In the Christian life, many pitfalls bedevil the areas of work and wealth.

The Bible contains numerous warnings about the improperly-ordered love of money and material possessions. The love of money is a root of all kinds of evils and causes some to wander away from the faith (1 Timothy 6:10). A greedy man brings trouble upon his house (Proverbs 15:27). Whoever trusts in his riches will fall (Proverbs 11:28).

In a country as wealthy as ours, the sins of greed, envy, and forgetting our need for God are prevalent traps. As Puritan Cotton Mather wrote in 1702, “Religion begat Prosperity, and the daughter devoured the mother.” It seems safe to say that the intervening 300 years of American life have vindicated this point.

Understandably, Christian pastors and thinkers have spilled much ink about the dangers of American decadence and the errors of the prosperity gospel, and their works have had varying levels of Biblical congruence and revolutionary zeal. Books like Ronald Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, Shane Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution, and David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream have influenced the theology and worldview of many believers.

However, with so much focus on avoiding the dangers of materialism, combined with the shaky biblical literacy and spotty knowledge of economics common amongst younger people, many in our Christian subculture have been led into a sclerotic “be broke for Jesus” theology. Symptoms of this strange, granola ideology include feeling shame for having nice things, avoiding the pleasures of material goods altogether, treating wealthy people with suspicion and contempt, believing that poverty is never the consequence of personal choices, believing that God is on the side of the poor, and defining Christian love and generosity as redistributing taxpayer money to the needy.

These beliefs are emblematic of other pitfalls in the world of work and wealth: rejection of God’s good gifts and rejection of the responsibilities He gave us.

The Bible says that prosperity is a God-given blessing (Deuteronomy 8:18, Ecclesiastes 5:19), and provides wisdom and directives for the proper accumulation and use of wealth and the avoidance of poverty. Wealth is built through diligence and should be acquired gradually, not hastily (Proverbs 21:5). Poverty can be caused by laziness (Proverbs 10:4). A good man leaves an inheritance to his grandchildren (Proverbs 13:22).

Households should provide for themselves and not be dependent upon others (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12), and men have a responsibility to provide for their families (1 Timothy 5:8) The Bible forbids envy, theft, and boasting, so it follows that the poor should not envy or steal from the rich, and the rich should not boast in their abundance or extort from the poor. For these reasons, socialist attitudes and policies are inconsistent with the tenets of the Christian faith.

Christians should not be shy about enjoying God’s blessings, nor apologetic about having them. In his book The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts, Joe Rigney describes the appropriate attitude well:

Supreme love for God orients our affections and orders our desires and integrates our loves. When we love God supremely, we are free to love creation as creation (and not as God). Because the divine excellence is really present in the gift, we are free to enjoy it for his sake. God's gifts become avenues for enjoying him, beams of glory that we chase back to the source. We don't set God and his gifts in opposition to each other, as though they are rivals. Instead, in the words of Charles Simeon, we ‘enjoy God in everything and everything in God.’

God is glorified when His children give Him thanks for a beautiful sunset, a comfortable house, a ride on a roller coaster, a delicious slice of cake, and the efficiency of a pneumatic nail gun.

The Great Commission must be funded. There are cathedrals to build. Christian schools must be staffed, supplied, and operated. Christian households must be productive and generous. Christian businesses and labor must be profitable in order to make all of these things possible. The money is not the point; the chief end of man is not to get rich, but the God who created us to glorify and enjoy Him forever has lavished us with abundant spiritual and material blessings, and in so doing, He has graciously set us free from any need to be handwringing, guilt-wracked misers.