Pipeline Not Pie

2 Thessalonians 3:10, “For even when we were with you, we used to give you this order: if anyone is not willing to work, then he is not to eat, either.”

Proverbs 14:23, “In all labor there is profit, But mere talk leads only to poverty.”

The world seems divided into two camps. The socialists that believe somehow the rich have accumulated too much, and therefore need their wealth redistributed to bottom. In other words; tax, steal, or otherwise dispossess some percentage of the population, and give it to the rest. They argue that the top 15% shouldn't “control” 95% of the wealth. As you should surmise by the end of this, 95% of the pipeline flows through 15% of the population, but they do not “control” anything.

The capitalists on the other hand believe that somehow paying taxes is stealing from their pie that they worked so hard to obtain. They believe in an American “dream” that anyone can make it to the top. They believe their intelligence or skills made them who they are, and yet look how many lose everything. Look for how many the inflowing pipeline dries up, and the outflowing pipeline leaves them dry.

I am here to tell you that both camps are wrong. There is a third option. That third option is to believe by faith in GOD’s economy. An economy where differing responsibilities among the populous is understood and embraced, and where sufficiency, lack, and abundance are all a blessing. But how do we find this truth? How to we move away from the right and left, which are both wrong, and look upward for the third option… the Christ option.

I think it begins with first understanding money. Money is NOT wealth. Money is literally 0’s on a piece of paper that a system called banking keeps track of. In fact, in terms of printed cash, I would suspect there is less than 10% printed cash available compared to the trillions of 0’s on paper.

Money is a measurement. It is a measurement of labor.  Nothing more and nothing less… unless you want to include a medium of exchange, but even in that it is a measurement of someone’s labor you may not see. Let me give you an example.

Someone labored to get iron ore out the ground to make steal. Someone else labored to move the iron ore to a factory. Factory workers labored to make steal. Fabricators labored to turn that steal into an oil rig. Oil workers labored with that rig to drill for oil. More labor was used to move the oil to a refinery, and more labor was used to refine it into gas, and then deliver it to a gas station where we buy it for $3.00 a gallon. When we pay $50.00 to fill our tank up, that money pays all that labor. That money flows like a fluid in a pipeline back through all those hands. The gas station pays the refinery, which pays the oil producers, who pay for their rig, who pay for their steal. And as money FLOWS through the pipeline it eventually comes back to us. For me, I work in the mortgage industry. All that labor paid needs housing, which pays me.

And so money comes in, and it goes out. All based on labor.

Gold is $1300 per ounce. That represents the labor it takes to find and deliver an ounce of it. Some is found in the ground, some is found in peoples safe, but there is labor to find it. Did you know that Gold has been made from mercury by bombing it with neutrons? But to do this process it takes $4000 in labor to produce 1/3 ounce. So Gold is not rare, it is just too expensive (labor intensive) to get it other than the current way.

Money as a measure of labor is limitless. Money does not come from a pie where someone has, and someone does not. In fact, if you were to study the top 15% or earners in America, the likelihood of them having “money” more than about 10% of their income sitting in a bank is very rare. In fact it is in the pipeline system. Their money is moving, just like your money is moving.

Money comes in, and money goes out. The prudent have a storage of money, so that if the money coming in slows, the money going out does not necessarily have to slow. Or if the money going out suddenly sucks from tragedy or unexpected suspense, then too there is a reserve. The fact that some have reserves and some do not, in general does not affect the whole pipeline, with certain exceptions like today’s economic times.

What is important about money is that there is flow. There is what economists call the velocity of money.

So what does this tell us as Christians? How do we move away from idea of have’s and have not’s, to God’s economy of all needs are met? I think we must first understand that money is a measurement of labor. If you are to have it FLOW through your hands you must labor. I labor primarily as a loan officer. My friend Jim Spivey labors literally for God meeting people in their trying times for comfort and insight. I get paid by a publicly traded company. Jim gets paid by donations, often from people he does not even meet with. But God moves that flow through our hands because of our labor. Because we get up every day, get dressed, and go into the world to labor at what God has for us. We tap into God’s pipeline which has limitless flow. It makes no difference if George Soros, and Bill Gates have billions. The pipeline is there for us all. We only need to understand it is God’s pipeline; it is not the US Government pipeline, nor the Capitalists pipeline, and certainly not the socialist's pie.

We labor “as unto the Lord” and the pipeline flows in… we obey and the pipeline flows out… but I will say the outflow for another day. Simply tap into the understanding that money is a measurement that flows like an endless artesian well. Stop living without faith in the mindset that money is a pie, and that if someone has, I therefore cannot have too. Start living in the faith that today I labored just as God would have me, and as a result a measurement (money) of that labor is going to flow through my hands.