Capital as Stewardship
My first company was venture-backed. At first the money was oxygen. Then the investors asked me to double down — and I finally understood what the oxygen had cost.
One of my first companies was venture-backed, and in the beginning the money felt like oxygen.
It paid for people I couldn’t otherwise afford. It bought runway, the luxury of building instead of scrambling, an end to the constant arithmetic of which two invoices had to clear before payroll. I remember the relief of it — the sense that the hard problems had finally gone soft.
But a noose tightens slowly, a notch at a time, so gradually you mistake it for the weather. A board to answer to. A growth curve that had quietly stopped being a hope and become an obligation. A hundred small decisions that now had to please someone whose only stake was the return. And then came the moment that made all of it plain: the investors wanted us to double down — more capital, bigger promises, and a great deal more string tied to every dollar. I looked hard at what saying yes would cost, and understood for the first time that the money had never been oxygen at all. It had been a lease on my obedience, and the landlord had come to raise the rent.
I walked away. It cost me more than I’ll put in writing here.
I didn’t leave because I was wise. I left because by then I’d learned to hear the question I should have asked before I ever cashed the first check: what will this money eventually ask me to do?
Because money always asks. Not at first. At first it just sits there being helpful, being oxygen, being the thing that makes the hard problems soft. But capital comes with a will attached to it — a set of expectations about growth, about returns, about timelines, about what counts as success. And the day comes, always, when what the capital expects and what faithfulness requires point in different directions. On that day you discover who’s actually steering.
The Sentence Nobody Quotes on the Finance Podcasts
Scripture has a lot to say about money, and most of it is more uncomfortable than we let it be. But one sentence cuts straight to the thing the podcasts never mention.
“The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender” (Proverbs 22:7).
Not the borrower is inconvenienced by the lender. Not the borrower has an obligation to the lender. The borrower is the slave of the lender. It’s a statement about who owns whom. The moment you owe, some portion of your freedom has changed hands. Your future labor is spoken for. Your options narrow. The lender now sits, invisibly, in every decision you make — because some part of every dollar you earn is already promised, and some part of every choice you face now has to pass through the question can I still service the debt?
I know this from the inside, though my lender never called itself one. The venture money never sent an invoice, but it did the same work a note does — it spoke for my future before I’d lived it. Work I’d have turned down in a heartbeat I now had to weigh against the growth curve I’d promised. Decisions that were mine on paper had to clear a second desk first. The capital never made me do anything, technically. It simply sat in the room for every choice I made, until a room with an investor in it had stopped being a room where I was free.
That’s what slavery to the lender feels like in a modern business. Not chains. Just the slow disappearance of no.
Money Wants to Be God
There’s a reason Scripture takes this so seriously — one that goes deeper than any worry about leverage ratios.
Jesus said: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24).
Notice He didn’t say you cannot have money, or use money, or steward money. He said you cannot serve it — and then He named it as a rival master, a would-be lord competing with God for your devotion. The old translations kept the personified word: mammon. Not a substance but almost a someone. A power that wants the throne.
And capital is how mammon makes its bid. It rarely announces itself as a master. It presents as a servant — here to help, here to fund the dream, here to remove the constraint. But the more of it you take on someone else’s terms, the more of your obedience it quietly acquires. Debt is mammon’s most efficient instrument, because debt converts the future into a master. You wanted the money to serve the mission. One signature later, the mission serves the money.
The closed fist never understands this. The grasping posture sees capital as pure gain — more of it is always better, take all you can get, leverage to the hilt. But the open hand asks a different question entirely: not how much can I get, but what will it cost me in freedom to obey?
Nehemiah and the Mortgaged Children
There’s a moment in Nehemiah that I can’t read without my stomach turning, because it’s so familiar.
The wall is half-built. The work of God is underway. And a cry goes up — not from the enemies outside, but from the workers’ own families. They’d borrowed to survive a famine, borrowed to pay the king’s tax, borrowed against their fields and their vineyards and finally against their children. “We are forcing our sons and our daughters to be slaves... but it is not in our power to help it, for other men have our fields and our vineyards” (Nehemiah 5:5). The lenders weren’t pagans. They were the nobles and officials — the prosperous, religious insiders — charging interest on their own brothers’ desperation.
Nehemiah’s response is fury. “I was very angry... I took counsel with myself, and I brought charges against the nobles and the officials. I said to them, ‘You are exacting interest, each from his brother’” (Nehemiah 5:6-7). And he makes them give it back. The fields, the vineyards, the houses, the interest — return it, cancel the debt, set the people free.
Two things sit in that story, and both bear on how you raise and lend money.
The debtors had mortgaged their freedom one reasonable loan at a time, until they’d pledged the very thing they most needed to protect. That’s the warning to anyone tempted to fund growth by leverage: you are pledging your future obedience, and you may not get it back as easily as you gave it.
And the lenders had used capital as a tool of extraction against their own neighbors, and God’s man called it an abomination worth public charges. That’s the warning to anyone who’d provide capital, too — because some of us will be on that side of the table, and the kingdom has just as much to say about how you lend as how you borrow.
Why the Ambassador Travels Light
When Jesus sent the seventy-two out as lambs among wolves, He gave them an odd instruction about money: “Carry no moneybag, no knapsack, no sandals” (Luke 10:4).
It sounds like a vow of poverty. It isn’t. It’s a strategy of freedom.
An ambassador in foreign territory has to be able to leave. That’s the whole posture we’ve been building toward in this series — the freedom to tell the truth, to refuse the deal, to shake the dust off your feet and walk when a town won’t receive you. And you cannot shake the dust if your creditors won’t let you leave the room. The traveler weighed down with debt and obligation has lost the lamb’s one great advantage: the ability to walk away clean, because his security was never in the moneybag to begin with.
This is the deepest reason to hold capital with an open hand. Not because money is dirty. Because freedom to obey is the most valuable asset you own, and leverage spends it.
“Owe no one anything, except to love each other” (Romans 13:8). Paul writes it as a settled aim — not an absolute prohibition on every loan, but a direction to lean, a default to return to. The faithful business tends toward freedom. It treats every claim on its future as a real cost, not free fuel. It asks of every dollar offered: does this enlarge my capacity to obey, or does it install a master who will one day demand I disobey?
So How Do You Fund the Work?
I’m not telling you to never borrow and never raise. The faithful path here is wisdom, not a rule, and wisdom looks at the actual terms.
Bootstrapping — funding growth out of revenue and patience — is slower and often the freest. You grow at the speed the work actually produces, which is humbling, but you answer to no one but the people you serve and the God who sent you. Modest, sober debt for a genuinely productive purpose, taken with clear eyes about the master you’re admitting, can be a tool rather than a chain. And outside investment can be a gift when the investors are genuinely aligned — when they share the mission and would rather you stay faithful than grow fast, when they’d celebrate you turning down the extractive deal instead of demanding it.
The test isn’t the instrument. The test is the will riding in on top of it. Before you take any of it, ask the question it took me a whole company to learn: when this money’s expectations and my Master’s instructions finally diverge — and they will — which one will I be free to follow?
If the honest answer is “the money,” you’ve already met your master. And He has a name, and it isn’t God.
I won’t pretend the free path is the painless one. The funded competitor will sprint while you walk. You’ll watch capital buy them speed you can’t match, reach you can’t touch, a year of runway you’d kill for. Some months the numbers will be tight again. The freedom costs exactly what every kingdom thing costs — slower, smaller, harder, with the wolves running past you the whole time.
Bought with a Price
But there’s a deeper reason to stay free than provision, and it turns the whole ledger over.
“You were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20). Paul wrote that to people who knew exactly what the words meant — a slave market ran in every city he visited. And then he drew the conclusion that lands on every term sheet and loan document you will ever be offered: “You were bought with a price; do not become bondservants of men“ (1 Corinthians 7:23).
The title to your obedience has already changed hands. It happened at the cross, at a cost no investor could match, and the transaction doesn’t run the way mammon’s does. Mammon lends — and takes your future as collateral. Christ ransomed— and handed your future back. He is the only Master in the universe whose ownership sets you free, the only Lord whose claim on you arrives as liberation instead of leverage.
That’s why you don’t have to mortgage yourself to a rival lord to survive. Provision was never coming from the moneybag anyway — it comes from the Father who fed the seventy-two in towns they entered empty-handed, who rained bread on a people who couldn’t store it overnight. His resources carry no clause that one day asks you to betray Him. The price for you has been paid in full, once, by Someone who paid it to set you loose.
You cannot be bought twice.
Walking away didn’t feel like wisdom at the time. It felt like failure — like I’d traded the only shot I’d get for a principle I couldn’t put on a balance sheet. I second-guessed it for longer than I’d like to admit.
But I never again mistook a lease for oxygen. And when the moment came — as it always comes — to tell a customer the truth that would lose the sale, I was free to tell it. No board in the room. No master but the One who sends.
Owe no one anything, except to love. Stay free enough to obey.
Who holds the title to your obedience right now — and what did they pay for it?
Subscribe to receive reflections on faithful business in a predatory marketplace.