We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

The Beauty and Necessity of Margins

Summer sun [explored]

Nikos Koutoulas via Compfight

Bev Murrill wrote a piece over on the She Loves blog about how we live with money based on a story from the Book of Ruth. Do you live on the very edge of your earnings? For some of us we are just scraping by, barely able to put food on the table: this article is not directed at you. But for many of us, we’re living with no financial margin as a result of choices we’ve made. Is there any financial margin in your life? Could there be? I hope you’ll check out the entire article here.

Excerpts from Bev’s post:

So many of us are in overload as far as our cost of living is concerned. We have many, many needs, and those needs cost money. We need that awesome car that will make heads turn. We need a house to suit our status. Our holidays become more exotic and expensive with every salary rise. Our credit cards are maxed out and we can only just manage to pay the interest. We live to the limits of our budget, the very edges of our fields. And then we grieve because we see real and desperate needs—the deep, grinding poverty of the world around us—and we turn away and sigh, or cry or walk on by because we have no way of helping. We’ve stripped our vineyards bare.

God doesn’t require us to be poor in order to please Him. He gets no glory or pleasure in His people being impoverished, but we are such extreme creatures that we legalistically veer erratically from one side of the Christian perspective on finances to the other. For many people, it’s either a feast or a famine. We think we should have nothing or everything, but that’s not what God is saying. He wants to bless us above and beyond our immediate needs, but He doesn’t want us to use all that blessing up on ourselves and our own stuff.

Related Reading

Lighten Up: Unexpected Generosity

When have you experienced unexpected generosity? And another good question is: when have you extended unexpected generosity to someone else? Let’s surprise someone with some of that today.

Is America God’s Favored Nation?

Bart via Compfight Is money a sign of God’s blessing? If so then the more you have the more blessed of God you are. If a church has more money, then more of God’s favor is on it. If a country is wealthy, then we can claim God’s favored status. But is this the way…

Are Christians Required to Give 10% of Their Income to the Church?

Question: I and my husband have become increasingly uncomfortable with the many sermons on tithing we’ve been recently hearing at our church. Our pastor insists we tithe 10% to the church regardless of what else we give to other ministries. It seems like it has been reduced to a formula: Give ten percent and be blessed…

Lighten Up: Happy Black Friday

Be careful out there folks.

Are Christians supposed to tithe?

Question: I and my husband have become increasingly uncomfortable with the many sermons on tithing we’ve been recently hearing at our church. Our pastor insists we tithe 10% to the church regardless of what else we give to other ministries. It seems like it has been reduced to a formula: Give ten percent and be…

How Much Is Enough?

Richard Beck over at Experimental Theology wrote a reflection on insights he gained from the book How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky. He points out how the advent of money changed the way we view our needs and made it easier to hoard without noticing it. It’s a…