intervention, and we got some.

But you don't get instructions for what you don't own.

That's the trade. The man who owns his money gets to make his own decisions about it, and he'll do about as well as his own wisdom allows. The man who owns nothing gets told what to do — and that's a far better deal than it sounds, because the One doing the telling can see around corners you can't.

So let me ask you the question the Holy Spirit asked about that businessman.

What's still dry?

Not what you'd say in a service. What's actually never gone under. What have you carefully kept above the water line your whole Christian life while the rest of you got soaked and you called it surrender?

You already know. You knew before you got to the end of that sentence.

Put your arm down.

This story opens my book Dependently Wealthy — the story of how a broke, insecure, unlikely preacher who knew nothing about business found financial breakthrough, not by being brilliant, but by learning what it means to be dependently wealthy. It's available in paperback and audio on Amazon.