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SPIRITUAL FINANCIAL MANEUVERING
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The Heritage of the Seed of Abraham
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Believers are "ingrafted" into the lineage of Abraham
and are heirs to God's Promises to him
Hank McIntyre
Romans 11:17 - ...you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in [into the lineage of Abraham] among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root...
Christians are meant to receive the full inheritance that God has promised to Abraham's seed. We are the "Ingrafted branches"…Yet there is a manner and a method to the original Seed of Abraham that a lot of us overlook:
The ability to take the dirt and rocks and critters of the earth and parlay them into a positive cash flow is essential if we are to live the life that we were designed for. We are not to be in bondage to our physical surroundings - they are to be managed, tamed, and exploited by us. The reason that the human race is not a species who just wallows around in the mud and pick bugs off of one another is that, at some point, God revealed to man the ability to distinguish diamonds from dirt, gold from granite... and the techniques of presenting them in a way as to make other people crave them and trade for them.
Exodus 31:1-6 - Then the Lord said to Moses, "See, I have chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts- to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of craftsmanship. Moreover, I have appointed Oholiab son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan, to help him. Also I have given skill to all the craftsmen to make everything I have commanded you...
There's a way to properly maneuver around in this life that will get us the things we need from it. God set the principles into motion, and we can study them by reading the history of God's people. We can develop an instinct for these principles by meditating on God while we examine a financial problem. And we can develop a habit of prosperity by avoiding getting excited by wealth: just manage it unemotionally as one of life's basic chores.
Matthew 25:27-29 - You should have put my money with the exchangers, and then at my return I would have received what I had with interest. Therefore, take the thousand dollars from him and give it to he who has ten thousand dollars. For everyone who has shall be given even more, and he will have abundance. But from he who has not, even what little he has shall be taken from him.
"Wealth doesn't come without work," is the constant comment we hear whenever prosperous man boasts of his prosperity. But: hard work does not produce wealth unless you do it as part of a wisely engineered plan, with strings that are firmly attached to the "hard work!" We all know people who have "worked hard" but never achieved wealth. Maybe you're one of them... I know I was! I just popped into a factory and said, "Where's the job?" Naturally I ended up on the job that everyone else there avoided like the plague. And, also naturally, I got paid as little as they could get away with. I didn't know about the "How Great I Am" resumes and other persuasive tricks that added the necessary spice to selling yourself in landing a job. Most of us never adopted this into our lifestyles. Schools and parents train kids to "not think too highly of yourself," that we're all mortal men and women, and "everyone is expendable." So, we get to thinking that it's "noble" to avoid boasting about ourselves, and to belittle ourselves in cheap self-deprecating humor in order to be sociable. And then ridicule any newcomer who speaks as though he still has some residue of hope left inside of him. "You'll find out!" the downtrodden will "warn" the neophyte. They don't mean any harm when they demoralize others (probably) - they just have never seen anything beyond their own miserable lives. And just about all of us came out of the same cookie-cutter: the Failure Factory: Traditional Education and Traditional Parenting.
And guess who we'll end up working for:
There are people who do not feel obliged to appear "worthless" in the eyes of others. They do not consider it "noble" to belittle themselves. They're not any better than anyone else (they're often worse) - but even a brat who sees himself as a "lord and master" will appear to be one - if he is unchallenged by the self-effacing hard worker. But these "brats" are not practicing any brilliant scheme. They just fell into it. They grew up with the impression that everything they say is worth listening to, and that everything they did was worthy of applause. They don't realize that they're practicing any special technique... they're just responding to their coddled upbringing the way we responded to our demeaning upbringing. But the solution is not just mimicking those who appear to be better off. The real solution is to understand the laws that God set into motion which allow a person to gradually develop prosperity.
PERSEVERENCE
Holding onto your dream even when everything around you is changing frantically: God instilled this in His people from the time they left their enslavement under Pharaoh, right up to the present day. It is a subconscious sense that there is an Ultimate Stabilizing Force in life, and that if you hold to your objective continuously, even when all outward circumstances are in chaos, ultimately you will see the day when that Stabilizing Force brings the chaos back into order and sanity. Then you will have the wealth that you would have otherwise squandered when everyone else was panicking. You can't develop a confidence in working with wealth when you're looking at the world around you. Worldly conditions always look unstable and threatening - because, without intervention from God, they are! We can only develop a confidence in working with wealth when we can see into the unseen world of God's patterning of events - the power which underlies the apparent "chaos" in the visible world around us.
This doesn't mean we will know the precise reasons behind everything we're dealing with. And we won't know the details of the solution before it happens. Rather it is a confidence that the "Flow" from God will bring things around as long as we keep hammering away at our given chores. This confidence is based on a Reality that other people cannot see. Which is why it's so frustrating for a worldly person when they deal with someone who's operating with this inner "Flow" of confidence: to the worldly eye, the man in the Godly "Flow" appears to be "cunning", or has inside information from an unseen world. But the person in the "Flow" is practicing Godly Financial Maneuvering: and it will make him appear to be oddly stubborn. Even arrogant. And the Maneuverer probably doesn't even know that he's operating that way... that subconscious "knowing" has always been a part of his view of the world. He, on the other hand, can't figure out why the worldly person is such a thickhead - impulsive and dull-witted: except to conclude that he's just a fool born to be at the mercy of wiser men.
A worldly person can accept the idea of having perseverance in their business dealings. But it's always a struggle. They have to warp all of their mental inclinations, and bend them around this idea of painfully "waiting it out". There's no intuition or spiritual insight on their part. These people often become successful - but they also become miserable, bitter misers who have to distort any ability of enjoying life into the singular goal of seizing money. But there's a motion to acquiring wealth. It's like a dance.
Worldly-thinking people see the work of acquiring wealth in straight lines : Find out where the money is, find a way to get it, then make sure no one else gets it. But this is out of step with the way in which nature replenishes itself: Consuming some of the crop, planting some of the seed, and producing more of a crop for next season. And knowing the right times and seasons for doing each. It is not frantic - it is a rhythm, a dance with the flow of life. With our subconscious inner-knowing of that Ultimate Stabilizing Force, we can maneuver through life's dealings in a "dance" made up of semi-circles instead of straight lines: Every time a change comes up, we change directions without stress. We don't know beforehand what the change is going to be - we're just ready to make the change as intuition lets us know it's time to do so. We know that, even though we have a specific plan, there'll be a need to change our direction on one day or another. Setbacks arise. We didn't get the crop we planted for, or the wealth that we worked for. The worldly mind sees this as a dead-end. The spiritual mind understands that he has to dance a semi-circle around it, maybe into a blind alley. But he's not so fixated on the failure that he's unable to seize another item that's available, maybe to hold for a future trade.
Spiritual Financial Maneuvering makes you emotionally unattached to the item you are pursuing. You can't crave things: That will put you into the control of the seller. Your subconscious awareness of the Ultimate Stabilizing Force reminds you that no one item in life is that great that you cannot live without it. So you dance around that, and leave the seller to stew in his own juices, while you work out a deal for another crop that is available. It's not what you originally wanted, but it's all you have to work with now... and it will become a part of your overall wealth. It is gold to put in your storehouse for future use. (There's no ego-gratification from this - it's just ordinary management of material. No emotionalism.) You don't know the physical outcomes of each of these deals. But you know the dance-motions you have to perform to set the pattern of wealth into a slowly developing tendency.
At the end of the day, the Maneuverer's satisfaction does not derive from possessing the thing he set out to acquire when the day began. You don't scream into the mirror, " I'll get what I set out to get come hell or high water!" That kind of ego-craving keeps you in financial bondage, acquiring things so you'll feel like a "go-getter" - until you end up living in a dumpster somewhere.
Instead, your satisfaction comes from knowing that you have set the dynamic into motion that will - eventually - lead you to prosperity. As you navigate these choppy waters, you feel the fuel of increase working in your life. It is invisible to the world, but it is more certain to you than the visible goods in others' possession. Their's will get repossessed tomorrow - most of the world is going into hock to get their stuff now. But for the Maneuverer, tomorrow is when he gets his stuff - and possess it without any enslaving liens, debt, or interest.
A Spiritual Financial Maneuverer would rather sell things out of his own pushcart, as his own business, than work for someone else.
© Hank McIntyre
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