What It Looks Like to Love Your Money

You walk into church on Sunday and see on the bulletin that today’s message is all about not loving your money. You’ve been around the church for a while, and you’ve heard it said that you shouldn’t love your money so you can tune out a bit during the service, right? 

You give yourself a mental pat on the back because you clearly don’t love your money. In fact, you’re feeling pretty good because you don’t have a ton of money in the bank. Your boss doesn’t pay you enough to really love your money. However, the thought of your low salary sends you down a spiral of worry… A bunch of questions start popping up in your head as the pastor begins to speak…

How will you pay for your auto insurance premium coming up next month? 
Is it bad that you haven’t saved a ton for retirement yet? 
What was that piece of advice you got about an emergency fun? Should you have one? 
But how can you save money when you’d love to use it to go on that cruise with your friends? What will they think if you say no because you don’t have the money?  
Why can’t you have more so you can just enjoy these things without any worries??

Then the pastor says something you’ve never really heard before. “The love of money isn’t just having a lot of it. In fact, many people without money still deeply struggle with the love of money.” 

Wait what? Did you hear him right? How can you, love money if you don’t have it…? 

So what exactly is the love of money? 

The love of money is simply the act of thinking that money can do for you what only God can do. It is trusting your ability to produce wealth over God’s promise to provide for you. It is trusting your money to keep you secure rather than God. It is looking for your identity in your wealth rather than putting your identity in Christ. It is asking your money to provide you with a purpose and happiness rather than seeking first the Kingdom of God. 

“We are seduced into thinking that if having some money made us happy, it stood to reason that having more of it would make us even happier.”
Dave Hataj, Good Work

“Every day millions of us are seduced into asking money to do for us what only God can do.” 
Paul David Tripp, Redeeming Money

The love of money doesn’t usually show up as desiring to buying lots of fancy things, accumulating tons of debt, or being really salary obsessed. The love of money shows up in a simpler form than most of the things we would typically characterize as loving money. 

The love of money is a disease of the heart. 

It’s time to do a heart check… Where is the love of money creeping into your life? 

And I purposely ask this question knowing that all of us, including myself, struggle with the love of money in some form. We always will because we are broken and sinful. But that shouldn’t stop us from working at uprooting the sin within our hearts. 

In this weeks YouTube video, I share a bit about my own current struggle with the love of money. Check it out here. 

Your friend and fellow struggler, 
Katie Jones