The Money Question

UV 1334/10,000 The Money Question

But thou, O man of God, flee these things; and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness.

I Timothy 6 v 11

The only competition for God in the hearts of mankind today is not other gods but Mammon or money. This is the reason Jesus said unequivocally, “ You can either worship God or money.” Today more than yesterday or the day before, the unabashed love of the pursuit of money in all domains and all nations and parts of the world is growing. It has crept into the community of believers and so called men of God too. Money or the earning of large sums of money through legitimate enterprise and activity itself is not evil but the love of money is the root cause of much of the strife in our lives. It has the potential of piercing our hearts with many sorrows. If our loyalty turns on money, it could prove to be a snare to our lives. It will affect our relationship with God as well as our nearest and dearest. Our choices and decisions will revolve around how to make more money. The love of money is not satiable. When Henry Ford was asked how much more money would satisfy him, he replied , “ A little more.” Many people try to become heroes by adding more and more zeroes behind their names. It intoxicates them even when they have no need for any more. Faith is proportionate to the love of money in our hearts. If the latter increases, our faith decreases. Our blessings on us and our generations also decline. Money is a good servant but a bad master. We must learn to keep it a servant for it is perverse for a servant to gain control over our house as over our heart.



We are asked in this uni-verse to flee or run away speedily rather than towards money as we might be now doing. It tells us what we are to be wary of and to flee from and what we are to pursue relentlessly. We are to flee from the love of money as well as the deception, compromise, curses and risks that the root of the love of money produces in human life. Our focus should rather be on how to be more useful, productive, creative and fruitful from God’s perspective. Our priority should not be what will we gain materially but in what we would gain spiritually for the former is temporal and temporary while the latter is eternal and secured forever. Spiritual and personal all round excellence should be our driving force and daily workhorse while money and material matters should be the cart that follows. Scripture is not positioned against material prosperity or advancement for it endorses the material blessing in the Psalm that says, " Let your carts overflow with abundance." God takes us through seasons of abundance and scarcity and sufficiency in order to test our loyalties in different situations. My father-in-law who slept in the Lord just a couple of days ago and who was a highly successful and well known builder was once a person who used to assess people only by their bank balance. But the Lord took him through a series of failed contracts and the losses it entailed in order to break the hold that money had on him. In his last years, he replaced his confidence in money with a mustard-seed sized faith that enabled him to endure and overcome the travails that loss brought on him. That little faith has now got him a mansion in the Kingdom of God. Indeed, we need to make a choice between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of gold. We should be ready to trod on gold as if it is a mere pathway for us to walk on and not something that we should hoard and treasure in our hearts.

The love of money affects our integrity. We should instead persist in following the biblical principles of being right with God through faith, expressing it through our works of righteousness and love for God and man. The human mind needs an addiction or obsession. Instead of being obsessed with money or the things it can buy, we need to be obsessed with being godly, patient, gentle and meek. Just as too much honey is bad for us and could cause diabetes or a diseased condition, too much money reduces our dependence on God as well as our love for God and man. I once saw a bottle of honey in which a lot of ants had drowned. If the ants had remain contented with just sucking on a drop or two of honey, they would have survived but they could not resist the temptation of taking the plunge into the whole bottle and drowned. Giving money to God’s cause and other good causes is one way of both breaking and testing our attitude towards money.


Prateep V Philip