Episode 95 - The City Rejoices with Finny Kuruvilla
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Building and running a fund in a way that also promotes human flourishing? This opens doors to sharing about the incredible redemptive mission of God that drives us as Faith Driven Investors. Finny Kuruvilla—Co-founder and Chief Investment Officer at Eventide— unpacks how our investments can serve the greater good. Recorded without interruption at our 2021 Faith Driven Investor Conference.
All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
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Finny Kuruvilla: We're here at the Faith Driven Investor conference, so it's appropriate to ask the question, what does the Bible, especially the New Testament, say about investing? Now I wish we were all in the same room so we could do this interactively. But be brutally honest, the answer in your mind, what is the passage in the New Testament that most directly speaks to the topic of investing without any doubt or hesitation? I would answer the passage that most directly speaks to investing in the New Testament is found in the sermon on the Mount. It's in Matthew Chapter six verses 19 to 24, where Jesus says, Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on Earth, where moth and Rusty destroy, and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves. Treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor Rusty destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal for where your treasure is there, your heart will be also. The lamp of the body is the eye, if they're for your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness. How great is that darkness? No one can serve two masters for either. He will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon. Wow, those are hard words, especially hard words for us who live in such a prosperous society and who work in investing that line. Do not lay up for yourselves. Treasures on Earth rings in my ears. How do we process this? First, we don't want to run away from the sermon on the Mount, but we want to face it head on. There's an author, Dean Smith, who says it well. The sermon on the Mount has a strange way of making us better people or better liars. In my talk, I'm going to give you two ways. How not to invest. And two ways to invest. Basically, two negative principles and two positive principles. OK. Two ways not to invest. First, only let your investing be goal directed toward a need like saving to buy a house or start a business. We shouldn't have aimless piles of money sitting around. That's exactly what Jesus seems to be speaking against. We wanted. He uses his words in as natural a sense as is possible. We remember and another place with very sober language, Jesus speaks in the gospel of Luke against a man who builds a second barn. We know that there is a type of blindness that money brings on a person that we have to be careful about. Did you also notice in that passage that I just read the last line? Jesus does not say you cannot serve God and Satan. He says you cannot. I love how someone put it in the early church who said that mammon is quote the form of idolatry with which the devil operates after the old idols lost their attraction to the Christian populace. We can call this mammoth olive tree. It's the new idolatry. One author also puts it well by saying the world's religion is acquisition. It's getting its mammon. Jesus will not have his disciples believe the world's religion or be possessed by the secular demon of possession. There's a name for this doctrine, and it's not very popular today, but it's called the doctrine of non accumulation. We're supposed to live simply and give away as much as we possibly can. That's my first negative principle. My second negative principle is to not invest in ways that take advantage of others. In Deuteronomy Chapter twenty three, verse 18, it says you must not bring the earnings of a female prostitute or of a male prostitute into the House of the Lord. Your God to pay any vow because the Lord, your god detests them both God. In this passage, doesn't want money donated to the temple donated to his house. They come from sinful activities. And really, this is just common sense, isn't it? From simple love your neighbor thinking we need to cultivate a sensitive conscience and not take advantage of others? Many people inadvertently profit from activities like abortion, pornography or gambling. Surely there should be lines that we can draw. One of the things we talk about it, Eventide, is this analogy of a mafia wife, and we sometimes speak of how the mafia like wife lives in a way that is very lavish. She she enjoys the diamond rings and the fur coats and knows that something shady is going on the other side of the door, but doesn't ask the hard questions. We don't want to be like that. We don't want to live in ignorance with this vague sense of unease there. In fact, Jesus says elsewhere in Luke Chapter 16, verse 11. Therefore, if you have not been faithful and the unrighteous madman who will commit to your trust, the true riches. OK, now I want to switch to two positive ways of investing rooted in the Christian faith. First, invest to serve the poor. This is a repeated refrain of Jesus, the call to serve the poor. I don't think you need me to convince you of how often he says this. He even speaks in Matthew Chapter 25 of how the final judgment is cast in terms of how much we have served the poor and those who are imprisoned. My very first job after high school was working for World Vision, which is a Christian humanitarian relief and development agency. They do great work at helping the poorest of the poor, especially children, and there is, of course, a standard, very noble way of making donations to help organizations like World Vision. But there is an alternative path. It's not competitive, but it is complementary. Every year I go to Africa to help out with a church plant and every time I go, I just got back a couple of weeks ago. I leave with this feeling that I wish we could start hundreds of ethical, high quality companies to employ the people there. That would do by far the most long term good to promote human flourishing in Africa. After all, we know that work is a basic human need. It imparts dignity and purpose, self-awareness of one's gift skills and, of course, the financial resources to put bread on the table. In the last decade, many thought leaders and experts have advanced sustainable business as the single best way to remedy global poverty. What an opportunity we have to create and fund businesses oriented at this noble goal. Second, I want us to remember what Jesus says here, which he sees charging us to invest for our heavenly reward. Jesus says that we are to lay up treasures in heaven. He's not just saying don't store up treasures as an end unto itself, but he is saying to lay up treasures in heaven. Now I'm sure that many of you and many of us here would struggle to imagine exactly what Jesus means with this picture. Some people, even when they think of heaven, imagine it as people floating on clouds, singing songs, playing harps all day. John Eldridge puts it well when he says nearly every Christian I have spoken with has some idea that eternity is an unending church service. We have settled on an image of the never ending singalong in the sky. One great him after another, forever and ever. Amen and our heart sinks forever and ever. That's it. That's the good news. And then we sigh and feel guilty that we are not more spiritual. We lose heart and we turn once more to the present to find what life we can. There's another part of the New Testament and Colossians three, where it says, set your mind on things above, not the things on the Earth. And we struggle with this. What are we supposed to think about? Are we supposed to think about people playing harps? Think about clouds, angels that look like chubby babies? I want us here to think about what Jesus is saying and to drill down on the concept of rewards. Jesus, in the earlier part of the sermon on the Mount, has talked about rewards. He talked about the father rewarding those who do their deeds, not to be seen by people, but to be seen by God. And here again, the theme of rewards comes up again. The basic message of this passage is very simple. Let us exchange what is perishable and decaying for what is glorious and eternal. It could hardly be simpler. Most of us know this in our minds, but I want us to move this into our hearts. So then we read it. Our hearts leap for joy. I mentioned that many people picture heaven in a more Gnostic sense where it's this ethereal disembodied existence, and you often frankly read that kind of language in modern books. There is a diminishment of the sense of physicality and place ness of heaven, and thus we are confused and go numb when we hear about heaven. Of course, the answer to this numbness is to appreciate that both heaven and Earth are renewed. The new heavens and the new Earth will have a more impressive Grand Canyon, a more picturesque Acadia National Park and a downtown Boston where I am right now that will surpass anything that we can imagine. John Milton, the medieval poet, said it well. He said, What if Earth? But the shadow of heaven and the things there in each to other like? So what Jesus is telling us in this passage is to seek rewards in this next life, this unbelievably amazing new heaven and new earth. Now the next challenge we have and understanding this is that some people don't know what to do with that. They almost feel guilty when they think about the concept of rewards. But I already told you, Jesus has repeatedly mentioned this concept of rewards in Chapter six of the sermon on the Mount. Are we supposed to do things that should be rewarded? The answer is yes. There's a kingdom mindset. We are supposed to do this. Is it selfish? No, of course not. Selfishness is putting oneself above God, in others in its proper place. We are supposed to use investing to seek eternal rewards on top of it. Look carefully at verse 20, Jesus says. Lay up or store up depending on your translation for yourselves. Did you notice that those two words jumped out at me for yourselves? Doesn't that seem almost selfish? We're supposed to do things for ourselves. How does this all work? Well, it's not a zero-sum game. In other religions like Buddhism, you're supposed to renounce all desire. They say that suffering comes from desire, so get rid of desire. But here Jesus teaches the opposite. He promotes our passions and our desires. Rightly, order desires submitted to God's will are good and proper and fitting. Dale Bruner says it well when he says Jesus does not quash ambition, he elevates it. The Christian is to be ambitious, passionate, acquisitive, enterprising for the father's approval for the well done of God's. Final judgment, thus, Jesus ethic is not so much ascetic as it is athletic with a similar idea. Randy Alcorn calls this concept the treasure principle. He says it very succinctly. You can't take it with you, but you can send it on a head. I like how he says that you'll never see a hearse. The funeral cars pulling a U-Haul. So hear what Jesus is doing as he's giving us an arbitrage opportunity. What is arbitrage? Most of you know, it's a fancy word. It's very simple. It's basically exploiting price or value differences. So if sugar costs 50 cents a pound at a store in San Diego, you can sell it for a dollar a pound at a store in Los Angeles. You back up the truck, you buy it in San Diego, you sell it in L.A. And for the people in the finance world, arbitrage is like the ultimate free money here. What Jesus is telling us is he's giving us an arbitrage opportunity. He's saying to convert earthly mammon into eternal rewards. Many of you have played the game of Monopoly, where you buy these various properties and charge rent for it, and you do this with this fake currency, this paper money. And imagine if you were to go to the store and take some of these green dollars and pink dollars and try to buy something, say, in a shoe store? Well, you'd be laughed out of the store. What Jesus is doing in this passage is he's basically telling us that earthly treasures, earthly mammon. It rots, it gets stolen. It's transient. And he's saying, convert it into something that last, convert it into something that's eternal and glorious. He's giving us an arbitrage opportunity when you hold a dollar the next time you take out your wallet. I want you to think of this as monopoly money. It's something that barely has any value whatsoever, except for this quick game of life that we happen to be in. Why not convert it through our giving, through our investing and just. That is eternal. There is an arbitrage opportunity that exists right now while we're alive. We can give to the poor, we can gain eternal rewards. We can invest our dollars in ways that advance the global common good. What a deal. May we in faith give and invest our worldly treasures to serve others for the sake of an unending, glorious reward.