It is wonderful to be back home after a few weeks of travel in Europe. Many of you have traveled with me in different parts of the world, and so you know that two of my major interests are history and culture. I like to know what has happened and what is happening now. I like to know how human beings have organized their lives and how they are still trying to organize their lives. A couple of weeks ago Helen and I found ourselves in a small town in central Germany that had a great little museum with all sorts of Roman artifacts, including an impressive display of Roman coins. And that got me to thinking about how money always seems to be a large part of human culture. Money is one of the tools that we use in order to make human society function better. When money becomes a problem—as it certainly has in the world in the last couple of years—all sorts of other problems begin to develop.

Everyone who has traveled has experienced the challenge of using different kinds of money. I envy those folks who can instantly calculate the relative value between dollars and Euros and British pounds. This last trip gave me a chance to learn about Hungarian money. Do you know what Hungarian currency is called? It is called the forint. I happen to have some good archaeological evidence that many of you travel, especially in Europe, Britain, Canada, and Mexico. And apparently a small minority of you travels in the Orient and Australia. I know this not because of what you have told me, but because last year, when the children of our church were collecting your loose change in order to support our campus renovation project, we collected not just American money, but also coins from all those places. Specifically, we received 2.02 Euros, 31 Canadian cents, 6 pesos, 13 pence, 2 dollars Australian, and 10 of some kind of Oriental money, I think probably Chinese. By the way, we also received 2 gold colored coins with angels stamped on both sides, as well as 2 metal golf ball markers, one that has only a symbol on it, and the other from Encinitas Ranch Golf Course. If any of you want your ball markers back, please see me after church today.

Money matters. In any society that calls itself advanced, money is an essential tool, for individuals, for families, for whole nations. And so we print money, we regulate money, we argue about the relative value of one currency over another, and we spend a great deal of our other two great resources—the resources of time and talent—dealing with the resource of money. Money matters. And money matters to God.

The use and abuse of money, or material wealth, is discussed in various ways throughout the Bible. For Christians, one of the memorable discussions of money is the one we’ve just read in Paul’s first letter to Timothy. You remember that Paul was the older, more experienced church leader writing to the younger Timothy, his protégé. Paul has been writing about a variety of important topics, including the topic of how to deal with contentious and difficult people whose aim is to further their own selfish goals rather than to build up the body of Christ. Paul moves to the topic of those who are trying to use their positions as members of the church for their own personal gain. Apparently, there has always been a temptation for some folks to think that doing God’s will is the road to riches. And there has always been a temptation for some folks to abuse the loving and helpful relationships the church is supposed to foster and instead use those relationships for financial success. But Paul touches on that topic only momentarily and then he moves on to a broader discussion about the topic of material wealth itself.

There is a kind of value associated with godliness, Paul affirms, but it is not the value of getting richer, rather, it is the value of learning to be content. Wouldn’t you like to learn to be content with what you have? Wouldn’t you like to escape the driven madness of craving more and more and more? Wouldn’t you like to have the spiritual depth that learns, as Paul put it in another of his letters, to be equally happy with little or with much, in the good times and the bad times? Wouldn’t you like to know that you are in control of your money and not the other way around?

Paul is teaching Timothy and teaching us a value system that places money and wealth in its proper place, and he begins by reminding us that material wealth is something of this world only. We come into this world with nothing and we go out with nothing. Another classic way of stating that is, “naked came I into this world, and naked shall I go.” You cannot argue with Paul on this point, unless you are perhaps an ancient Egyptian ruler who stuffed all sorts of things into their pyramids for their use in the next life. Money is a thing that is of this world, and we had better never forget that. And yet, we do.

We all know, I suppose, about the temptation of wanting to be rich. That term is a relative term, of course. What is “rich?” By the standards of the whole world, everyone in this room is rich. And even by the standards of the modern and developed world, so many of us in this church are rich. Now I will be the last person to deny the benefits and joys of having material wealth. It is good to have enough to eat, enough to wear, and a good place in which to live. And certainly Paul and also Jesus were very much in favor of folks working and having enough. But Paul here is not talking about just having enough. He is talking about a spiritual disease he called the love of money. “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” And there is the heart of the problem. It is a problem of love. What did Jesus say? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” He did not say, “Love your money.” Sometimes folks tend to summarize what Paul said here and they leave out some important words. If you ask the person on the street, they will often quote to you that the Bible says something like “money is the root of all evil,” which implies that money itself is a bad thing and that every kind of evil in the world results from money. But that is not what Paul said. And that is not what Jesus implied. Money is shorthand for talking about material goods. God made us to live in a material world and therefore we need material things. The desire to have your material needs met is not a bad thing, it is a thing created into you by God. But there is more to this world than the material aspect, and there is more to the business of satisfaction and happiness than having our material needs met. The love of money is about the misplaced idea that material goods can give us what they cannot. The love of money is about placing our hope in something that will always disappoint us. The love of money is about making a god out of something that is not, which always leads us into what Paul writes to Timothy is “ruin and destruction.”

And so, here is my question for you today. How do you know if you love money or not? Every one of us here likes to have the things that money buys. Every one of us here likes to have our physical needs met and we like to have all the goodies and extras as well. But does that mean we love money? Perhaps. Generally speaking, I tend to believe that most of the big spiritual issues of life are issues that every single one of us faces. None of us are immune from the spiritual disaster that loving money represents, and probably some of us here today are struggling with it in a mighty way, just like all of us struggle with our own particular set of spiritual issues. How do you know if you love money or not?

I’ve been thinking hard and long about that, and I’ve come up with a list of seven questions you and I should ask ourselves now and then. The list perhaps could be shorter, and almost certainly could be longer. But these seven questions—for me—get at the heart of our spiritual problem of loving money and the many harmful things that result when we do love money. Here is my list of questions, and a comment or two about each of them.

• Do you work for the sake of making money, or for the sake of contributing something useful to the world? Some people get rich as the byproduct of their creating and providing something useful to the rest of us. But other people are not so much interested in creating something valuable as they are simply interested in creating a larger bank account for themselves. It seems to me that much of our recent economic mess is the result of those folks who have only tried to get rich with no concern for providing anything of value to the rest of us.
• Do you abuse yourself for the sake of making money? I know there can be a fine line between good, old-fashioned hard work and what we today would call being a workaholic. But the line exists. Do you abuse your physical health, your mental health, your spiritual health, for the sake of making money?
• Do you abuse others for the sake of making money? How many marriages and families are destroyed or compromised by a father or mother’s neglect that results from the desire for wealth? How many friendships, how many co-worker relationships, are ended over matters of money? How many millions of people are hurt when those in positions of great influence over the economy don’t do the morally right thing?
• Do you expect possessions to make you happy? We all know what it means to expect the next house, the next car, the next purchase, the next gift, to make us happy. And most of them do, for a while. But every latest and greatest thing today becomes tomorrow’s used up and has been thing. No thing will make us happy, so why do we keep wanting more things?
• Do you judge your personal worth and value by how much you have? Some of us find it difficult to be in the presence of people who have more than we do. Some of us are always trying to show off how much more we have than others. Some of us are impressed by those who simply have more, or we think we impress others with what we have. Do we think our net worth is the same as our personal worth?
• Do you transgress the laws of God for the sake of making money? This one seems simple enough. Don’t break the law in order to make money. But law is not enough. What about the higher law of loving God and neighbor? Things can be legal that are not moral, not ethical, not good enough according to the higher standard of love.
• And finally, do you find it easy or do you find it difficult to give your money away? One of the reasons that God has always taught his people to give some of their financial resource back to him is not because God wants your money, but because God wants you to learn that all of your money is his in the first place and that only he can fulfill your deepest needs and desires. If you find it difficult to give, then perhaps you love your money more than God.

That brings me to the last thing I want to say about money matters today. It is the message that Isaiah proclaimed as he tried to communicate with the people of Israel about what a relationship with the Living God is all about. Isaiah said, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” He had his spiritual priorities in order. He knew about the proper place of money, just as did Paul. The existence and use of money is not a bad thing. The love of money is. There is only one thing we are called to love, and that is God and other people. When we love the right things then we have the blessings of an everlasting relationship with God, what Isaiah called God’s steadfast and sure love for David, for God’s people, for Israel and for all the world.

Do you love money? My prescription for you today is to ask yourself these seven questions, and to keep asking them, so that you can resist the evil that will result in your life when you love the wrong thing.

Amen.