Can You Pursue Financial Freedom as a Follower of Jesus?

Jesus praised wise and responsible stewardship (Matt 25:30-23) but condemned the steward who only maintained his master’s wealth (Matt 25:18, 24-30). Take note that this steward did not even deplete his master’s wealth. All he did was save it. And Jesus found this condemnable. 

But here’s what we must not miss: no matter how much wealth we create, it will never set us free. And that is because the deepest slavery is not limited finances but idols that captivate our hearts. 

If you want to experience real and lasting freedom, eradicate the idols from your life. Start here. Then it becomes much easier to pursue financial freedom from an untethered heart. 

The fastest track to slavery is worshipping anything but God. In fact, every single sin we have ever committed, by thought or deed, was an act of idolatry. 

When you destroy idolatry from your life, you begin to experience a freedom that is so transcendent, no man, woman, or system can manipulate, blackmail, threaten, or control you. 

And then, when you make a ton of money or lose it all, your heart is still free, because it was tethered to the one you will never lose, Jesus Christ. 

But to experience this freedom as its fullest, here are seven steps toward eradicating idols from your life. 

#1. Identify the idol

An idol is anything that we worship in place of God. Now it’s unlikely that you are burning incense to a golden statue in your living room. Idols today are more modernized and the worship of them more subtle. Sex. Drugs. Alcohol. Money. These are the obvious ones.

And then there are the not-so-obvious idols. Business. Spouse. Kids. Church. Ministry. 

Anything outside of God that controls your happiness is an idol. I don’t mean that if you stub your toe you won’t feel pain, if you lose your wife you won’t weep, or if you come down with cancer you won’t suffer fear. We all suffer. 

But there’s a difference between something causing you pain versus it controlling your happiness. 

Even atheists worship. In the very same sentence, an atheist will berate Christians for creating a god out of their own imagination to fulfill a psychological need. And then he waxes on, spilling his knowledge for the uninitiated, disproving the very point he set out to make. He worships knowledge and intellect. 

Here’s an easy way to see if something is an idol in your life: When it’s taken away, do you lose your peace? Again you may feel pain but that does not mean it’s an idol. But if you lose your sense of well being, become angry, vindictive, or utterly distraught, it’s probably an idol. You placed so much hope in this thing that you have become undone without it. 

#2. Be honest with yourself: we long to worship something 

When God gave Israel the 10 commandments, why did the first two address idolatry? Because we humans can’t help ourselves. We were made for worship. 

Commandment #1: “You shall have no other gods before Me” (Ex 20:3). 

Commandment #2: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth (Ex 20:4).

Atheist, pagan, Catholic, or Buddhist, we want to worship something, whether it be our own intellect, a philosophy of peace, or an idol of wood. God didn’t just design us to worship, it’s the very nature of our created being. 

The created worships the Creator. 

The problem is not that we worship but what we worship. 

This is not new. Satan tempted Eve to worship the created fruit over God, to defy the One who commanded her not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 3:1-6). 

#3: Receive God’s forgiveness  

If you were a slave to another human being, no matter how hard you tried to live as a freeman, until you’ve been set free, it’s impossible. You could pretend to be a freeman, fantasize that you’re a freeman, and even tell others that you are free. But reality doesn’t lie. You are a slave to your master.

The same is true for our hearts. No matter how hard we try to put God first in our life, without a redeemed heart, it’s impossible. This is why before God gave Israel the 10 Commandments He said, 

“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex 20:20. 

God redeemed them from slavery before He gave them commands to obey. 

Redemption precedes obedience. 

It's impossible to live free from idols until we have been set free from those idols. Just as God brought Israel out of bondage from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, so He can bring you out of bondage from sin, through Jesus Christ. 

To be set free from idol worship means to be forgiven of every single sin you ever have or ever will commit. It means to now have the power to resist the temptation to return to slavery, and to begin living as God designed you: free to worship Him alone. 

“For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace” (Rom 6:14). 

#4. Deal with the vertical problem first

There’s another reason the first two commandments address idolatry. 

If your kitchen faucet is producing water laced with metals, installing a filter can help. But it fails to address the core issue: the water source. 

Likewise, when you deal with your vertical problems first (your relationship with God), your horizontal struggles (your relationship with other humans) become much easier to resolve. 

Did you ever notice that the first four of the 10 commandments dealt with Israel’s relationship with God but the last six deal with their relationship with their fellow man? 

Vertical: Israel’s relationship with God

#1: You shall have no other gods before Me (Ex 20:3). 

#2: Do not make for yourself an idol (Ex 20:4-6). 

#3: Do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain (Ex 20:7). 

#4: Remember the sabbath day (Ex 20:8-11). 

Horizontal: Israel’s relationship with others

#5: Honor your father and your mother (Ex 20:12). 

#6: You shall not murder (Ex 20:13). 

#7: You shall not commit adultery (Ex 20:14). 

#8: You shall not steal (Ex 20:15). 

#9: You shall not bear false witness (Ex 20:16). 

#10: You shall not covet (Ex 20:17). 

This order is not coincidental. Trying to fix horizontal problems before addressing the vertical issues is a lost cause only resulting in behavior change but no real freedom. 

Topple the idols of your heart first and following the other commands of Scripture come naturally. 

#5: Admit that idolatry is slavery

If you want to be rid of idols, first understand how deep idolatry goes. We tend to downplay how deep a grip our idols have on us.

Have you ever wondered why God tells the Israelites, “You shall not worship them or serve them” (Ex 20:5a)? Idolatry goes far deeper than prizing something more than God. 

We serve our idols. And what does a slave do? He serves his master? The very idols we love become our slave masters. 

When people ask me, “If God is good, why didn’t he condemn slavery?” I like to respond, “He did. But he addressed a much worse kind of slavery–one so deeply embedded that if you find freedom from this slavery, the slavery of humans owning humans will naturally disappear.” 

“And what is that?” they ask.

“The slavery of sin.” 

This is why Paul wrote in Romans 6:16 that you are “slaves of the one whom you obey.” The man whose entire life revolved around trying to earn more and dies unsatisfied made himself a slave to his work. 

The woman who spent her entire marriage trying to make her husband happy until the codependent marriage crumbled, made herself a slave to marriage. And the pastor whose identity was rooted in how many people showed up on Sunday morning made himself a slave to ministry. 

We are all enslaved to something: creation or the Creator. But the Creator is a kind and loving master who will fill our hearts with freedom, creativity, and joy. He never disappoints. 

If you doubt this, consider that God loved Israel so much, that for her to worship a false God made him jealous for her: “You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God” (Ex 20:5). 

Just as a husband is jealous if his wife favors another man, so God is lovingly jealous for us when we favor anything over Him. 

#6 Believe that true happiness and freedom are possible

If you follow Jesus, you are not doomed to a life of misery. Paul experienced unbelievable joy even after being beaten and thrown into prison (Acts 16:22-25). 

It’s critical that we grasp this: suffering and happiness are not opposites. You can go through suffering or experience deep loss, and yet the joy of the Lord still calms your heart. 

I felt this deeply when one of my own children turned against everything my wife and I had taught her. I felt deeper pain. But God’s presence was deeper than the pain. I had peace. 

When you make God the center of your life, your happiness is no longer held hostage by suffering. 

#7 Recognize that sometimes great loss is the path to peace 

My friend lost his wife and his business. He also spent a year in a prison cell, only getting one hour a day to enjoy the sun. 

Did he feel pain and sadness? Of course. But through this suffering he experienced a joy he never had before: God. And his great loss became the path to indescribable peace. He had to lose in order to gain. 

No wonder Paul wrote, “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ” (Phil 3:7). 

Paul lost his status as a circumcised Pharisee from the elite line of Benjamin and an expert in the law (Phil 3:4-6). But the loss was what he had to go through in order to gain something infinitely better, Jesus Christ. 

When my company, Just One Dime, had to file chapter 7 bankruptcy, and I lost all my businesses, homes, car, and money, it was not losing the wealth that hurt so much. It was the fact that my company could not survive Covid. I had placed my identity in how well I performed as an entrepreneur, and God had to take all of that away when my $30 million company crumbled. But this is what had to happen in order to realign my heart with Him. 

And I could not be more grateful. Now I get to rebuild from scratch while asking God to guard my heart along the way. 

I promise you this: when God removes something from your life, He will replace it with something far better.

When you eradicate the idols from your life, it sets you free to live as God designed you, leveraging your talents, resources, and experience to build your business with joy. And then financial freedom becomes the product, not the ultimate end goal. After all, we can’t take a dime of it with us when we go to meet Jesus.