The Use of Money

Earn All You Can, Save All You Can, Give All You Can: A Timeless Call to Faithful Stewardship
Most of us have a childhood moment we remember. It starts with the thrill of holding something wonderful, something sweet or shiny or exciting, only to watch it disappear far too quickly. Cotton candy dissolves the instant it touches your tongue. Bubbles pop before you can even reach out to touch them. Ice cream melts if you are not paying attention. These small disappointments are more than childhood frustrations. They are, as Kayla said this week, a parable about the nature of everything we try to hold too tightly in this life. It is all temporary.

Money is a lot like cotton candy. It seems bigger than it is. It promises more than it can deliver. And when we make it the center of our lives, we find ourselves chasing something that will never fully satisfy, it never fully lasts, and never fully save us.

This tension sits at the heart of one of the most honest and challenging conversations the Christian faith asks us to have: What do we do with what we have been given?

The Problem Is Not Money Itself
It would be easy to read passages like 1 Timothy 6 and walk away thinking that money is simply evil, something to be avoided or treated with suspicion. That would be an easier way to deal with this because then it isn’t our fault; it's something else's fault. But that misses the point, because the text makes it pretty clear: It is not money that is the root of all kinds of evil. It is the love of money. The distinction matters enormously.

Money, in and of itself, is morally neutral. It is a tool. It has only the value we assign to it, and it does only the work we put it toward. As generations of Christian thinkers have recognized, the fault does not lie in the thing itself. It lies in how we relate to it, what we expect from it, and what we are willing to do to get it or keep it, or what we use it for.

The trouble begins when money moves from being a means to worship God with our whole being to money becoming an end. When our sense of security, identity, worth, or power becomes wrapped up in what we own or earn, we put something at the center of our lives that was never designed to hold that weight. And it will crack under the pressure every time. Why? Because we have put something before God, which breaks rule #1. We cannot get past rule number 1…

Gaining Without Causing Harm
There is a straightforward and even liberating call woven through the Wesleyan tradition around money: earn all you can. Work hard. Apply yourself. Use your gifts and your energy with diligence. There is no virtue in laziness or in squandering the opportunities you have been given.

But earning all you can comes with conditions that matter deeply. We are called to earn in ways that do not harm our own bodies and minds, that do not turn work into an idol that crowds out rest, relationships, and God. That does not make us into workaholics. We are called to earn in ways that do not harm our neighbors, that do not exploit the vulnerable, that do not profit from someone else's suffering or desperation.

Luke 16 tells a striking story about a dishonest manager who, facing the loss of his position, uses his remaining authority to secure his own future by reducing the debts owed to his master. Jesus uses this story not to endorse dishonesty, but to make an observation: the people of this world are often far more strategic and deliberate about earthly resources than people of faith are about eternal ones. The world teaches us to be as intentional about how we use what we have been given as the world is about accumulating more.

The chapter closes with one of the most direct statements in all of Scripture on this subject. No one can serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and wealth. This is not a suggestion or a gentle nudge. It is a declaration about the architecture of the human heart. We are simply not built to give ultimate loyalty to two competing centers of gravity.

Saving With Wisdom, Not Greed
Why are you saving? Saving all you can is not a call to hoarding. It is a call to wisdom and contentment. The discipline of saving means resisting the pull of culture that tells us we always need more, always need the newest, always need what everyone else has. There is always going to be a newer phone, a better car, a more impressive home. The chase never ends unless we decide to stop running.

Saving also means being honest about the difference between what we need and what we want. Godliness with contentment is great gain, Paul writes to Timothy. That word contentment is worth sitting with. It does not mean indifference or passivity. It means a settled peace with what we have, rooted not in the abundance of our possessions but in the faithfulness of the One who provides them.

Saving also doesn't necessarily mean doing so for us or our children, which is the exact opposite of why we save today. Wesley says again and again in the sermon that we are not called to waste our money on silliness but so that we can give to those in need.

Giving as an Act of Faith
Here is where everything comes together. We earn all we can and save all we can so that we can give all we can. Not because generosity earns us favor with God, but because generosity is the natural overflow of a faith that understands who owns everything in the first place.

The rich man in Luke 16 who ignored Lazarus at his gate did not fail because he had wealth. He failed because his wealth had become a wall between him and his neighbor, literally. He had everything and shared nothing. And in the end, the distance he maintained in life became a chasm he could not cross in death. Build a wall between you and the last, and the lost, and one will come in life to come according to Luke.

Generosity breaks down that wall. It reorients our hearts toward the people around us. It reminds us that what we hold is held in trust, not in ownership. We brought nothing into this world, and we will take nothing out of it. What we do with the time in between is the question that matters.

The invitation is not complicated, even if it is costly. Use what you have been given honestly. Spend it wisely. Share it freely. And in doing so, participate in the kind of life that does not dissolve like cotton candy or pop like a bubble, but endures into something far greater than anything we could accumulate on our own.