Financial obedience is better than sacrifice

By Robert Netzly, Op-ed contributor Tuesday, December 31, 2019

God doesn’t need your money, but He does command your obedience.

Droves of Christian investors are discovering biblically responsible investing (BRI) for the first time as the BRI movement continues to gain momentum around the country and around the globe. These investors are learning the hard truth that they have been investing God’s money – and it’s all God’s money, right? – into businesses directly profiting from and supporting some of the vilest forms of depravity that the human mind can conjure.

It is currently the norm for the portfolios of millions of Christians around the world to be invested in abortion drug manufacturing, pornography sales, LGBT activism, human trafficking infested supply chains and the list goes on.

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And then we give that money to God on Sunday morning and expect that He is pleased with our offering.

Hear me right, my heart bleeds with compassion for my brothers and sisters and echoes the prayer of Christ on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), because not long ago that was me. I know the sting and sorrow of that conviction personally as it was only by the mercy of God that He caused me to stumble across the ugliness of what I was investing His money in, and what I was profiting from.

The Israelites in the Old Testament had the same problem. Over generations, the covenant people of God had lost their way. For some Israelites, theirs was a deliberately defiant disobedience. They knew the commands of God and they purposefully chose not to obey.

For others, like me and many Christian investors today, they simply were unaware. They had been “conformed to the pattern of the world” (Rom. 12:2) and were ignorant of what God expected of them as His people. Even though these Israelites were still adhering to the sacrificial system of worship with varying degrees of faithfulness, God was not pleased with their sacrifices. They brought their bulls, their rams, their doves and grain, but that wasn’t what God wanted. He wanted their heart and the obedient life that flows from a dedication to loving God above all else.

Hear God’s word to His people through the prophet Samuel, “’Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams’” (1 Samuel 15:22).

The danger for Christian investors wrestling with a newfound conviction over their investments is to seek to justify their investment in companies that profit from pornography (such as Amazon, Netflix, Roku, Dish Network and others), promote abortion (such as Pfizer, Intel, Bank of America and others), and sponsor LGBT activism (such as Wells Fargo, Target, T-Mobile, AT&T and others) by dedicating the returns from these investments as gifts to the Lord.

More than once I have heard well-meaning Christians declare that they have decided to continue to invest in companies involved in immoral activities so that they can give the profits to God. Their logic is that by doing so they are operating like a modern day Robin Hood of Christendom, profiting from the evil and giving to the holy, like some sort of spiritual money laundering scheme.

But there is a problem with this approach: God doesn’t want tainted gifts of sacrifice, He wants holy gifts of obedience. These believers confuse sacrifice with obedience, just as the Israelites did in Samuel’s day.

God makes it very clear He detests money earned from immoral activity and forbids His people from offering such ill-gotten gain to Him saying, “You must not bring the earnings of a female prostitute or of a male prostitute into the house of the LORD your God to pay any vow, because the LORD your God detests them both” (Deuteronomy 23:18). And elsewhere the Bible teaches that it would be better to earn lower returns than to support injustice, “Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues with injustice” (Proverbs 16:8).

Brothers and sisters, we must pay very close attention to what God is saying here. He would rather us give Him nothing than give Him an unholy offering. Better yet, God would rather us “learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause” (Isaiah 1:17) with our finances and with our entire lives, and give Him the fruit of those good works, to the praise of His glorious grace.

It starts by learning what you are actually invested in from a biblical morals perspective, and you can find out for free at inspireinsight.com. Once you discover what issues are lurking in your portfolio, you can prayerfully make the changes necessary to transform your investment account into a God-glorifying financial engine that pursues righteous revenues instead of ill-gotten gain.

Let’s give Him holy gifts of obedience that are as worthy of His holy name as we possibly can by His grace. Such offerings are truly a pleasing aroma to our Lord.