« Stewardship Devotional
Day Seven - Money at the Root
1 Timothy 6:10 “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”
Read
1 Timothy 6:6-10
Apply
This famous passage is central to our view of money. Paul claims that money is at the bottom of a wide variety of sin and idolatry. Money is like a spice in the smorgasbord of sinful desires. In other words, few people lust after mere dollar bills. Instead, money plays into idolatries of security, or comfort, or approval, or power. We like money because it gets us something we want. Even the Scrooge, always counting his coins, is actually counting his security, counting the thing he trusts in rather than God.
The warning flags are up. As a Christian, we are free to use money, but we should use it with caution, understanding its dangerous ability to turn our hearts from Christ to the things of this world. Jesus goes so far as to call Mammon “unrighteous” (Luke 16:9)1. “We so badly want to believe that mammon has no power over us, no authority of its own. But by giving the descriptive unrighteous to mammon, Jesus forbids us from ever taking so naive a view of wealth. We must be more tough minded, more realistic.”2
- Take an honest look at some of your most intense desires. Does money play a role in them? In what way does it play a role?
- What do you think about people who have a lot more money and possessions than you do? Are they better people, more secure, live a better life?
Pray
Pray for a renewed heart that recognizes the power of money to turn your desires away from Christ and is able to counter that power by remembering the beauty of Christ.
Do
Take one alluring aspect of money and write a list of the ways it affects your life. For example, “The ways that I act like money gives me pleasure are…” or “The ways that I act like money makes me better than other people are…”
1 The NIV translates ‘unrighteous’ in this verse as ‘worldly,’ which somewhat weakens the point of Christ’s claim
2 The Challenge of the Disciplined Life , Richard Foster (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1985)
Copyright 1997. Redeemer Presbyterian Church of New York City