This presentation by Dr. Jonathan Pennington was given at the 2026 Kingdom Advisors conference. You can download a copy of the personal assessment here.

Introduction – Biblical GOATS

In any and every area of human interest, it’s natural to wonder about the GOATS – the Greatest of All Times. In popular music is it The Beatles, Metallica, Taylor Swift? In basketball is it Jordan or LeBron? In retail, is it Sam’s Club or Costco? (Just kidding – for sure, Costco!) In theology is it Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, Wesley?

We also see plenty of GOATS in the Bible, and not just the non-sheep and scape-ish versions. I mean we have several occasions where the question of what thing is the greatest comes up and where something is described in the Bible as being “Great,” as in “of utmost importance.”

I can think of three ideas and teachings and instructions, three momentous moments in the Bible that are seen as of utmost importance, to which we can ascribe the adjective “Great.” The three Great moments I’m thinking of are:

• God’s instructions to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1-2 about what the responsibility of humanity is
• Jesus’ answer when he’s asked about how to interpret the whole of the Bible during the last week of his life in Jerusalem
• Jesus’ final instructions to his disciples at the end of the First Gospel

In our theological and ecclesial traditions, we have various names for these three moments and instructions – The Cultural Mandate, the Greatest Commandment, and the Great Commission.

These three distinct ideas and teachings all share GOAT-status in their respective realms. To help us see their connection, I’d like to give them slightly different titles. We could appropriately name them the:

• Cultural Mandate
• Commandment Mandate
• Commission Mandate

Or maybe even better, to highlight their biblically-emphasized importance, I’d like to rename these three central biblical ideas as:

• The Great Cultivation
• The Great Commandment
• The Great Commission

The King of the Hill and GOAT of GOATS

Now occasionally I’ve heard my kids debate the hypothetical question of who would win in a theoretical competition of greats? Who would win if Thor battled Superman? Or if all 47 US Presidents could all run in a major election against each other, who would win? What about if they all ran in a 40-yard dash against each other? We could come up with lots of others.

But I want to ask a more serious biblical Greatest of All question that is quite weighty in its import but has rarely, if ever, been asked:

Which of these Great instructions – the Great Cultivation, the Great Commandment, and the Great Commission – would win in a biblical competition?

That is, which of these, according to the Scriptures, is of most importance? After all, Jesus himself does speak of some commandments being “weightier” than others (Matt 23:23). All of God’s instructions are important but some teachings in Scripture are deeper, heavier, of broader significance and impact.

So, of these big moments and ideas – the Cultural Mandate, the Greatest Commandment, and the Great Commission – which is the King of the Hill, the GOAT of the GOATS?

If there is some inevitable competition between these three Greats, how do we understand their relative value and role in our lives?

Some might try to answer this in terms of a progression throughout the Bible. In this view, consciously or unconsciously, the Great Cultivation been replaced by the later Great Commandment that was subsequently replaced by Jesus’ final Great Commission. Thus, we should be all about the mission of evangelism and discipleship.

Others might analyze these as different types of commandments and thereby prioritize one over the others. In this view, the Great Commandment of love could be seen as the essential ethic worked out respectively in the Great Cultivation and/or the Great Commission.

I would suggest something else – That all three of these Greats are of a piece, are organically connected, and are meant to be taken together as the ongoing work of God’s people in the world. Rather than seeing the Great Cultivation, the Great Commandment, and the Great Commission as in competition with one other or as alternatives in our obedience, all three of these momentous ideas mutually inform and enhance each other as THE work and call of God upon the Church and her members.

I am suggesting that in a fundamental way we should see the Cultural Mandate, the Greatest Commandment, and the Great Commission as really one thing, three sides of one triangle, that we should think of all three of these as Great Commandments that are essential to the Christian faith and life.

What I’d like to speak with you about today, as my title indicates, is these Three Great Commandments and how they relate to investing, to how we think about and handle the money that God entrusts to us personally and through your vocation as financial advisors.

What I’m going to do this morning is give you a brief overview of these Three Great Commandments and then offer an understanding of how they fit together and then finally, think with you about how this might all affect how we think about our own work – our own businesses – as well as our practice of investing.

The Great Commission

Of these three GOAT moments in Holy Scripture, the Great Commission is likely the most familiar and most attended to by the modern Evangelical movement with its strong focus on missions. After all, who hasn’t heard Matt 28:16-20 preached by a missionary home on furlough!

From the earliest days of the Church, the Gospel of Matthew was the centerpiece of the faith. Earliest Christianity was largely Matthean Christianity. In the New Testament – the collection of authoritative Christian apostolic writings – the Gospel of Matthew was put at the head and this is not on accident. The “First Gospel” was the primary source for much of the Church’s theological understanding and liturgy. In addition to the long “Who’s Who” list of greatest hits teachings from Jesus, Matthew concludes with this famous text that eventually gets the title, The Great Commission.

What we see in the Great Commission:

• The return to Galilee from where the mission of Jesus into all the world is launched
• Clarification of the titles given to Jesus at the beginning – He is Son of David and Son of Abraham. We see now that as the Son of David (king) he will rule not only over Israel but all the nations (children of Abraham), Jews and Gentiles
• Major Themes from throughout Matthew reappear here:
  • Worship of Jesus
• Authority – echoing also authority now given to the church on earth to continue his mission
• All nations (cf. Abraham)
• Heaven and earth
• Disciple-making / disciples
• Teaching
• God/Jesus with / Immanuel
• We also see many ways in which the Old Testament is connected to and fulfilled in the Great Commission:
  • Dan 7
  • Genesis – heaven and earth, Abraham, book of genesis
  • Cyrus’ decree (Ezra 1:1-4; 2 Chron 36:22-23)

The Great Commission is a GOAT passage because the discipleship of the world becomes the ongoing mission of Christ’s Covenant Community on the earth as they await Jesus’ return.

But before we move on to our next GOAT, it is important to pause for a moment and consider what “making disciples of all nations” would have meant to Matthew and his first-century hearers.

• Inviting people to adopt a whole-person philosophy of life through repentance, to take Jesus Yoke upon their lives and “learn” from him for the purpose of finding true life/shalom
• Inviting people into a new covenant community of people = Kingdom = ekklesia…
• Inviting people to adopt a new identity (followers of Jesus) and enter into the life-long process of having their sensibilities, habits, values, attitudes retrained/resocialized/reformed

These are very important ideas that go beyond getting someone “saved.” We’ll come back to this crucial insight.

Let’s consider the second of our Greats, The Great Commandment: 

The Great Commandment

Near the end of his public ministry and earthly life, in the shadow of the Temple precincts in Jerusalem, Jesus was drawn into a spicy and heated public sparring with the Jewish religious and political leaders. They were fed up with his popularity, his influence, his obvious power in teaching and healing, his audacity to challenge their established and educated authority. His three-year ministry of teaching about the kingdom of God and his restoring of people to life in their souls and bodies was reaching its concluding purpose. He planned and directed all of this to happen at the Temple in the great City where God had dwelt with his people, where sacrifices were made to maintain humanity’s relationship with God. Now Jesus is going to be both Priest and Sacrifice to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth.

The Jewish leadership had a plan – publicly disgrace this uneducated country bumpkin charismatic wonderworker by trapping him with big theological questions. The first question they ask him is a heated one about whether faithful Jews should pay taxes to Caesar. This is a full-proof way to discredit Jesus by either showing him to be a sell-out to the oppressive Roman Empire or get him arrested by the Romans for being a treasonous revolutionary. We all know the story of Jesus’ unexpected and brilliant answer – “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” Their brilliant plan didn’t materialize.

Plan B – The Sadducees try to run intellectual circles around him by setting him with a ridiculous theological question. If a woman marries multiple brothers who all die, whose wife will she be in the Resurrection Age? Not only is this a classic case of “hard cases make bad laws” but it’s also absurd for this sect of Jews who don’t even believe in the Resurrection Age to be asking him this question. Once again, he shocks the audience by giving an unexpectedly brilliant answer.

Finally, the religious leaders regroup and rally and try one more time to show the crowds that this Galilean upstart is not worthy of their hopes and allegiance. Their third and final question is the only one that has any real merit as a theological query. Even though they mean it to discredit Jesus, it’s a legitimate question – Of all the many, many commandments and teachings of the whole of the Jewish Scriptures, what’s the most important one? Of all the things God has spoken, how do we best sort and weigh them out to discern the Greatest Commandment? Is there one ring to rule all or so?

They are likely hoping that Jesus’ lack of formal rabbinic training will make this complicated question impossible for him to answer, revealing the gaping hole in his supposed Messianic armor.

Jesus’ answer – that the greatest commandment is a whole-person love for God – is so familiar to most readers today that we may overlook what a wise answer it is. The closest thing to an overall theological statement in the Jewish Scriptures is the Shema from Deuteronomy 6, and this is what Jesus quotes. The Shema (from the command in Hebrew to “hear”) remains the most central confessional tradition in the long history of Judaism down to today. It is recited by most Jews daily, is used as the climactic moment of final prayer of Yom Kippur, and is traditionally the last words a Jew would say before death. The Shema emphasizes God’s oneness/singularity and subsequently exhorts God’s people to love the Lord singularly – that is with wholeness and integrity across one’s life (Deut 6:4-5).

Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 as his answer to their question, an answer that would not have been shocking to the rabbinic ear. It is unclear what they expected Jesus to say and what answer he might have given that would have been successful in entrapping him. Maybe they were simply hoping that as a man untrained in the rabbinic tradition, he might stumble to come up with an educated answer to a complex question. Maybe they hoped he would say something completely off base, wrongly emphasizing some obscure perspective, thus showing him to be a hack. We are not told their response to his inquiry but the assumption is that, as in the preceding interactions, they were silenced by his wisdom.

But Jesus doesn’t stop there with his excellent and surprisingly astute answer. He shows himself to be a wise teacher beyond their imagination by going on to offer more than they asked for – he also articulates what the second greatest commandment is. Continuing with the theme of love, he quotes Lev 19:18 and its command to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Matt 22:39).

Why does Jesus add this to his answer? The reason is found in how he frames the quote. The second greatest command is “like” the first. That is, these two greatest commandments are organically related and connected, not merely organized by importance.

He goes on to say something shocking that we need to consider carefully – that “all of the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (22:40). This is not just a bit of poetic rhetoric from Jesus. By offering this second greatest commandment and making the interpretation of God’s revelation dependent on both of the commands, Jesus offers a particular way of reading all of Scripture. He is challenging any would-be interpretation of Torah that emphasizes a relationship with God and faithfulness to God that neglects love and care for others.

In this, he is continuing his prophetic critique of his self-appointed opponents. In this Jesus is putting his finger on a timeless religious human problem – the potentiality of practicing divine devotion in a way that neglects or even eschews devotion to fellow creatures made in God’s image, the family of humanity together under the Father. Love for God that does not also include love for others is not whole and singular, but incomplete and adulterated. And we can also observe the opposite truth – love for others that does not include love for God is also incomplete.

In the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly stresses that providing compassionate help and forgiveness to others – that is, mercy – is what righteousness looks like, doing the will of God by showing mercy even as God the Father does (e.g., Luke 6:36). Closely connected, Matthew also repeatedly emphasizes the theme of wholeness (teleios-ity) – whole-personness as necessary to be a disciple of Jesus and to enter into the kingdom of heaven, not mere external and heartless obedience. This also corresponds to the Ten Commandments (Exod 20:1-17), whose two tables or parts can be interpreted as relating to God and to humanity in an inseparable way.

It is difficult to know whether Jesus’ addendum to the Pharisees’ answer was shocking or understandable to them. Its familiarity to us in the Christian tradition may make it seem like a natural and obvious understanding of Torah, but at least in practice, it was the lack of obeying the second command that was the source of Jesus’ regular critique of the scribes as Pharisees. This will come to a sharp point in the subsequent discourse in chapter 23.

Jesus’ “loving God and neighbor” interpretation of the Scriptures becomes central to the Apostolic teaching and the subsequent Christian tradition. We see Jesus’ followers interpret the Scriptures the same way, often using the second commandment as the basis for key moral exhortations, such as in Galatians 5:14 and Romans 13:8-13. The entirety of the First Epistle of John can be seen as an outworking of this understanding of the organic relationship between loving God and loving others. The new commandment which is really an old commandment is that Christians must love one another. Claiming to know God and walk in his light yet living a life that is not marked by loving others is falsehood and darkness. Certainly reflecting on Jesus’ command, John writes, “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister” (1 John 4:20-21 NIV; cf. also 2:9-11; 3:16-18). In the post-Apostolic Christian tradition this connection will become crystalized in what is called the Double Love command, exposited and emphasized in Augustine, among others.

So you can see why this Double Love has to be included in our (non-agricultural) GOAT analysis – it’s what Jesus himself says is central to his followers!

And this brings us to our last Great, the one that is actually the oldest and starts the whole program, the Great Cultivation (also known as the Cultural Mandate).

The Great Cultivation

Every religion and philosophy of life has what we call a metaphysic – an understanding of what the world is and how it functions. Every religion and philosophy needs to have a robust metaphysic because to flourish as humans we have to answer core questions about our existence –

• How did the world come to be? – a Cosmogony
• How is the world structured? – a Cosmology
• What does it mean to be human? – an Anthropology
• What’s wrong and how did things go wrong? – a Hamartiology
• What’s the end game and goal? — an Eschatology

One would be hard-pressed to find a metaphysic in any worldview that is more comprehensive, nuanced, and ancient than the Judeo-Christian understanding. The first three chapters of Genesis provide central answers to all of these questions, and the rest of the two-testament Bible explain and extend this.

When we turn to these chapters with these metaphysical questions, the answers are clear and compelling:

Cosmogony – How did the world come to be?

• There is really only one God who made all that exists from his Word(s)
• The rest of the Bible explains and expands this so that we see that God is Triune and all was made by the Father through the Son and by the Spirit [JTP-only note to self = Two-Testament Explanation and Expansion]

Cosmology – How is the world structured?

• All things he made are Tov – good and beautiful; sevenfold repetition
• Diversity, distinction, connection
• The rest of the Bible explains and expands this so that we see that – All things are upheld and sustained through Jesus Christ

Anthropology – What does it mean to be human?

• Unique among all creatures, humans are a combination of the earth and God’s own breath, and most distinctly, Humans alone bear the image of God, are marked by him and have a special relationship with him
• Human is both male and female, equally essential, distinct but mutually symbiotic, and together revealing God’s image
• To be human is to be very Tov
• But even as Tov, Adam and Eve are not complete – they still lack the knowledge of Good and Evil and eternal life (both trees) – and the world is not complete (the Garden is yet to be expanded to the whole earth and yet to be transformed into the Garden-City.
• The rest of the Bible explains and expands this so that we see that – Jesus Christ is the exact representation of God’s image, the Second Adam, God himself as a Man, and he is rebooting/reforming/transforming humanity back into its intended glory

Hamartiology – What’s wrong and how did things go wrong?

• Evil is not a separate entity but is the perversion and disordering of Good (cf. Augustine)
• The Tov humans in the Tov world encounter a creature who leads them to disorder and short circuit God’s goal for them by appealing to their limits in knowledge and experience.
• As a result, humanity’s intimate relationship with God is broken and their relationship to the Tov Garden is severed, resulting in banishment to the wilderness. Death has now entered the world.
• The rest of the Bible explains and expands this so that we see that – This tempting serpent is a fallen angel who is opposed to God. All humans now have the Tov image cracked and distorted in them and continue in the same experiences and consequences of sin.

Eschatology – What’s the end game and goal?

• God graciously does not kill and destroy all that he has made but rather, promises a future time when the serpent will be crushed and Adam and Eve will be restored to their place of authority over creation.
• This is most nascent part of the Gen 1-3 account.
• The rest of the Bible explains and expands this so that we see that – God continues to reach into and relate to his fallen creatures in the wilderness. He sets in motion a plan to re-establish his relationship to the whole world through one man and his descendants, Abraham. He will make a special relationship with these descendants (a covenant) for a purpose – to raise up a final descendant who will complete and fulfill all the promises, hopes, and longings. This Second Adam, Jesus, will forgive sins, conquer death, and ultimately restore creation.

When we drill down specifically into the specifics of God’s creation of humanity we can see what I am calling the Great Cultivation (or the Cultural Mandate). In Gen 1:26-28 we see God’s particular act in creating humanity as male and female and we hear his words spoken directly to them. God blessed them and told the humans to (1) be fruitful and increase in number, filling the earth, and (2) to rule over all of creation and subdue it.

This responsibility is the joyful task of doing what God had set in motion, bringing order out of chaos, organizing the diverse aspects of creation, cultivating and developing the good into more good.

You may have never considered the way Gen 1&2 describes the world:

• If we were to ask where Adam was created and what color it was from Gen 2 we would probably assume and say that he was made in the green and beautiful Garden of Eden. But if you actually slow down and pay attention to the text you’ll see that Adam is made from and is sitting in the brown earth/mud and then twice we are told that God placed him / settled him into the Garden of Delights.
• Gen 2:15 reads,“Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.” NASB
• He gave Adam and Eve the responsibility to tend and extend, to plant and to expand, to discover and develop, in short to Cultivate the Garden so that it fills the whole earth with God’s glory, turning the tohu vevohu , the formless and empty world of Gen 1, into light and life and flourishing.

All of this can be described as a cultivating ruling, like a good king and queen. Indeed, one crucial aspect of humanity’s image-bearing is God enlisting Adam and Eve to serve as his vice-regents in his kingdom-world, bearing his royal stamp that is imprinted on them.

This royal role of caring for, developing, and expanding the Tov-ness of the Garden into all the world is fundamental to what it means to be human. And we can see that it ties together all of the aspects of the Judeo-Christian metaphysic:

• God created the world through organizing chaos (cosmogony) with the result of an increasingly Tov place (cosmology).
• As the crowning work of creation, God created humanity in his image and called them to rule over creation and to continue to develop its Tovness (anthropology),
• But humanity rebelled against God, damaging the image of God in humanity and introducing sin into our task of ruling (hamartiology),
• But God did not abandon or destroy his creation. Instead, he redeemed it through Christ—restoring the image of God in all who believe, redirecting their rule toward his glory, and promising to one day renew the whole of creation (eschatology).

Hopefully you can see now the importance of the great cultivation to the human purpose in God’s plan.

Tying it all Together – The Triangle

And so now we can finally come to the Question that I began with and has been driving this discussion:

What is the relationship of these three momentous and weighty teachings of Scripture – the Great Cultivation, the Great Commandment, and the Great Commission?

Rather than seeing these as separate, unrelated, or in some kind of competitive relationship, these three moments form a triangle that is the ongoing call of the work of the Church and its members in the world. They fit together like this: the point of the Great Commission is to create Great Commandment people who can then re-engage in the lost Great Cultivation calling.

The Great Commission that has been so important to Christians, especially the focus in the last few centuries, is not an end in itself. The reason Jesus sends his followers to all the nations is not just to “get them saved” and to get them into Church. Those are fine benefits. But rather, the purpose of the Great Commission is to make disciples.

And then we must ask, according to the Bible, what is a disciple? Answer: A disciple of Jesus is one who follows him in living out the Great Commandment of the Double Love. A disciple of Jesus is one whose humanity is, by the power of the Spirit, being restored into the image of Jesus Christ, who is the exact representation of God. This New Testament way of talking is intentionally going all the way back to Genesis because it was the First Adam who was made of the earth and filled with God’s own breath and then commissioned to spread the Garden throughout the world. And now, the New Testament teaches, the Second Adam, God Incarnate, breathes the Spirit of God into his believing creatures, making them into a born-again, a new kind of human who can take up and fulfill the mantle that our ancestors Adam and Eve dropped and failed, spreading the love of God and love of others throughout the world. Once again, the point of the Great Commission is to create Great Commandment people who can then re-engage in the lost Great Cultivation calling.

The point of the Great Commission was to create Great Commandment lovers who re-engage with the Great Cultivation mandate.

The reason it matters so much for us to grasp and rediscover this grand biblical, triangular truth is that all three sides of this Triangle matter if we are to faithfully live as Christians and fulfill the call of God upon us as individuals and a corporate body.

• If we try to fulfill the Great Cultivation without the Great Commandment and Great Commission, we will merely be engaged in culture-making and ecology without addressing the God-centeredness and life-transformation that discipleship brings.
• If we try to fulfill the Great Commandment without the Great Cultivation and Great Commission, we will tend toward a generic social gospel of “Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man” without the message of Jesus’ new life and without a clear ongoing human purpose.
• If we try to fulfill the Great Commission without the Great Commandment and Great Cultivation, we will be presenting a truncated message of heaven-focused, individualistic forgiveness that often devolves into a “Get Out of Hell Free” card but with no transformative work of the Double Love and no clear reason for Christians to be engaged in this world at all.

The Triangle and Investing

All of this lays the foundation for the question that is the goal of our reflections together today – the impact on a Christian view of investing. How does this biblical vision of the Three Great Commandments affect how we Christians should think about money and markets, stewardship and giving, investing our own money and that of our clients?

Now we know that anyone here at the Kingdom Advisors conference really cares about how to be faithful and wise with money – your own and your clients. We also know you want to work out your Christian faith in terms of how you run your business, how you relate to your clients, and how you manage wealth. This is all good and beautiful.

I think it would be helpful, therefore, to consider how we can see the Triangle of the Three Commandments work its way out in these two different contexts that you all operate in:

(1) The context of your own business and how you operate as a Christian

(2) The context of how you invest money.

We believe the Three Commandments affect both of these contexts.

The Great Commission

For the last several decades, the way many Christians have thought about how to run their wealth management businesses as Christians and how to invest Christianly has focused primarily on the Great Commission. As we noted, this Commandment is very familiar to us and how most of our church traditions tend to think and speak.

As the Great Commission applies to our lives in both these contexts it often looks like this:

Business Context

• Fulfilling the Great Commission by consciously including evangelism and discipleship into our business mindset – openly sharing our faith at work, maybe running a Bible study, offering to pray for and with clients.
• Some good examples of this:
  • Jim Wise, Client Discipleship – every client/prospect we meet in on a “Spiritual Continuum” with respect to Jesus, how can we help them move closer to him with every interaction we have?
  • Randy Wilson, Director of Spiritual Integration at Eversource – missions background, job is to design a comprehensive strategy for guiding clients/prospects to Christ

Investment Context

• Investing too can be a way for us to live out the Great Commission. When investing is fruitful, we have the opportunity to give. And one of the good things we can support with our giving is the work of evangelism and discipleship.
• For some Christians the Great Commission has also been creatively applied in consciously investing in publicly traded companies that have some sort of Christian presence (Christian CEO, Christian chaplain, Christian Employee Resource Group [ERC]). The idea is that investing in those businesses is a way to align your money with companies where spiritual conversions and discipleship are possible. This is sometimes called “Spiritual Integration” as an investing strategy. We can think of it as what has been called “Business as Mission (BAM)” now applied to investing, or “Investing as Mission”.
• Some also look to invest in what are called “Kingdom businesses” on the frontiers of world missions. Kingdom businesses are in areas with low gospel penetration, and the businesses will have an explicit Christian/evangelism mission alongside an ordinary business mission. Positive examples of this include World Vision’s VisionFund, Hope International’s Hope Global Investments, and Faith-Driven Investor’s marketplace of investments like these.

There is so much goodness in all of this and it honors God, and it is probably quite familiar to you.

But it is only one side of the Triangle. If we only think of business practices and investment strategies as for the purpose of evangelism and missions:

• It can become an “ends justify the means” error.
  • This can be seen in the popular mantra: “Make as much as you can so you can give as much as you can” (so you can fund the Great Commission).
  • Consider this quote from Pastor Rick Warren in The Purpose Driven Life (264-5): “[There are] two kinds of people: Kingdom Builders and Wealth Builders. Both are skilled at making a business grow, making deals or sales, and making profit. Wealth Builders continue to amass wealth for themselves no matter how much they make, but Kingdom Builders change the rules of the game. They still try to make as much as they can, but they do it to give it away. They use the wealth to fund God’s church and its mission in the world.” (Obviously he’s speaking about maximizing profits in a business, not investing, but the logic is the same.): Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?, Zondervan, October 8, 2002, p. 264-265
  • The extreme emphasis on giving can cause us to invest for maximal return, without careful consideration of what we’re investing in. In our good, but fallen world, investing is full of problem areas, so we must be careful and discerning. We don’t want to invest in bad things just to do good through our giving.
• We can consider the only good in the world to be evangelism and missions and fail to grasp the full goodness of God’s world and his work to renew creation itself, not merely rescue immaterial souls from hell. This mindset often leads Christians to either withdraw from culture and the creational good for which we were made, or simply to conform to the norms and patterns set by the world.
• As a result of these errors, our evangelism itself can be “thin” and uncompelling since it has no “good news” for vast parts of life in the world, like how we run our businesses and how we invest. We can inadvertently cease being salt and light in the world and living in such a way that unbelievers may see our “good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matt 5:16).

The Great Commandment

While many Christians continue to focus on the Great Commission, there have also been more recent moves to also pay attention to the Great Commandment in how we run our businesses and how we invest, particularly, the second half of the Great Commandment – loving our neighbor.

Business Context

• When Christians take seriously the Great Commandment(s) in how we run business, the focus is often on personal ethics in our work environment (being a person of high integrity and love) and consciously seeking to love and serve our employees and customers. Sharing the gospel, yes, when possible, but not only that; truly caring for and serving others regardless of their knowledge of or response to the gospel.
• Some thoughtful Christians have considered ways they might think about how love of neighbor works out through all the “neighbors” or stakeholders of their business – clients, vendors, cleaning crews, your landlord, etc. All of these people are ones God has put into your path to love as yourself.
  • A positive example of this is from Ameriprise’s CFAN Leadership Model (CLM). Their model looks at: Clients, Team, Corporate, Self, Community, and Suppliers. They’ve even discussed how to they might love and serve their competitors (contemplating Jesus’ command to love even our “enemies”).

Investment Context

• In recent decades there has been an increased awareness of how love for God and neighbor can create an awareness of the need for ethical approaches to investing. These ethical approaches go by names like “faith-based investing” or “biblically responsible investing.”
• This has looked like:
  • Negative screening (also known as exclusionary screening), avoiding companies that dishonor God and harm neighbor. Primarily focused on avoiding “bad products” (abortive drugs and procedures, tobacco/marijuana/e-cigs, sports betting and casinos and online gambling, pornography, etc.).
    • Randy Alcorn quote (From endorsement for /Kingdom Gains/ by Dwight Short): “God cannot be pleased when we invest his money into companies whose products and services dishonor him and hurt others. It’s time to take seriously what it means to be biblically responsible investors.”Randy Alcorn, cover endorsement, Kingdom Gains: What Every Christian Should Know Before Investing, and How to Use Socially and Biblically Responsible Investments (BRI) as a Steward of God’s Money, by Dwight Short, GShort.com, LLC, September 5, 2010.
    • “[Biblically Responsible Investing] represents a framework to help investors avoid companies that profit from activities that are not honoring to God.” (Loran Graham, Investing with Integrity)Loran Graham, Investing with Integrity, Deep River Books LLC, May 1, 2014, p. 15.
  • Dan Hardt slide from 2023 NACFC Conference presentation: “The motivation behind BRI: Love God, Love Neighbor (Matthew 22:36-40)”Dan Hardt, “Biblically Responsible Investing: Understanding the Heart of God,” National Association of Christian Financial Consultants Conference, Kokomo, IN, July 19, 2023.
• Later development: adding a focus on the positives.
  • Understanding that “loving one’s neighbor” requires doing more than not harming one’s neighbor. There is a helpful analogy here with the medical ethics dictum [Hippocratic oath] that is often misquoted as “Do no harm” when in fact it says “First, do no harm”. Thankfully doctors don’t stop at not harming patients, but in fact seek to heal them.
    • The positive emphasis is sometimes referred to as “Positive Screening” or “Impact Investing”.
      • The idea is looking for companies whose products and/or practices are especially praiseworthy and compelling from a Christian perspective.
      • Examples tend to be “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Charity!” stories like breakthrough healthcare treatments for devastating diseases.
      • Can also be applied in the investment process by looking to invest in businesses that are loving all of their stakeholder “neighbors” — customers, employees, suppliers, communities, environment, society.(e.g., Eventide’s Business 360 approach to investing.)

As with the Great Commission focus, the Great Commandment can help us live out our Christian faith in business and investing in good ways, especially broadening our understanding to include God’s love for the whole world, including those who do not know him. As Jesus reminds us, God loves even his enemies (and calls us to do the same) and “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt 5:45).

But while it is good to avoid investing in bad companies and to look for good companies to invest in, the focus on the Great Commandment might lead us to miss seeing a deeper and wider good in investing – the general good of the material world that God has made. So for example, we might not see how a waste management company or a materials company or an energy company is doing something that honors God and serves the world, even if it is not run by Christians and even if it is not providing some obvious health breakthrough or charitable service. There is a God-given good even in “boring businesses”, when they are aligned with God’s purposes for work. Seen through God’s eyes, even boring businesses can be wondrous displays of God’s glory in creation.

But seeing business this way requires the third side of our Triangle.

The Great Cultivation

And finally, we come to the third side of our Triangle, the one that is, I think for most of us, the least familiar in our biblical understanding and our Christian practice. That is, there is a temptation to think that if we focus our business and investment practices on the Great Commission and the Great Commandment that our work is done. But in light of the Bible holding these three together, we are suggesting that we also need a vision for the cultural mandate in our business and investing.

Business Context

• Applying this third commandment to how we run our businesses requires retooling our understanding. We need to see our business itself as a way to engage our Adam and Eve roles of cultivating God’s good creation. When we do this, we begin to see an exciting fundamental purpose to our business beyond evangelism and neighbor-service. Practiced wisely and well, financial planning, retirement planning, legacy planning, charitable planning, and wealth management serve not just clients, but God.
• A financial advice business is not merely instrumental toward some other good. The calling of financial advice is to help others use resources wisely, both for client needs and for the development of the world.
• God is continually at work toward the flourishing of the world, and he invites us to participate in that same work through our callings in financial advice. This is the vision that drives what we do at a fundamental creational and material level.
• We run our business for the Common Good locally, regionally, nationally, and globally because that’s what God is doing!

Investment Context

• Beyond maximizing returns for radical giving and beyond ethical investing, we will see our investing as a participation with God in the work of creation and re-creation. God created out of nothing (ex nihilo) but he then invites us to continue his work as his vice-regents, his stewards, uncovering the hidden potential of his amazing creation.
• And amazingly, he invites us to expand on and develop what he has created in our role that JRR Tolkien has called being “sub-creators.” God created the world “very good” and in his generosity invites us to make it ‘even better.’
  • In visual and musical arts, in science and math, in developing building materials from minerals and wood, in understanding chemical reactions and subatomic particles so that we can make medicines and glues and Velcro and rocket fuel and hypodermic needles – in all these ways God invites us to cultivate, develop, expand, extend the goodness and beauty (Tov-ness) of his creation.
• The focus of Great Cultivation investing is on how our investing is enlarging the beauty and goodness of the world through the businesses we are supporting, seeing capital as a God-given gift to continue the Cultural Mandate. We are called to take care of the earth and to take care how we develop the earth. If there is any group of people on earth who should be paying attention to this it is Christians!

Finally, what does it look like when we live out this full triangular vision in our businesses and in our investing?

I think it looks like this:

“If the gospel is to challenge the public life of our society … [it] will only be by movements that begin with the local congregation in which the reality of the new creation is present, known, and experienced, and from which men and women will go into every sector of public life … as sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s redeeming grace for the whole life of society.” – Lesslie NewbiginLesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Eerdmans, 1989, p232-233.

May your work in financial advice be a sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s kingdom in the world.

[1] One of the earliest and most influential theologians to argue this way was Irenaeus (ca. AD 130-200) who described Christ’s work as “recapitulation” – the gathering up, refashioning, and culmination of the human race. What was lost in Adam is restored in the Second Adam and humanity can be renewed in him. Christian don’t just adopt a new set of beliefs and morals, they enter into a new mode of being human through participation in the Incarnate One (Against Heresies III.18-22, V.1-21). Similar ideas are developed in Athanasius of Alexandria (On the Incarnation), Gregory of Nyssa (On the Making of Man), Augustine (various), Tertullian (On the Flesh of Christ), and Cyril of Alexandria (various).

[2] July 19^th 2023, NACFC 2023 Conference

[3] Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Eerdmans, 1989, p232-233.