The Eric Metaxas Show - #42 - John Coleman

Episode Date: January 24, 2026

Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, Eric talks with John Coleman about a biblical view of money and why Christians should earn, spend, invest, and give with purpose. They break down Good Money, a six step framework for building a financial life that serves human flourishing, and they challenge the culture’s retirement mindset with his argument to save for freedom, not permanent leisure. Subscribe for clips from The Eric Metaxas Show to hear politics and culture from a Christian perspective.📢 Sponsor: BlockTrustIRA — Smarter Crypto Investing for Your Retirement: https://www.metaxascrypto.com/⏱️ TIMESTAMPS0:00 Intro0:35 John Coleman Joins2:31 Is Money Evil Or Misused?6:07 Six Steps To Good Money7:09 Save For Freedom, Not Retirement14:09 Practical Ways To Find Purpose19:55 What Do Young People Believe Now?22:38 Final Takeaways

Hey, the folks, welcome back. I have as my guest, my friend, John Coleman. He is the managing partner of sovereign's capital, co-founder of faith-driven investors. And he's the author of a book. I like the title of the book. It is Good Money, Six Steps to Building a Financial Life with Purpose. I am all about that, folks. Everything we do, we should do with purpose, including how we invest and how we spend and all of that stuff.

So John Coleman, welcome back. Hey, thank you so much, Eric. It's a privilege to be here. Well, this is important because, I mean, I've said this so many times in so many different ways that we're supposed to do everything to the glory of God. And, you know, it's one thing to say, like, you need to vote. Like some Christians are so pathetic that they're like,

yeah, I don't vote. You're like, well, you know, we have a lot of influence. And so if you can vote in America, that's number one. But that's just the beginning. Everything we do, how we spend our money, where we spend our money, where we invest our money, all of that stuff matters. And you're in the middle of that. So talk a little bit about what you do because I know you care about this and know much more about it than I do. Yeah, Eric, and you're spot on.

You know, the Christian teachings have a lot to say about money throughout. I think it's the most mentioned thing in the Bible, something like 2,350 references. And certainly many of those are cautionary. People are familiar with the verse, the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And yet, God also blesses certain people with money. Abraham was one of the richest people of his day, David, Solomon, even characters in the New Testament, who are blessed with money that they could use for kingdom purposes in the way that others were gifted with other talents. And so that's one of the guiding things that's influenced me right now is trying to explore in my day job, both as a writer and invest. I'm very focused on human flourishing.

I've written books for Harvard about this in the past, and it's sovereign's capital where a values-based investment manager focused on faith-driven investing. And so this book and this topic were important to me because I see out in the world people misusing money in a variety of ways, but I think that money can be used as any other gift to create human flourishing purpose and lives. And so it's that that I wanted to explore with this book.

So when you use the term good money, again, this is what's so interesting is that when I was, you know, at Yale among the communist Marxists, you know, I bought into this idea, these progressive lies that rich people bad, bankers bad, I bought into that. And then when I became a Christian, I started realizing, this is ridiculous. Like, you know, I know all kinds of people that are bad and all kinds of people that are good. And you can use. if God blesses you with money, you can use it for God's purposes. And some people do. And you can bless people. And so that's one of the Marxist lies that is in the culture. And it has infiltrated the church that there are many people in the church. They don't understand this issue. That the scripture doesn't say money is evil. It says the love of money can be the root. So if you make an idol of money, just like if you make an idol of anything, it can lead to evil. But isn't that at the heart of the problem here is that there are so many, including in the church, that they really don't understand this issue? Yeah, absolutely. I think there are two errors. One is some people get obsessed with money. And we see this in our culture broadly. And they're confusing a means within ends. Money is not an ends that creates human flourishing. Achieving financial prosperity is not something that will intrinsically make you happy or more purposeful. It is a means by which you can pursue great relationships.

character and virtue, helping others, purpose in your work, et cetera. On the other side, you have people afraid of money, almost thinking that they have to swear it off entirely or that money is intrinsically bad. And I think there's a narrow path in the middle where you say that money is a gift just like anything else. If God blesses you with money, it's for a purpose and he's entrusting you to use that for his purposes. But it is uniquely tempting, which is why God mentions it so often in the Bible.

and it's easily misused. It can become a focus of your life rather than just by a means by which you achieve his purposes for yourself and for others. And that's where I think people get led astray who have great amounts of wealth. They come to view money as their identity. They come to view having more money as an indication that they're a better person or that their life is going to be good. And when they're led astray by that, develop bad habits, spending in the wrong places, of earning just to earn instead of working with purpose, of not giving to others, of not engaging in charity, as God calls us to do. Then they get let us strain.

It becomes destructive. But money itself can confer amazing blessings on ourselves and on others. And so teaching folks how to use it properly to achieve those ends, I think is critically important. I mean, I know the book is titled Good Money, but you say that money can be good, good or bad. So what can we do? And I know you talk about this on the book, but what can any of us do to make the money that we have good? Or what do you mean by that more generally?

Absolutely. So in the book, I lay out a six-part framework to investigate this topic. There are basically four ways in which we interact with money. We earn it. We spend it. We invest it. And we give it. And so the book is laid out in six parts.

The first is developing what I call good money mindsets, which is coming to view money. as a means, not an ends, coming to view our identities as anchored in God, our faith traditions, our communities, our families, rather than in just financial prosperity, because obviously that's not an indicator of how good or bad a person is, whether they have wealth. And learning to do things like set of financial finish lines so that we know when we're done accumulating for ourselves and ready to accumulate only for the benefit of others. And then we go through this process of looking at how do you earn with purpose. So not just work a job for money, but work it to achieve something.

sort of purposeable impact in the world. How do you spend wisely? So not just on stuff on the things we accumulate, but on things like health, experiences, relationships, time, et cetera. How do you invest with impact? So how do you use your investment dollars to create a positive change according to your values in the world? And how do you give wisely and well? So how do we become more philanthropic and charitable, but do so in a way that's wise? And then maybe the most controversial of the topics is the sixth where I encourage people to save for freedom, not retirement. I think retirement is actually kind of a bad concept as conventionally conceived. It robs people of the opportunity to live purposely throughout their lives. And so I encourage folks to really save to achieve autonomy

and agency in their lives rather than permanent leisure, which is the way current retirement is often positioned. I just have to say, what a joke. How, I mean, I would rather die than just be, You say, well, I'm done. So now it's about having fun. I can't imagine that there are people who buy into that. I shouldn't say I can't imagine it. But I'm astonished that people think that way. There's certainly nothing biblical about that idea that at some point I'm supposed to

like punch out and, you know, party time on the golf course until I die. Like, that's just not a biblical view of life. That's right. And this is one of the many areas of money where the script. and modern social science intersect, I think. You know, the scriptures tell us to run the race as if to win it. God never calls us to just kind of check out and stop serving others. We're intended to use our lives for good. And modern social science would tell us there's emerging research that early retirement leads to increased mortality. So delaying retirement even one or two years can often

lower the incidence of mortality 40 or 50 percent. Retirement often leads to deterioration of physical health, at least the deterioration of community and mental and spiritual health, it can lead to an onset of purposelessness. And it makes sense, right? Humans are wired to use their talents for the benefit of others, to use them in ways that take advantage of those talents. And if we just check out and stop doing that, we lose one of the primary senses of purpose that we as human beings have in life. While the corrupt federal elites have been quietly building wealth through cryptocurrency, hardworking American patriots have been left behind. Today, I want to tell you about metaxuscripto.com.

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It is kind of amazing to me that so many people have bought into that mindset, that I work and it's miserable, and then I eventually get to retire. And listen, to be fair, for some people, work can be tough. I mean, if you're working in a factory or whatever, so I don't want to denigrate that, you know, there are some people who they look forward to not working. But we're talking about something else here.

We're talking about purpose in life. And that never ends, that we're supposed to have purpose. We're supposed to live with purpose and joy. And so I think this feeds into another one of these cultural lies that like work is bad and leisure is good. And you think, what are you talking about? It depends on what kind of work you're doing. If you're doing something that can help people or that is building something, it can be beautiful. and wonderful. And I think, so that's another one of those ideas that people buy into, like work

as this thing I have to do just to make money, which I know you write directly against that idea in your book. Well, and those two chapters are interlinked, right? If you start to view earning as not just the way you pay the bills, and certainly some people are in difficult circumstances, as you said. I mean, if you're a single mom who has to clean hotel rooms or work as a janitor, that can be a really tough job. And some people really do. have to make ends meet, and so I'm not dismissing that at all. But we need to turn the way that we earn or work into a pursuit of purpose in our lives. I think there is no success without significance. And you see a glut of even incredibly wealthy people who aren't really viewing their work as a way

to have positive impact or achieve a personal sense of purpose. So if you're doing that, then this need to get out of work to escape something bad can go away. You know, there was a recent survey are only about 15% of people, 1, 5% of people globally are engaged at work. So there really is this epidemic of people not seeing the purpose in their work. And so you have to start viewing it that way. And if you do, then this idea of retirement becomes less compelling. And that's why I say you save for freedom, not retirement. Again, you may want to shift careers. You may want to work part-time. You may want to generate more of your time serving others through volunteer work or through mentorship or other things. But if you save properly, you create the financial flexibility

such that you can over time achieve even greater sense of purpose and impact in the work you're doing. And so I think those two concepts are very interlinked. And if people started to view their work as a sense of purpose in their lives, I mean, that's where you and I and many others spend 40, 50, 60 hours a week to not have a sense of purpose in that would be a great shame. It would be a waste of talent. And if you can enhance that for the entirety of your life until health requires that you not be able to do that anymore, I think that leads to them your more flourishing life than just kind of punching a clock to earn bills or ultimately retiring to the golf course and not using your talents for the benefit of others anymore. What are some practical steps that people can take along

these lines. I know you have some of that in the book. Yeah. So in terms of earning with purpose, there are a lot of ways to look at it. There are four simple ways. I encourage everyone to look at their jobs. The first is to craft their work. This is an idea in the management literature called job crafting, which is where you look at your job, see what's unique about it, see what gives you the greatest purpose, and tweak your job to make it more meaningful to you. There was a great study, for example, of hospital janitors from a Yale academic, actually, where she sought to understand which janitors achieve greater purpose in their work. And she found that those were happiest were those who had crafted their jobs to be a part of the care team for patients rather than just

as seeing themselves as janitors or technicians. So one would move artwork around on the walls of long-term patients, for example, so that they achieved greater beauty in their lives, despite the fact that they were stuck in a hospital. She really viewed herself as a part of the care team. So that's learning to craft your work. The second is to treat work as a craft. You know, the old cobblers or artisans

or carpenters always try to perfect their craft, right? And if you're focused on doing something as well as you can, that's inherently meaningful. The third is to learn how to serve others in your work. You know, one of the things that gives us the greatest source of purpose or meaning in life, often number two or three in the surveys, is service to others, giving to others.

And if you find ways you're serving others in your work, that makes it more meaningful. And then the fourth is to build positive relationships at your work. The number one determinant of people's happiness in almost every survey is the depth and breadth of their close positive relationships. And often we neglect those at work. We fail to cultivate those.

And so I think if you look at those four things and focus on those in a daily job, those can help make it more meaningful. And then this idea of saving for freedom not retirement, one of the things that tells us how much we enjoy a job is how much agency or autonomy we have. So the feeling that we actually control our fates and that we have some influence over what we're doing in the companies that we work for. And obviously, if you build financial flexibility by careful saving, you have the opportunity to create that agency on autonomy or if it's not something you can create within your current environment to switch and do something more meaningful to you. And so again, those two concepts are quite interlinked, I think. I don't know if we've said it explicitly, but what we're talking about is a biblical view of reality.

So money, of course, is just part of reality, money, power, freedom, you know, this is the world we live in. And if you have a biblical view, now, if you don't have a biblical view, and this is the issue, if you have a, you know, a Marxist, materialist view, then none of this is going to make any sense, really. because I think to myself that, you know, one thing that I would say to people is pray that God would lead you to what he created you to do. There is a God. He hears your prayers and he wants you to do the work that he made you to do. Now, again, you know, we were talking about some people don't have that freedom, but in America, a lot of people have that freedom. It's an amazing thing that most people since the beginning of time didn't have the kind of freedom and opportunities that we do. So we actually have the ability at this stage in history in this nation to say, you know, I get to choose what I do with my life.

A lot of people, you know, if you were a surf in the 11th century, you didn't get to choose what to do with your life. You could still praise God while you're hoeing the field, but you didn't get to choose whether you're going to be working. the field. But we do. And God wants us, if we have that ability as many of us do, to invite him into the process and to say, Lord, what did you make me to do? I find it funny, like when Trump talks about how he loves doing what he does, and it's so obvious that it's not drudgery, that he's excited that he gets to do stuff or makes him whatever it is. And, you know, I think that if you didn't feel that way, work would be in agony. And I, you know, when I write, my books, it is work. Sometimes it's, it's an agony. Sometimes. Sometimes there's a joy,

but it's work. And that's the, that's the nature of work. Sometimes it's tough. Sometimes it's, it's not. But if I were doing it just to make money, it would be it, that would be an agony. I mean, I'm doing it because I, I'm dying to communicate. I want to communicate these ideas. So of course, I hope people will buy the books, because if people don't buy the books, then they won't read the books. But if it only was about making a buck, I don't even know what I would do. I mean, you think how cynical that would be

if you start thinking that way, it's just about how can I figure out, you know, a scheme to make a buck. I mean, I guess for some people, that's fun figuring out a scheme how to make a buck. But it's just tied to something deeper. It's a biblical view of the world,

the idea that God loves me and wants to use me. He created me for something more than nothing. So I just want to say, that's, you know, that's at the heart of your message here is, is that God takes, he has a view on all of these things and he invites us with him to, to figure out what he wants us to do with the gifts that he's given us and then with the money we get to make and so on and so forth. What do you, what is your sense of where we are now in the culture, like with the younger generation? Because I, I can think about what my generation has thought of wealth and money.

Do you have a sense that younger people are getting this idea that you're talking about in the book? Well, I think there are some mixed signals, honestly, Eric. I think there are some really worrying signals. So one of the things I talked about in good money, there was a recent Wall Street Journal poll, for example, that people's faith in traditional values, like patriotism, like religion, even on like things like marriage and family, were all declined. these were becoming less important as cultural values. The only thing that they surveyed that was going up in terms of its importance as a cultural value was money. So there is this worrying trend where traditional cultural institutions and values are decaying. And it's leading to a gap that people are trying to fill with material possessions or money.

There are some positive signs amongst Gen Z, Gen Alpha, others about this desire to seek purpose. There have even been upticks in things like Bible sales and church attendance that show that some people are seeking that in the right places. So I think what the younger generation is getting right is they realize something's missing from their lives. Unfortunately, I believe because of the popular culture, many are trying to fill that with material possessions and money. And there are all sorts of negative influences here on TikTok and Instagram. I mean, you can think, Eric, of the male influencers who are showing off their fancy cars and watches and cash. women and it's just leading to all sorts of negative searches for a purpose. And so one of the points of this book was to really get people focused on human flourishing and what it means to

live a good life as a human being and how money fits into that, how it becomes a platform through which you can achieve that. And the one other thing I would say based on your prior comment, one of the beautiful things about being a Christian is you think that what God is telling us about our purpose and our flourishing is true. And so the social, social science is eventually going to align with that. I tell people all the time, Christians have nothing to be afraid of from science or social science because we believe it to be true. And if it's done authentically, it will ultimately lead you to the revelation of God. And what Harvard Business Review has done in good money has allowed me to combine both this ancient wisdom through scripture,

including, as well as social science. And it's amazing to me how often what the researchers are discovering through social science lines up with the lessons we were taught through the Bible and as Christians about what will help us flourish and how to make money a meaningful part of that. And so I think young people are searching, but it's a critically important juncture where they need to really be thoughtful about money as a part of that search and make sure they don't put their faith in something transient or intrinsically not meaningful and instead anchor on universal truths that can make them live better. Amen.

Well, the book is Good Money, Six Steps to Building a Financial Life with Purpose. Good Money is the title. And the author is John Coleman, my guest. John, thank you so much. Eric, thank you so much. It's a privilege to be with you. Hey, folks. I want to tell you about a coffee company.

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