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The Root of All Evil?

What Money Is and How It Is Loved

WE’RE GOING to be Evangelpreneurs, then we need to not only be debt-free, but also we need to understand money’s place in the world. How do you view money? Do you think it’s the root of all evil?

“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 money as the Messiah treated His church? I know a lot of people who sweat, bleed, and cry over money only to have it reject them.

• Do your dreams of the future only come true if more money is in the picture?

• Do you ever get up early for money? Stay up late to make or worry about money issues?

• Do you invest time and energy growing your money? Compare the amount spent “raising” your money versus the amount of time raising your own children. How much time do you spend making money? How much time is left over for your spouse and kids?

I told you that it would be painful!

Actions speak louder than words, so let’s take a look at common actions and you can discern for yourself where your love is.

Show Me the Money

When I go into a church or speak to a group of believers, they love to tell me that money is not the most important thing. I couldn’t agree more, so I recently asked a men’s group, what is the first question you have asked, or plan on asking, your daughter’s fiancé when he asks for her hand in marriage? Do you know what the most common answer is across the Western world of believers? It is not “How long have you been walking with the Lord?” It is not “Do you have a plan on leading my daughter and grandchildren in their spiritual walk?” Do you know what the number-one question Christian/Jewish/Muslim fathers ask? Keep in mind that these are fathers who are believers, fathers who will tell you in a heartbeat that money is not the most important thing. They ask, “How do you plan on providing for my daughter?” Not even, “How do you know you love my daughter enough to be her husband?” Nope, the first question around the world is focused on money.

The number-one question is focusing on an issue that we tell ourselves is not the most important thing? Obviously, there is a problem.

Do you know what the second question often is? “How big of a wedding are you thinking of having?”

Sadly, when asking nonbelievers what their first question would be, I get, “When do you plan on having the wedding?” Again, not what I would think would be the most important, but a much better question than that of most believers! Not that the question of provision is not important—it is, which is why I wrote this book—but to a believer, questions like, “How long have you been a believer?” “Do you have a good prayer life?” “How long have you been going to church?” “What church do you go to?” all would be a better place to start when talking to the man who plans on marrying your daughter.

Believers, for a bunch of people who claim to not love money, sure are greed focused. Therein lies the problem: We don’t really know what greed is.

Pretend for a minute that you are not reading this book and answer the following question honestly. Or, better yet, think of the people you know; how would they answer the following question?

“If you were to get a 10 percent raise at work, what would you do with the money?”

The most common answers I get are:

• I would get a bigger TV.

• I would take a vacation.

• I would get new rims for my truck.

• I would get an iPad.

• I would get new carpet.

We don’t really know what greed is.

Nine out of ten times the answers revolve around what the person can buy for themselves. Part of what it means to love money is focusing on accumulating the stuff money allows you to gather.

This is where it gets interesting. When I ask people (and you can do the same) what would they do if I gave them a substantial amount of money, say $10 million or more? They say:

• I would quit working so hard (stop chasing money).

• I would get a private nurse for my aging parents.

• I would give to the children’s hospital.

• I would build a homeless shelter.

• I would send a million Bibles into Third World nations.

Well, this is indeed interesting. When most people think about getting a substantial amount of money— what most would consider “too much” or “greedy” for them to keep for themselves—they think of ways to act with it that are not greedy at all. But when they think about getting just a little bit more than what they have— an amount nobody would consider “greedy”—they actually become greedy and selfish, thinking of ways to spend it on themselves. If this is you, don’t feel too bad, you are in the same boat as most people around you. I used to be the same way. When you don’t have enough for you, you are what you tend to think about. When you no longer have to worry about you, you have the ability to expand your vision. It just goes to show, though, how much work we have cut out for us; we have been living the wrong way (but calling it right) for generations now.

This means the vast majority of people, those with a heart and soul, are and have been using the non-Biblical definition of “love of money,” which is really just the image of greed and/or accumulating wealth, as the common definition.

Yet, so wrong is the common definition that we don’t even recognize greed when we live it out. Here is an example:

Sally goes to church, reads the Scriptures, and has a job at Road Runner Logistics. She goes into work early, leaving family behind in order to make money. She stays late for the extra $2 per hour in overtime. When offered time at work this weekend, she accepts, sadly missing her daughter’s soccer game so she can make an extra 80 bucks after taxes. When a transfer opportunity is offered to her, one that would require her to move her family three hundred miles away, away from the kids’ school, away from her friends, away from her and her husband’s parents and siblings, she takes it because it pays more. How much does it pay? Five dollars more per hour. An extra $200 a week, or $800 a month, was all it took for her to leave the most important things in order to “advance my family’s financial situation.” Eight hundred bucks! And that’s before taxes.

Do not misunderstand me; I am all for doing whatever it takes to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. There are wonderful parents raising kids out of their cars as they work any job that will have them. Even though they may need to work long hours, they are doing what they can. I respect them for doing what they need to do, and it should be appreciated! A child raised in a tent city where his parents read the Scriptures to him and teach him the ways he should live has a much better life than a kid in an exclusive neighborhood with parents who ignore his upbringing.

My point is not that we should ignore our families’ needs—we shouldn’t—but that what we are doing many times is not the right thing, for us or our families, and in many cases it is actually the greedy thing to do because it only focuses on our needs and not the greater needs we, as believers, should be focusing on.

I remember once, after I gave a presentation, someone came up to me and said, “Josh, I don’t need millions of dollars, I can get by very nicely on forty thousand a year.” To which my response was, “That is great and I’m glad you have your needs met. There is a children’s hospital in town, and that hospital needs more money to help more kids. There are unsaved people around the world who need to have a missionary share with them the Gospel, but the missionary needs money in order to go. If you care about God and others, life is not about what is enough for you, it is about living out God’s purpose for your life, and a billion dollars, at that point, would not be ‘enough’ for you.”

Working Hard for the Money

The problem is not that everyone needs to make a billion dollars in order for them to live out God’s will for their life. Nor is the problem that if you make $70,000 with your needs met but no one else’s that you must be greedy. Both assertions would be foolish.

Let me be clear: Your salvation has nothing to do with your income. You cannot buy a position in Heaven. You are not worth less if you don’t have money. The point is that if you are working, you are working for money. If your employer stopped paying you, you would stop showing up. We also know that money, while not one of life’s most important things, is still important, yet we pretend it is not, or pretend we don’t need it, or couldn’t use it. When we pretend these things we are living outside the will of God.

God uses rich people—look at the stories of David, Solomon, Moses, and Joseph. He also uses poor people—for example, the poor widow with the two coins, Ruth, and the widow with only olive oil and flour who took care of Elijah. Nowhere does the Bible command us to take a vow of poverty. (If you are thinking of Yeshua’s lesson regarding the rich man entering Heaven, see my discussion of this verse in its full context in the FAQ section of this book.) We are to work for a living. If we are to work for a living, it would be irresponsible for us not to want to do our best. If we do our best and we are not controlled by an employment situation, many times our best will lead to a certain amount of wealth. It’s not bad, it’s not evil, and it may come and go in seasons according to God’s will for your particular life (Job and Joseph come to mind).

Greed, or too much money, really isn’t the issue; the issue is engaging in revenue generation in such a manner that takes us away from the most important thing and replaces those things with a situation that abdicates time with family, time with God, or time pursuing your calling, and more often than not places you in a detrimental financial position.

This problem is not just that of the individual, either. Churches are falling for greed as well. Any church that has the audacity to ask for or accept money without teaching the proper perspective of money and its generation is ignorant at best, and if they continue to build on debt while they witness their congregation suffering financially, it is bordering on greed. Sadly, this is the vast majority of churches. No wonder so many are in financial trouble!

[T]he Bible talks more about

money than it does Heaven.

It is time we refocus our efforts and redefine “greed.” The situation in which we find ourselves now is that we believe money isn’t important, so we go about earning it in the wrong way (more on this later). However, because to us money really does have importance, we sacrifice time with God and family in order to get more of money, meanwhile failing to realize that while we are earning money, we are costing ourselves what we say is more valuable. Instead, we should realize that the Bible talks more about money than it does Heaven. The Bible tells us: “A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children” (Proverbs 13:22).

Newsflash: That is wealth! We have already covered how poverty is a curse and prosperity is a blessing. When four out of five churchgoing people are at or near poverty, are we experiencing the blessing or the curse? When most people don’t have six hundred bucks in the bank, let alone the ability to leave an inheritance for two generations (his “children’s children”), are we blessed or cursed? Wouldn’t it be better, if instead of dancing around the issue or pretending it doesn’t matter, or worse, blaming God for our lack of success, we approached money as a tool to accomplish our larger priorities and the goals associated with it?

EVANGELPRENEUR ACTION STEP

Since we are so ingrained in our perspective of money, we need to work on reexamining what money is, how we personally use it, and how we can use it in ways that would be outside of our normal routine. So, in the next twenty-four hours, do the following to expand your perspective a bit. It might seem a bit silly at first but it will give you a fresh perspective:

Buy something for someone who is not expecting it.

Donate money to a religious cause.

Donate money to a political issue.

Go on Craigslist or a similar site and barter. There are hundreds of people right now looking to engage in economic activity without using money, and it is great to experience how empowering that can be.

Give money to a stranger directly.

Sell something you own.

Yes, you can do all that in twenty-four hours! You do not need to use big amounts, either. You could accomplish the entire task list for less than the cost of this book. It is not about the amount but rather getting you to experience different uses for money in the shortest amount of time possible. Because we’re in the rut of “Go to Work—Buy Groceries—Pay Bills—Tithe—Go To Work,” we tend to forget what we can do with money. I promise, at the end of twenty-four hours you will feel great and you will have more awareness of the fact that money is a tool.