Lesson 4 of 11 · Chapter: Money

Your Paycheck Has a Purpose

Read time: about 7 minutes · Skill: stewarding money for mercy, family, and ministry

Lesson 3 asked how you work. This lesson asks what your earning is for. The surprise of Chapter 4 is that money is not the enemy of the gospel. It has a job to do for the gospel, and your paycheck is provision for that job.

The story that frames the chapter

A country band sings honestly about youthful hunger for the luxury life: the trinkets, the travel, the chance to show off. The expensive things are supposed to buy happiness and control. But the song ends somewhere unexpected. The singers want a life free of the compulsion to obtain the things that were supposed to make them happy. The things they yearned for turned out to be bondage, not freedom.

That is why Jesus will not leave money alone. Chapell stops us with a count: Jesus talks about money more than he talks about heaven, more than he talks about hell. One quarter of his parables touch it. Why? Because he knows the mechanism:

Jesus is not after your wallet. He is after your heart, which follows your wallet wherever it goes. So he and his apostles instruct us, in both the blessings and the dangers of money.

Money is not the villain

Before Paul writes the famous warning that "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil" (1 Tim. 6:10), he spends a whole passage telling us what money is good for. The anchor text is 1 Timothy 5:8-18, and in it Paul names three gospel purposes for money:

1. Mercy - providing for those who cannot provide for themselves.
2. Family - caring for the relatives God has placed in your life.
3. Ministry - resourcing those who labor in preaching and teaching.

Even Jesus says it plainly: "The laborer deserves his wages" (Luke 10:7). If wages are something a person deserves, then money is not the enemy. The question is what those wages are for.

Mercy: the physical echo of grace

Paul tells the church to enroll widows on a mercy list and provide for them. Mercy, Chapell says, is helping people who cannot help themselves. That is a physical act, but it echoes the spiritual reality of the gospel: God provides for those whose effort could never earn it. When you spend money on someone who can never pay you back, you preach grace in a language anyone can read.

Chapell tells of two women who came to his church with little money and no relatives in the pews. One grew so despondent she attempted suicide. Shaken, the elders asked why no one had noticed them. One elder answered with surgical honesty: "The reason we did not know about them is that it was not to anyone's advantage to pay attention to them." Mercy refuses that math. It gives because of the image of God in a person, not because of what they can return.

Family: where the gospel gets a name

That is a startling sentence. Paul is not saying family care earns salvation. He is saying that a believer who hoards while his own relatives go without has made the gospel look worthless. A grasping Christian is a worse witness than a generous unbeliever. The needs of your household, your aging parents, the relatives God put within your reach, these are not incidental to the gospel. They are where the gospel gets a name in your neighborhood.

Chapell and his wife paid Christian school tuition for over twenty-five consecutive years. Friends called them crazy. They answered: "What better way could we spend our money than on the spiritually sensitive education of our children?" The dollar amounts will differ in your life. The question is the same: does the way I spend show that heaven is real and the people in my house are loved?

Ministry: joy, not guilt

The third purpose is resourcing the ministry of God's word. "The laborer deserves his wages" (1 Tim. 5:18). Paul's phrase "double honor" meant real financial provision for those who feed the church the grain of the gospel.

Chapell, who spent a lifetime raising money as a seminary president, learned to spot two kinds of givers. One group has found the joy of giving. They know their wealth is an undeserved convergence of circumstances, and they delight to steward it for eternal purposes. The other group gives grudgingly and treats the asker like a beggar. The difference is not the size of the gift. It is the engine running it. As his friend Ben Edwards, head of the A. G. Edwards investment firm, told him:

It's not that difficult. Tell God's work to God's people, and let God take care of the rest.

That is the whole secret. Guilt never produces healthy giving; joy always does. Jesus takes guilt away. Giving did not earn that. We give because grace already found us.

Money is a holy compass

Before Paul warns us, he shows us the privilege. Having daily bread is meant to release us from fear. Chapell's wife told of a couple so broke in college they kept thirty-one cans of pork and beans on the shelf, one for each day of the month, so they would know they would not starve. That is daily bread, in its most literal form.

James 1:17 says every good gift comes down from the Father of lights, the same hand that hung the sun and moon. So the God who runs the cosmos is the one keeping your pantry full. If you really believed that, it would dissolve the fear that makes you hoard. Chapell noticed something odd: when the stock market plunges and his retirement shrinks, he becomes more generous. Once you accept you cannot protect the stash, sharing it stops feeling like loss.

So money functions as a holy compass. How you hold it tells you where your heart is pointing. Chapell's diagnostic is worth memorizing:

Contentment is where freedom lives

Now Paul's warning lands. "Godliness with contentment is great gain" (1 Tim. 6:6); "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils" (6:10). The danger is not money itself but the craving for more. The prayer that keeps us level is an old one from Proverbs:

God knows your personality, your needs, your soul, what tempts you and what supports you. So he gives you, to the penny, what you need to glorify him. If you believed that, you would be content. Chapell names the telltale signs that you have drifted off the path: envy ("I want what they have"), debt (families crushed by credit cards and car loans they took to keep up), and the cruelest symptom of all, lost generosity, the dull conviction that you cannot afford to give.

Then he reaches for John Wesley's threefold charge, which only makes sense once you see money as provision for mercy, family, and ministry:

Earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can.

And the New Testament standard for how to give is not a formula argued to the decimal. It is a posture:

An honest tithe can mark a generous heart. But God is after the heart, not the calculator. If those who only glimpsed the gospel in the Old Testament gave a tenth, how much more should we, who have seen the risen Christ, give for his purposes, from gratitude, not from fear?

Make it real this week

Theology of money only sticks when you look at your own. These answers save in this browser, so come back and revisit them when the next paycheck lands.

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Where this is going

Money asks what you are working for. Next we ask how you keep score. Chapter 5 turns to Success, and Chapell will dismantle the world's yardstick. Malcolm Forbes supposedly said, "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." The quiet reply: whoever dies with the most toys dies, and there are no Brinks trucks in a funeral procession. Faithfulness, not accumulation, turns out to be the measure.