Christianity Has the Best ROI

I am not a very moral person. I mostly care about myself and what’s best for me. Paul at least had the decency to agonise over this — “I do not do the good I want to do” (Romans 7:19) — whereas I mostly just do what I want.

I would like to say I saw the beauty and holiness of Christianity, and ran toward it. The truth is less flattering: I looked at my life, at the habits that make me anxious and divided, and I noticed that following Christ was better for me than ignoring him.

That sounds crass because ROI is a business word, and Christianity is supposed to be sacred. I understand the objection. I am not trying to turn Jesus into a wellness app or reduce God to a productivity system. My point is, some people seem to begin with love, while I am often moved by self-interest. The mysterious mercy of Christianity is that it can meet a person where they are, and still help them grow into something more.

Counting what disobedience costs

A lot of sin sells itself as freedom. Do what you want. Say what you feel. Sleep with whoever. Buy the thing. Nurse the grudge. Keep the second life alive. Take the edge off. The pitch is always some version of relief now, consequence later, and when I am in the wrong mood that pitch works on me.

Christianity interrupts that bargain. It tells me no before I have finished building the excuse. That feels restrictive when I want the thing, but it also simplifies life. A commandment is much less tiring than a negotiation with your worst appetites. If I have already decided that certain doors are closed, I do not have to stand in front of them every week pretending to be open-minded.

This is one reason the line about serving two masters hits me so hard: “No one can serve two masters… You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24). For most of my life I was serving four or five: money, status, comfort, other people’s approval. Each one pulled in a different direction. James calls that man “double-minded, unstable in all his ways” (James 1:8). I know that instability. It is the mental noise that comes from trying to obey God, impress people, maximize pleasure, protect ego, chase money, avoid pain, and still call myself a coherent person.

One master makes the field clearer. When you genuinely don’t know what to do, the instruction is simple: “If any of you lacks wisdom, ask God” (James 1:5). “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart,” Proverbs says, “and lean not unto thine own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5-6). That is not an excuse to become stupid. It is relief from pretending that my appetites are wise.

Double-mindedness is exhausting. You can try to be faithful and impressive, pure and secretly indulgent, generous and greedy, peaceful and addicted to status, but the human mind does not split cleanly. Eventually one master starts sending invoices to the other.

The returns reach your wallet

Following Christ leaves more money in your life because obedience stops some obvious leaks. If I am not getting drunk, gambling out of boredom, chasing status, buying lust, feeding envy, or trying to soothe every bad feeling with a purchase, then fewer dollars leave my life through holes I pretended were harmless.

This is not an argument that every Christian becomes rich. The Bible does not teach that. It actually warns that the love of money pierces people with many sorrows (1 Timothy 6:6-10). It tells me to be content with what I have (Hebrews 13:5), to watch where my treasure is (Matthew 6:19-21), and to remember that “a foolish man spendeth it up” (Proverbs 21:20). The point is not prosperity-gospel nonsense. The point is that foolishness has a bill.

Christianity attacks leakage at the root. It does not merely say, “Spend less.” It says, “Want differently.” It teaches contentment, self-control, generosity, sobriety, and stewardship. Those words can sound pious until I remember that each one has a practical consequence. A content man is harder to upsell. A sober man is harder to exploit. A generous man is less likely to worship his bank account. A self-controlled man keeps more of his life.

Getting back peace and attention

The bigger return is not money. It is peace.

When I drift from God, I do not become some extreme sinner. I become anxious, scattered, defensive, and tired. I start running small internal campaigns for every questionable decision. I explain myself to myself. I keep tabs open in my head. I worry about being exposed, misunderstood, left behind, or judged by people whose opinions I claim not to care about.

Following Christ reduces some of that noise because it gives my life a center outside my mood. I still feel fear. I still overthink. I still care too much about how I am perceived. But the decision tree gets smaller: tell the truth, forgive, repent, work, pray, give, resist temptation, try again tomorrow. That may sound basic. But a simple rule followed seriously can do more for a life than a thousand clever exceptions.

There is data around this: Pew Research Center found in a 2019 analysis of the United States and more than two dozen other countries that actively religious people tend to report more happiness; in the U.S., 36 percent of actively religious adults described themselves as “very happy,” compared with 25 percent of both inactive religious adults and the unaffiliated. Worship, community, discipline, gratitude, and hope change a person. Pew’s newer Religious Landscape Study also found that 49 percent of Christians report feeling a deep sense of spiritual peace and well-being at least weekly.

If I only consult my ambition, fear, lust, resentment, and Google search results, I can justify almost anything. Prayer does not make every decision easy, but it makes it harder to pretend that I am the wisest person in the room.

Purpose compounds quietly

Purpose is the return I least expected to care about, and it turned out to be the one holding the others up. “We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). You have assignments, prepared before you arrived, and a person with assignments is hard to demoralize.

The Global Flourishing Study surveyed over 200,000 people across 22 countries for Harvard, Baylor and Gallup, and found religious service attendance among the strongest predictors of human flourishing, holding even in the most secular societies. Whatever congregations produce, it doesn’t stop working when the surrounding culture stops believing.

Purpose also feeds the items above it. A person with assignments gets out of bed differently from a person who is merely avoiding pain: purpose converts straight into energy, and it produces hope, which I used to think was the softest entry on my list.

Taking hope seriously

The coldest part of my calculation is also the most serious: if Christianity is true, the upside is not only a cleaner life now. It is eternal life. I cannot prove that in a spreadsheet, and I am not going to pretend that the promise of heaven works like a savings account. But I also cannot ignore it. If Christ is who he says he is, then the practical question is not whether Christianity is useful. The practical question is why I would gamble my life against him.

Even short of that final claim, hope matters. A 2020 JAMA Psychiatry cohort study of more than 100,000 U.S. health care professionals found that attending religious services at least once a week was associated with a lower subsequent risk of deaths from despair: 68 percent lower among women and 43 percent lower among men, compared with never attending. A life with worship, moral structure, and people expecting you to show up can be harder to abandon.

That may be the part I respect most now. Christianity does not only tell me to stop doing things. It gives me something to look forward to, someone to become, and a reason to keep going when my own desires become thin. It gives suffering a frame. It gives guilt somewhere to go. It gives ordinary work a witness. It gives me a way to interpret my life that is larger than whether today felt good.

So yes, Christianity has the best ROI. I do not mean that as the highest statement of faith. It’s just an analysis of the different directions I can take with my life: If I follow myself, I get some pleasure, some control, some applause, and a lot of cleanup. If I follow Christ, I give up things that were already making me worse, and in return I get discipline, peace, purpose, hope, and a chance at heaven.

For a selfish man, that is not a bad deal. It may even be the beginning of becoming less selfish.