If you want your financial situation improved, waiting around for someone else to give you a ton of money just isn’t a very good strategy. Ain’t likely. It’s up to you to do something. You have to make things happen—get a promotion, get a job that pays more, take a second job, or sell some possessions for the cash.

The DIY mind-set pervades the religious world too. Every man-made religious philosophy is based on rewards promised to people who either perform well according to the religion’s rules, who observe the religion’s rituals, or who buy the deity’s favor with their contributions and gifts.

The Christian faith is unique in that it reveals the portrait of a God who dares to give it away. “Now to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation. However, to the one who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness” (Romans 4:4,5). Did your jaw drop at that outrageous concept? God justifies the ungodly! That does not mean that God rewards disobedience to his will. What he does mean is that he loves people so much that he sent his Son to a bloody cross in order to give people the righteousness they could never earn.

This means that you can live your life out of gratitude to God instead of nervously trying to earn his favor. This means that the central message of your congregation must always be grace, not the demands of the law.