When you invest finance you always obtain an investment return. The worst return you can possibly obtain is to get back what you put in, but you will always obtain an investment return. 

There are different ways of investing. There are different kinds of soil that you can plant in. You may plant the same seed but it will grow differently according to the soil that you plant it in. 

Let's look at a few different ways that you can invest your money. 

Investing in Physical Needs

You can invest it in your physical needs and desires. The most common form of this investment is providing food for your stomach.

Have you ever tried to work out your budget to see what percentage of your salary you spend on your stomach? If you haven't then try it some time. You will be amazed.

What kind of return do you get on this investment?

You get an immediate return. You get an immediate sense of comfort and satisfaction and maybe a bit of strength and energy. It usually lasts about a third of a day because we eat three times a day. 

You say, "We went out last night and we had a wonderful meal. We had a great time." 

Then you wake up in the morning and you say,

"What's for breakfast?" 

"But didn't you eat last night?" 

"Yes, we ate quite a lot too." 

"So what do you want breakfast for? What do you want lunch for? Didn't you eat yesterday?" 

You see it gives a wonderful return, but it is emptiness. It gives a quick return and it is very necessary that you invest money in your body.

Your body has to be kept alive. But how much do you invest in the pleasures of the body? There is nothing wrong with that either. The Lord wants us to enjoy His creation.

But you see if you look at the wealth you are investing and the percentage of wealth that you are investing, you need to be investing into something that is going to give you a bigger investment return.

This is certainly not one of them. It is the bottom rung of the ladder. 

Investing in Recreation

How about recreation and entertainment? What about fun, play and pleasure? It gives you such a lovely feeling and an emotional lift. You have a good laugh. 

You say, "We had such a good time. We enjoyed ourselves. We must do it again next week." 

Well that one might last a week, but it is still temporary and transitory. You got your return on your investment. It came right back at you but it did not last. 

Investing in Tools and Appliances

We can go up a rung now and invest in practical objects and implements. These are things that you can use into the future - appliances, tools and things that you can use over and over again. 

Every time you use that object you obtain a return on your investment. You continue to obtain returns on your investment for as long as the life span or the usefulness of that object continues. 

You are now starting to invest into something a little more worthwhile. This is in an investment where you do not have to go and buy another one next week. It is going to last a while before it breaks down or wears out. 

It is not going to last forever, but it will last a lot longer. Not only that, but you can now take this object and use it to make your activities and your work more efficient.

It can help you to increase your quality and worth, because you can now be a better craftsman with a better tool. 

Investing in Savings

You could take your money and save it by putting it into a Savings Account. If you put it there it is going to accumulate a certain rate of interest according to your country and the economy of the time.

Your money will gradually build in value, but the little that it builds in value will at times seem negligible. The Scripture tells us to,

… store up treasures on earth where moth and rust corrupt.

What is the moth and rust? Inflation will eat away at it and taxes will take some of your growth. In the end it will devalue instead of increasing in value.

But you do have a potential power there and it is a good investment, because the cash is available for you to use when you need it. 

Of course if you can increase its size then you can start doing more with it. You can buy bigger things that can be of more use with larger amounts of money, instead of spending out all the smaller amounts.

By accumulating your financial resources you are coming to a better means of investing your money. 

You can also have long-term investments like life assurance policies and various other investment programs. This is where you have to lock the money in for a certain period of time to obtain higher growth rates. 

But there are also disadvantages to this because you have to wait for the money before you can use it. Also it is under the World System and is being corroded all the time. 

Investing in Competitions and Lotteries

You could try to invest your money in competitions, raffles, lotteries and gambling. But really all you are doing is throwing it by the sidewalk. It is like the seed sown on hard ground. It would be like saying,

"Well we'll just throw this seed on the ground and hope some of it grows. I'm sure out of a thousand seeds we sow, one of them will hit the right spot. Maybe it will; maybe it won't. It's one of the chances we have to take." 

When you do this you become subject to that wonderful thing they call luck. This is not a good investment at all. It is playing right into Satan's hands, so that he can steal from you everything that you have. 

Investing in Appreciating Assets

So what do you invest in? What is the wisest thing in the natural to invest in?

You need to invest in an appreciating asset. In other words you need to invest in something that will increase in value. Now there is an investment that is worthwhile, because it is getting bigger and bigger and increasing in value all the time! 

You could invest on the stock market, and you could buy shares in businesses that are growing and prospering. And so over a period of time your stocks can go up and increase in value.

As a result, what you invested now becomes greater because you can sell those stocks at a far higher price than what you paid for them. 

That seems to be what a lot of people think is the best way to invest, and many Christians are getting involved in investing on the stock market. I do not want to knock it, but I just want to say one thing. You need to be very careful. 

When you invest in stocks and shares in a company, you make yourself a partner in a company that may be run by ungodly people.

You have actually made yourself a partner to that business. You have made yourself a shareholder, to partake of their profits according to the way they run their company. 

This can be a very dangerous situation. The Scripture speaks about not being in partnership with the world.

You can invest your money in property. You can then lease or rent it out to generate a continual income.

Property tends to also increase in value over a period of time so it is a very good investment. It appreciates in value while producing income at the same time. 

You can also invest in expensive quality equipment that can be hired out. Not only will it pay for itself, but it will generate a continual income for an extended period of time. 

Investing in Reproducing Assets

There is one final form of investment that is the greatest of all. You can invest in a reproducing asset. What kind of reproducing asset? Well in Bible days livestock was the big thing. 

If you go back to the nation of Israel, their herds and flocks, their wives and children were all considered assets. Your herds and flocks, wives and children were reproducing all the time. The key principle in those days was,

"If you want to get rich, have lots of kids." 

In those days having a lot of kids made you rich. These days it makes you a pauper. The idea was you obtain some livestock. Then all you do is feed them a bit of grass which is lying everywhere and they start making babies. 

They start reproducing, multiplying, duplicating and quadruplicating. Before you know it you have a great big herd of livestock, and all it cost you was a little bit of food that you gave them. 

That was easy because the ground yielded its food naturally. All you needed to do was set them out to graze and they would reproduce.

You would simply buy a cow and put her in the herd and she would reproduce. You did not need to do anything more. It would increase all by itself. 

Investing in People

How do you buy a reproducing asset today? Well you could still invest in livestock I suppose. I know there are cattle farmers who invest in these sorts of things.

But what is your best investment in a reproducing asset? It is when people invest in other people. But we do not like to do that do we? We prefer to be selfish and keep everything to ourselves. 

The World System says,

"Destroy the opposition. Build everything up for yourselves. Become rich and wealthy." 

But if you invest and reproduce yourself in others they will continue reproducing. What better way to reproduce than to take all that you have and pour it into somebody else? Teach them and train them in everything that you have. 

The better way is to take all the knowledge that you have and to produce a reproducing asset.

You could produce a son or daughter and pour into him or her all that you have. Now you have a helper with you in your work, and there are two of you doing the same job with the same capability.

This produces twice the return. As the multiplication goes on it gets bigger and bigger, until you have a whole crowd all working at peak efficiency and producing together at the same time. How do we learn to do that?

In Acts 2 we read about when the Spirit of God came down on the Day of Pentecost and the church was born. The people came together and they took everything that they had - the wealthy and the poor together - and pooled their resources.

Everybody had their needs met. They worked together and grew and multiplied, and there was not a poor person among them. 

But how is the World System set up? It is set up in a way that everybody grabs for themselves.

There is enough in this world for everybody, contrary to all the big hype about population explosion. There is enough in this world for every single soul to be wealthy. 

But instead there are those who have grabbed the wealth and held it for themselves. The rest suffer because people will not invest in others. They invest only in themselves and keep it all.

The wealth of the world is being held by the selfishness in the heart of man. God wants us to break out of that and get back to His system of giving out. The key to wealth and prosperity in God's economy is giving out to others.

Reversing the Curse

Throughout the Old Testament we see all the effects of the fall - the Adamic curse, the thorns, the thistles, the pests, the domination of the World System and Satan. All of these things interfered with God's prosperity. 

God offered the Old Covenant to Abraham and gave him promises to overcome all of these things. He said,

"You are going to rise up. You are going to be the head and not the tail." 

It is all there in Deuteronomy 28 about how God lifted them up. He promised He would take them to a land filled with milk and honey and He would prosper them. He said He would bless the work of their hands and reverse the effects of the curse. 

Let's get back to the illustration of a chemical reaction. When you mix all your chemicals together and end up with just a tiny bit of your compound, it is because half of it was lost in energy. 

The same thing applies where the curse is concerned, because it reduces productivity and efficiency. You need to reverse the effects of the curse. 

Believers should be able to do the same amount of work as an unbeliever and receive a higher return. God will increase our quality so that we become more valuable.

A prospective employer should desire to employ you above others because you have the spirit of wisdom dwelling within you. 

A Day of Victory for Me

The Lord first showed this to me when I began my career in computer programming. I remember facing a problem that I could not figure out. My boss who was a Christian said to me,

"Les, we need to have this program out by tomorrow. Our business depends on it." 

But I could not find the bug and I cried out,

"Lord you have to help me." 

The Lord said to me,

"The spirit of wisdom that created the worlds is living in you." 

So I stopped right there and prayed,

"Lord your wisdom is within me. Let it rise up in me now by the power of the Holy Spirit." 

Suddenly I saw what looked like a blueprint in my mind. I saw the whole picture and it fell into place like a jigsaw puzzle. I wrote it down and tried it out. Then I phoned my boss and said,

"I have it. We can go ahead; I can do it. I've solved the problem." 

It has happened to me many times since then, but that was the first time I saw how powerful it is. God has given us the ability as His children to rise up and to overcome. 

We can overcome the thorns, the thistles and the pests; everything that interferes with our natural ability to accumulate wealth. We can use all of those natural resources that God has put into man. 

We receive deliverance from the curses, and our prosperity is no longer based on works but on faith. The Old Covenant was based on obedience. Now under the New Covenant it is based on faith in the Lord and in Him alone. 

We have been promised that whatever we invest in the heavenly realm will generate a hundredfold return. There is no interest rate like that anywhere in this world. 

And now we do not have to be confined to investing in this world alone. We can invest in the heavenly realm as we saw in Section 01 on spiritual transmutation.

We are able to transmute and invest into the heavenly realm also and receive a hundredfold return.

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