—Daryl F. Heller, Entrepreneur Founder and CEO, Premier Companies LLC Chairman, Horizon Initiative
Coins Left Over is a book for every believer! In this life we all will deal with money in one way or another. Our natural inclination is to avoid that which is hard or difficult or is causing us pain and frustration. Yet the principles described in Coins Left Over will help many people tackle the mountain of financial concerns and give them the courage to overcome it. This book brings the spiritual principles of wealth and finances into our everyday, natural lives and gives us practical tools to change our financial situation. Gene shares principles that he has applied in his own life to achieve financial freedom. You can do the same. Take your first steps to financial freedom by reading this book!
—Pieter Jordaan
Business: Director of Jordaan Ltd Church & Ministry: Founder of Gateway Ministries & Gateway Fellowship, Aylesbury, United Kingdom
It has always been God’s intention for mankind to have dominion over all things, except each other. The Church’s misaligned concept of dominion is that it will suddenly descend upon us through Heaven’s wave of a magic wand. Coins Left Over unlocks truth that there cannot be dominion without stewardship. Dominion is the result of good stewardship. This book is a pragmatic gift to the Body of Christ that unveils designs from the heart of God to shift the Church into her destiny, which is dominion! I highly recommend this book to every child of God whose desire is to walk in dominion.
—Ravi Naicker, Senior Elder
From Jesus Christ Ministries, South Africa
Foreword
Within the Kingdom of God is everything necessary for life and godliness. This includes wealth. Historically, a false dilemma has been created around the subject of money. One extreme extols poverty as a virtue to be embraced as the proof of personal piety, while the other extreme insists that wealth is the undeniable indication of God’s favor. Both points of view claim the support of Scripture while attempting to interpret Scripture out of their respective traditions. In doing so, they fail to present the truth regarding wealth.
The tradition surrounding the view that poverty is a virtue considers wealth as evil because of its potential to distract one from devotion to God. That tradition refers to the Scripture, “For the love of money is the root of all that is evil,” and to Jesus’ statement, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay His head,” as reliable proof that wealth is inherently evil, and is to be eschewed as thoroughly as Jesus treated it. It overlooks the fact, however, that Jesus condemned “the love of money,” but not money itself.
Love is the greatest emotion of which the human being is capable. In the ability to love, the human is capable of emulating God Himself. It is therefore imperative that this emotion be directed to the most worthwhile of objectives. Under the law, the two greatest commandments were related to those things the Jews were to love. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart…and your neighbor as yourself.” And in the New Testament the central command is to love as God Himself loves: “Love one another as I have loved you.” It is always appropriate to love God and one another. It is never appropriate to love money. Money is never more than a tool to be used in the furtherance of the purposes of God. It should never be elevated to a place of comparable status to God, or to our fellow man.
Similarly, the Lord of Heaven and earth could have lived anywhere upon the earth that He chose. While He was on the earth, He could have commanded the use of anything He wished. On the rarest of occasions He exercised this prerogative. He commanded the fish to fill Peter’s net; He had a coin inserted into the mouth of a fish; and He turned water into wine. Whenever He ruled in this way, it was conspicuously to benefit others. He chose to bring no earthly possession under His control in order to demonstrate that anyone could fulfill his or her destiny regardless of material circumstances. Wealth is therefore neither the enemy nor the master of mankind. The tradition that presents poverty as a virtue is commonly associated with institutional religions in which the leaders exercise near total control over the daily lives of the members. And the poor are often uneducated and therefore easier to control. Poverty and backwardness are common companions in the lives of religious people.
On the side of those who insist that wealth is a basic entitlement to those who have had a salvation experience, their claim is also based on a shallow understanding of Scripture. They rightly claim that God is the owner of all earth’s resources, and that He is their Father. The inference is that if you are the son of a wealthy king, then you are entitled to draw down whatever resources you want when you want it. They support this inference with a formulaic compilation of Scripture and apply the formulas with ad populum reasoning. Although they properly assert the truth that they are sons of God, their motivation for doing so is in the hope of gain. In that sense, they continue to evidence the emotions of orphans who are classically preoccupied with the issues of their provision and protection.
A son’s true calling is to represent his father, and he does only what he sees his father doing. In the pursuit of his father’s business, all the resources of his father’s house are at his disposal. The orphan has no proper view of a father, and therefore thinks that the mandate of his father is to supply enough means so that the son does not have to trust his father for his provision and protection. Should the father honor the son’s request, the result would be that the son receives enough wealth that he would be independent of his father, and could supply his own provision and arrange for his own protection. No importance is attached to the need for discipline and maturity because an orphan equates discipline with rejection, and recoils from the prospect of being disciplined by his father so that he could have his father’s view of all things including wealth. Without discipline, no one can become mature, and without maturity, the true riches of the Kingdom can never be imparted into the hands of a child.
The third way is to view wealth as part of the overall purpose of God for His family in the earth, and not as an end within itself. Gene Strite has been given as comprehensive and practical a view of this revelation as anyone writing on this subject today. He attaches the context of Kingdom purposes to the subject of wealth. He challenges his readers to come face-to-face with their destiny and to examine their preconceptions about wealth. Gene believes that wealth is a tool for advancing the purposes of God in the life of a son of God. He sees wealth as neither an enemy nor a master, but a servant. He gives no quarter to the spirits of poverty, ignorance, and religion, and is uncompromising in the standards of truth that he sets forth. As one who has had conversations with him on his back porch until the early hours of the morning, I can say plainly that his message is the story of his life. His revelation is not theoretical; the reality has been field tested in his extraordinary life.
—Sam Soleyn
The Kingdom of God Ministries
Chapter One ~ Sharing Your Blessings
It is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35b NIV).
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s brought upheaval into the lives of millions of Europeans. Euphoria over newfound freedom quickly mingled with fear of the breakdown of social order. Hope for the future was tempered by uncertainty over the present. Triumph or tragedy, everyone had a story. One young man, an artist, struggled for nearly two years to survive as a beggar on the streets of an eastern European city. One day, moved at the sight of two other beggars in similar circumstances to his own, he counted out the biggest coins he had and divided them between the two. Soon after this, someone bought not one, but two, of the lovely little paintings he was selling. This was the beginning of his rise out of poverty. What made the difference? Reflecting on what had happened, the young artist remembered reading Jesus’ words, “Give, and it will be given to you…” (Luke 6:38 NKJV). It was then that he realized the true value and power of giving.
In