Give today — and plant seed for tomorrow. This is the whole secret to sustainable Kingdom-giving.
Rich Abba, Holy Abba
25 Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
Matthew 6:25-26
In my opinion, this is one of the most misunderstood and misapplied verses in the Bible. I have heard this passage taught countless times, in church services, Bible studies and even in books specifically focused on what the Bible teaches about finances and the love of money.
And the message almost always goes the same way.
- Love of money is bad; you can’t serve God and Money
- The Bible tells us not to worry about material possessions
- Therefore don’t store up riches on earth; seek God’s kingdom and righteousness instead.
The above is all true — but this focus misses one important point;
Matthew 6:25 is not a warning against storing up riches! In fact, the entire passage (Matthew 25-34) never even mentions wealth or riches. Not once.
Rather, it refers to basic necessities. Food. Water. Clothing. Let’s look at vs 25 again. Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. These are the worries that Jesus calls out.
So why is this important?
It is important because whenever we focus on the wrong aspect of a verse, we miss an opportunity for God to speak into our own lives and mould us into his image. By way of example, when I read this verse as it is generally taught in Christian circles, my thinking may go as follows:
- Do I love money? No. Therefore, I serve God, not money. Check
- Do I worry about acquiring material possessions (boats, cars, private jets)? No. Therefore I am not materialistic. Check
- Do I chase after wealth and riches? No. Therefore, I must be seeking God’s kingdom and his righteousness. Check
… and then we let the entire passage blow right past us.
So we leave church satisfied that we have held up our lives against the mirror of God’s word and ticked the box on all counts. The Bible passage, while interesting and informative, did not reveal any shortcomings in our lives this week. We are doing okay.
I would submit that this is a very dangerous path to walk, as believers.
Now let’s focus on the verse from a “Basic Necessities” point of view. I will answer each question below honestly from my personal life and experience. Your answers may be different. But I urge you to consider each question and answer honestly for yourself.
Do I currently serve God or Money?
(Author’s personal assessment)
Taking the pursuit of riches out of the equation, as this is not what Matthew 6:25 addresses, how might I consider this question?
The truth is, I spend almost every waking moment of my life working to earn money in order to support myself and my family. None of this is in the pursuit of riches; rather it is to ensure that I can provide for my family’s basic necessities like food, drink, clothing and shelter.
If I spend all of my time trying to earn money, who am I really serving? God or Mammon?
The answer to that question is a little scary for me. It gives me pause to thank God for his grace and shines a light on an area of my life that I should bring to Jesus and lay down at the cross.
Perhaps repentance is in order and maybe I need to consider how I can restructure my life to spend more of my time serving God and his purposes.
Am I gripped by materialism?
(Author’s personal assessment)
Once again, acknowledging that the pursuit of riches is not the context in which Matthew 6:25 is written, how might I think about materialism?
When I consider all the things I have acquired over the years and the bills I have currently racked up, I confess that part of the reason I head to office each day is to ensure that I earn enough money to pay for all the possessions I have acquired, many of them on credit. That makes me materialistic, by definition.
I have recently made some changes and reduced my monthly spending, learning to be content with what I have rather than always striving for more.
I don’t yet give as much as I know I should and I only recently began to acknowledge that all I earn is God’s and that I am a mere steward of those resources. I have begun giving more deliberately to God’s kingdom and also planting seeds for future harvest so that I can continue to increase my giving in the years to come — but I still have a long way to go.
Do I worry about earning enough for my basic needs in life? Food, water, clothing?
(Author’s personal assessment)
Well — yes. It is probably the reason I have willingly chained myself to a desk in the office every working day these past twenty years. Job security is important to me.
In fact, if I am honest, clinging to job security is not the means of overcoming my financial anxiety. Rather, I do it because of my financial anxiety.
The cost of that anxiety has been a life spent largely in pursuit of making ends meet rather than in living out God’s will and purposes for my life. I want to change this going forward.
I feel God’s word challenging me to truly trust my heavenly Father for provision of my family’s basic needs rather than my employment contract.
Do I worry about what I will eat or drink, or wear? I guess I have to put my hand up.
Matthew 6:25 – Conclusions
… and now that I have held my life up to the mirror of God’s word and seen my image clearly reflected, I have the opportunity to grow in Christ.
What are your thoughts on Matthew 6:25 and how did you fare in answering the above questions? Check in with me on Facebook and let me know.
Author’s Note
The above verses form part of a widely-known passage (Matthew 6:25-34) that culminates in the famous phrase, ‘But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness …’. It is well worth studying the entire passage as a whole rather than just the two verses covered in this article.
It is also worth noting that the preceding verse (Matthew 6:24) is all about God and Mammon, ‘No one can serve two masters…’.
Forsaking the pursuit of riches is easy. Forsaking pursuit of the mundane and ordinary requires true courage.
Rich Abba, Holy Abba
Time Poverty is all too common in first-world society. Hard-working people find themselves locked in the office or commuting for most of their waking hours each day, usually for at least five or six days a week. Many are forced to hold down two jobs just to make ends meet.
As such, many hard-working Christians may find themselves to be money-rich but time-poor. In other words, they manage to make rent or mortgage payments and pay their bills each month but they have little time for anything outside of work. This is Time Poverty
I would argue that Christians need to be time-rich. After all, Jesus has given us the keys to the kingdom! He has called us to share God’s love and preach the good news of the gospel to all the world.
And yet… all to often, we fail in this because we simply don’t have the time.
Sure, we could quit our jobs but this would simply change our lot from time-poor to money-poor. Not really a solution to the problem. So how should we escape this vicious cycle?
According to Wikipedia, marketing analysis suggests that significant differences in behavior and attitudes impact the buying habits of the following four groups of people:
- ‘money-poor, time-poor’
- ‘money-poor, time-rich’
- ‘money-rich, time-poor’ and
- ‘money-rich, time-rich’
As with so much in life, the lines of cause and effect often become blurred. By way of example, if someone moved from one of the above groups to another, the research shows that their buying habits are likely to change. By the same token, if someone changed their buying habits, they are equally likely to find that they will have moved from one group to another over time.
In other words, your lot in life determines your buying habits, just as much as your buying habits determine your lot in life. But here’s the good news. Changing your lot in life may be difficult – but changing your buying habits is easy. Painful, yes, but doable.
A Modern-Day Time Poverty Parable
So how do we overcome Time Poverty as Christians? Let’s look at a real-world scenario.
Ben and Karen are a hard-working Christian couple with a typical money-rich, time-poor spending pattern. They make a decent living but they both spend twelve to fourteen hours each day either at the office or commuting between work and home.
They make their mortgage and car payments each month and, somehow, always manage to break even after paying all their bills. However they only manage this because both of them have reasonably high-paying jobs.
There is little money left for luxuries and even family holidays over the summer are generally paid for with a credit-card which they then pay off over several months. By the grace of God, they usually pay the card down just in time for the Black Friday run-up to Christmas.
Ben and Karen have a burning passion to minister to unreached people in the Amazon, Peru. They support some missionaries there through their local church but God has placed a deep desire in their hearts to actually go there and experience this ministry first-hand. A full trip would require ten weeks over the summer; time they can simply not afford to take off work. While they would love to spend ten weeks each year preaching the gospel in the Amazon jungle, it is simply not feasible. They are locked in Time Poverty. This is their lot in life.
Now, what if Ben and Karen made a slight adjustment to their spending pattern? Let’s assume they traded both of their cars, which are heavily financed, for two much cheaper vehicles which they could purchase for cash? This would immediately give them breathing room by removing two of their major monthly expenses.
Next, Ben and Karen use that saved cash each month to pay off their credit cards, quickly reducing their monthly expenses even further. After a year, having reduced their credit to zero, this couple now has a large amount of surplus cash each month. They dutifully save this over the next year.
At this point, Ben and Karen are tempted to spend their entire nest-egg on that trip to the Amazon but they recognize this temptation for what it is; a money-rich, time-poor spending pattern. It might just about cover the cost of one trip – if they reloaded the credit card to make up the balance and paid that off over the following year. It is not sustainable and will not achieve what God has called them to do.
Instead, they continue to save for two more years until they have enough to put down as a deposit on a rental property. The following year, their rental income coupled with their surplus earnings leaves them with enough cash to cover their normal monthly expenses for four weeks. Ben and Karen take one month of unpaid leave along with their standard two-week vacation and embark on their first six-week trip to Peru with their children over the summer.
It’s not the full ten weeks, but it is a start. Over the next few years, their rental property increases in value and they eventually remortgage and use the extra money to buy a second rental property. At this point, they begin to generate enough income from their property portfolio and surplus income to cover two months of normal living expenses. That allows them to take two months of unpaid leave each year which, coupled with their annual two weeks’ holiday, means they can now spend ten weeks each year on mission trips in the Amazon.
Ben and Karen now have a money-rich, time-rich lifestyle and this is, of course, reflected in their spending patterns. In fact, they embarked on that spending pattern the moment they traded in their expensive cars. It may have taken several years but their family’s move to a time-rich lifestyle was inevitable – as sure as night follows day.
In this story, Ben and Karen did not pursue riches; they pursued a Godly vision and exercised financial wisdom in pursuit of that goal. In the end, they were no better off financially than they had been in the beginning. The size of their income had not increased. Only the source of their income had changed, albeit slightly.
However, their family has moved from a time-poor to a time-rich paradigm. By exercising financial wisdom and keeping the vision before them, Ben and Karen are now living out God’s plan for their lives!
The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.
Proverbs 21:5
The righteous eat to their hearts’ content, but the stomach of the wicked goes hungry.
Proverbs 13:25
Covetousness is one of the primary ways in which the love of money manifests itself even in the lives of many Christians today.
Whenever we encounter someone who is better off that we are, there covetousness lurks in the shadows of our hearts.
Why is covetousness so dangerous? Let’s lead with the fact that the Bible calls it sin and it should have no place in our lives as Christians. Sin takes many different forms and there are a myriad of ways we disappoint God every day, believers and non-believers alike. However, covetousness gets special mention in the ten commandments.
It’s a big deal!
17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male, or female servant, his ox or his donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
Exodus 20:17
If that were not enough, let’s consider the emotional damage covetousness wreaks. There is a deep-seated sort of bitterness that that thrives on covetousness in the human heart. Left unchecked, it can grow like a cancer in the human soul, eventually engulfing its victim in hatred, self-pity, depression and despair.
It is, without doubt, one of the most destructive conditions of the human heart.
Beyond that, there are also very tangible consequences of covetousness. Most people don’t realize how covetousness actually keeps people poor. The only way to bring healing from such circumstances is by living free of covetousness.
Living Free of Covetousness
In my post, the Love of Money at its Ugliest, I shared the story of a village in Southern Africa and how a covetous spirit kept an entire community locked in poverty.
While many first-world citizens are nowhere near as destitute as an impoverished rural community in Sub-Saharan Africa, that does not immunize the average hard-working person from financial struggle.
Sure, problems are different in the first-world but they can include job losses, struggles to find employment, insufficient earnings for day-to-day expenses, crippling debt… the list goes on.
So how does covetousness keep people locked in a place of constant striving and financial struggle?
- It focuses on blaming others instead of taking personal responsibility. Only when we take responsibility for ourselves, can we break free from financial bondage.
- It seeks to undermine another person’s freedom and privilege rather than seeking to expand one’s own. How exactly will another person’s suffering improve our own circumstances? Even if that rich celebrity suddenly loses all his money and his nice car, will that somehow magically give me the ability to make rent?
- It feeds our natural sense of self-entitlement. This means we will forever wait for that living we believe the universe owes us rather than accepting that only we can change our current circumstances.
Instead of resenting the privilege of others, let us rather use their privilege to inspire us. This is the type of love that God’s word demands of us. It will also bring a spiritual and emotional healing within.
And, as an added bonus, living free of covetousness puts us in the right frame of mind to break free of the financial bondage in our own lives and live the lives that God intended for us.
Precious treasure and oil are in a wise man’s dwelling, but a foolish man devours it.
Proverbs 21:20
My elven-year-old son and I were out walking his dog over the weekend. Out of the blue he asks one of his random questions – my son, not the dog.
“Dad. Would you rather earn a million dollars a year or a million dollars a month?”
I puzzled over this question for a moment. How to make use of this teaching opportunity?
I did so by turning the question on its head. “That’s not the real question we should be asking.”
I continued, “Let me ask you this. Would you rather work sixteen hours a day for six days a week to earn one million dollars a year or four hours a week to earn just fifty thousand dollars a year?”
That got him thinking. My goal was to illustrate the difference between riches and my personal definition of true wealth.
Riches are the measure of a bank balance. Wealth is the measure of freedom and choice.
Rich Abba, Holy Abba
True Wealth vs One Million Dollars a Year
What is the point of having a million dollars a year if you have to spend every waking minute working in pursuit of that money? Sure, you would earn a million dollars in a year but you would have no life.
To put it in perspective for my son, I explained, “There are fifty-two weeks in a year. Most people get two weeks of holiday and have to work forty hours a week, Monday to Friday, for the other fifty.
“If you only have to work four hours a week, that means you are effectively working just over five weeks a year. For the other forty-seven, you get to do whatever you want.”
What would you do with that time?
I suspect my son might spend it playing Fortnite on his PS4 or watching Youtube videos. My daughter, on the other hand, is a few years older and has a deeper understanding of Biblical Stewardship. She would probably use some of those extra weeks to volunteer on Mercy Ships. There, she would be able to help the poor and share God’s love with people who might have never heard the gospel before.
In the above illustration, I used $50,000 as an arbitrary figure. Some readers might consider this amount excessively greedy while others might feel that it would not be enough to live on. Every believer will have their own perspective on how much is enough.
There is no judgment here. Whatever your number is, I urge you to consider what it would take to earn that amount as a passive income that can, in turn, generate opportunities for personal freedom and choice.
Once you embark on that journey, may God guide you to use your time wisely as you work to further His kingdom, give generously and share the gospel with others.
Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.
Ecclesiastes 11:4
The other day , while having dinner with the extended family, one close family member mentioned that they had read a newspaper report suggesting the UK government plans to announce an increase in property tax to pay for all the economic losses incurred during Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020. The article’s message was property investors beware! Don’t invest as the government will tax all your investments and bleed you dry.
My family member’s warning was well-meant but, sadly, unhelpful. Newspapers publish a slew of these stories every week. Sometimes they turn out to be true and sometimes they don’t. I call this Crystal-Ball Reporting; when a newspaper quotes some alleged, or self-proclaimed, “expert” who predicts a terrifying event at some unspecified date in the future. The expert will never be held to account for their claim if it turns out to be incorrect and they have a 50/50 chance of being right in any case.
Frankly, the journalists who write these articles don’t care whether or not the prediction turns out to be true. They know that their articles will breed fear – and fear sells newspapers!
The truth of the matter is this. We don’t know whether or not the government will increase UK property tax in the future – and if they do, we don’t know what taxes they will increase, or by how much. We also don’t know what the secondary consequences might be. For instance, if the government raises tax, the number of buyers might decrease and the number of sellers might increase. This could create an increase in supply and a reduction in demand, with a resulting drop in property prices. In other words, it might just be the best news in the world for an investor looking to buy their next property.
We just don’t know.
Ecclesiastes 11:4 is a cautionary proverb for those who like to overthink things. On any given day, there are a million reasons to put off a decision or delay taking action until tomorrow. Whoever watches the wind will not plant.
What we fail to realize is that indecision is, itself, a decision. The trouble is that indecision is based in fear which, invariably, results in the worst possible decision we can make. Whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.
When it comes to investing, or planting seeds for future harvest, we have to overcome the fear of loss that leads to indecision. We need to overcome the fear that prevents us from taking action.
Why not follow Solomon’s advice? Nobody knows the future. None of us has a crystal ball that will tell us what tomorrow holds. If you have learned to be content and now have surplus income that God has blessed you with, it is time to begin planting seeds that will produce a future harvest.
If Money is Not Important – Sow the Seed!
Seek out viable opportunities and invest; plant those seeds so that they may grow. One of two things will happen. Either your investment will pay off and you will reap a future harvest or it will fail and you will learn a valuable life-lesson. You will use that learning opportunity to make better investments in future.
Yes, I know it is scary but this is part of the learning process. Education can be costly but it is worth every penny if you learn from the experience.
As far as fear of losing money goes, why be afraid? As Christians, our focus is on eternity. Money is not important, remember? If money is not important, there should be no reason to fear risking it on investment opportunities.
Each of us has a simple choice. We can watch the wind and look at the clouds (i.e. listen to every doomsayer and journalistic fearmonger) or we can follow Biblical advice to plant and reap. Which would you rather do?