Money Lessons From The Book Of Proverbs - Chapter 11: Financial bondage

The rich rules over the poor, And the borrower is servant to the lender. -Proverbs 22:7 NKJV

Poverty and indebtedness robs a person of true freedom. You can be free legislatively, you can even be free spiritually, but if you are poor and in debt your freedom is not complete. You will still be subject to your creditor; you will still be servant or slave to the lender. Even though slavery has long been abolished, if you are in debt you are still in bondage.

Financial freedom

Therefore, you have to undertake a journey towards freedom, financial freedom. You have to break the bondage that poverty brings upon you. Financial freedom is achievable when you “owe no man nothing”. That is where it starts. It is achieved by having more than enough resources, to an extent that work becomes a pleasure not a necessity. The goal is to redeem your time, and do that as soon as possible.

The idea of work is not only to trade your skills and time to obtain money. You have to build up sufficient resources to redeem your time. Therefore your resources should be sufficient enough to cover your expenses for as long as possible. Some people achieve this when they are sixty, some people achieve this much earlier. In either situation, this can only be achieved when you are debt free.
Therefore the key is to build on a life of no debt. It becomes important therefore to achieve a surplus in your budget in order to start building up sufficient resources to free your time.

Psalm 37 v 21 says, “The wicked borrows and does not repay, But the righteous shows mercy and gives.” As a child of God you should not be like the wicked who borrows but does not repay. Your standard should be to have more than enough so that you can meet your needs and still be able to give.

For example, it is difficult to repay when you have nothing to repay with. Conversely, it is easy to give when you have more than enough. If a person is living on borrowings, it means he/she is living beyond his/her means, and needs to cover the deficit with borrowings. It is difficult to give when you don't have anything. But if you have a surplus, giving becomes a joy not a struggle. If you have a deficit in your budget, giving becomes impossible.

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