“Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you’.” – Hebrews 13:5
Why do we as people have this yearning for money? So many of our thoughts are centered on money, we make life choices based on money. I can’t even count the amount of times I was talking to another college student and they tell me what they want to do with their lives, but the main reason they have chosen that career is because that’s where the money is. We make choices that will affect our happiness for the rest of our lives based off of what the world says is important. So many times I see people make choices that go against everything that is within them, simply because they can’t make as much money in other fields. The amount of times I have heard some of my professors or people that I worked with tell me that I was wasting all my potential by entering the IGNITE program, can’t be counted on my hands. The question I always got was why, and my answer seemed to always be so hard for them to grasp. I got the response, “you really think you can make a difference? Okay, so you help one child, what good does that do you or the rest of the world? You need to make money, think of yourself and don’t limit your future.” Yet, if money was the thing that guided my future and was what I put my hope in, what would I be living for? Hebrews says to keep ourselves free from the love of money. But, what is love? There are a couple of different types of love, but the verse that I thought of in this moment was 1 John 3:16, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.” Jesus laid down His life because He so loved us, He died to Himself, so that I might live. How often do I see people laying down their lives for money? People choose careers that they hate for the love of money, people tear relationships apart because they love money, people sacrifice their families for the love of money, people trade other people’s wellbeing for their love of money, but most importantly people trade eternal life with their creator for the love of money. They trade everything for something they can’t depend on. The Lord says to be content with what you have. The funny thing is, is that those who are poor, yet content in their circumstances, have more joy then those who are rich and not content.
The word ‘because’ always follows the word ‘why’. As people who are force fed the lies of the world daily it can become easy to ask God, “Why should I be content?” Why should we be content in a world full of sin? One that rips us off, cheats, steals, takes advantage, discriminates, and the list could go on and on. The world tries to make us believe that everyone is out to get us and that people will have no problem running us down, so we need to think only of ourselves. We become self-centered, and then when we are not content, we ask God why He would ask us to do what might seem impossible. The author of Hebrews gives us that why, “Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you.” This is one of God promises to us. He asks us not to be content with the sin in this world, but to be content in Him. In Philippians 4:12-13 Paul says, “I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. For I can do everything with the help of Christ who gives me the strength I need.” When we place our love in money, we place money over God; ultimately, making money our god or idol and we are never truly content. God is asking us to be content, because we can rest in the fact that He will provide for our every need. He is faithful, even when we are faithless. When we are content in Him is when He is truly able to use us, because that is when we realize we can do nothing on our own.
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