Relational Peace

About the Course

To Both Ways Free is a course on finding emotional, relational, and spiritual peace about money by developing a God-honoring financial lifestyle. Note that this isn’t one more “how-to” course on filling in budget books and cutting up credit cards. It’s more of a “how-come” course.

Research has shown that financial self-help materials fail most of the time — not because the materials are deficient, but because most of us just don’t have the motivation to stick with them. But that motivation can develop when we realize the cosmic significance and the eternal consequences of how we handle our money. And that underlying realization can break through when we learn to see our money through the lens of God’s Word. That is the crux of To Both Ways Free.

What most Christians are surprised to find in the Bible, though, is that a God-honoring financial lifestyle is NOT constrained by a rigid set of rules. Rather, it’s gently guided by a set of “dynamic tensions.” So for example, Proverbs 22 says that “the borrower is the slave of the lender,” and at the same time, Psalm 112 says that “good will come to those who lend freely.” If we try to make a rule out of either one of those verses and ignore the other, we can get caught up in some very sanctimonious rules, but we won’t experience God’s financial freedom.

To Both Ways Free is based on the conviction that the unsettling tensions among the Bible’s counterpoised financial principles are the “cords of compassion” and “bands of love” that can “lift the yoke from our necks.” The course deals with tensions in what the Bible teaches about owning, saving, borrowing, giving, and spending. Frankly, legalistic rules would be easier to grasp, but true financial freedom demands much deeper thinking.

Course Structure

For people who learn best by hearing and seeing, this course is available as a series of seven online videos that range from 20 to 38 minutes in length. And for people who learn best by reading, the same course is also available as a seven-chapter, 116-page book. Everything that’s in the videos is also in the book, but the book also supplies quite a few additional insights as well as some discussion questions.

Either of the two formats can stand alone, and either format could be used by individuals or by groups. The richest experience of this course would, however, be to view the videos in a small-group setting and then debate the very open-ended discussion questions that appear at the end of each chapter of the book.

The companion book has the same title as the video course — To Both Ways Free — and it’s available through Amazon.com as either a paperback or a Kindle e-book. Groups who need large numbers of books may contact Relational Peace University about possible volume discounts.