What the Bible Says About Money: A Plain Guide

Money shows up in scripture more often than heaven does. Not as a reward for faith, and not as proof of greed, but as the thing that most reliably reveals where a person's hope actually sits.

Below: whether money itself is evil, what scripture says about working, saving and giving, what Jesus says about worry, and where to start.

What the Bible says about money

What the Bible says about money is that it is a tool, a test, and a rival. A tool because it does real good. A test because what you do with it shows what you believe. A rival because it is the only thing Jesus ever named as a competing god.

That last one is the part people miss. In Matthew 6:24 Jesus does not say you cannot serve God and sin. He says you cannot serve God and money. He gives money a name and treats it as something that wants your allegiance.

Scripture does not solve this with a rule about how much to have. It keeps asking a harder question: what are you trusting?

Is money evil?

No. Money is not evil, and the verse everyone half remembers says so.

1 Timothy 6:10 says the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Not money. The love of it. Paul is writing to a church with wealthy members and he never tells them to get rid of what they have.

Scripture is full of people with money whom God uses rather than scolds. Abraham had livestock and land. Lydia ran a business in purple cloth and funded a church out of it. Joseph of Arimathea paid for a tomb. The problem has never been the balance. It has been what the balance is holding up.

What does the Bible say about working for money?

Scripture treats work as good, and treats the wage as something you have earned rather than something you should feel guilty about.

Paul tells the Thessalonians to work with their hands and mind their own business. He tells Timothy that a worker deserves his wages. Proverbs praises the person who plans and saves and has something ready for the lean year.

What scripture does not do is make your work your identity. The Sabbath exists partly to prove that the world keeps running when you stop. If taking a day off makes you anxious about money, that is worth noticing.

What does the Bible say about saving?

Saving is called wisdom in scripture. Trusting your savings is called something else.

Proverbs 21:20 describes wise people keeping a store of oil and food while a fool swallows everything he gets. Joseph saves seven years of grain and an entire region survives because of it. Nobody in scripture is praised for having nothing set aside.

But Jesus also tells a story about a man with an excellent harvest who builds bigger barns, tells himself he is set for years, and dies that night. The man is not condemned for saving. He is condemned for thinking the barn was the point.

What does the Bible say about giving?

Scripture ties giving to gratitude rather than obligation, and it is unusually specific about the posture.

Paul tells the Corinthians that God loves a cheerful giver, and the word behind cheerful is closer to hilarious than dutiful. He tells wealthy Ephesians to be generous and ready to share. The widow who gives two small coins is held up over the people giving far larger amounts, because she gave from what she needed rather than from what she had spare.

None of this is a fundraising strategy. It is a claim about where the money came from in the first place.

What does the Bible say about worrying about money?

Jesus addresses money anxiety directly, and he does it without ever calling the worry irrational.

In Matthew 6 he points at birds and flowers and asks whether worry has ever added a single hour to anyone's life. He is not pretending bills are imaginary. He is pointing out that anxiety does not function as a plan, however much it feels like one at two in the morning.

His instruction is to seek the kingdom first and let the rest follow. Not to stop budgeting. To stop treating the budget as the thing that saves you.

Where do I start?

Start by finding out what you actually believe, which is usually visible in your bank statement before it is visible in your prayers.

Open the last thirty days and read it without judging a single line. Then ask what somebody would conclude about your hope if that statement were all they had to go on.

At UAMEZ Church in Palo Alto we are spending six Sundays on this in a series called Money Moves. We meet at 3549 Middlefield Rd., Palo Alto, CA, and you are welcome in the room whatever your statement says.