Recession Proof: The Equity Equation with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaChurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

It's good to see you guys.

If you're new with us, my name's Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta, and we are in week two of our recession proof series.

Now, every week we'll stand alone, but it is a series that is building over time.

So if you missed last week and you are engaged by what we talk about today, I'd really encourage you to get caught up.

You can do that on our website, metachurch.tv, or you can go to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash metachurch.

We're in this series specifically about our finances.

And one of the reasons is because over the last year, a huge percentage of the prayer requests that have come forward after service, that have emailed into us are about financial stress and financial struggles.

And it's no wonder you guys know that we're in one of the worst economic climates in the last 40 years.

We looked at this uh last week.

We'll look at it again in August of this year.

Gasoline was up 26% year over year, electricity up 20%, food and beverages up 11% year over year, with some grocery necessities up as much as 30%.

Uh everything is inflated, which means things cost more, which means that your money doesn't go as far.

And so all of us have gotten quite a bit poorer this year, and for many of us, we were already struggling financially, already buried under debt, already lacking skill sets in how to manage our money.

Uh we didn't really like have a sense of our money working for us.

It's like we work for our money, and it's not like we own things, it's like things own us.

And so we really started digging into this.

And in week one, we got to the core issue and we talked about our desires.

Our culture inflates our desires through c comparison across basically everyone in the world through social media.

Influencers use comparison to drive fear, fear that you don't have enough, or you're not enough, or that you're missing out, that fear leads us to insecurity.

And when we feel insecure, we are primed to try and find our security from the goods and services that people are trying to sell us.

Our desires are inflated, and at the core of the issue, we don't actually have a money problem, we have a desire problem.

That's some important context to today.

Today we're going to a much higher level of practicality.

And, you know, I don't really know exactly what people are looking for every Sunday when you come in here, but what I do know is every time we go into a sermon or a series of sermons that are really, really practical, we can sometimes get pushback from people who are wanting more spiritual depth, and they really want to dive into some of the difficult passages of scripture and exegete all the words line by line.

And so here's my encouragement if you're a little more focused on getting that out of Sunday mornings.

All true spiritual depth manifests itself in practicality.

Let me say that again.

All truly deep spiritual things manifest themselves in practical ways in your life.

Scripture says this true and undefiled religion, like the purest spiritual experience you can have, is helping widows and orphans in their distress.

What is that saying?

That the true measure of the depth of your spiritual experience is how well it plays out in the practical implications of your life.

And you know this money is highly personal, it's highly emotional, and for the majority of us, our money is in control of our lives.

We are not in control of our money.

We start with a belief at MetaCurch that you were created by God on purpose and you were instilled by God with purpose.

And money is one of the biggest things in this world that can sabotage the significant life that you were created to live.

I want to set a little more context because I know this feels personal.

And for so many of us, we are in such a financial hole that this can be a very depressing conversation.

And so let me just remind you that as we look at the facts and as we dig into the wisdom of Scripture, we do not come here to point fingers at each other.

We come here to try and orient our lives towards God and the purposes that He has for us, including how we steward our finances and all of our other resources.

We are gonna turn the corner into a super practical yet hopefully powerful conversation today.

My message is called the Equity Equation.

The equity equation.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you and we thank you for loving us.

And we just come uh with open hands, open minds, open hearts.

I pray that as we've set aside this time on our Sunday morning, that we would just lay down any pride, any fear.

God, that your word would cut through any confusion, that we could come here not as a religious exercise to check some box, but we could come and get very honest and allow you to do a work in our life.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

And if you're ready to learn the equity equation, say amen.

Amen.

This series is rooted in a very cool letter that we have in the Christian scriptures, a letter called First Timothy.

It was written by the Apostle Paul, who is kind of the dominant spiritual figure at that time.

And he was writing to a younger pastor named Timothy.

And in 1 Timothy 6, he gives him some incredible financial advice.

He says this in verse 9 but those who want to be rich fall into temptation, they fall into a trap, they fall into many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge people into ruin and destruction.

This culture that we live in, narcissistic, self-centered, desire, overly inflated desire culture, this is a stark warning to us.

This kind of living, this soul focus on being rich, and more specifically on being viewed as rich, it will plunge people.

It is a temptation, it is a trap, plunge you into ruin and destruction.

Verse 10, for the love of money, the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and by craving it, some have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

Verse 10 is one of the most misquoted verses, maybe in all of scripture, because what you hear a lot is money is the root of all evil.

As if a printed paper, dollar bill or some metal coins themselves are inherently evil.

And that is a misquote.

What Paul actually says is the love of money, when you attach it to verse 9, this deep, insatiable desire to be rich and to be seen as rich.

And so here's the question.

And remember, that this is what we do.

If you're new at MetaCurch, we don't come here to just sit in the seats and sing some songs and check a box and feel a little bit better about ourselves.

We come here to get brutally honest so that we open ourselves up to God doing a work in our lives.

And we oriented ourselves in brutal honesty last week by just acknowledging that for almost all of us, our desires are inflated, right?

That's the culture we live in.

Today, I want to ask a question and I want us to be honest.

Do you want to be rich?

You don't have to answer out loud.

Do you want to be rich?

Now I know what the right answer is on Sunday morning.

Pastor, all I need is some beans and some blessings, you know?

And I'm good, Pastor.

That's all I need.

But unfortunately for y'all, I follow most of you on Instagram, okay?

We want to be rich.

And if you, you know, just pulled like a random 1,000 Americans, at least 999 of those thousand are gonna say, Well, heck yeah.

Who doesn't want to be rich?

And everything pushes us to that.

And and all the songs, like like like Celeste just sang about, all the songs are pushing that kind of lifestyle of flashy affluence, right?

And so we want to be rich and we live for that, and it takes up a lot of our mental capacity, and we think about it a lot, and we want to look rich, and so we get the right things and we filter them the right way, and we write the right caption, and we make our net worth seem like it's a little bit higher than it actually is on Instagram, because we can get away with it, because we want to be rich, and we lose a little bit of sleep uh at night because we're anxious that we don't have enough, and we're thinking about all of the things that we've been searching for on Facebook Marketplace every day, all day for the last three weeks.

We want to be rich, and more importantly, we want to be seen as rich.

Now, in scripture, there's nothing, if you really read it in its context, that says you have to be poor.

Money is not the root of evil.

It is okay to have things, and depending on your unique financial situation, it's okay to have nice things.

However, what does Paul say?

Those who want to be rich, they fall into a trap.

And this could be a whole 10-week sermon series because there are a lot of angles on this trap.

It is a mental trap, it is an emotional trap, it is a relational trap.

Today I want to talk about the aspect of this trap that keeps us from recession-proofing our life, from lining our life up with the ancient wisdom of Scripture, to be able to thrive in good economic seasons and to do more than just survive in economic seasons just like the one we are in right now.

What I'm talking about today, we're gonna call the treasure trap.

And here is the baseline false dichotomy that the world has convinced us of that keeps us stuck in the treasure trap.

And that is that there are two categories: rich versus poor.

Either you are rich or you are poor, and that's it.

And everyone is trying to be rich, and yet everyone, almost everyone, feels like they are not rich.

And if you were to ask, maybe they're even closer to poor.

And rich is difficult because last week we saw that our inflated desires can never actually be fulfilled.

Because the closer you get to actually meeting your desires, the more your desires will grow.

We got a new perspective last week that we are rich.

By the standard of the world that we live in, if we get outside of our Western mindset, if you make$40,000 a year, you're in the top 2.6% of wealth on the globe today.

We saw that we are vastly more wealthy than basically everyone from all of human history, but we do not feel rich.

We don't feel rich because we are living paycheck to paycheck, we don't drive the car we want, we don't wear the brands we want, we don't live in the neighborhood we desire, we don't look there's all this evidence that I'm not rich.

Because I can compare myself to others, and they have a bunch, and I don't have as much.

How could I possibly be rich?

And so here's what you need to know you are not rich or poor based on how you feel.

And money is very emotional, and most of us are being driven in our financial decisions by our emotions, not aligning our emotions up with the reality and the logic and reason that God has given us.

You are not rich or poor based on comparison to others.

It doesn't matter what somebody else has, that doesn't determine who you are.

And this one's kind of crazy, and we're gonna break this down for a while today.

You are not rich or poor even based on what you have.

And that's interesting because when we talk about rich and poor, we'll even call it the have and the have nots.

But there's a new perspective that we're gonna look at today that says rich and poor is not even decided based on what you have.

And the love of money and the desire to be rich, it has put us on the track to be trapped.

Trapped by our possessions, trapped by our desires, trapped by our debt, trapped by our anxiety and worry.

Rich cannot be measured.

Some of you have experienced this.

We talked about it last week.

When you were making 20,000 a year, you thought, if I could make 45, I would finally be rich.

Man, the car I could buy if I was bringing in 45K.

And you made it to 45k, and within a month you thought, if I could make it to 70K a year, I will be rich.

And at 70, you think 150.

And at 150, you think 300.

Because your desires just inflate and inflate and inflate.

You'll never reach rich.

Enough will never be enough.

And so to start our conversation, we have to redefine our goals and escape this treasure trap, this idea that the world has put in front of us again and again and again.

I promise you, if you can do this, it will not magically solve your problems, but it will make your life better now and immensely more successful later.

Most people will not adopt this mindset because they have the wrong metrics.

Rich, being rich is not the proper measure of your finances.

Being rich is not the proper measure of your finances.

Rich is something you will never get to.

It's always out of reach.

And the closer it seems you get, the further away it is.

Do you know what being rich is?

It is the carrot that they dangle in front of the donkey to keep him pulling the load forever and ever.

You can't ever let the donkey get the carrot, or the donkey will stop doing the work.

And so let me tell you: if you're seeking to be rich, and rich is your carrot, then I'm just gonna let you know in the King James Version that makes you the ass, all right?

You're carrying the load for culture, trying to get something you will never attain.

Rich is not the proper measure of your finances.

A true measure of financial success is wealth.

A true measure of financial success is wealth.

So what's the difference?

Well, we use these words interchangeably, but there is a distinction that makes a massive, massive difference.

And we have to understand that if we're gonna escape that treasure trap and actually begin to get our lives in line with what it means to handle our resources appropriately.

Here's the difference being rich is an idea that is based on desire.

It is culturally driven, it is always kept in front of you.

And you need to know this.

Big, big companies, Fortune 500 companies, influencers online, they have a vested interest in making sure you never feel rich.

Because as long as they can keep you in a poverty mindset, they can keep you spending your money trying to find security in whatever they are selling.

Rich is an idea based on desire, inflated desires.

Wealth is a reality that is based on math.

Y'all don't know this about me, but I'm a little bit of a math nerd.

I get a little bit excited about mathematics.

Wealth is a reality, it's measurable, and it is based on math.

Desires can never truly be fulfilled.

They grow the more you feed them.

You'll never be rich enough to be rich.

If you don't hear anything else, know this you will never be rich enough to actually feel rich.

Wealth is attainable right where you are.

Wealth is scalable.

But to understand it and to attain it, you have to grasp the mathematical principle, as simple as it is, the mathematical principle that underpins true wealth.

To do that first, we have to understand the lie.

Here's the lie: being rich and looking rich is about having lots of assets.

The more things that you can have, the richer you will appear.

This is the treasure trap.

And so if you have one new car, then you took one more step towards being rich and being viewed as rich by the people around you.

If you have two new cars and a couple motorcycles and a golf cart, because heaven forbid you walk to the community pool like a peasant, you know?

If you're wearing all of the right designer brands, if you make sure that you get your kids every single thing they want for Christmas, not because they need it, but because you're afraid that the other parents might judge what you bought your kids.

If you have hobbies that are way too expensive, if you're going on vacations, you can't afford, if you have all of the things that you can throw on Instagram to show the world that you're rich, then you made it, right?

You're ballin', you're rich, rich.

The problem is that is an illusion.

And when you go through things like the pandemic of 2020 and 2021, and now the ensuing recession of 2022 and probably beyond, all of a sudden, the treasure that once made you look so good in the eyes of culture now is a treasure trap.

This is the lie that the more things that you have, the richer you become.

The truth is found in what economists call the equity equation.

The equity equation starts here, but it has a different metric.

It's not worried about being rich, it's worried about actual wealth.

Not an idea based on desire, but a reality based on math.

And what you have to do is you have to complete the equation.

It's not just about your assets, what you have.

The equity equation says that wealth is your assets minus the other side of the scale, your liabilities.

That's as simple as it is.

Assets are what you have what you have, and liabilities are what you owe on what you have.

This is your stuff, and this is your debt.

And to understand your actual wealth, you have to take all the things you have, the things that make you look rich, and you have to subtract from them all of the things that you owe.

And so let's talk about our liabilities.

San Antonio has one of the highest rates of credit card debt per capita.

On average, San Antonians have$12,000 of credit card debt.

That is a liability.

Almost all of that debt is consumer debt, which means you wanted something, you didn't have the funds to actually buy it, and so you took out a line of credit to get it.

What we try to do with debt when we are unwise is we try to live million-dollar lives on thousand-dollar budgets.

And there is a world all around you who is desperate to give you lines of credit because if they can get you to purchase something on credit, not only do you not own that thing, now the financial institution owns you.

Assets are what you have, but to understand your wealth, you have to take the value of your assets and subtract from that your liabilities what you owe.

Look at what the book of wisdom, Proverbs chapter 22, 7 says.

Proverbs 22 · chapter mention

It says the borrower is slave to the lender.

The debtor is slave to the lender.

We have$12,000 on average.

Now, we think about this very individualistically because we're here in the West, but I want to remind you that you are a part of a movement.

Here at MetaCurch, we are a part of the movement of Jesus.

We're this localized community of believers who are on mission.

We could not have a more important purpose.

We're ambassadors of God, we're the hands and feet of Jesus upon the earth.

Our resources will either fund our passions and our purpose, or they will sabotage our significance.

And so, on average,$12,000 in credit card debt alone means that just here in our metachurch movement, in our congregation, conservatively, conservatively, we have seven or eight million dollars in credit card debt.

And that's just credit cards.

We take out lines of credit for all kinds of things.

Most uh households have two cars that are both being financed.

On average, there's around$50,000 that's still out on lines of credit.

That$50,000 is being paid over six years with anywhere from a 4% interest rate to up to 14 or 15% interest rates, depending on where you buy your car from.

This is called a depreciating asset.

That means the moment you drive it off of the lot, every mile you put on your car, its value drops tremendously.

After six years of paying off a$50,000 car, you'll have actually paid$60 or$70,000, and the car that was$50,000 is now worth$15,000.

That means in the equity equation, where you take what you have and you subtract what you owe, a car can almost never be an asset.

It is almost always a liability.

And we go out of our way to give our kids every single thing they want, not just what they need, but everything they want.

And I talk to parents and they're taking out lines of credit, sometimes three or four thousand dollars a quarter, so their kid can travel and play baseball, hoping that their kid will make the major leagues or maybe get a full ride scholarship.

Of course, if you would take$4,000 a quarter and just put it in a college account, then you could give your kid a full ride out of the money you're investing into their baseball in the first place.

But we don't think about it.

And it's not an asset, it's a liability.

As long as you're buying it on debt, it is a liability.

And most people who have gone to college, on average, have$40,000 in student loans.

And it just continues to escalate and escalate and escalate.

And we have hobbies, and it's great to have hobbies, but we have hobbies and we think that we need the top of the line in everything.

And we can't afford the top of the line, but there is someone waiting at the store to tell you that for 0% interest for 12 months of no payments, you can get it and have it right now.

So why wait when you can get it on credit?

Can I tell you about the first credit card I ever opened?

I was 18, I'd been building a band for about three years, and we were finally making money.

I had an electric guitar, you know, it was made abroad.

It was a couple hundred dollars, and it worked fine.

It did everything I needed it to do.

But I had inflated desires, and I thought, if I'm gonna be taken seriously, I need to be holding a real guitar up there.

So I went to Guitar Center.

I thought maybe I could spend four or five hundred dollars.

But there was an American-made, Fender Deluxe Stratocaster, that really caught my eye.

It was a little over a thousand dollars, and this very helpful person came up and they said, you know, um, that's a thousand dollars, but we have a special going right now.

How old are you?

And I thought, well, obviously you can see my mustache is growing, and I'm 18 now.

And uh, to my surprise, they said, Well, we could probably qualify you for a credit card.

It's 0% interest for the first 12 months, and you don't even have to make a payment.

So I could take this guitar home, and it's kind of like free.

Isn't that crazy?

And so I bought my first guitar and I bought it on a line of credit, and I looked really cool paying it.

The only problem is I was so excited about this free guitar.

18 months later, I'd forgot to make any payments.

Now they were charging me 19% interest, and my$1,000 guitar ended up costing quite a bit more than that.

It wasn't actually an asset to me, it ended up being a liability, and the scales keep shifting, and we end up out of alignment here.

And it starts with our desires, and that's what we talked about last week.

Our desires are so inflated, we want to live million-dollar lives on thousand-dollar salaries, and and the world will do everything they can to help you live that way.

And people get trapped in these cycles of poverty because they take out money on debt, and then they can't repay that debt, and so their credit score sinks, and then the only person who will lend to them is a loan shark who lends at about 19, 20, 25, 30 percent interest, and all of a sudden you can't pay that out, so you gotta go get another line of credit.

And the anxiety and the weight and the sleepless nights, just waiting for your life to implode as your insatiable desires drive you into worse and worse decisions, and we're stuck in the treasure trap, and we think just the more we can get, the richer we will be because we're rich if people think we're rich, right?

And rich was never the right measurement in the first place.

See, the desire to be rich, it is corrosive to your soul and it leads you to foolish decisions with your money.

Money is not evil, it is the love of, the appetite for, the constant soul search for money and for riches.

Wealth orients you when you understand it properly towards the wisdom and best practices of scripture.

And if we want to get a hold of our finances and if we want to free ourselves from the shackles of all of the debt that we have come under and all of the things we are experiencing that are hurting us, if we want to really move forward in our life, then we have to get out of the treasure trap.

We have to start thinking, not about being rich, we have to start thinking about what it means to actually acquire wealth.

I said at the beginning, your financial situation is not about how you feel, it's not about who you are in comparison to others, and it's not even about what you have.

What you have can only truly be understood when measured against what you owe.

Wealth is not about what you have, wealth is about what you own.

And if it's out on a line of credit, you don't own it.

And there's nothing wrong with having things, and there's nothing wrong with having nice things.

I don't even think there's anything wrong with having really nice things.

But the equity equation is instructive.

And when you are upside down and when your scales are not balanced, that is not the time to pursue the richer desires of life.

That is the time to buckle down and to do the work of balancing your scales, of getting your life in order, getting your house in order, allowing your finances to not be an anchor holding you back from the race that you have been called to run, but instead being wind in your sails, pushing you forward to what God has given you to do in life.

This understanding of the equity equation, it can be quite depressing.

And maybe you've been caught in that mindset that if I can just have more and more and more stuff, who cares how I get it?

If I can pile up stuff, that means I'm winning.

And maybe you're realizing that if you were to actually tilt the scales, your life would be shown to be upside down.

So it can be very difficult.

But it also should be incredibly empowering.

Here's why.

Because wealth is scalable when it is understood correctly.

If someone makes$300,000 a year, but they spend more money than they make, and they spend money like it's on fire, and they just have things and things and things all taken out on debt, they could end up with this same exact picture, even though they're an incredibly high earner.

Someone making a million dollars a year, if they spend 1.5 every year, then they are out of balance in their finances.

At the same time, if you make$30,000 a year or you make$40,000 a year, and you work and work and you get on a budget and you stay on that budget and you minimize your liabilities and you pay off your debts, you can begin to balance the scales.

And here's the beautiful thing: another way to say this, instead of wealth or equity, this is showing your net worth.

Did you know that you have a net worth?

I'll be honest, I always thought that that was for millionaires and celebrities.

I didn't know I had a net worth.

You have a net worth, just for most people, it's in the negative.

And yet, if you can get out of debt, if you can pay off all of your consumer silly debt, the debt you should not have gotten, if you can pay off your debt and get to zero, then you have a net worth if you own anything.

Last week we parked uh a hundred thousand dollar Porsche or something that we rented from a guy for 30 bucks out on the under the driveway.

And uh I saw a lot of y'all took pictures with it.

It was pretty sweet, right?

Uh I know jealousy is not great, but Pastor Ryan got to go pick it up, and I was a little, you know, a tinge of jealousy there.

And uh it was almost like no one even saw my truck under there.

I'm not mad, I'm just saying I didn't see a lot of pictures in front of the 04 tundra, okay?

And I get it, and look, I'll probably drive something else someday, but right now I don't desire anything else, and let me tell you why.

That truck is worth six grand.

I know, because I took it to CarMax and they told me.

Six G's, baby.

It's been bought off since the day I got it.

You know what that means?

I got a six thousand dollar net worth.

That's what that means.

It means I'm in the positive because I own it.

And wealth is not about what you have, wealth is about what you actually own.

And most of what we're going into debt on are depreciating assets.

Their value is dropping by 20%, 50%, 80%.

The moment we drive it off the lot, the moment we wear it out of the house, the first pit stain you put on that prata all of a sudden is going down in value.

And we're stacking up, borrowing from our future selves, bankrupting our future selves, going into debt today.

And it's because our perspective is off.

And last week we talked about understanding, deeply understanding, beginning with the perspective that you are a child of God.

Your security comes from God, your identity comes from God.

And I really do believe this.

Satan and the enemies of God, they don't need the church to be axe murderers, to be to be uh out there committing grand larceny.

We just gotta be distracted.

Stuck in the rat race, stuck in the treasure trap, stuck with inflated desires, stuck thinking that our value is gonna come from appearing rich to the world outside of us.

Instead of living a wealthy, wise, powerful life, the kind of life that I promise you that you were created to live.

And I know there's some contingency of us in this room watching online who are like, I get it, but if I'm real honest, man, give me the cars and boats and chains and give it to me on credit.

I just want to live right now.

I'll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.

And that is the problem.

We want so badly to be rich that we're trading in the opportunity to be wealthy.

And step one is minimizing our liabilities.

People spend money on crazy stuff.

I mean really crazy stuff.

There are some adults, you're not gonna believe this.

There are some adults who spend real money on sneakers.

Can you even, can you even, why are y'all looking at me like that?

Can you even imagine?

You know, Katie and I, a part of our story is we got married, I was uh sole income, and we were making less than$35,000 a year, and we went into debt, and it really wasn't consumer debt.

Um, it wasn't a lot of foolish debt, but it was debt nonetheless.

We went into tens and tens of thousands of dollars in our adoption process of trying to build our family and get custody, and then when we finally got to adopt, getting her in therapy and getting through all the training that she needed, getting her caught up financially, and we ended up with very low income and immense debt, immense debt.

Our scales were so off-kilter, and there were days where it felt like, how is there even hope?

There were days we couldn't see a future for ourselves where we weren't just being crushed under the weight of our finances.

And when we began to understand this picture, we began to do everything we could to minimize our liabilities.

You know, it's our 10-year anniversary.

At the end of the month, we're going on a vacation like we've never been on.

Our scales are finally like this a little bit.

We're really going out, we're celebrating.

Can I tell you something though?

Your kid right now, your eight-year-old right now, they do not know the difference between Corpus and St.

Lucia.

I promise you, they do not.

And you're going not to build family memories, you're going because your homeboy, your homegirl, they went there and you want to put it on the gram too.

And so you'll put five grand on your liability side instead of a tank of gas on the asset side, building memories for your future.

And you don't need the name brands, you don't need them.

And you know, for for years and years and years, y'all, not all y'all know this, but some of y'all go way back with me, like 10 years back with me, back to BRCC.

I wasn't the preacher in sneakers, you can fact check me.

I was the barefoot pastor.

We were minimizing liabilities, we went after it hard, and you can too.

And there's this old proverb, and it says, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.

And maybe that's how you feel, you're 50 and you have nothing in retirement.

And what you really need is a time machine, or you're 40 and you're under a hundred thousand dollars of debt.

And what you really need is a time machine, because if you could go back 20 years, then you wouldn't be in that situation in the first place.

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.

The birds would nest in its branches, you could enjoy the shade and the coolness.

The second best time to plant a tree is right now.

And you can't go back in the past, but you can begin pursuing wisdom and recession proofing your life and escaping the treasure trap, and you can do it right now.

And it happens like everything happens, it happens one step at a time, and you can begin to minimize your liabilities, and the less liabilities you get, the more your wealth increases, and all of a sudden you don't have a negative net worth, you got a four-grand net worth.

You know why?

Because you own a car that's worth$3,500 that you bought used for cash on the lot, and you got a$500 in the bank account, and that's a start, and you can build wealth from there.

And there are people who are making a million dollars a year and spending a million five, and they're upside down like this.

And there are people making$40,000 a year, and for the last 10 years, they've been spending less than they make and putting away and investing, and now their life is worth$30,000,$40,000,$50,000,$100,000,$200,000.

And did you know that if you will invest 15% of a$50,000 salary, that is about the average salary in San Antonio?

$15 of a$50,000 salary for 35 years.

If you put that into real retirement accounts, mutual funds, you will retire a millionaire, making$50,000 a year for your entire career.

And we don't know that because no one tells us that, because they are incentivized against you becoming wealthy.

They need you in a poverty mindset so you will buy to find security in the crap they are trying to sell you.

They do not care about you, they do not care about your future.

And it is time that the people of God begin caring enough about themselves to take care of themselves now and to take care of your future self.

And here's where it gets good.

Wealth is not just about minimizing your liabilities.

Wealth is about maximizing your assets.

Buying assets that appreciate, that gain value over time.

Here's what wealthy people do.

In Proverbs 21:5, it says, the plans of the diligent certainly lead to profit, but anyone who is reckless certainly becomes poor.

Proverbs 21:5

Here's what wealthy people do: wealthy people save and they save and they save.

They spend less money than they make, and they put money in their savings account until they have enough money that emergencies can happen and they're okay.

And after that, they invest.

I didn't know this for most of my life.

Wealthy people do not have their money in a bank account.

Here's what I always pictured.

I thought wealthy people were all like Scrooge McDuck, and they opened the vault and they dove into golden coins.

That's what I thought.

Your savings account brings about a 0.5% return year after year.

Wealthy people don't have their money in bank accounts.

Wealthy people invest.

Your most powerful asset is your income.

And our income is being eaten alive by our desires.

And if you can learn to live on less than you make, then you will free up money to begin investing.

And there's all the advice you could ever need online, and we'll give you a lot of it on Saturday at our one-day financial workshop.

But investing is making your money work for you.

And let me tell you another secret.

They won't tell you.

You're not gonna learn this in school, and most of you didn't learn this in your family of origin.

Right now, in recessions, with the stock market tanking right now, is when wealthy people exponentially grow their wealth.

You see, your dollar doesn't go as far in the grocery store or the gas station, but your dollar goes further right now in the stock market.

If a stock was$20 and now it's$11, every dollar you spend buys you more of them.

And right now, the people who have balanced out their life, recession proofed their life, they're not just gonna survive this recession, they're going to come out massively ahead.

Massively ahead.

They don't care that their retirement account is down.

When they see it go down, they raise the amount they're putting in.

And we're not taught this.

And there's not some like secret cabal, there's not like secret meetings happening where you get this information.

Our desires are inflated.

And we don't understand how to sacrifice.

And investing means sacrificing desires today for success down the road.

And we don't know how to sacrifice if we're in the treasure trap.

And we don't know how to sacrifice if our desires are inflated.

Here's how it works debt makes you look richer while draining your actual wealth.

Debt lets you live a million-dollar lifestyle on a thousand-dollar salary.

It makes you look richer while draining your actual wealth and bankrupting your future self.

Investment.

It makes you feel poorer while building your actual wealth.

If you're giving 10%, 15% of your money into investments every month, you feel poor because you don't have enough money to set on fire to buy things that you didn't need in the first place.

It makes you feel poorer.

But it's actually building wealth in a way that you probably never have before.

Here's what Paul said those who want to be rich fall into temptation, a trap, and many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge people into ruin and destruction.

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and by craving it, some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.

The second best time is right here, right now, to change your perspective and then to allow us as a community to come alongside each other to change our habits and to build our skill sets.

And that's exactly what we're gonna do this Saturday.

This Saturday, October 15th, from 9 a.m.

to 1 p.m., we have a one-day financial workshop.

This is not a get rich quick seminar.

This is about building real skill sets, following the wisdom of Scripture, and beginning to balance out your life.

I hope you will sign up at metachurch.tv slash assets.

I hope you will pack a lunch and show up ready to do the work that is required to either dig yourself, begin digging yourself out of your financial hole, getting an actual plan for your life and for your future.

And man, there is something incredible about being stuck and leaving with a plan.

And a plan will give you hope and it will give you action steps.

We're gonna surround you in that event with wisdom, with people who are there, can advise you, can listen to your situation, and help you know how to move forward.

I hope you will be there because your life matters.

And my desire for your life is for you to find out how to take your resources and steward them in a way that helps you live life and life to the fullest.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you and we thank you for all good things that you have given us.

God, I know so many times I am tempted and I fall into finding my worth or my value, my dignity, my identity in these things of the world that have nothing for me.

And so we're seeking to change our perspective, to escape the treasure trap, to live lives of true wealth, true wisdom, lives where we are set up to have the impact you created us to have.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

You can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.