Money Isn't the Root of All Evil

Somebody rich got caught doing something rotten this week.

And somebody you know already used it to explain why they never tried.

Welcome to The Real Jason Duncan Podcast.

This whole show runs on one idea: to expose the lies you believe and the truths you don't. Most of us have believed things for a long time that just weren't true, and when you finally see the truth, it changes things.

The most dangerous lies don't look like lies. They look like success. They look like golden cages, where the bars are covered in gold so you can't see them, and as a result people like you and me get deceived, because the lies that trap us look like good things, they look like truth, they look like wisdom.

Maybe there's something you used to believe that kept you trapped and you are so glad you don't believe it anymore. Maybe there's something you still believe, and you don't realize that it's keeping you trapped. This show is about helping you break free from that cage.

I expose these lies twice a week.

Every Monday, I interview someone who believed one of those lies. We talk about what they used to believe, why they don't believe it anymore, and what it costs people to stay stuck inside that lie for another five years.

On Wednesdays, just like today, I bring you a special edition, where I read you a version of the article I write for my newsletter every Wednesday called What's Real?

You can subscribe free at therealjasonduncan.com/articles, and it hits your inbox every Wednesday morning before this episode drops.

This week's post is called "Money Isn't the Root of All Evil. You've Been Misquoting It."

Somebody wealthy gets caught doing something rotten, and within a day you'll hear about it.

See? Money is the root of all evil.

It gets said with a smile and a slightly uptilted nose, as if the person saying it is somehow untainted by this evil thing called money.

And it gets said most often by people who don't have much of it.

The successful guy did something wrong, so the money must have done it to him, and the whole idea of money gets polluted because of one man's behavior.

I've heard it my entire life. In church. At family tables. In comment sections.

And the part that bothers me the most is that almost everybody who says it has never once looked up the verse they're quoting.

The verse is First Timothy, chapter six, verse ten.

Now before I get to what it actually says, it helps to know who was writing it and why.

Paul was an apostle of Jesus Christ, and he was writing to Timothy, a younger coworker in ministry that he had put into a leadership role. Paul had told him to stay in Ephesus and keep certain men from teaching things that were not in line with truth.

That whole letter is about protecting people from teaching that sounds religious but produces the wrong kind of life.

By chapter six, Paul describes those false teachers as conceited, argumentative, and the kind of people who cause friction. He describes them as people who treat godliness as a means of financial gain. And then he answers that with a line worth memorizing.

Godliness with contentment is great gain.

Then he says that those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires.

And then comes the verse that gets misquoted more than just about any other verse in the whole Bible.

But watch the progression Paul lays out first, because he's building something here.

False teaching leads to using godliness for financial gain.

Which leads to wanting to be rich.

Which leads to temptation and destructive desires.

Which leads to a love of money.

Which leads to walking away from your faith.

Which leads to personal suffering.

Paul never said money is bad.

What the verse actually says is that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils.

Not money.

The love of it.

Take the words love of out of that sentence and you have changed the subject entirely.

One version indicts a human appetite. The other indicts a thing that has no ability to want, choose, or do anything at all.

Now the thing that settles this for me isn't even a theological argument.

Money is something human beings invented. It isn't a substance we found lying around with properties already attached to it. We agreed that a thing would represent value, we all kept agreeing, and that agreement is the whole mechanism of money.

Go back far enough and you can actually watch it get built.

In Mesopotamia, more than five thousand years ago, temple administrators needed a way to track rations and debts. So a silver shekel was fixed by decree as equal to a measure of barley. It wasn't a coin at all. It was just a unit of weight used for accounting.

Coins stamped with images of animals and rulers didn't show up until Lydia, in what's now Turkey, roughly twenty-six hundred years ago.

Units of account came thousands of years before the first coin ever existed.

So money is a human agreement. It has no will, no intent, and no moral weight of its own.

A hammer builds a house, or a hammer breaks a jaw. And nobody blames the hammer.

So why do people keep misquoting this verse? If it's that easy to check, why does the wrong version keep living on in conversations?

Because it does a job for two very different people.

For the person who never built anything, the misquote turns an outcome into a virtue. Not having money stops being the result of choices and circumstances, and it starts being evidence of clean hands. It's a scripture-based reason to quit trying, and it comes with moral high ground attached to it.

For the person who has plenty, it works differently. Quote it at the right dinner party and you sound humble. Wary of your own wealth. Appropriately conflicted. And then you go right on doing exactly what you were doing.

Both people get to walk away without changing a single thing.

But pay attention to this one, because most people miss it.

The love of money is fully available to people who don't have any.

Yes. You can be consumed by money you have never held.

You can organize your entire inner life around a number you've never hit, resent everybody who has, and look up what other people paid for their house.

That's the exact condition Paul was describing. And an empty bank account is no protection from it whatsoever.

Some of the people I've known who were the most gripped by money were people who had very little of it. It ran their conversations. It ran their comparisons. It ran their opinion of nearly everyone they met.

The verse isn't asking how much money you have. It's asking how much of your attention it owns.

And that lie costs you something real.

If money is dirty at the root, then wanting it is shameful. And shameful things get pursued badly.

You underprice, because charging what you're worth feels greedy. You apologize in the middle of your own proposals. You get uncomfortable when a deal goes well, and you soften your numbers before anybody even pushes back on them.

The belief doesn't keep you pure. It keeps you underpaid. And it leaves a low-grade resentment toward people who don't carry the same hangup.

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Now since we're talking about what money actually is, let me tell you about something most people were never taught.

Every time you finance something through a bank, you hand over interest you will never see again. You earned that money. You spent it. And the growth on it belongs to somebody else. Most people never look straight at that, because it's just how everybody does it.

Bank on Yourself is built on a different idea. You use a specially designed dividend-paying whole life policy as your own financing system. Your cash value keeps growing whether you've borrowed against it or not. So when you buy the truck or you fund the deal, you're paying yourself back instead of paying a bank.

I'm not going to explain the whole thing in ninety seconds. Go look at it yourself at therealjasonduncan.com/bankonyourself.

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So here are two things to do this week.

First, notice when you do it.

Think about the last time you heard that somebody was doing really well, and something inside you resented it a little. Or made you feel less than them. Maybe you said a version of that line out loud. Maybe you just thought it.

Either way, that reaction isn't about them.

Second, find the thing you've been undercharging for.

Name it. Name the number you'd charge if you didn't feel weird about it. And then quote that number to the next person who asks.

Neither one of those takes an hour. And both of them will tell you something.

If you run a company or belong to an association that puts on events, and you'd want this kind of talk on the stage, I'm booking keynotes for twenty twenty-seven. Go to therealjasonduncan.com/speaking. That's therealjasonduncan.com, slash, S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G. The link is in the show notes.

There's a proverb that lands right on this. Proverbs thirty, verses eight and nine.

Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, who is the Lord? Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.

Look at what Agur is asking for there, because he names two dangers, not just one.

Too much money can make a man forget God. Too little can make him do things he swore he'd never do.

Both of those conditions are spiritually dangerous. And that is not how most of us were taught to think about being broke.

Poverty isn't holiness. Wealth isn't wickedness.

The man who wrote that prayer understood both, three thousand years before anybody printed it on a coffee mug and got it backwards.

Go read the full post at therealjasonduncan.com/articles.

And if there's something you've been undercharging for and you finally raise the number this week, I want to hear what happened. Hit reply on the newsletter and tell me. I want to know if they blinked.

As always, I am your host, The Real Jason Duncan, and Jesus is King.