Responsible Love and Money

Responsible Love and Money

In many places, God tells us to love people, love certain characteristics (Galatians 5:22), and to love Him and His ways.

In 1 Timothy 6, God gives us a warning. The source of many kinds (or types) of evil is when we love money. Now, money is to be enjoyed because God gives it. We can make it, we can spend it, we can save it, and we can share it. But we shouldn’t love it.

We are told many times to be responsible with money. But we are not expected to place our desire in it. Money is a means to an end – and not the end itself. This is why there are so many warnings against having, keeping, and making money.

We have to learn to enjoy money but not to be owned by it. Greed, the opposite of contentment, is the wife of love for money. Contentment is saying “I will enjoy what I have.” Greed is saying: “I want more.” Greed teaches us that for us to enjoy life, we have to have more. This desire to have more drives the need to love money. Loving money really means that you have decided to worship materials and things, rather than the God who lets you make the materials and things.

The leech has two daughters–
Give and Give!
(Proverbs 30:15 NKJV)

I say that greed is the wife of love for money. You may desire money, and when you desire to love money, then you will also want to want and desire what you don’t have. Love for money and greed go together – they are the husband and wife of “financial failure”. They work and live together. Their children are debt and misery.

Photo by Olga DeLawrence on Unsplash