During this tax season, these five truths will help clear the air about our many problems with money:

1. It is a lousy, lousy, lousy god.  When given a seat at the table of our motivations for daily living, money will ruin whatever significance and satisfaction our lives are meant to find in Christ alone.  Sadly, the idolatrous desire to have money can affect rich and poor alike and can subtly poison our veins until we’re under the control of “more! more!” and “I must have!”  When our joys, sorrows, peacetimes and anxieties ebb and flow with our personal fortunes or lack thereof, we’ve grown sick.  God help us.
2. It doesn’t grow on trees.  Seriously, you will not find new & crisp greenbacks growing as deciduous foliage.  It requires earning by hard work, sometimes in jobs under difficult circumstances, bosses or hours that we don’t prefer.  It requires living within our means and saying “no-can-do” a lot.  It requires the rejection of the cultural pressures to spend and have.
3. Tithing is not just a river somewhere in Asia.  The biblical practice of giving 10% of our income to the church for gospel mission is a wonderfully liberating practice for the believer.  It is quite contrary to the hoarding heart that is scandalized by the thought of monthly giving hundreds of dollars to the church (and to God who cannot be seen and whose reward cannot be seen – yet).  The tithe is a primary antivirus to the heart’s love of money.
4. It belongs to God and then to the Federal Government.  
   • Every single penny that you have in the various locations in your life (yes, even the ashtray of your minivan) belongs first and foremost to GOD, and then, in a secondary mode, to the Feds.  Yes, we have homes, cars, food, clothing, plumbing and paper goods all because there is One who acts and loves like a Father and has compassion on his children and gives them all that they need.  Every single thing we have has been given to us generously by God.
   • Secondarily, if you read the front of our paper currency, it is very clear to whom it belongs to: “Federal Reserve Note… this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private”.  If that weren’t enough, there are various clues to what nation this legal tender is printed by and belongs to, such as pictures of past presidents, bald eagles, pyramids with eyeballs, etc.  Jesus tells us straight up: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Mark 12:17).
   • Let’s be clear about money: it isn’t ours.  Scripture states that we are merely stewards of it.  On our most wealthy of days it remains a flammable and temporary item that is only as good as the federal reserve that backs it.
5. It can’t buy me love.  John, Paul, George and Ringo (not the apostles, the Beatles)  got this right.  Money, with all the influence and power that it seems to wield, at the end of the day is but a shallow means of subsistence.  It should not go beyond subsidizing our basic life needs.  Love, joy, peace and all the stuff that satisfies and sets the heart right – these things come from a vital and mediated relationship with God through his only Son, Jesus Christ.  Jesus is the crown jewel of life and living, and if we fixate on the pittance of human currency, we’re sunk.