Godliness Vs. Gain
In American church culture, we can tend to correlate prosperity with blessedness. Someone who is well off is blessed, and someone who struggles to get by is less so. But while material goods can sometimes be a blessing, scripture does not measure blessedness or favor in God’s eyes in this way. In fact, scripture is full of warnings about the danger of riches, and Jesus called the poor “blessed” explicitly in the passage called the Sermon on the Mount!
But why is this relevant to us? Mostly, it is important because it changes the way we assess our relationship with God. If we think we’re in right-standing with God only when we’re financially well-off, what are we to say about a person who has become rich by dishonest means? On the flip side, suppose you’re a faithful Christian who happens to be lower on the income spectrum. How disillusioning it must be when you believe that you’re doing things right, but God is not holding up his end of the deal?
It is for this reason that we must have a scripture-informed view on money, prosperity, and blessing. So what does the bible have to say about it? An awful lot, as it turns out! There are more than 2,000 references to money and possessions in the Bible. Some of them are simply part of the relation of a story, like when Abraham bought a plot of land to bury his late wife Sarah. But some also give us some very clear principles about how we are to view money.
One such example is in 1 Timothy 6, where Paul warns Timothy that, while some wicked people have imagined that preaching the Gospel is a good way to make money, “godliness with contentment is great gain,” and that chasing after money only leads to temptation and pain. In Matthew 6, Jesus talks about God being our provider, and urges his listeners to “Seek first the Kingdom, and the righteousness that comes from God, and all these things [meaning the basic needs of life, I.E. food, clothes] will be added to you.” In the parable of the sower, Jesus warns of the ability of worldly desires to choke out faith, and the book of Proverbs is full of warnings about ill-gotten gain, with counterpoints about the sureness that comes from living righteously.
Perhaps the best example may be the life of Paul, a faithful servant of Christ to the point of imprisonment, abuse, and eventually death! So confident was he in the reward of remaining faithful to Christ that he didn’t think any of his extensive suffering was even worth comparing to it.
If one thing is clear in all this, it’s that we can’t judge people (ourselves or others) by the depth of their pockets. Faithfulness to God can only be measured by His word, including what he has to say about money! If you find yourself struggling with a love of money, take heed to the warning in 1 Timothy 6, and don’t “wander from the faith and pierce yourself with many griefs,” but instead, rest in the comfort of Jesus’ promise in Matthew 19:29.
“And everyone who has given up houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or property, for my sake, will receive a hundred times as much in return and will inherit eternal life.”
