The Love of Money (I Timothy 6:6-19)

How much of my life has been bound up with money! All my life, I have had to work to earn it. I had to work to earn it at one job or task or another because I found out early on that my widowed mother was right: it does not grow on trees. And if it did, such a tree certainly did not grow in our yard.
I.
Money is a problem to all people, and it always has been. Why else would roughly 2,350 verses in the Bible speak to money and possessions? Why else would so many of all the sayings and parables of Jesus that are recorded in the gospels have to do with money and material possessions and our relationship to them? That amounts to one of every seven verses in the synoptic gospels and 16 of the 38 parables Jesus told.
Why is this so? It is so because Jesus recognized that whether you are rich or poor the truth in our text applies to all of us: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.”
A fragment of that verse, incidentally, is one of the most often misquoted texts in the Bible. You have probably heard it rendered as “money is the root of all evil.“ But it is not money that is the problem; it is the love of money. And the “the root of all evil” is a King James Version mistranslation. Clearly, there are many sins and crimes that have nothing to do with money. The writer was merely being emphatic when he said that money is a root of all kinds of evil. As one commentator said, “When one is dealing with a degrading vice, the interests of virtue are not served by qualified assertions.” Does that remind you of some recent political advertising?
Truly, however, there is no kind of evil that cannot grow out of the love of money--when the desire for more money becomes merely unfettered greed and people become unrestrained in their drive for more money.
The desire for money, when it takes hold, can become like a thirst that is insatiable. The Romans said that wealth is like sea water. The more of both you taste, the thirstier for them you become.
The desire for wealth is founded on illusions. It is founded first on the desire for security from the world’s hard knocks. But it cannot buy security from what life deals to us. It cannot deliver us from sickness, sorrow, or tragedy or death. It cannot buy health.
It is further founded on the desire for comfort and luxury. But it cannot protect us from broken hearts and grief, nor from the loneliness we experience inside ourselves. It cannot buy love. Even the Beatles, wealthy beyond our imagining, knew that. They sang, “I'll give you all I got to give if you say you love me too. I may not have a lot to give, but what I got I'll give to you. I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love. Can't buy me love, everybody tells me so. Can't buy me love, no, no, no, no.”
The desire for money can make us into selfish people. It creates a competitive spirit within us. It means nothing to the money-motivated person that someone else must have less in order that he may have more…or that someone else must lose in order for him to win.
The desire for wealth can so fix our thoughts upon ourselves and our own affairs that other people become merely the means to enriching ourselves…or mere obstacles in the path to riches.
One of the strangest things about the desire for wealth is that it is founded on the desire for security--but it results in worry and anxiety, the fear of losing what one has. The more a man has to keep, the more he has to lose.
By far the greatest danger of the love of money is that it may lead us into wrong ways of getting it. Some people will swindle and cheat to get money. We read about them every day.
Most people will not go that far, but all of us may be tempted to bend the rules a little…cut the corners, just a bit…neglect to mention a fact or two…just slightly mislead others…or silently allow them to mislead themselves…deliver just a little less value than we could have.
And some may not do any of these things, but so drive themselves down the road to financial success that they use up their bodies…and their minds. They never stop to smell the roses…and if they have heard it, they do not reflect on the proverb that says, “There are no pockets in a shroud.”
II.
We have not been talking about money, but about the love of money and what it can do to people. Clearly, money is an important concern to us and to all people. Our task as Christians is to keep money in its proper place in our lives. There are still a few stories in the news to gladden our hearts, and one of those in the past week was about the elderly couple in Canada who just gave away to charity 98% of the $11 million they had won in the lottery. They said they are just plain country folks who didn’t need more than what they already had, and so they prudently put 2% in savings and gave away the rest.
A realistic and proper concern for money is a realistic and proper concern of Christians. We ought to examine on a regular basis the way we think and feel about money.
Money is the way the world works. There is no escaping it. To seek to be independent, to pay one’s bills, to provide a home and opportunity for one’s family, to provide for one’s own old age--all this is a Christian duty. Paul tells us in I Timothy 5:8 that anyone who does not provide for his own has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
Christianity does not argue for poverty. Jesus Christ does not urge us to be poor. Rather he is presented to us as one who chose to be the friend of the poor. But there is no special virtue in being poor, and there is no happiness to be found in struggling to make ends meet. Rather, the Christian church--including this tiny island of Presbyterianism that we call Faith Church--has been told by its Lord to seek by any and all means within both our individual and our corporate powers to work to improve the economic lot of the world’s poor people.
Money, Christians, is neither good nor bad. It is simply dangerous. With money, we can do great good. In the pursuit of money, we can do great evil.
Money is a responsibility. It brings with it power into our pockets and pocketbooks--the power to do evil or to do good.
The habit of liberal giving to people and causes that need our money is the greatest antidote to any selfishness or sinfulness concerning our money. Stewardship is a wise and deliberate dedication to God of a portion of that which we have been given by God. The money in your pocket or pocketbook has inscribed on it “In God We Trust.” Our use of our money will testify silently as to whether we trust in God--or in money itself.
III.
Paul wrote that he had learned to be content in whatever circumstances he found himself. Most of us have not, most of the time. But can we learn that contentment, that state of mind that trusts in God rather than in treasure? Yes, if we work at it.
Peace of mind will never be found in more money. It can be created only in us. The contentment that Christ can bring is more profound than anything that money can bring us. It is a state of mind that is independent of money. It is the state of self-sufficiency.
Sir Henry Wotton wrote, a long time ago, of the character of a happy life and said that the person was blessed, “Who God doth late and early pray more of his grace than goods to send, and is Lord of himself, though not of lands, and having nothing, yet hath all.”
Socrates marveled, “How many things there are which I can do without.”
Epicurus said, “To whom little is not enough, nothing is enough.” And he went on to say that to make a man happy, “Add not to a man’s possessions, but take away his desires.
And the rabbis of old taught their congregations: “Who is rich? He that is content with his lot.”
Our western developed society, unlike other societies in undeveloped parts of the world, has seen each succeeding generation, by and large, enjoy more material prosperity than the preceding generation. The middle-class income of a family headed by a college graduate in the United States makes us richer than 95% of the people on this planet--and richer than 99.9% of all the people who ever lived.
My parents would have counted themselves wealthy to have enjoyed what I take for granted. The economic and material world of my children is vastly different from the one my wife and I entered into when we first began our married life. And my children’s children think that world as I describe it to them is simply quaint. They cannot imagine a world of just 60 or so years ago in which television was only just being born. And in a store that sells memorabilia, when I pointed out to one of my camera-in-his cell-phone grandsons a black, rotary-dial telephone, he asked, “What is it?”
I am content, when I look at the reality of my life, when I look at that which is real in my life. The peace of contentment grows out of a concentration on the things that are permanent…the things we can take with us.
There are just two things we can take with us: our selves--whatever they have been--and the trusting conviction that we go to the one who is our friend and the lover of our souls.
Before we go, we will find happiness and contentment on this planet when we escape the slavery of money and possessions, when we find a different kind of wealth in the love and fellowship of family and friends and fellow Christians, and when we realize that our most precious possession is our relationship to God, made possible through Jesus Christ. Amen.