Breathing Room (3) – Money (Luke 16:13)

We are in our third week of our series Breathing Room and we have been talking about creating margin or breathing room in several important areas of our lives.  Again we defined breathing room as the space between your current pace of life and your ultimate limits.  You may have more capacity than an average person, but ultimately we all have our limits.  And when you don’t have room between your pace of life and your limit, you will feel stress and your relationships suffer.  It is God’s intention for us to live a life with breathing room, when we don’t do as much as we can do, we can still trust God to provide for us.

Last week we talked about creating breathing room in our schedules.  I hope you have taken some time either in small group or by yourself to think about how you would adjust your schedule this year.  Today we are going to talk about money.  I know this is a very sensitive topic in the Chinese culture.  But I feel that if we were to truly be followers of Christ, we should talk about it, because Jesus talked about it quite an awful lot when you read the New Testament.  We live in a culture that continually tells us to pursue a higher standard of living in order to improve our quality of life.  But “standard of living” and “quality of life” aren’t the same thing.  One has to do with the stuff we accumulate. The other is about the peace we experience regardless of our circumstances.  What if your pursuit of a standard of living is undermining your quality of life?

Moving Forward

Money doesn’t raise your quality of life, financial breathing room does. In fact, you may need a lower standard of living in order to improve your quality of life. You can’t obey the teachings of Jesus without financial breathing room because he said not to worry and you’ll worry a lot if you have no financial margin. Don’t let your finances be your master.

Discussion Questions

1. Talk about one of the happiest times in your life. What were your finances like during that period?

2. Think about how you managed your money last year. What would you like to do differently this year?

3. How well do you document your expenses so that you know where your money is going? What influenced you to document your expenses the way you do?

4. “You can raise your standard of living with debt, but you can only raise your quality of life with discipline.” How accurately does that statement align with what you’ve experienced?

5. What is one thing you can do this week to begin to create breathing room in your finances? What can this group do to support you?