On God and Mammon

4 Dangerous Attitudes that Sway Our Hearts Toward the Love of Money

Four Common Pitfalls with Money

1. The first is ingratitude. A grateful heart is a heart at rest. A grateful person is aware that he deserves nothing of all he possesses and enjoys. Because of this, he daily counts his blessings and is thankful for the little things that would otherwise be taken for granted. The unthankful person does just the opposite. He keeps telling himself that he deserves more than he has. Because of this, he is way more aware of what he doesn’t yet have than of all the things he has been graciously given. This causes him to live an entitled and demanding life. Never quite satisfied, he easily justifies a wasteful and selfish use of money.
2. The second ingredient is need. This is one of the most poorly and overused words in human culture. The majority of what we are able to tell ourselves we need, we don’t actually need. We all are very skilled at loading our desires into our need category, and once we have, we think it’s our right to have these things, and therefore it’s appropriate to do what is necessary to posses them. So we waste all kinds of money satisfying needs that aren’t really needs, all the while feeling quite comfortable, because if it’s a need, it seems right to acquire it. So with closets bursting with more clothes than we can wear and refrigerators filled with more than we can eat and houses bigger than we actually occupy, we are still able to tell ourselves that we are needy. And because we have told ourselves that we are needy, we will spend more.
3. The third thing that weakens the defenses of the heart against the love of money: discontentment. Because I am not grateful for all the things I have been given and don’t deserve, and because I have misdiagnosed need, loading many things in my need category that are not needs, I am a constantly discontented person. It is virtually impossible to be satisfied with what I have, so I am on a constant quest for more. Since I am on a constant quest for more, I tend to spend more than I should to satisfy myself, but because my discontentment is rooted in ingratitude and misunderstood need, spending more won’t solve my problem. So, I end up spending more than I have, because what I am trying to do can’t work. Contentment isn’t a money problem, a possession problem, or a location problem; it’s a problem of the heart and therefore is not solved by spending.
4. The final ingredient that works with ingratitude, need, and discontentment to set up your heart to misappropriate money is envy. If you are unthankful and convinced that you deserve more, if you have been able to convince yourself that you need certain things that you do not have, leaving you deeply discontented, you will invariably look over the fence and envy the person who appears to have what you have not yet been able to acquire. Envious people are always taking account. Envious people are always comparing. Envious people are constantly placing things on their “she has, but I don’t” list. Envious people regularly feel that they have been given a bad deal, so it is right for them to use their resources to settle the score. Envy will cause you to be both self-oriented and foolish in your use of money.

It is ingratitude, neediness, discontent, and envy of the heart that cause us to be all too money conscious, all too self-focused in our use of it, and all too liberal in our expenditures. If we persist on that course, our life really will end up being “money, money, money,” no matter how much of it we actually have. We need to continue to remind ourselves that the problem with money is not that it exists. The problem with money is not that we have too little or too much. Money problems are always heart problems; they’re deeper than the size of our paycheck and the specificity of our budget. Money can be a blessing or a curse.

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