But thou shalt remember the
Lord thy God: For it is He that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may
establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day.
Deuteronomy 8:18
This topic is an inexhaustible topic but
I will address my teaching practically. I have chosen to pick an area of Creating
Kingdom Wealth that I consider important but neglected. The area appears
inconsequential but is very important to creating and maintaining kingdom
wealth. That area borders on the characteristics that a Christian must have in
order to create and maintain kingdom wealth.
I’ll focus this teaching bearing the
following simple questions in mind:
1. What are the personality traits
of wealthy people?
2. What are the qualities that we should
emulate in wealthy people?
The answers to these questions appear
easy but are difficult to meet for a lot of us. I will however attempt to state
six (6) really important characteristics of wealthy people.
1. REALIZATION THAT GOD IS THE ONE THAT
GIVES POWER TO GET WEALTH
This to my mind is the foundation. Just
like the scripture says we must first and foremost acknowledge God.
5 Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own
understanding. 6 In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall
direct thy paths.
Proverbs 3:5-6
It is only after we have acknowledged God
that we can fully take advantage of the powers that he has made available to
us, including the power to get wealth.
Acknowledgement of God is like an eye
drop that opens our closed eyes to see the powers that God has promised us
about wealth.
Therefore, the importance of
acknowledging God cannot be overemphasized. Why?
All natural resources are God given.
Land, sun, water, oil, gas, minerals, forests etc.
Other resources that are not considered
natural are also God given. These include ideas, attitudes, mind, imagination,
intelligence, common sense, discretion etc.
2. HARD WORK
Hard work has the capacity to make us
high achievers. Regular working hours are expected to be minimum working hours.
Being energetic and putting in extra hours are traits of wealthy individuals.
The desire for success and an entrepreneurial spirit propel hard working
individuals to make their own decisions about setting up businesses and doing
something they genuinely care about. The alternative to hard work in my view is
being laid back and lazy.
We must ask ourselves the question:
Does a laid back, lazy attitude make for
success in creating and maintaining wealth?
3. EDUCATION
Statistics show that well over sixty
percent of wealthy people attribute their success to education. I am not saying
that lack of education is a barrier to being wealthy or creating wealth as we
also have close to thirty percent of wealthy people who have attained wealth
through non-traditional routes.
4. SMART INVESTING FOR BIGGER GAINS
The higher the percentage of your income
that you invest wisely, the bigger the returns. Big time investors believe that
investing and saving money is more rewarding than spending money.
5. RISK TAKING
Taking risks from time to time without
being impulsive in decision making is an important characteristic of the
wealthy. When you are focused on building and maintaining wealth, you must be
skilled at gathering and analyzing information to help you determine whether to
say “yes” or walk away from an investment proposal.
6. FRUGALITY
This is a very simplistic quality of the
wealthy. And it makes a lot of sense. The basic principle behind this is that
you accumulate wealth when you spend less. It is good advice to avoid wasteful
spending and shun an opulent lifestyle because it simply means we are able to
apply more of our income into asset building and investment for returns.
In my view however, there are a lot more
questions that we must consider and answer to help us discover ourselves and
help in creating and sustaining our businesses.
Are you able to take risks? Creating
wealth involves taking on a risk of loss of wealth, integrity, associates etc.
How do you respond to the likelihood of these losses?
Do you present yourself as humble enough
to learn? Or as an arrogant know-all kind of person?
Can you be trusted by people?
Are you hardworking and able to sacrifice
for the purpose of your dedicated goal?
Do you easily get discouraged and lose
hope? Are you easily swayed by the negative decisions of others? Do you bother
so much about what people think about you and your ideas?
When you are successful what are your
goals? Who will be the beneficiaries of your wealth? Are you willing to deploy
your wealth to achieve the plan and purpose of God?
Do you have a conscience? Do you understand
the concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, Godly and ungodly?
How do you handle the wealth that God has
given you?
There is a common saying that you never
know a man until he has money.
An important lesson for success in wealth
creation is that we must learn to master wealth.
How do you show that you have mastered
wealth? The only way you show that you have mastered wealth is when, apart from
God, no one (except you) can see the difference in your lifestyle. There will be no difference between what you
do at the time you have money and when you do not have.
In my view these are issues that we must
have at the back of our minds.
Like I said earlier, the posers appear
simple but may be tricky and when we search ourselves we may discover that we
are not able to answer most in the correct way.
- Dipo Onifade
