Instead of pursuing money, pursue God. As we have seen, money is a valuable resource and there are principles in Proverbs that help us steward what God has given. Yet, knowing and fearing God is far more precious than great riches (15:16). While money can benefit us during our lives on earth, there is so much more to live for.

Money. We all deal with it, but few know what to think about it. Our culture and even our friends and family can give us conflicting messages: money is power; money is a curse; money corrupts; money means you’ve made it.
Unfortunately, many Christians feel just as conflicted. Some fear wealth, feeling that the way to godliness is cutting oneself off from worldly concerns, especially financial ones. Some fear wealth is only an illusion; only the immaterial matters. Others, taking a cue from prosperity preachers, feel that riches much be a sign of favor and blessing from God. And if they aren’t rich, either they don’t have enough faith or God is cruelly withholding what is good. Many find themselves caught between these two extremes.
How are Christians to view money? Does God care how we use our financial resources, and if so, what should we do?
The book of Proverbs gives us a treasure trove of insights into how Christians should view and use wealth. Here are ten essential lessons:
1. Money has some value.

A rich man’s wealth is his strong city; the poverty of the poor is their ruin. (Prov. 10:15)

Proverbs takes an incredibly practical, realistic view of wealth. It hardly needs to be said that money is a powerful tool. Wealth is a “strong city” (10:15) that protects the rich. Money gives favor and “many friends” (14:20, 19:4). While money used well can be a blessing, it can also be used corruptly. The rich abuse wealth to rule over the poor (22:7) and pervert justice through bribery (17:8, 17:23). Although wealth is valuable, it is limited. While the rich may perceive it to be “a high wall” (18:11), some may not realize that “those who trust in riches will fall” (11:28).
2. If you want money, you must work for it.

A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like a robber and want like an armed man. (Prov. 6:10-11, see also Prov. 24:33-34)

Money doesn’t come easily. While many dream of winning the lottery or receiving a large inheritance, that is the exception, not the rule. Economics teaches us the principle of scarcity: there are limited resources, and so everything comes at a cost. Growing money requires faithful, diligent, patient work. Proverbs teaches that “the hand of the diligent makes rich” (10:4) and “in all toil there is profit” (14:23). It requires patience to gather wealth slowly, “little by little” (13:11). On the other hand, those who are lazy (6:10-11, 12:24) and eager to get rich (28:20) cheat themselves. The one who procrastinates “is a brother to him who destroys” (18:9), with his own desires killing him (21:25).
3. Don’t fall for a “get-rich-quick” scheme; ill-gotten gain always comes back to bite.

Such are the ways of everyone who is greedy for unjust gain; it takes away the life of its possessors. (Prov. 1:19)

Bribery, theft, dishonest business practices, fraud, lies—the media provides example after example of dishonest means to get ahead. And it isn’t just “out there”; most of us face the danger of being defrauded or temptation to cut corners at work. And yet, wealth gained in such a way will become a curse. It does “not profit” (10:2), “will dwindle” (13:11), “brings troubles” (15:27), is a “fleeting vapor and a snare of death” (21:6) and leads to poverty (28:22). Our righteous God “will by no means clear the guilty” (Exod. 34:7), including those guilty of financial crimes.
4. Plan ahead, plan ahead, plan ahead.

Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure. (Prov. 4:26)

Planning ahead for your finances cannot be overstated. The wise save to take care of needs down the road (21:20). Diligent, thoughtful planning leads to “abundance” (21:5). Planning involves being realistic about your financial situation. Idle talk (14:23) and wishful thinking (28:19) lead only to poverty and want. The wise plan ahead to avoid dangers into which the simple keep going (22:3). Since “riches do not last forever,” careful thought and attention are required to provide for yourself and your family (27:23-27).
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The resolutions about money, sex, and power aren’t all that surprising, or even probing. This deadly trio, while ruinous, does not represent the deepest sins of the heart. They are manifestations of unbelief and rebellion, but they grow in the soil of “the great evil,” as C.S. Lewis calls it: pride. So, it’s actually this third resolution — the one that many eyes might overlook — that may be the most preceptive and profound, the most searching, the most unexpected and significant of the four: to not talk down churches and pastors.

Ever heard of Elmer Gantry?
If not — or if the name only vaguely rings a bell — then you might, like many today, lack an important bit of context for understanding the origins of the so-called “Billy Graham Rule.”
The choice of the singular “Rule” also may represent two additional misunderstandings. Graham and his three closest ministry associates made four resolutions, not one — and importantly, they did not call them rules (to enforce on others) but resolutions (embraced for their own lives). Graham says it was an “informal understanding among ourselves.”
Just as He Was
In his autobiography, Just as I Am, published in 1997, Graham himself tells the story of the beginning of the now (in)famous “Rule” that bears his name. During a two-week crusade in Modesto, California, in October of 1948, the 29-year-old Graham found himself at a critical juncture.
He had been working as an evangelist for a large and long-established ministry called Youth for Christ. Now, he was beginning to launch out on his own, to begin a new work as an independent evangelist, and he and his team felt the weight of the public scrutiny they’d be under. And they longed not to become, or even appear to be, what characterized some evangelists in the first half of the twentieth century. They heard their share of stories, and personally knew evangelists whose “success” became devastating. Such men slid from one small degree of compromise to the next in their desires for money, power, and illicit sex, all under the cloak of Christian ministry and seeming fruitfulness.
Graham and his team were not the only ones aware of such stories. Twenty years before, in 1927, author Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) — the “red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds,” as H.L. Mencken called him — published the satirical novel Elmer Gantry, dedicated to Mencken, his fellow satirist. The title character was a narcissistic, womanizing evangelist. And the book was as a sensation.
On the one hand, it was banned in Boston and denounced by evangelist Billy Sunday, Graham’s forerunner, as “Satan’s cohort.” On the other, it became the bestselling fiction work of 1927. And this just two years after the 1925 “Scopes monkey trial,” reported on by Mencken, as part of the growing social critique of “fundamentalist” Christianity. (The fictional Gantry would make another pop culture appearance in the 1960 summer film bearing his name, introducing the character, and his notorious lack of character, to yet another generation.)
Hallmark of Integrity
In the fall of 1948, as Graham contemplated leaving the security of a respected and rooted ministry to found his own evangelistic association, he saw an imposing obstacle on the horizon: “the recurring problems many evangelists seemed to have, and . . . the poor image so-called mass evangelism had in the eyes of many people.” Then he adds, “Sinclair Lewis’s fictional character Elmer Gantry unquestionably had given traveling evangelists a bad name” (127).
Importantly, Graham says these resolutions among the four founders “did not mark a radical departure for us; we had always held these principles.” Yet the act of resolving, and doing so together, had purpose and effect. “It did,” he says, “settle in our hearts and minds, once and for all, the determination that integrity would be the hallmark of both our lives and our ministry” (129). (The 500-word section in Graham’s autobiography on the four resolutions is available online at billygraham.org.)
First Up: Money
What, then, were these four resolutions (rather than one rule) that made up the “Modesto Manifesto,” as Graham and his team came to call it?
First, they renounced “the temptation to wring as much money as possible out of an audience.” I’m not aware of any public outcry then or today against this first resolve. Traveling evangelists had little accountability in those days.
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In an embedded conference lecture, delivered last fall, Vines warns that the goals of queer theorists are at odds with the goals of the Reformation Project. “We don’t need to ‘queer’ the Bible,” he says. “We just need to interpret it more accurately and faithfully. And we don’t need to ‘queer’ the church.” Where the Reformation Project argues for normalizing LGBTQ people in the Church, queer theorists want to do away with sexual norms altogether. 

Twelve years ago, a college student named Matthew Vines exploded onto the faith and culture scene with his hour-long lecture “The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality.” The viral speech was delivered to his home church in Wichita, Kan., presenting a revisionist case for affirming the goodness of same-sex romance. Vines had taken two years out of his Harvard studies to research the presentation, which doubled as a personal testimony about growing up same-sex attracted in an evangelical home. This quickly established him as the progressive poster boy in the evangelical “gay wars,” with his work drawing major press coverage in outlets like the New York Times and TIME. He went on to write a book (God and the Gay Christian, in 2014) and found a non-profit (The Reformation Project, established in 2016), which are frequently cited as valuable resources by other progressive voices.
So, imagine my surprise when I discovered that Vines has recently been coming under heavy fire … from the left.
The criticism was sparked by a new statement on the Reformation Project’s website, titled “Reform vs. Revolution.” The statement is crafted to draw a sharp distinction between “affirming theology” and “queer theology.”
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