Hebrews 13:5a “Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have.

We don’t usually think of a warning as a blessing. But when a warning comes to us in love, it really is a blessing, isn’t it? If someone warns you that the water on the road up ahead is too deep to drive through, it could even save your life.

God is showing you such love when he warns, “Keep your lives free from the love of money.” There is nothing wrong with money itself. Like everything else, it is a good creation of God. He is the one who provides us with it.

But God never made our money or any of our valuables to be loved. He only gave them to us for their use. Ultimately, he wants us to use them to serve him, to use them to show our love for him and for others.

Sometimes we are tempted to turn this around. Money, wealth, possessions can become even more important to us even than the people around us, even than God himself. It seems as if we are in a relationship of love with our things, and that we use people to serve them instead.

But you can’t really have a relationship with your things or your money. You can give your affection, your attention, and your devotion to them, but they can never give it back. They are cold, emotionless, and unloving. That is not because they are bad. It is because the Lord made them only to be used.

When we try to build such a relationship with our money or possessions, our relationships with everyone else, including our Lord, tend to suffer. Those who keep track of such statistics will tell you that more marriages break up today because of arguments over the money than for any other reason. God gives you this warning, then, to be a blessing, so that worldly wealth will never come between us, and others, and our Lord.

He has given us something to love, after all. He has given us himself with a giving and a loving no money could pay for. His love is so great that he gave his life in love in payment for our sins. He has cleansed us from our greed and every other selfishness. Let his warning be a blessing, then: Keep your lives free from the love of money.