I recently spent the weekend with some dear friends in ministry. What began as a work trip quickly became a great weekend of ministry, refueling and discipleship training. This couple has become family to me over the past few years and we always find ways to engage in deep conversation. We don’t connect on social media, in fact I’m pretty sure neither of them are on Twitter or Facebook. They are as “offline” as you can possibly get.

We started talking at one of our meals about how to be good “investors” of the resources God gives us… not just financially, but across the board including time, gifts, talents and our identity.

Too often we believe that being good “stewards” of our resources means to add to our total sum. If we were talking in financial terms, we would believe that being a good steward of $100 is to add an additional $100 to our total sum. Though that isn’t bad stewardship, I think we’re called to better.

What if we were to throw the expectation of addition out the window for a second and set a new expectation of multiplication in our lives? What if we set our goal to double whatever is in our hand? We would still add $100 to our net sum (the same when we focused on addition), but now we would have $200 total.

If we repeated this again and again within a few cycles we would be well over simply adding and our pot would grow faster than we could work to add to it. This is the power of multiplication.

How can we let our resources (gifts, time, money, influence, etc) have such great multiplication power that our “investments” work harder than we can work ourselves?

If you think about it, that’s the model Jesus used. He poured himself into twelve, but really mentored three. He called them the cornerstone of the Church. He expected them to go out and minister after He was gone.

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Jesus knew that if he poured himself into three and let them take that knowledge from there, then He was able to be far more effective than trying to pour into the millions of followers of Christ that are in the global Church today.

This is also how the successful/wealthy operate. They understand the power of compound interest and the power of asset based investments. They’re in the business of multiplication.

No millionaire has ever become a millionaire by investing in something that simply adds $100 to their financial pot every month. They would never have substantial growth. They figure out how to make the $100 turn into $200 and the $200 turn into $400 and on and on. Over time this principle becomes incredibly valuable in building wealth.

How can you multiply your efforts, gifts, talents, finances, etc and break the standards of addition?