Stop asking, “How much should I give?” Ask this instead...

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also….No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. (Matthew 6:21, 24)

In one of The Hunger Games novels, the characters are placed into a tropic arena where they are forced to survive and fight to the death. One of the warriors is tempted by the allure of her surroundings until she realizes that “everything in this pretty place — the luscious fruit dangling from the bushes, the water in the crystalline streams, even the scent of the flowers when inhaled too directly — is deadly poisonous” and designed to kill her.

That’s a pretty good picture of how God’s Word describes money: tantalizing but toxic. Which is why God calls us to surrender it to him. That brings us to the second biblical principle for stewarding the financial fruit of your labor: God doesn't need your money, but he wants your heart before money destroys it.

Scripture consistently uses violent and graphic language to warn us of the spiritual dangers that accompany having more than you need financially. God says that money can “plunge” you “into ruin and destruction,” enslave and “master” you, make you a “fool” in God’s eyes, “eat your flesh like fire,” and “choke” God’s Word out of your life (see 1 Timothy 6:9–10, Matthew 6:24, Luke 12:15–21, James 5:1–3, and Matthew 13:22).

Commenting on this theme, my friends at The Theology of Work Project say, “Jesus seems to look on wealth the way the rest of us would look at a stick of dynamite.” 

God doesn’t need your money. He owns “the cattle on a thousand hills” (Psalm 50:10). God doesn’t even need your heart. He’s been experiencing the perfect love of the trinity for eternity. God doesn’t need you. He wants you because he loves you. And he knows that if you don’t hand him your wallet, you’ll never fully hand him your heart. 

Given Scripture’s warnings about the spiritual danger of hoarding wealth, let me encourage you to stop asking, “How much should I give?” and start asking, “How much should I keep knowing what I know of money’s power?”

I think this is the point of Mark 12:41-44. After Jesus watched “many rich people” throw in “large amounts” of money to the “temple treasury,” a “poor widow” threw in “only a few cents,” but it was “everything” for her—“all she had to live on.” And she is the one who Jesus praised. Because he knew this woman had found fullness of joy in him.

“Not what you give but what you keep is what the King is counting,” sings Kristyn Getty. With that in mind, prayerfully discern not what you should give, but what you should keep, to ensure that your heart belongs to God alone.