Prayer and Your Finances

While prayer should be an integral part of every aspect of your life, I doubt that many people associate prayer with their personal finances. Sure there are many people in the world today praying that God will make them rich. They pray for a new job, a bigger house, a larger bank account and even ask God to give them the winning numbers for their lottery tickets. It’s easy to ask God to give us more, but do we ever ask God how we should be managing what He has already given us?

King Solomon was likely the richest man of his day. He lived in a massive palace (1 Kings 7:2) that few could even imagine. He received annual incomes of gold, silver and other precious items. Yet none of Solomon’s wealth came because he prayed that God would bless him financially. In fact, Solomon prayed that God would give him neither riches nor poverty.

“Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me.” Proverbs 30:8.

However, when Solomon prayed for wisdom, God also blessed him with wealth and riches.
“Wisdom and knowledge is granted unto thee; and I will give thee riches, and wealth, and honour, such as none of the kings have had that have been before thee, neither shall there any after thee have the like.” II Chronicles 1:12.

God blessed Solomon with great wealth, but also gave him wisdom to know how to use that wealth. However, in today’s world many of us lack the wisdom we need to handle the finances that God has given us.

Most individuals will be faced with several major buying decisions in their lives – such as when they buy a house or a car. These are the types of major financial decisions that you should not only pray about, but it would also be a good idea to counsel with someone like your pastor as well.

In recent years, too many people have been quick to spend money without even pausing to consider the potential consequences. Unfortunately, Christians have been just as hasty to spend money without regard to their role as stewards of God’s money. As a consequence of hasty spending decisions, millions of individuals have found their world crashing in on them over the last year.

Of course praying over the major decisions in your life seems obvious and I’m sure many of you reading this article have already done that. But after praying about which house to buy or which car to purchase, do you pray about how you should spend the rest of your money? It’s not just the big-ticket items that you should pray about, but also the little ones.

While I’m not necessarily advocating praying over whether or not you should buy a hamburger at McDonald’s or not, it is important to remember that God requires you to be a good steward over all the finances He has given you.

Are you spending money on things that you know God wouldn’t approve of?

If Jesus were paying your bills or setting your budget, would He make the same choices that you are?

As Christians, we are striving to live as Jesus would live. This is easy to translate into our church attendance, our relationships with other saints of God, our relationship with the world, but it is just as valid with our financial lives as well. We should even be striving to spend our money as Jesus would.

I have to believe that if we as Christians would pray more about how to spend our money, we would make much better spending decisions. We would likely have less debt and more peace as impulsive buying is replaced by prayerful consideration.