Wealth: Your Tool or Your god?

In initial conversations with newfound friends, I often ask about their occupations. I know that’s faux pas in ministry circles, and if I stopped there and simply labeled or categorized them based on their jobs, I would agree that it is a shallow and presumptuous practice. However, it’s the follow-up questions that give me insight into who they are. The answers to “Do you enjoy your work?” and “Why?” or “Why not?” often give me insight into a person’s values.

Ten years ago, I found that slightly more than half the responses focused, positively or negatively, on serving people, doing what they love, developing skillsets, contributing to a meaningful mission, schedules, or co-workers. Slightly less than half focused on income. Though the last couple of years, that seems to have changed. Now, about eight out of ten speak about their ability or inability to attain wealth through their current work.

We are a culture obsessed with attaining as much wealth as quickly and easily as we can. Young men and women are being lured into leaving their plans and preparations to make meaningful contributions to society by simply posting pictures online. I mean who would blame them for walking away from serving others, doing what they love, developing their potential, and contributing to meaningful missions if they can make exponentially more money exponentially faster exponentially easier? That rationale comes from a society that has raised the value of attaining wealth above all other values. It’s become the American way. And, while posting nude selfies may be frowned upon in most churches, the undergirding value of attaining as much wealth as fast and easy as one can is clearly alive and well in most of those same churches. We’ve embraced the lie that more personal wealth will bring us what we need most, and enough money will solve any issue. We may not preach it, but it’s laced throughout our conversations, schedules, to-do lists, and prayers.  

Two recent conversations illustrated the self-deception of making wealth attainment a core value. The first conversation was with a young homeless woman I found huddled by a doorway on our church property in the kind of ski jacket popular on Colorado ski slopes in the 1990s on a fifty-degree rainy day. She was crying because her male companion had just been arrested for an outstanding warrant. She was alone and jonesing for another hit of meth. I gave her a hot meal and she began telling me about her three kids, ages 2, 4, and 6. A family member was taking care of them but would not allow her and her companion to stay because they had brought illegal drugs into the house. They had been staying in someone’s shed just outside of town. I started talking with her about the love of Christ, a shelter for the night, and the opportunity to go to rehab. But she couldn’t hear me. She had already convinced herself that if she just had enough money to pay a deposit and rent, she’d overcome the drug addiction, reconcile the relationships, and be able to provide for her kids. She made it clear that she did not want help from family, a shelter, or rehab, and that she would do whatever she needed to do, legal or illegal, to get that money as quickly as possible. The route I was suggesting would take too long, but she would appreciate any gifts and prayers for money that I might offer.

The other conversation took place just a couple of days earlier. I sat in a beautiful room with a massive stone fireplace on handsome leather couches surrounded by the heads of magnificent animals. My companion was in his early forties, clad in gear that not so subtlety whispered, “I’ve arrived.” He told me that he had focused all his attention and energy for years on growing a business. His plan was to grow it as fast as possible, sell it for a significant profit, and enjoy a life of ease. He succeeded. After years of largely ignoring his family, he moved them to Georgia to enjoy the life only this kind of wealth could offer. He bought every toy, took every trip, played every round, and hunted and fished for every trophy. Each offered a short-lived hit of dopamine or blast of adrenaline, before leaving him joyless and looking for more. His children increasingly dismissed him while accepting his gifts, his wife left, and his dad died.    

At this point, you may be thinking that I’m one of those guys that think that wealth or the attainment of wealth is evil. I’m not. Though I do think that we fall well short of the life God intends for us when we rely on wealth to attain temporary substitutes for what God offers in spades. As a society we have been fooled to think that the temporal rubbish that wealth brings can somehow fill the longings for the rewards that only the Gospel provides.  

To grasp this, simply talk to people about what wealth or financial resources represent to them. As a relationship counselor, I’ve often explored this with couples. In fact, one of the most common sources of marital conflict stems from the failure to recognize that a lack of money may represent completely different concerns for each spouse. That misunderstanding leads each spouse to address the issue only from their perspective while failing to even recognize that their spouse has a different perspective. For some people, money simply represents potential or possibilities. For others, it represents security, status/identity, pleasure…

Let’s start with perhaps the most misunderstood of these, that last one – pleasure. I think it is safe to say that most Americans associate pleasure with wealth. But Jesus seems to indicate that real pleasure is disconnected from circumstances when he tells us that amid hardship, we should rejoice and leap for joy (Luke 6:22-23). I love what C.S. Lewis said about this in his book, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses:

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

Could Lewis be right? Are we far too easily pleased? Are we half-hearted, compromising or settling for the pleasures offered by wealth, leaving the much loftier and lasting rewards of a relationship with God on the table as we swagger to the bedroom for our version of five minutes in heaven? Perhaps the pleasures offered by wealth are spiritual versions of fast food, readily available, but seldom as sustaining or good for us as whole foods. What God promises is whole life complete with peace, joy, love, grace, and rejoicing unbound by our past, current, or future circumstances. Wealth is not evil in and of itself, but when we disregard the promises of God in favor of the promises of wealth, it’s like settling for a diet of fries and soft drinks when a feast prepared specifically for our pleasure is within reach.

If we can accept that God offers us joy and pleasure far beyond what can be attained through wealth, how hard is it for us to grasp that God provides for each of the needs we so often associate with wealth? Certainly, disease and death have long unseated wealth as a source of security. The death rate is still 100% for both the poorest and wealthiest on the planet. Though Jesus defeated death, promises us the same victory, and has gone to prepare a place for us where “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21:4). One could argue that there are other levels of security addressed by wealth, and I would agree, but then we fall into the same trap of basing our status or identities on wealth. God has offered us a key to his mansion. Instead, we use wealth to build our own impressive looking house, but it’s not built on a solid foundation; and the storm will eventually come and leave us homeless.  

So, must faithful believers abandon their wealth? No, we are called to renounce our dependence upon our wealth for pleasure, joy, security, identity, status… Nearly every call to self-denial, service, or giving in the New Testament is accompanied by an appeal to experience greater pleasure, joy, security, identity, and status in Christ. We are not called to have less of what wealth offers. We are called to have infinitely more than our wealth can attain. When we stop settling for what only wealth can offer, we become stewards of what we have rather than simply consumers. At that point, our wealth becomes what it was meant to be, a tool to be used for good, rather than a god upon whom we depend.