Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
Hebrews 13:5
Why is it the “love of money” has such a hold over us?
Before we can answer that, we need to understand what the “love of money” is. If you are like me, you have likely brushed off that phrase because you believe it does not apply to you: “I am not greedy! I may like money, but I do not love it like that!”
Greed can definitely be an example of “love of money”, and it is easy for us to see why it can be problematic; however, that it just one end to the spectrum. Many of us fall squarely on the other: fear.
Love is more than affection and feelings; it is attachment, devotion, and sacrifice. The difference between something you like and something you love is that you will disrupt or even give up your life for the latter.
Who among us has not been guilty of disrupting or even giving up our life for the sake of money? Each of us, at some point, has made a big decision based on how it would fill or deplete our bank account; where we work, where we live, who we interact with is often shaped by the financial impact it carries. To put it bluntly, many of our decisions are based more on money than they are God.
Our relationship with money is one of the most addressed topics in scripture, and yet passages like Hebrews 13:5 leave us flailing. How do we keep our lives free from love of money with money is such a powerful force in our lives? How can we be content with what we have when we barely have anything?
The answer to these questions rests at the end: God “will never leave nor forsake you.“
The issue is not money — either having too much or too little — but trusting more in money’s ability to sustain our lives than God’s.
The way we live indicates that deep down we believe we can manage without God — forgoing time in prayer, worship, and fellowship — but could never manage without money. We think, “If I forget to read my Bible for a month, I will still have food on the table… but if I do not have money, I will come to ruin!”
We have forgotten what we actually need, made clear by God ages ago:
And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.
Deuteronomy 8:3
Love of money has a hold over us because we trust it more than we trust our Father; we fear it more than we fear God. Today you have the opportunity to choose the opposite, and embrace contentment not because it is enough, but because HE is.
