Do you ever worry about how to budget your money for the coming year? Do you fret and toil over how much to spend each month and how much to save—if there is anything left to save?

I graduated from college with a degree in economics, so budgeting had become endemic to my way of calculating. I was excellent at forming budgets and following them. But within a few years, I grew tired and weary of always worrying about how much to spend and how to earn more.

Then I developed a rule for budgeting that changed my life.

Budget for spiritual prosperity, I concluded.

This was a radical concept.

I quit focusing on what to do with my money and started focusing on what to do with my life. A big difference! I figured that if my motives for living were right with God, funds would always be available when I needed them, and I would never have to spend more than I had at the moment.

Spiritual success is what I wanted most in my life, I reasoned, not things and more things and money and more money. Ugh, how empty and void that vain pursuit all becomes. What I wanted more than anything was to feel close to God, to feel a deep anchored peace in my life and to feel more love. And those things were not going to come from obsessing over budgets. They were going to come from growing spiritually, staying mentally close to God and living a spiritually rich life.

My budget decisions changed from, “How much money should I spend in December,” to “What can I do more of in December to grow spiritually and be a better healer?” I still worked, held a job, spent money at the grocery store and paid all my bills. But it was so much easier. I only spent what I needed to expend to keep growing spiritually, take care of my family responsibly and put food on the table. And the effect was liberating.

It was easy to live on a modest budget. We learned contentment with what we had. We were not tempted to go into debt. We didn’t fret over having things we couldn’t afford. Why? Because the center of our attention was not serving self and satisfying self-indulgences, but serving God, growing spiritually and becoming more spiritually minded. You can do these things on a very modest budget, and be very happy all at the same time. Very happy indeed!

It’s incredibly liberating to choose serving God over slaving to mammon.

The effect of budgeting for spiritual prosperity has served me and my family well over the years. Very well, actually. The amazing thing is that when you put serving God first, and silence selfish desire, you spend a lot less, you find contentment with what you have, you stay out of debt, and your savings grow much faster. Living a spiritually rich life translates into abundance in the fullest sense of the term. Life becomes about what you can give rather than what you can get. And you discover that you don’t have to agonize about whether you’ll have enough money in the future because there is always enough. God sees to that.

When one puts serving God first in their budget decisions they’ll discover how God has put them first in His budget decisions.

“Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” Jesus Christ

It’s true! I’ve seen the rule work gloriously firsthand.