My friend, a pastor, looked at me with wide eyes as if my skin color was green and I had just walked off a spaceship from Mars. He and I had gone for a brisk morning walk along a beautiful river in rural Canada as we were preparing for a church service. Our conversation had turned to finances and I was sharing with him what I was learning about net worth. He could not understand the concept and had no idea what it meant. I patiently explained to him that calculating net worth is a valuable tool to determine and accumulate wealth.

The first two questions asked of anyone who walks into the bank for any advice or funding are as follows: What do you owe (your liabilities)?  How much do you own (your assets)? The bank wants to know your equity, or in simple terms, your net worth. This is a commonly used evaluation tool in the financial world to measure your financial status, however most Christians don’t think in these terms when considering their own financial situation. If this is how bankers and wealthy people measure wealth then maybe we should take a look at it. It states in Proverbs that our house contains great wealth and stores of choice food, so maybe we should learn how to measure it.

The house of the righteous contains great treasure, but the income of the wicked brings them trouble (Proverbs 15:6)

As I dialogued with many Christians I found that very few even understood the concept of net worth. When you hear the term millionaire you are hearing about a person who has a net worth of more than a million dollars. Please understand, I am not saying everyone should be a millionaire, I am only asking you to think like a millionaire. The point here is to change our thinking to a more prosperous manner of thinking. This is why I am challenging you to calculate your net worth. Details to follow…