On Revive Our Hearts this week, certified financial planner and author Jan Thompson shared great tips for financial freedom. As Christians, our ultimate purpose for money is to advance the Kingdom of God. Jan discusses our priorities with money, setting up a spending plan rather than a budget, teaching financial responsibility to children, dealing with spouses who are not on board with a spending plan, planning for the future, and caring for elderly parents. She also gives several testimonies of how God blesses in miraculous ways when we give and when we handle our money biblically. I especially loved what Jan told her son, “…let’s trust God and not compromise putting Him first and let’s see what He can do with the little bit that you’ve got.” This series was a great encouragement for me.

Listen to or read the transcripts to the series “Financial Wisdom for God’s Glory,” Parts 1-4 here on ReviveOurHearts.com.

As a parent I try to check out movies before allowing my children to watch them. For movies, DVDs, and music, I like to read the full reviews at Plugged In Online by Focus on the Family, which is a Christian company. They tell you exactly what is in the movie or music so that you can decide if it’s something you want your family to be involved with. They also have reviews on TV and games. I would hate to be the one who has to watch or listen to the movies or music in order to write up these reviews—there is some pretty rough stuff out there!

Movieguide is another website I use, but mostly to find out about older movies that Plugged In Online does not have reviews for. Movieguide is run by a Christian company also, but does not go into as much detail as Plugged In Online does. It is helpful to compare the two sites when making decisions about what movies to watch.

Screen It is a paid movie review site for families, but is much more thorough than the above sites. There are no other sites that are this thorough. Membership is $24.95 a year. You can visit the website to see samples of their reviews. I think you’ll be very impressed!

Since I’m talking about movies, I did want to mention how much we love Netflix. I love that we get our DVDs in the mail, so there is no driving back and forth to a rental store. I especially love that I don’t have to try to hide my children’s eyes from objectionable movie covers as we are trying to find a good movie to watch. The DVDs come very quickly, usually arriving the day after Netflix mails them. The prices are very reasonable, which includes being able to watch many selections on your computer screen! Also, there are no limits to how much you can watch on your computer screen. I can’t recommend Netflix enough!