Faith has several meanings but one of them is fiduciary. I don’t know about you but I have always struggled trying to understand what faith is.  Faith is a shield in the prayer of the body of armor.  Faith is this thing that we should always have, we should be faithful, we should have faith, we should believe.  Faith is trust right? And faith obedience, I had one one Bible teacher say that faith is frequently tied to obedience. If you have faith, then you just obey God.  That is well and good, but I don’t know about you, but I’ve been hurt, and hurt a lot. I have obeyed and obedience just leads to more hurt, more trauma, more abuse, especially in environments that capitalize on power structures; so faith in God versus faith in man, yeah that’s painful.  The church frequently implies that faith in God is faith in the church, and that obedience is faith.  But as I was reading the Bible with my mom, we got to talking about how we both struggle with faith, but we decided to look up the word in the concordance. It said things like trust and obedience, but as we’re going through this whole list of words there’s jumped off the page the word fiduciary.  OK I’m an accountant, the word fiduciary has big meaning to me. It has big consequences to me. It has pain, the ramifications of not doing your fiduciary duty are career ending and jail time. Except that the context of this was not that I, Jett, had to be a fiduciary. The context was that God was my fiduciary, and that I needed to rest in him. That phrase was plthat he was my fiduciary, and it shook me, and here is why. A fiduciary in the business world is an attorney, is an accountant, is a financial consultant, and we have a responsibility, a duty not just an honor but a consequence driven responsibility that if we muck up your life we are liable. Why is that important? Because not only do we have to pay restitution, we have to go to jail.

I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember the whole Berni Madoff Ponzi scheme but the dude created an investment funds and he got a whole bunch of people to invest in it withdrew all the money and left all these people with nothing. As l an investment broker, he had a fiduciary responsibility to all of these people to give them advice that would benefit them, that would enhance their stability, and enhance their security, because he completely (not just negligently) but intentionally screwed them. It was more than just he owes them money, he forever indebted himself, and his family to the repayment of that debt, and then he also had to go to jail for the entirety of his life, so he is no longer capable of repaying, earning back the money, and paying that back. He put the consequence and the weight, the ramifications, then on the next generation, and the next generation like two or three generations, until that debt is paid.  We see a historical evidence of this in the debtors prison of Europe but also we see historical evidence in the Bible where parents would get into debt and they would sell their children off in the Bible. However in the Bible there’s this thing called the year of jubilee the year the debts are wiped off in full, whether paid or unpaid. If we had that concepts in this culture, what we would see, is something like debtors prison with a maximum sentence of 50 years and he would be set free, and his family would be set free of the debt. Another way this was utilized in the Bible was when they sold land because they got into to much debt and couldn’t retain the land that their family owned, in 50 years it reverted back to the family of original ownership and basically was more like a upto 50 year lease and not like a selling of this asset. It was leasing of the asset so that they could eventually make money back as a family again in 50 years.

Back to fiduciary, that was a tangent, sorry.  

At its most simple, a fiduciary has a lifelong responsibility to not just not lose your money but to make you money. 

Warren Buffett once said, “The first rule of an investment is don't lose [money]. And the second rule of an investment is don't forget the first rule. And that's all the rules there are.”

The institutions that implement this have built I the responsibility, but they built into the culture not just that the legal responsibility, but the mindset responsibility of a fiduciary.  Again that’s an attorney, an accountant, that’s a tax preparer, is a financial consultant, and that’s a business consultant. Most business consultant have this responsibilities also.

All my life I have been told that I need to have faith that I need to put all my trust into this unseen God, who talks to people, who talk to me. I don’t mean to imply that I don’t believe he exists, I fully believe he exists, and he has shown himself to me in ways that are uniquely, personal and affectionately loving but I’ve never had someone tell me that he has a fiduciary responsibility to me, basically I’ve always been told to just blind trust.

 They’ll sit there and say, “trust really isn’t blind that’s l a fallacy you know, God proves himself over and over and over and over and over again.” That’s true, but I’ve never had faith explained. 

God has a fiduciary duty to you to not just get you through,you aren’t negative and you aren’t neutral, but you are grown into something better. He has a fiduciary duty, he will go to prison until that debt is paid. When you have faith you enter into a relationship where you give him yourself and He obligates himself to you. He now owes you this.  Now to say that God owes us is a bit entitled it is however a more like a professional contract that both parties agree to and enter willingly. He is God and our sin separated us from him and our sin broke our relationship with him but the idea of a fiduciary is that there an expert in their field. 

That’s why we’re going to them so if you have a retirement account and you go to Charles Schwab or TD Ameritrade or Merrill Lynch or whatever, you don’t necessarily know who’s handling your money, but if they handle it wrong you’re gonna know “, and if you lose money that’s a problem.  If you make money good, that’s what they’re there for. That’s their job. They have a fiduciary responsibility to you to not screw it up, and you don’t even put a huge amount of stress or concern into this choice. You put your money there and you tell them to do their job. You go to your bank and you say manage my money, you go to your accountant and say tell me what to do so that my money grows, you go to your attorney, and you say what do I do to protect my business, to protect my family. These people have paid the price for their expertise, and they carry a consequence if they fail, and sometimes they fail. 

The consequences are there, that’s the real world. Not to say, God isn’t part of the real world, but the weight of it, because he is perfect and he cannot lie, is bigger and the weight of faith is eliminated for me, because I’m not the expert he is.  If I put my life in his hands, then he has a duty, a debt obligation, with legal ramifications to himself, to protect me and provide for me, to not just let me perish, but to make it better. 

I don’t mean to sit here and tell you that health, wealth, and happiness is the ultimate goal. It is not the goal in the Kingdom of Heaven at all.

Love as defined by 1 Corinthians 13 is the goal of the Kingdom of Heaven for us and all our experiences and suffering are to make us more like Christ. Making it better doesn’t mean that there won’t be pain and sorrow. Making it better doesn’t mean that you are gonna have a Porsche, and the white picket fence, and the three story house, and the fountain in the hot tub, that’s bull-shirt. It’s a pipe dream, it doesn’t exist, for most people, it doesn’t exist.

Make it better,  is that we can have hope, we can have peace, make it better is about our character. He cares about our heart state, our posture, not our physical posture, our spiritual and emotional posture towards each other and towards him. And he also does care about our physical. He cares about our relationship, he cares that we’re not living in a constant state of fight or flight. He cares that we’re not living in a constant state of trauma. He cares. He cares that we have our basic needs, and he designed us with those basic needs; of heat, of shelter, of water, of food, of oxygen, of fulfilling relationship, he cares those exist because he designed us with those basic needs. He intends for us to have those basic needs and walks with us in our grief and in our pain. This is his fiduciary that we can understand who the expert is and that he has an obligation to us. I’m not talking about all the people claiming to be Christian, I’m talking about him. He has an obligation to us to be faithful to us, as we put our lives, our hopes, our dreams, our finances, and our expectations on the altar to him. 

We’re not just killing our hopes on the alter, though it definitely can feel like that. We are also saying do what you do best, take this thing which I love and grow it. I trust you to hold what I cherish,  hold that which I fear over, which I agonize over and do what you do best. You say that if I trust you, if I give this to you, if I have faith, faith is the substance of things unseen, if I have faith, then I am putting it in your hands with the understanding that you have a obligation to protect and to grow it. So I put my child in your hands, so I put my retirement in your hands, so I put my legacy in your hands, so I put my tomorrow in your hands, so I put my house in your hands, so I put my spouse in your hands, so I put my economic stability in your hands, so I put my job in your hands, because you gotta do what you do best.  I put my character in your hands, that’s not to say I’m not afraid of what you’ll do with it, I don’t know what he’s gonna do with it and some of the very best investors are kind of risky.

But ships were not built to sit in harbors. 

 There’s a story in the Bible of the three servants. The first invested the sum the master gave him and made 10 back. And the second invested the sum the master gave him and made a five back. And l one buried it in the ground to keep it safe, and got nothing back. I think that we as people who have been hurt, who are afraid, who are abused, we like to bury it in the ground to keep it safe, to make sure we don’t lose it, but we need a fiduciary to not lose. Tthat’s what Faith is, faith is I’m putting my $10 the only $10 I have in my bank account in your hands, and I’m trusting you to turn it into 11.  Faith is his job, his part of this faith, his fiduciary responsibility, is that he’s gonna to grow it, when I give him back the 11 he’s gonna turn into 12, when I give him back the 12, he’s gonna turn it into 15. 

It is a process and it is a brutally hard process for someone like me who’s been abused but it’s a lot easier when I know that he has ramifications, that he has put on himself. He volunteered those ramifications, if he built the system, he volunteered to be a fiduciary.

Now we’ve talked a lot about this topic but I want to point out there’s a big glaring hole, and I touched on it just briefly, sin separated us from God. Due to that sin, the covenant of the fiduciary responsibility is null, he owes us nothing until we chose to have him be our personal lord and savior. I also wanna point out Romans it says well we were enemies of Christ. He died for us while we were enemies of Christ, he bought our freedom from sin because there was nothing we could do to reenter covenant with him. He owed us nothing, he owes us nothing, and yet he created that bridge so that we could fully depend on him we could never get back to a state of being blessed by him, and the only way we can be blessed by him is if we depend on him.

I don’t know about you, but that’s terrifying to me as someone who’s been abused And is feral but I needed him to save me so that I can trust him enough to be blessed. I don’t know if you have seen cat videos, cat videos, lots of cat videos. So there is this video, cat, trapped in a well dripping, wet, freezing, cold nothing it can do to get out of that well, without help it will die there. Cat is injured, does not trust anyone, is hissing and biting, and scratching the hand that is dragging it out of the hole, out of the muddy, wet water, but with love with tenderness with faithfulness with gentleness, the cat is brought in to a dry place. The cat is bathed with warm water. The cat is cleaned. The cat is dried. The cat is fed. The cat is given water. The cat is given medicine and it takes a while.  After all of this to convince the cat that the caregiver is good, the cat is still not sure and is still angry and fighting back. The cat may be even more angry, but in time the cat sees the faithfulness of their caregiver, there was nothing that cat could do to save its life. It was as good as dead, and the caregiver would have been gracious, if all they did was pull it out of the hole and the cat may have still lived. But in this case, it lived and well, now weeks months later, the cat is clean, dry, fed, watered and the cat is loved and the cat has a new life. It has never known of love and affection and safety, and this is the visual of what God did. God died on the cross to get us out of the hole and if that was all there was, it would’ve been enough but he didn’t stop there. He cleaned us up and then he loved us while we were still biting and kicking and screaming and fighting back, he saw in our trauma and he faithfully loved us through it and this is how he shows that he is the fiduciary that we can trust him. I’m not saying Christian behave like this, I’m saying God, Jesus chooses to behave like this toward us