Faith Ventures welcomes Scott Maderer, founder of Inspired Stewardship, business coach, lay church leader, and host of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast — now over 1,800 episodes strong. Scott works with Christians in every walk of life to help them think more intentionally about how they steward their time, talent, and treasure, and how those three areas shape everything else: their relationships, their work, their finances, and their walk with God.
https://youtu.be/qa5yvjWOFPk
Scott Maderer paid off nearly $79,000 in debt on a teacher’s salary. He survived two collapsed lungs in one winter, suicidal ideation at the bottom of a financial crisis, and a marriage that almost didn’t make it. He’s now built a coaching practice, a book, and a podcast with over 1,800 episodes around a single organizing conviction: Christian stewardship isn’t a financial category. It’s a whole-life framework. And how you hear God when making decisions depends entirely on whether you’ve done the internal work to be the kind of person who can receive what God is saying.
The Questions Christians Ask About Stewardship, Decisions, and Designing the Right Life
How do you actually hear God when making decisions — practically speaking?
You create the conditions for it first. Most people try to hear God at maximum noise, maximum pressure, and maximum distraction — and then wonder why nothing comes through clearly. Scott’s coaching is designed to strip away what he calls the fog: financial fog, calendar overload, identity confusion between who you are and what your job requires you to be. Once that fog clears, the signal improves. Hearing God when making decisions isn’t a technique you apply in the moment of crisis. It’s the fruit of an ongoing discipline of honesty, quietness, and self-knowledge built up over time. Then — and this is the part most people leave out — you take action. Passive waiting isn’t discernment. It’s avoidance.
What is the difference between stewardship and ownership in the Christian life?
Stewardship means managing something that belongs to someone else. Ownership means possessing it. The entire frame of Christian life, in Scott’s coaching framework, shifts when you recognize that your time, your talent, and your treasure are not ultimately yours — they are entrusted to you for a purpose and a season, and you will give an account for how you managed them. That’s not guilt language. It’s freedom language: it means the pressure of ultimate control is lifted, and what remains is the responsibility of faithful choice. You chose how to spend your time today. You did not control what happened as a result. Both of those things are true and important.
What do you do when financial stress feels spiritually paralyzing?
Tell the truth. Scott’s turning point was not a budget or a plan — it was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a parking lot and a conversation where he finally said out loud what was actually happening. His wife had been carrying the same weight silently for the same reason: she wanted to protect him. The isolation of mutual silence was more damaging than the debt itself. Scott describes the moment of honesty as the beginning of hearing God again — because God had been operating all along, arranging the right message through a Dave Ramsey broadcast for both of them independently, but neither of them could receive it until they stopped protecting each other from the truth. Financial crisis doesn’t disqualify you from hearing God. Silence does.
How do you know if the business or career you’ve built is actually right for you?
Ask whether it fits how God built you — and be honest when the answer is no. Scott’s example is direct: if travel is a deep, God-given value of yours and you’ve built a retail establishment that requires your physical presence every day, you have built the wrong business. Not because retail is bad. Because it’s wrong for you. The mismatch between your God-given wiring and the structure of your work will compound over time in ways that affect your relationships, your health, your spiritual life, and your capacity to make good decisions. Aligning your work with your values isn’t spiritual indulgence. It’s the recognition that God built you deliberately, and pretending otherwise has real consequences.
What is the relationship between choice and control in Christian stewardship?
You have the power of choice. You do not have the power to determine the results of your choices. That gap is where most Christians get stuck — either abdicating responsibility (“I’m waiting for God to show me”) or overreaching (“if I work hard enough, I can guarantee the outcome”). Christian stewardship of decisions lives in the gap: take full ownership of what you choose, hold the outcomes in open hands, and stay in relationship with the voice that can guide you toward better choices over time. Scott learned this when a collapsed lung doubled his debt in the middle of his payoff plan. He couldn’t control that. He could control what he did next. He chose, and kept choosing, and paid off every penny.
Why does Scott keep coming back to time, talent, and treasure as the framework?
Because they are not three separate categories — they are three dimensions of one life, and what you do in any one of them shapes all the others. Neglect your financial stewardship and the stress bleeds into your relationships and your spiritual life. Build a business that consumes all your time and your talent is being stewarded at the expense of every other area. The person who comes home from a bad day at work and takes it out on their family has not failed at home — they have shown up as themselves in two places. You are one person. You cannot steward one area of your life well while ignoring the others. That’s not a management problem. It’s a design feature.
Conclusion: How to Hear God When Making Decisions — Get Quiet, Know Yourself, Then Move
Scott Maderer’s final word is the same for a single mom on thirty-seven thousand a year and a business owner clearing two hundred fifty thousand a month: the numbers are different, but the choices aren’t, because you are who you are. Wonderfully made. Built deliberately. Accountable for what you do with what’s been entrusted to you.
Get quiet. Listen to that voice. Then begin to take some action. Hearing God when making decisions is less about the moment of decision than about the ongoing discipline of becoming someone whose life is quiet enough, honest enough, and aligned enough to actually receive what God is saying.
Civilmente, indivíduos são proibidos de iniciar agressões contra outros. Imoralidade não agressiva pode ser abordada por entidades não civis, como a igreja.
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Os cristãos não estão desobedecendo 1 Timóteo 6:10, desde que não estejam buscando o dinheiro como um fim em si mesmo. É o gosta, de dinheiro que é proibido, não a mera acumulação dele.
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Os cristãos não estão desobedecendo 1 Timóteo 6:10, desde que não estejam buscando o dinheiro como um fim em si mesmo. É o gosta, de dinheiro que é proibido, não a mera acumulação dele.
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Historicamente, os libertários não se decidiram sobre a questão do aborto, e argumentamos que o aborto é uma violação do princípio da não agressão e, portanto, antilibertário.
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Deus forneceu às pessoas as ferramentas de que precisamos para enfrentar esses desafios, começando com as primeiras vestes que ele fez para Adão e Eva a partir de peles de animais (Gênesis 3:21).
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