Money With A Mission Order Printed Copy

Author: Leroy Thompson
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About the Book

"MONEY WITH A MISSION" by Leroy Thompson is a guide to help individuals understand the purpose of money and how to use it to fulfill their financial goals and make a positive impact on the world. The book emphasizes the importance of having a clear vision and mission for one's finances, and offers practical advice on budgeting, investing, and giving back to society. Through personal anecdotes and biblical principles, Thompson encourages readers to view money as a tool for creating positive change in their own lives and the lives of others.

John A. Broadus

John Broadus, Southern’s second president, was born on January 24, 1827 in Culpeper County, Virginia. After undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Virginia, he joined the university’s faculty as an assistant professor of classics. There, he displayed unusual facility in his post. He served simultaneously as pastor of the Charlottesville Baptist Church. In this period, Broadus won the heart of Maria Harrison, daughter of renowned classics professor Gessner Harrison. Married on November 18, 1850, the Broaduses had three daughters (Eliza, Annie, and Maria) together before Maria passed away on October 21, 1857 at twenty-six years of age. On January 4, 1859, Broadus married Charlotte Eleanor Sinclair, who gave birth to several additional children. The 1858 Education Convention elected Broadus to the seminary’s first faculty. Broadus declined the position because he had close ties to school and family in Charlottesville. For months, Boyce and Manly doggedly urged him to reconsider. After much thought, and not a little anguish, Broadus accepted. From the time he began teaching, Broadus showed a lifelong affection for instructing and mentoring students. Prior to the seminary’s closing in the Civil War period, Broadus drew a single student to his homiletics class. Rather than canceling the class, Broadus lectured to his lone pupil week after week, honing the content that later became the book The Preparation and Delivery of Sermons. The text’s durability was remarkable. Over half a century later, several seminaries used it in homiletics classes. When Southern suspended courses in 1862, Broadus served as a chaplain to Confederate soldiers. He returned to Southern at the war’s end and resumed his teaching post. His talents gained renown. Over Broadus’s career, the University of Chicago, Vassar University, Brown University, Georgetown College, and Crozer Theological Seminary each wooed the professor as a potential president. Large and wealthy churches invited him to be their pastor. Broadus declined these overtures. The greatest need and his greatest influence were at the seminary he loved. In 1889 trustees elected Broadus president of the seminary to succeed Boyce. He guided the school for six peaceful years. Broadus contributed much to the fields in which he taught. In addition to his landmark text on preaching, the scholar labored over his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew for twenty years before publishing it. With such depth of thought, he excelled at preaching. University of Chicago professor W. C. Wilkinson once remarked of Broadus that he had “every natural endowment, every acquired accomplishment to have become, had he been only a preacher, a preacher hardly second to any in the world.” (1) By his plain exposition and conversational delivery, Broadus changed the character of SBC preaching, a shift seen in the current day. Broadus’s life is notable on a variety of fronts. While a pastor in Virginia, Broadus baptized Lottie Moon, who became Southern Baptist’s most famous overseas missionary. In the Civil War, Broadus preached before Confederate general Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals, earning a standing invitation from Lee to preach for him. J. D. Rockefeller went further than Lee—he offered Broadus a hefty salary to become his pastor in New York City, an offer Broadus turned down. In 1886, on the 250th anniversary of Harvard University, the school conferred an honorary degree on Broadus due to his national academic reputation. In 1889, Yale University invited the professor to New Haven to deliver the Lyman Beecher Lectures on preaching. Broadus was the only Southern Baptist to address the Ivy League school in a series of talks. Together with Basil Manly, Jr., he founded the monthly Sunday School newspaper, Kind Words in 1866, a title that was eventually adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Home Mission Board. As a preacher, professor, and leader, Broadus looms large in Southern’s history and in the history of the SBC. He was an active churchman at Louisville’s Walnut Street Baptist Church. Broadus passed away on March 16, 1895. (1) William Mueller, A History of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 67. Sources: William Mueller, A History of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Nashville, TN: Broadman, 1959.

how to find joy in your work

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). One of the sadder experiences in our fallen states is so easily losing our sense of wonder in the most familiar things — like the first verse in the Bible, as laden with glory as it is. We easily stop pondering it because we think we understand it, even though we may have only scratched the surface of its meaning. Has it ever hit you that the first verse in the Bible is about work — what God calls his creative activity (Genesis 2:2)? Or that the very first work undertaken is described as creative — not drudgery to avoid? Or that God really enjoyed his work? The more we think about the whole first chapter of Genesis, the more glorious things we see regarding how God views his work, and the wonderful, liberating implications it has on how we are to view our work. God Works for Joy So where do we get the idea that God enjoys his work? From the last verse of the first chapter in the Bible: And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. (Genesis 1:31) No, the word “joy” isn’t explicitly there, but it’s there. God doesn’t have sin-disordered affections and emotions like we do. God always experiences the appropriate joy from good work (Philippians 2:13) — even his brutal work on the cross (Hebrews 12:2). And being made in his image, we also receive joy from his work (Psalm 92:4). It’s amazing to think about: the very first thing the Bible teaches us about God is that he engaged in incredibly vigorous, prolonged, creative work, and he enjoyed it— both the work itself and the fruit of his work. God never works just to get a paycheck. God never works to prove himself out of some kind of internal insecurity. He never works to get something he needs, for he provides everything for his creation out of his abundance (Acts 17:25). God’s work is always the overflow of his joy in being the triune God. And as Jonathan Edwards said, “It is no argument of the emptiness or deficiency of a fountain that it is inclined to overflow” (God’s Passion for His Glory, 165). God works for the immediate and ultimate joy of it! We’re Designed to Work for Joy And here’s where the wonderful, liberating implications for us come in. God made us in his image and gives us work to do — work that’s like his: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:27–28) God created us to do work similar to his work and to experience from work similar benefits, appropriate to our capacities. Our work is to be creative (“be fruitful and multiply”), vigorous (“have dominion . . . subdue”), and give us joy (God “blessed” us with his mandate). God always meant for our work to be sharing with him in his work, and sharing his joy. We aren’t meant to work just to get a paycheck, or to prove our worth, or to gain our identity because we’re insecure or prideful. God didn’t design work to be a drudgery, or a necessary evil. That disease infected our work when we fell from grace. What Destroys Our Joy in Work A curse infected our work the day our original forebears trusted the viper’s promise over God’s: “Because you have . . . eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:17–19) This is work as we experience it in this age: lots of sweat-producing effort yielding lots of thorns and thistles. The ground (or its equivalent for us) fights us, our tools fail us, our indwelling, prideful or slothful sin inhibits us, our frail bodies weaken us, other sinners impede us, demons assail us. Like all of creation, our work is subjected to futility by God (Romans 8:20). This is why we often resent or even hate work: our sin and the curse make it so hard. So we avoid work, or we turn it into a pragmatic, mercenary enterprise to buy something or to give us an identity we believe will bring us joy. But that’s not what work is for. We are not meant to prostitute our work to get money or status. God meant our work to creatively and vigorously steward some part of his creation, to be a means of providing for our needs and serve others, and to bring us joy. And God has made that possible, even in this futile age, no matter our circumstances. What Restores Our Joy in Work Here is stunning good news, which brings unconquerable hope, for every worker who will believe it: Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:58) Wait, our labor is not in vain? Isn’t that what futility is? Yes! And part of the gospel is that labor done “in the Lord” is not in vain because it cannot ultimately be derailed by the curse of sin. What is labor done “in the Lord”? Does that only apply to “kingdom work”? Yes. But “kingdom work” encompasses everything Christians do: Whatever you do , work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. (Colossians 3:23–24) This means God wants every work we undertake, no matter who we are or what we do, to be a “work of faith” (2 Thessalonians 1:11), done in the strength he supplies (1 Peter 4:11). We give ourselves wholly to God, knowing he bought us with a price (1 Corinthians 6:20), and we do the work he gives our hands to do for his sake. For we serve the Lord Christ, not men and not money. Wherever You Work Even though we still suffer the effects of the curse, the death and resurrection of Jesus, which redeems all things for Christians, liberates our faith-fueled labors from being in vain, and causes them to work for our eternal good and joy (Romans 8:28). He restores our joy in our work. Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, whatever God gives your hands to do today, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the creative, vigorous, joy-producing work of the Lord.