Budgets

We all budget our money.  For some people it is a formal affair with columns and lines and debits and credit.  For others it is kept in their head.  I've got so much money and it needs to last me to payday.  I think for most people, it is someplace in the middle, but we all budget.

I have been involved with budgets at home, at the school and the church.  One thing that I've noticed is that there are really two types of line items in a budget.  There are limits and anticipations.  In limits we set boundaries for our expenses.  We will spend so much on Christmas presents, but no more.  We have control over these things.  In larger organizations it might be office supplies or advertisement.  When the money is gone, you stop spending and due without.

Anticipation line items have no limits.  They cost what they cost and we are going to pay it.  Think of the propane to heat the house.  We try to control our use.  We shop for the best price.  But in the end, we are going to heat the house and propane is out option.  We try to anticipate what it will cost and adjust the other lines accordingly.

I remember working on the church budget one year.  The economy was down and there were a lot of people reaching out to the church for help.  The line in the budget called "benevolence" was over budget.  The decision was to keep on helping people.  We started looking for other places to trim the budget and trusted in God to provide the rest.  

There are other things that we budget besides our money.  Time is one.  We can spend so much of our time on work and so much on relaxing and so much on chores, etc.  While we all have twenty four hours in the day, how we spend them is up to us.  We have to be careful which items fall into the anticipation and which into the limits.  If our priorities are off, we can spend most of our time on that which is least important to us and leave little left for our highest priorities.

One facet of our lives that we can't budget through is our character.  Even if we could add up the rights and the wrongs, having a positive balance might be good enough for us, but not for God.  It doesn't matter if we treat our own good works as limited expenditures, we will do this and this and this.  Or if we treat them as anticipated expenditures, doing all that we can where ever we can; it doesn't matter.  We can never. ever. ever.  do enough to shift the balance back to the positive.  Our account with God is always in the red.  And that is the amazing thing.

Watch this clip from Pastor Chris.  It's a pretty short clip today.  So watch it.

We can never do enough good deeds to get our character budget out of the red.  No matter what we do it is never enough.  Following the Christian path involves surrendering to the will of God.  And then in our imperfect ways, try to do the best we can all the time trusting in God to make up the difference.

God takes our account from the red to the black when we surrender ourselves to His will.  And that is a pretty good deal.