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Money is one of those rare subjects that almost everyone has opinions on, including most Christians.  And of course there are so many cliches about money—‘money can’t buy you love’ being a familiar one thanks to the Beatles. In fact there are also many myths about money as well.  In this post I want to talk about a few of the myths that arise in Christian contexts.   This post will be devoted to two of these myths. As we shall see, most of these Christian myths arise out of sound-byting small portions of Scripture and taking them out of context.

Myth One:  If you just
trust God, he will give you ‘all the desires of your heart’ 

What the Scripture in question actually says is  “Delight yourself in the LORD, and He shall
give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD, trust also in
Him, and He shall bring it to pass”. ~ Psalm 37:4,5.     This has nothing necessarily to do with
economic prosperity at all.  The desire
of the heart referred to here is God!  If
you delight in God he will bless you with more of the divine presence is all
the psalmist has in view.  The problem here is with the phrase desires of the heart.  Materialistic persons often just assume that the desires of their heart are perfectly fine and legitimate and that God is in the business of fulfilling such desires. 

This unreflective approach never stops to ask whether there might not be sinful as well as good desires in the human heart.  Just because they are genuine desires of a human heart doesn’t mean they are good. Jesus however is unequivocal about the desires of the heart often being enormously problematic— “For from within, out of your hearts come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed,  malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly” (Mk. 7.21).  This verse makes perfectly clear that one has to examine, process, and critique the desires of one’s hearts, for it is equally or even more probable that one has selfish and sinful desires than good and godly ones.

Myth Two:  If you
‘seek first the kingdom’ then God will give you all the things you long
for.  It’s just a matter of getting one’s
priorities straight.

Again, this is a profound misreading of what the Biblical
text says.  Jesus in Mt. 6.25-34 has been
talking about the basic necessities in life–food, clothing, and the like.  Tells his disciples they should not be
anxious even about the necessities in life, not least because God knows we need
such things to survive.  Instead of such
anxious worrying we are to seek first the kingdom, and these necessities will
be added to us.  In context Jesus says
nothing about blessing us with wealth, or great prosperity or anything of the
kind.  He refers only to food, drink, and
clothing, nor is anything said about lavish clothing or non-necessary food and
drink items.

In general God is not in the business of putting us into a condition wherein we begin to believe a further myth– namely the Stoic one about our being the master of our own fate and the captain of our own souls if only we reach a position of ‘financial independence’.  The Bible is a book about finding our sufficiency in God, not about self-sufficiency or putting ourselves in a position of not having to depend on God day by day for the necessities of life.  Think for instance about the Lord’s prayer— “give us today our daily bread”.  Jesus does not encourage us to pray “make us wealthy beyond our wildest dreams so we don’t need to look to God each day for the basic necessities of life, don’t need to continue to work, don’t need to face the fact that we are not self-sufficient, independent beings”.   

Even within the church, there are many problematic assumptions about money that need to be deprogrammed before we can even begin to build a more positive Biblical approach to money and other resources.  So there will be some more deprogramming in order before we get to the positive axioms offered us by Jesus and the NT writers.