The Purpose of Money
Early in my journey of learning about money, I noticed a very odd disconnect.
On the one hand, it was obvious that there’s a ton of personal finance advice readily available. Search on any financial question and within seconds you can find answers.
And yet, lots of people struggle with money.
Why is that? With so much guidance so close at hand, why is money so hard for so many people to figure out?
I believe it’s because too many people aren’t clear about the purpose of their lives. They’re living reactive lives, bouncing from one popular message about what matters to another.
The only way to understand the purpose of money is to understand the purpose of life. And the only way to achieve truly meaningful success is to orient our use of money around our life purpose.
Do You Know Who You Are?
The English writer Samuel Johnson once said, “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.”
Oh we need instruction, but all the instruction in the world won’t do us any good if we’re not clear about who we are and what really matters.
Our culture would have us believe we’re consumers. It sounds harmless enough, right? But have you ever looked up the definition? To consume means to use up, devour, spend wastefully. How’s that working out for us?
The word first came into popular use during the Industrial Revolution, the period roughly between 1880 and 1920 that set the wheels in motion for today’s consumer culture.
Our society shifted from agriculture to industry. People went from self-sufficient to income dependent, from making things to buying things. With so many goods spilling off assembly lines, businesses needed people to use stuff up. To paraphrase Aldous Huxley from “Brave New World,” “ending (throwing stuff away)” needed to replace the habit of “mending.”
To entice us to buy, buy, buy, advertising began linking products to our identity and happiness. Products became branded, and so did we. No longer were we referred to as citizens or workers. We became consumers.
From that point forward, huge sums of money have been spent in an effort to keep us from remembering who we were made to be.
What’s In a Name?
Consumer is more than a word; it’s a worldview. If I’m a consumer, I’m the most important person in the world. Life is all about me – my pleasure, my comfort, my happiness.
If I’m a consumer, I’m convinced that happiness is found in money and stuff.
And if I’m a consumer, life is about competition. I notice what others around me have and I’m happiest when I have more.
People who study happiness say this is the path that leads in the exact opposite direction of where we’d all like to go. It’s like trying to get to New York from Chicago and getting on a westbound highway.
They say happiness is found in living for something bigger than ourselves, loving people instead of stuff, and living a life of contribution instead of competition.
Remembering Who We Are
The good news is that we were not designed to be consumers. The Bible doesn’t say that on the sixth day God made consumers who would use up and waste all that He made on the previous five days. It says He made man and woman in His image.
Financially, the Bible describes us as stewards, or managers.
But I think a lot of people misunderstand that. The word seems heavy, like a burden. It’s as if they’ve been given managerial responsibility over some stuff and misheard the instructions as: “Whatever you do, don’t break or lose any of this stuff.”
Those aren’t the instructions we’ve been given at all.
In the Parable of the Talents, a wealthy man entrusts three servants with his stuff, goes on a long journey, and then returns to see how they did. One servant got the instructions wrong. He hid what was entrusted to him and then returned it to his master. He hadn’t lost or broken any of it. For his efforts, or lack thereof, he received a harsh rebuke.
The other two servants were different. They turned what had been entrusted to them into something more. For their efforts, they received strong words of affirmation. Oh, and on top of that, the master then entrusted them with more stuff.
Of course, the master represents God; the servants represent us.
The Art and Joy of Being Ourselves
We weren’t designed to destruct – to use stuff up. We were designed to construct – to create, build, make something more of what has been entrusted to us.
What is that something more?
Modern day happiness researchers who think they’ve stumbled on some new discovery have only discovered what the Bible has taught for thousands of years. Of course, the Bible gets a bit more specific. It says we were designed to live not just for something more, but for someone more – God. So, the first purpose of money is to use it in ways that glorify God.
The Bible says the second most important priority in life is to love others. It never says that money or things are inherently bad. It just teaches us not to love money or things, but to love people. So, the second purpose of money is to use it in ways that strengthen our relationships with others.
And the Bible says we’ve all been given resources so that we can be generous to others. So, the third purpose of money is to share it with others, making a meaningful contribution to the world.
Those are the three overarching purposes of money: use it to love God, love others, and share with others in need. They are the guiding principles for how we are to prioritize our use of money. They are the path toward a meaningful, successful experience with money.
If you were to honestly evaluate your current use of money, how well does it line up with these three purposes?