How to Honor God and Steward Your Finances!

JOHN COLEMAN
John Coleman is an investor, author, and public speaker whose work explores the intersection of money, purpose, leadership, and human flourishing. Coleman is a successful businessman having written multiple books and been featured in several streams of media. Throughout his career, Coleman has spent considerable time examining the role that purpose plays in our professional and personal lives. In his latest book, he brings that same question into an area that affects nearly everyone: money.

GOOD MONEY

Traditional personal finance books tend to offer the same basic formula for everyone: make more money, buy a home, save for your children’s education, invest for retirement, and build as much financial security as possible. The advice often focuses on the mechanics of money — budgeting, saving, investing, borrowing, and planning — without spending much time asking a more fundamental question: What is all that money actually for?

In Good Money: Six Steps to Building a Financial Life with Purpose, Coleman approaches personal finance from a different direction. Rather than beginning with the goal of accumulating more wealth, he asks readers to consider how money can contribute to a meaningful and flourishing life. The book is ultimately less about maximizing a bank account and more about making sure the way we earn, spend, save, give, and invest reflects what we genuinely value.

Coleman provides a six-part framework designed to help readers develop a healthier and more purposeful relationship with money. Throughout the book, he uses detailed examples, firsthand interviews, and practical guidance to show how these principles can affect not only individuals but also their children, families, communities, and the causes they care about.

Several of the book’s ideas challenge conventional assumptions about financial success. Coleman explores the idea that beyond a certain point, simply having more money does not necessarily produce greater well-being. He also examines how comparison can fuel financial dissatisfaction, even when a person’s actual circumstances are relatively comfortable.

The book encourages readers to reconsider what they are ultimately saving toward as well. Instead of thinking only about saving for retirement, Coleman encourages people to think about saving for freedom — creating the financial flexibility to make decisions consistent with their priorities and purpose.

Underlying these ideas is the belief that money is never entirely neutral. How people earn it, spend it, save it, invest it, and give it away inevitably communicates something about what they value. Money, from this perspective, is a tool. The question is whether that tool is intentionally serving the life a person wants to build or quietly becoming the measure by which that life is judged.

FAITH, STEWARDSHIP & PURPOSE

Although Good Money is written for a mainstream audience, many of its themes intersect naturally with Christian ideas about stewardship, generosity, contentment, and purpose. For Christian readers, the book provides an opportunity to think beyond financial success and consider how money can be handled faithfully. Wealth does not have to be viewed as the ultimate goal of life, but as a resource that can be used in service of family, community, generosity, and a larger calling.

That perspective can transform ordinary financial decisions into questions of stewardship. Earning becomes connected to purpose. Giving becomes an expression of generosity rather than simply an obligation. Saving can create freedom rather than being motivated entirely by fear. Investing can take into account not only financial returns but also the kind of impact a person wants his or her resources to have.

Those questions have taken on greater significance in a culture marked by economic uncertainty. Concerns about inflation, rapid developments in artificial intelligence, changes in the workplace, and questions about long-term financial security have caused many people to reconsider traditional definitions of success and stability. Many believers also struggle quietly with financial stress and questions about how their faith should shape the way they handle money.

Good Money offers a framework for approaching those concerns from a different starting point. Rather than allowing uncertainty to make the accumulation of money the ultimate source of security, Coleman encourages readers to develop a more intentional relationship with their finances — one in which financial literacy and a deeper sense of purpose can work together.

Ultimately, Good Money is not simply a book about budgeting or becoming wealthier. It is about building a financial life with purpose — one that can contribute to genuine happiness, meaningful relationships, generosity, freedom, and a life well lived. Coleman challenges readers to consider whether their financial habits are helping them become the people they want to be, strengthen the relationships that matter most, contribute meaningfully to others, and use their resources in ways consistent with their deepest convictions.

Instead of asking only, “How much money do I need?” Good Money asks a larger question: “What do I want my money to accomplish?” The answer can change not only the way people manage their finances, but the kind of life those finances help them build.
 

To learn more about John Coleman, click the LINK!

To purchase his book, Good Money, click the LINK!

CREDITS

Author, Good Money (Harvard Business Review Press, 2026); co-CEO of Sovereign’s Capital; previously worked with McKinsey & Company and Invesco; MBA. Harvard Business School; MPA, Harvard Kennedy School; Featured on Harvard Business Review, Forbes, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, and Los Angeles Times.