The Idolatry of the Bottom Line

Somewhere along the way, America traded its soul for a spreadsheet.

God has never been opposed to increase. The parable of the talents is not a call to contentment. It is a command to increase. Tend to something carefully, pay attention, and it gets better. That is not a worldly idea. The God who made the seed and the soil thought of it first. The problem was never growth itself. The problem is what we started growing for.

Extraction is the spirit of the age. Take as much as you can, as fast as you can. Maximize the quarterly return. Hit the number. Get the bonus. And if that means grinding employees down to nothing, squeezing suppliers until they bleed, and delivering a product you'd be embarrassed to put your name on — that's just business.

1 Timothy 6:10 says the love of money causes men to err from the faith and pierce themselves through with many sorrows. Look at Boeing — one of the greatest engineering companies in American history, handed over to financial extraction until the accountants overruled the engineers and two planes fell out of the sky. Look at Bed Bath & Beyond, a retailer that had everything — brand recognition, loyal customers, hundreds of locations — until the people running it spent billions buying back their own stock instead of taking care of their business. And the little restaurant down the street where one day the lights were off and the sign was gone. Same fingerprints every time. Someone decided the next quarter mattered more than the next decade. Someone forgot that no man is ever truly an owner. We are all stewards of what God entrusted to us. And stewards do not answer to shareholders alone. They answer to God.

Proverbs 11:24 says, There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty. God's arithmetic runs in the opposite direction from everything Wall Street believes. You cannot take your way to abundance. The extractor always ends up with less than he started with — and he rarely goes down alone.

That wreckage has a name. And the God who made the seed and the soil has been pointing toward something better the whole time.

What God calls us to is not extraction. It is fruitfulness.

In John 15, the Lord Jesus does not tell His disciples to maximize their yield. He tells them to abide. Stay connected to the vine. Be faithful with what you've been given. The fruit comes from that — genuine, lasting fruit that you didn't conjure or force. One man plants, another waters, but it is God who gives the increase. Fruitfulness is not a strategy. It is what happens when faithful people stop trying to extract and start trying to grow.

The extractor is not just miscalculating. He is making a moral confession. He is saying, in practice if not in words, that this moment is all there is. That there is no accounting coming. That he will never stand before a God who saw every person he used up, every relationship he burned, every soul he treated as a means to an end. He has made his choice. He has chosen the number over the people. And one day he will answer for it.

But there is an accounting coming. There always is.

Luke 16:10 says, He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much. Faithfulness to the people God placed in your care. Faithfulness with what He entrusted to you. That is what still stands when you are gone.

Romans 12:2 says be not conformed to this world. That is not a suggestion for Sunday morning. That is a command for Monday morning. Every budget meeting. Every decision about how to treat the people in your path. Every moment when the pressure to extract is louder than the call to cultivate — that verse is speaking directly to you.

You cannot extract your way to greatness. But by the grace of God, you can grow toward it.