I grew up in a single-parent home. My mother worked hard to support me and my sister while we were young but money was always tight and we faced constant financial struggle in my formative years.
After completing school, I was a little rudderless. I never went on to tertiary education. Instead, I started a Christian outreach band and built a small music ministry. This was a great calling but it earned nothing so I started working in sales on a commission-only basis in order to pay the monthly bills. I was a terrible sales-person and, as a result, my income was low and quite sporadic. While my friends all went to university and then started working in high-paying jobs, I continued living from one intermittent paycheck to the next.
I had always believed that the love of money is the root of all evil, just as the Bible and my pastors taught me. I still do. However, there came a time when I realized that I simply had to earn more in order to make rent and put food on the table. I didn’t want to be rich — but I also knew that God did not want me to starve.
It was around this time that I moved to a new church that introduced me to the ‘Prosperity Gospel’. This teaching offered a perspective on money that I had never heard in church previously. Before I go any further, let me state for the record that I DO NOT buy into this teaching. I believe it is contrary to scripture, that it is a false teaching and, ultimately a dangerous one.
However, for a time in my twenties, I attended this church and bought into the idea that God wants every believer, including me, to be rich. The only requirements were a little faith on my part along with a lot of generous giving into the offering each week. This, according to my pastoral team, would obligate God to open the floodgates and pour out a financial blessing so great that my bank account would not be able to contain it.
Needless to say, that promise never came to pass. The only good that came out of the experience is that I learned the value of giving generously to God’s kingdom — something my previous churches had also kept fairly low-key.
In that dark place, I told God that I no longer believed he cared about my financial state…that I no longer needed or wanted his help…from that moment on, I would take care of my finances myself
I cried out to God in frustration
In my late twenties, I found myself earning a paltry $200 (yes — two hundred dollars) a month on average. And many months, I failed to earn even that much. Taking inflation into account, I was earning the equivalent of about $680/month, or just under $4.00/hour. This is less than half of minimum wage in over thirty states, according to these statistics, at time of writing. In short, I was locked in a cycle of eternal financial struggle.
I never lost my faith in God but I reached a point where I cried out to him in frustration. In that dark place, I told God that I no longer believed he cared about my financial state. I told him that I no longer needed or wanted his help or intervention with respect to my finances. And I told him that from that moment on, I would take care of my finances myself and that he would have no part that that aspect of my life going forward.
Fortunately, this dark period of my Christian walk only lasted a few months before I recognized my own foolishness and repented. I realized that my expectations were based on deliberately misunderstood and misinterpreted scriptures about prosperity, taught to me by a misguided pastoral team. I am sure that many of these men of God were and are sincere believers — but, with respect to their teachings on financial prosperity, they were sincerely wrong.
I put the prosperity teaching behind me and turned my face towards God and his word. Still, little changed with respect to my financial worries. God did not deliver me from the deep financial struggle in which I found myself. I started a business which did extremely well in its first year, and then tanked in the second. As I approached my thirties, and looking to get married, I found myself effectively unemployed with nothing to show for my life but a failed business.
I opted for a career change and started working in IT. With no tertiary qualification and zero experience, my starting salary was equivalent to that of someone fresh out of school, and barely above minimum wage. However, for me it was a step up. At least it was a regular income.
I got married in my early thirties. My wife and I built a life together and raised a family. Two children, one emigration and countless career changes later, our financial situation had changed in many respects. Our income was higher and more regular, that much is certain. And yet, our financial struggle remained. We still found ourselves living from paycheck to paycheck every month. As our income grew, so did our expenses, so much so that we were hardly able to keep up.
I now found myself facing a daily commute, two hours each way. I left for work at 06h00 every morning and returned home at 18h30-19h00 each evening. I spent the time in between chained to a desk for five days a week — all in an effort to simply make ends meet. My wife was in the same position as we needed two incomes just to cover our monthly expenses.
Wealthy? You’re joking! We were barely scraping by.
In this new normal, I barely ever saw my children. I was either working or commuting to and from work for roughly sixty-five hours each week. The demands of my job also left little space for God in my life and my Christian walk suffered as a result. The problem was, I dared not stop for fear of falling back into a situation that left me unable to make rent or put food on the table. I wasn’t twenty any more and I had two children relying on me to provide for them.
And so, I continued in my eternal financial struggle. All the while I had this deep-seated feeling that something was terribly wrong. This was not the life to which God had called me. Sure, I was able to put food on the table, but at what cost? My health? My family? My faith?
What the Bible Says About Money
I decided once and for all to understand what the Bible says about money…what it actually says… and, by extension…everything it says
What the Bible says about money
As I approached my fifties, I decided once and for all to understand what the Bible says about money. Not what popular Christian culture claims it says. Not what I think it says — nor what my pastors tell me it says. I wanted to understand what it actually says. And, by extension, I wanted to understand everything it says on the subject.
So began my journey into God’s word to understand… what the Bible says about money.
The first point to note is this; nothing I read negated what I had always been taught with respect to the love of money.
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
1 Timothy 6:10
This is what the Bible says about money. It is very clear on this — so don’t let anybody tell you anything different.
However, as I studied 1 Timothy 6:10, a frightening truth began to emerge; I was a lover of money! In fact, I had always loved money.
What the Bible says about money in 1 Timothy 6:10, made it clear that the love of money is a state of heart; not a bank balance. As a lifelong believer, I had heard this verse taught countless times from the pulpit. But the way it was taught and, as I had always understood it, the verse simply did not apply to me. After all, I had never chased after riches. Quite the contrary; I had faced financial struggle my whole life.
But, as I read God’s word, this chilling thought consumed me; you don’t have to be rich to love money. In fact, you don’t even have to want to be rich to love money. As I studied what the Bible says about money, I came to realize that the love of money has led far more people into consumer-debt and relative poverty than it has ever led to wealth. And my life was a glaring example of this terrifying Biblical truth.
I began to understand that my desperate need for job security was little more than a fear of loss — loss of the little that I had managed to acquire. I also began to grasp how an ingrained cultural focus on consumer spending always left me coming up short. This, in turn, left me working and commuting sixty hours or more each week, forever chasing that next paycheck to cover mounting bills and keep food in the table. This is the love of money at its stealthiest. I never planned for this life. Not once did I picture this as living the dream back in my teens and twenties.
As I studied God’s word, I began to understand something my pastors had never taught me; how the love of money would keep me steeped in poverty and financial struggle for the rest of my life — if I let it. My pastors had always called out the danger of chasing after riches, and how to avoid it but not once had a pastor ever explained to me how my innate love of money could keep me forever chained in a life of financial struggle.
This was the first Biblical truth my pastor never taught me about money. There were many more to come as I embarked on this frightening and exhilarating journey into God’s word.
As I delved into God’s word to learn what the Bible says about money, I discovered a treasure trove of verses that offer immense wisdom on the subject. Here are a few to get you started.