Everybody knows one thing about a car, even people who don’t know anything else about cars. The moment you drive it off the lot, it’s worth less than it was ten minutes ago. Then it keeps going. Every mile, every winter in the salt, every year puts a little more distance between what it’s worth and what you paid.
That’s not a scandal. It’s a depreciating asset. You buy it knowing it’s on its way down, and you get value out of it on the way.
I’ve been thinking for a couple of years now about how much of what we build in a church works the same way. The building depreciates. The sound system depreciates faster than the building. Programs have a shelf life. The website will look dated in four years. Even the sermon: I’ll spend twelve hours on one, and by Wednesday most people who heard it couldn’t tell you the main point. I’ve made peace with that.
There is exactly one thing you can pour yourself into that doesn’t depreciate.
A person.
A person compounds. A person walks out of your life carrying what you gave them and hands it to somebody you will never meet. That’s the whole idea behind what we’re starting at Living Faith, and it fits in one sentence: the best return on investment is a person.
Two kinds of investments, and only one survives you
Everything you can spend your life on falls into one of two categories. The first is things: money, buildings, programs, reputations. Useful, but every one of them is on a clock.
The second is people. People are the only investment where the return keeps growing after you stop making deposits. And after you’re gone.
That can sound like a motivational poster, so let me put some weight under it. Paul tells the Corinthian church that every one of us is building on the foundation of Christ, and a day is coming when fire will test what we built. Some of it turns out to be gold and silver and precious stones. Some of it turns out to be wood, hay, and straw (1 Corinthians 3:10–15). And the building material Paul has in mind in that chapter is people: who planted, who watered, who is following whom.
Later he puts it flat out: “the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). That’s a strange sentence when you think about it. The transient things are the ones you can point at. The eternal thing is sitting three rows back, and you don’t have a metric for him.
Here’s a test I’ve started running on myself. Take whatever gets most of your hours right now and ask: in fifty years, what’s left of this? For most of what I do, the answer is nothing. The car’s scrapped, the software’s rewritten, the building has a different sign on it.
But if I’ve sat across from somebody and handed them what was handed to me, then in fifty years that person is either still walking with Christ or he isn’t. And if he is, he’s probably handed it to someone else, and I can’t see the end of that line from here. That isn’t a poster. It’s arithmetic.
Necessary, and then not
I’ve written before about the woman at the well: an hour with Jesus, a water jar left behind, a whole town told. I want to come back to that story for one detail that’s easy to read past.
She goes into town and says, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” (John 4:29). And it works. John says, “Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony” (John 4:39).
Because of her. She was the bridge. Without her, nobody walks out to that well.
Then Jesus stays two days, and look at what the townspeople tell her: “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world” (John 4:42).
Read that slowly. She was necessary, and then she wasn’t. In about two days.
I think that’s the most important verse in the chapter for anyone who wants to invest in people. The goal was never for that town to need her. The goal was to get them to Jesus and then get out of the way. She wasn’t building a following. She was pointing.
That’s what we’re training for. Not people who need you. People who don’t.
It’s also a relief. You aren’t signing up to be somebody’s permanent life support. If you do it well, the day comes when they don’t need you, and that day is the win.
“I’m not qualified”
I know the objection, because I’ve used it. Somebody once asked me a question I couldn’t answer. Not a hard one. A basic one, the kind I should have handled after that many years as a Christian. I felt my face get hot, and I said something that was about sixty percent true and a hundred percent confident, which is the worst possible ratio. I drove home thinking: I have no business doing this.
That thought is completely true. It’s also completely irrelevant.
There are two ditches on this road. The first one is full of humble, sincere people who won’t open their mouths about the Lord because they’re waiting to be ready. They have a list: I don’t know enough Bible, my marriage isn’t great, I’ve only been a Christian four years. The list is honest, which is what makes it so effective.
The second ditch is smaller and uglier: the person who has decided he’s plenty qualified, thanks. James warns that person directly: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1). That’s a real warning and I won’t soften it.
But notice who actually reads that verse. It’s never the guy in the second ditch. It’s always the guy in the first one, using it as a reason never to talk to his neighbor about Jesus.
So here’s the line as plainly as I can draw it: character is a qualification. Competence is not.
Read the lists in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. They’re almost all character. You know what’s not on them? Seminary. Public speaking. Knowing where Habakkuk is. Being finished.
And the pattern runs through the whole Bible. Moses tells God he isn’t a good speaker and asks him to send someone else (Exodus 4:10–13). Gideon says his clan is the weakest and he’s the least in his family. Jeremiah says he’s only a youth. God never once answers, “No, you’re better than you think.” He says some version of I will be with you. The qualification was never in them.
My favorite is in Acts 4. Peter and John stand before the most credentialed religious council in Jerusalem, and Luke records the reaction: “Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).
That’s the résumé. Time with Jesus, visible on a person. If you’ve walked with Christ for a couple of years and somebody has poured into you, you have something to hand on. The hesitation you feel may not be humility. It may be fear wearing humility’s coat.
The fifth leaf
At Living Faith we describe the Christian life as a path with five leaves, drawn from the Lord’s Prayer: Worship, Group, Serve, Belong, Invest. I unpack all five in Living the Lord’s Prayer. Investing is the fifth leaf, and it grows from the last petition: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13). We call that leaf Overcoming Sin.
Which raises a fair question. Why is the leaf about my own sin the same leaf as investing in somebody else?
Because the only person who can help someone fight is someone who is fighting.
You can’t hand on a war you’re not in. A man who has never wrestled with anything has nothing to say to a twenty-four-year-old who thinks he’s the only one. But a man who is in the fight, losing sometimes, getting back up, with somebody who knows, can look that young man in the eye and say four words that will change his year: me too. Here’s what helps.
Paul understood this. He calls himself the foremost of sinners, present tense, and says he received mercy so that Christ could display his patience “as an example to those who were to believe in him” (1 Timothy 1:16). His disqualification became the display case.
There’s a guardrail here, and it goes first. Jesus says, “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5). The order is mandatory. Your log first, every time.
And there is an enormous difference between a sin you are fighting and a sin you are protecting. If you are hiding and defending something, the next step isn’t investing in someone. It’s confession and help. But if you’re in the fight, you aren’t disqualified. You’re credible. As I put it in the book, “There are no doctors in this hospital. Only patients further along in treatment, showing newer patients where healing is found.”
That’s why the two halves belong together. Overcoming is what gives you something to invest. And investing keeps you honest about overcoming.
Maturity is a disciple making disciples
We don’t call someone a master craftsman because he’s watched a lot of videos. We call him a master when he can train an apprentice. Think of a skill you actually own, anything at all. Who taught you? Not one of us learned it from a book alone. Somebody stood next to us.
Jesus preached to thousands and discipled twelve, and the twelve are why you know his name. The one command in the Great Commission is “make disciples” (Matthew 28:19). Not converts, not attenders. And that can’t be mass-produced from a stage. It happens the way it happened to you: a kitchen table, a truck cab, a lunch break.
Paul’s last letter, written from a cold Roman cell, makes the same point. He tells Timothy, “what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). Count the people in that sentence. Paul. Timothy. Faithful men. Others also. Four generations, written by a man who would never meet the last two. We’ll spend a whole article on that verse next week.
And the path loops. The person you invest in starts at the first leaf. The last leaf drops a seed, and a new tree starts growing.
The bar for this is intention, not size. Not “become a preacher.” Not even “lead a group.” One person. Coffee every other week, the Bible open, prayed for by name, asked a real question. That is fully this step.
What two years asks of you
We’re giving this two years at Living Faith, one evening a month, for three reasons.
Leaders never stop being led. Our elders meet weekly, and every week the same question comes around the table: do you have any unconfessed sin? If they need that room, so do the rest of us. Nobody graduates off the top of the path.
Nobody should get thrown in the deep end. You lead with someone before you lead instead of someone. A monthly room is that middle layer, with a name and a date on it.
Intention without a calendar decays. Most Christians already agree with everything in this article. Agreement has never once produced a disciple. A recurring Thursday might.
What it costs is smaller than people expect: an evening a month, one practice between gatherings, one partner you’re honest with, and one person you’re actually investing in. What it really costs is a relationship’s worth of time. That’s the price of anything that compounds.
Your practice this month
Here’s the step, and it’s small on purpose.
Write down one name you could invest in. Then pray for that person every day for a month. Don’t ask them anything yet.
Get there by praying a simple question: God, who’s the one person you’ve put near me that nobody is investing in? A name usually comes faster than people expect. When it does, write it somewhere you can’t avoid: inside your Bible cover, on a sticky note on the dash, in the notes app you actually open.
Saying it and writing it makes it real. A vague sense that you should pour into somebody produces nothing. A name produces a phone call, eventually.
Praying first keeps this from becoming a self-improvement project. Before Jesus chose the twelve, he spent all night in prayer. You can manage two minutes in the truck.
And not asking yet matters too. You’re letting God shape your heart toward one person before you shape any plans around him.
Somebody once decided you were worth some hours. Nobody announced it. It wasn’t a program. Everything else you build will depreciate, so go be that name in somebody else’s story.
This article is part of The Investors, a two-year leadership track at Living Faith Church for people who are ready to pour into someone else the way someone poured into them.
Next: Who Are Your Three? Paul, Barnabas, and Timothy