Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. Jake is in Des Moines, Iowa. Hi, Jake.
How are you? Hey, guys. It's an honor to speak with you. Thanks for having me.
Our pleasure. How can we help, sir? Yeah, so I'm 35 years old, have no debt, and I'm about to step into Baby Step 6. And my question is, you talk about Baby Step 7, living and giving like no one else.
I have no problem with the giving aspect of things. The part that is a little tricky for me to wrap my mind around is the living like no one else because I'm a pastor. And so to be stepping into Baby Step 7, hopefully here in the next five or six years, I'm trying to imagine life in my 40s living like no one else while being a pastor and living in the community of people who have paid for my financial success, you could say. I don't know how else you would put it, but how should I think through that as I look forward to the next five or 10 years?
Well, don't muzzle the ox as he treads out the grain. You probably read that scripture, right? Yeah. And a worker is worthy of his hire.
You probably read that scripture, right? So are you a good pastor and you're worth what they pay you? I sure hope so. Then if you use that money wisely in Christianity, we would call that good stewardship, wouldn't we?
I think you're modeling for those people what the results of good stewardship are, that it ends up with wealth. But we're taught by Karl Marx, not by Jesus, that wealth is evil. Wealth is not evil. People are evil, particularly some of them in your church.
I'm kidding. Not much. But yeah. So you're always going to have a hater whether you win or you lose if you do it at scale.
If you lose, you weren't a good steward and you're horrible and you worked your whole life and you have nothing to show for it. And we call that being a good steward. That's not a good steward. That means you did a bad job handling your money.
So you're supposed to model for your congregation how to be a good husband, how to be a good dad, right? Right. How to be a great leader. We're supposed to model in Christianity.
It's called a witness. We call... And yet my friend Craig Groeschel says, why is it that wealth is the only blessing from God we're supposed to apologize for? And I've got several friends that are pastors that are a decade and a half ahead of you and they're facing the exact same thing because they have systematically carefully invested in their 401ks and in their Roth IRAs and in their retirement programs.
And some of them bought real estate carefully and they don't have jet airplanes. They're not on TV. You know, it's none of that junk. They're just good guys as a pastor and they've been careful with their income and most of them are millionaires because they did the stuff I teach.
But now there's always some doober that says a pastor should never be a millionaire. Yeah, that's what I want. I want my pastor to be broke and stupid. No, I don't either.
I want my... You know, pastors should never... Listen, I want my pastor, I want his marriage to be something I can look up to. I want his kids to be something I can look up to.
I want the way he handles money to be something I can look up to because obviously the book he is reading is having an effect on his life. And I want to know more about what that book called the Bible says then. But not if you're out, you know... But you're always going to be criticized, Jake, whether it's about your message or the car you drive.
Exactly. There's got to be someone out there. You know, you have to get... If you're a Christian, you have to drive a used Accord because that's what Jesus said.
They were all in one Accord. Oh, that one still gets me. This is The Ramsey Show.