(I wrote the following article 11 years ago. It was relevant then, but far more relevant today!! It can be found on page 110 of my book Extra Effort.)How can you really invest for the future? Are there any guarantees?

Most folks have a mindset that the economic system of America is a place you can put your faith. That has been shaken somewhat by what has happened in the stock market and in the economic conditions of the world. Many analysts agree that one of the latest huge drops in the Dow Jones was related to the collapse of a big hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management LP.

I don’t understand a lot of this but this was a group of high-powered brains that devised sophisticated models where basically they predicted what markets would do and used borrowed money to “hedge.” It had a great track record! However, it didn’t predict the current economic condition, and got in trouble.

The people who were making the decisions are some of the best minds in the economic world. There are Myron Scholes and Robert Merton; both had won Nobel Prizes for economics. One teaches at MIT and the other at Harvard. David Mullins is the former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. Their leader is John Meriwether, who pioneered fixed-income arbitrage at Salomon Brothers and built its trading desk into a huge moneymaker. You would think that leadership like that couldn’t be wrong.

They are brilliant men, but they made some mistakes that required some of America’s financial powerhouses to “bail them out.”

This is just a reminder. We need to truly put our faith and trust in eternal things, not in earthly things. Even the strongest economic system in the world cannot be totally trusted. Matthew 6: 19 – 21 and Matthew 6: 25-34 focus on helping us to invest our money, time, talents, and energy in things that really matter. Our leader, the Lord Jesus Christ, calls the shots and He doesn’t make any mistakes!

The Bible is our best financial guide!