you. Together we will get there, and the discomfort you may be feeling now will be but a motivating memory.
| EVANGELPRENEUR ACTION STEP |
| Take a moment and do a self-check: What financial bondage do you find yourself in? Do you recognize it or have you grown so accustomed to it that you just see your bondage as part of life? |
| Take a look at your church, if you go to one, and ask yourself: Is financial bondage there? What does it look like? Is an un-needed expansion being built with borrowed money? Is the pastoral staff hoping a bigger building will be like the promise in Field of Dreams—if they build it, the people will come? |
| Once you start looking for financial bondage, you will see it everywhere! |
The Root of All Evil?
What Money Is and How It Is Loved
“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” —1 Timothy 6:10
What a famous and misused bit of Scripture!
Usually when this Scripture sound bite is used, “the love of” is usually redacted, leaving us with the more often used phrase, “Money is the root of all evil.”
Is money the root of all evil? Of course not. Is money the fruit of all goodness then? No, of course not. Money is neither good nor evil, it is just money. So before we dig too deeply, we need to define “money.” What is it? Where does it come from? Are we supposed to avoid it since the love of it is the root of all evil?
Money is simply a tool, an economic device that allows us to trade and engage in economic activity. Today, money takes many forms, from gold and silver to fiat currency to internet “bits,” such as Bitcoin and Worldcoin. Even time itself is being used as money now in a number of Western economies. For example, in Breckenridge, Colorado, Mountain Hours are used as a local form of currency valued by the worth given to one hour’s worth of labor. Residents can use Mountain Hours as payment in town restaurants and other local businesses. It gives the people of the community more control over the value of items as well as a bit of protection against inflation.
I’ll Trade Ya
The concept of money is simple: I have eggs that you want, you have furniture that Sally wants, and Sally has clothes that Jim wants. You and I could trade, but it would be messy. In order for you to get my eggs, you would have to talk me into taking your furniture, which I might not want at the time. Sally wants your furniture, but because you wanted my eggs more than you wanted Sally’s clothes, Sally is out of luck if you and I reach an agreement and I get your furniture. Also, since I don’t really want your furniture, I might require more of it when you trade with me than Jim would require from you because he could trade it with Sally for the clothes she has and he wants—so the amount used to trade with each of us could vary widely. Not only that, but if you were to travel to another town you would have to take a lot of your furniture with you just to have enough to trade for all you need, such as food and lodging at your destination. Even then, you better hope they need your furniture and like it, or you will be out of luck. You can see the obvious problems here, and that is with only three products and four people. For millions of products and billions of people, this system just becomes impossible.
Then something called money comes along. Money, in its simplest form, makes the process much easier. The money is given a value (usually backed by a commonly accepted item with value, like gold), and then you decide how much your furniture, for example, is worth—let us say 76 money units for a table. I decide my cartons of eggs are each worth 2 money units. So if I want a table, but you don’t want eggs, then instead of paying you with 38 cartons of eggs for your table, I can pay you 76 money units after I sell my eggs to someone who does want them. It is a bit more complicated than that when it comes to things like exchange rates, fexible valuations, and inflation, but as far as defining what money is, we are spot on.
Since that is what money is, then we can also say that it is a tool that allows us to accumulate items, and power over those with less of it, and that empowers mobility in a societal structure.
Is money evil? Of course not. It is as evil as a wrench or a toothbrush.
Loving Money
Now that we know that money is not evil, we have to look at what it means to love money.
How do you love your family?
• You spend time with him/her/them
• Take the pain for them so they are protected
• Your thoughts are captivated by them when they are not in your presence
• You are tender, kind, slow to anger, quick to forgive
• If you are a man, you sacrifice and live for your wife as Yeshua did for His bride
• Your dreams of the future revolve around them
• Late nights and early mornings are spent building and protecting your relationship with your family
• You purposely invest time and effort in your children so they grow to where you want them to be
• Your happiness is determined by the health of those relationships
We’ll come back to our relationship with family, but first let’s look at our relationship with money. I’m going to warn you—the following will be painful for most, but it is a pain that will shed truth on life, and again, it is worth it to be free.
Whenever we talk about money there is a word that comes up that seems synonymous with “money,” and that word is “greed.” We all have a mental picture of someone who loves money, someone who’s greedy. The limo, top hat, big cigar, private jet, and extravagant jewels are usually among the images that flood the mind when the word “greed” is uttered. The man from the Monopoly board game or Daddy Warbucks from the musical Annie are personalities that personify “greed.”
Is this the correct image, though?
Now that we know what love for family looks like, let’s replace “family” with the word “money” and let’s see what we get.
How do you love money?
• Spend time with it (making it, managing it)
• Taking the pain so it doesn’t have to. Ever get up early to make money? Ever work through illness to make money?
• Do you ever get angry at money? No? Most of us get angry at and are slow to forgive those who don’t give us as much money as we want or get in the way of us making more of it.
• Have you ever treated
