Augustine of Hippo: Saving for children teaches them avarice; instead, share generously and teach them to trust God to provide for their needs

From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. Jeremiah 6:13

“Don’t be sparing of transitory treasures, of vain wealth. Don’t increase your money under the guise of family piety. “I’m saving it for my children”; a marvelous excuse! He’s saving it for his children. Let’s see, shall we? Your Father saves it for you, you save it for your children, your children for their children, and so on through the generations, and no one of them is going to carry out the commandments of God. Why don’t you rather pay it all over to Him who made you out of nothing? The One who made you is the One who feeds you with the things he made; He is the one who also feeds your children. You don’t, after all, do better by entrusting your sons to patrimony for support, than to your Creator. Any anyhow, people are just lying. Avarice is evil. They want to cover up and whitewash themselves with a name for family piety so that they may appear to be saving up for their children what in fact they are saving up for avarice.”


Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, (354-430) Sermon 9.20 trans. Daniel Doyle and Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 2007).

“It takes work to give. To pay attention when someone speaks, you must concentrate; to make a donation to a charity, you must not only earn the money but, as a wise giver, you must research the charity before writing the check; to help in the soup kitchen, you must…well, set aside time and help. Often we are simply too comfortable to give; we’d rather play, be entertained, or just plain do nothing…It will come as no surprise then that we need God to better ourselves as givers. If we are good givers to the extent that we echo God’s giving, then only God can reverse the ill effects that selfishness, pride, and sloth have on giving.”

Miroslav Volf in Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005) 100.

“Often we are inclined to give, give, and give without asking anything in return…When we keep giving without receiving we burn out quickly. Only when we pay careful attention to our own physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs can we be, and remain, joyful givers. There is a time to give and a time to receive. We need equal time for both if we want to live healthy lives.”

Henri Nouwen in Bread for the Journey, entry for July 11 (SanFrancisco: Harper, 1997).

Share with God’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality. Romans 12:13

“Paul is urging the Roman Christians to…come to the aid of such people, but this will certainly be in no condescending manner but as being one with them…

Christian hospitality must inconvenience us more than that of the world; we do not choose our time or our guests.

Paul is not advocating pleasant social exercise among friends, but the use of one’s home to help even people we do not know, if that will advance God’s cause.

Leon Morris and Franz Leenhardt in The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988) 448.

“Consumerism confronts North American Christians as a central problem of our lives. It presents the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance on the one hand, and the power of our belief in scarcity on the other hand. Scarcity works on fear that God’s grace will run out. It assumes that money is security and that there won’t be enough resources for all. Based on market economics, scarcity begins not with our limited needs but with our unlimited wants. As long as we believe that more is always better, we will never have enough…Jesus revealed the reign of God as a different kind of economy, one that is infused with abundance and self-giving generosity. Living out our gratitude, we are called to trust God’s generosity.”

Walter Brueggemann in “The Liturgy of Abundance, the Myth of Scarcity” in The Christian Century, March 24-31, 1999: 342-347.

“There is no room in Christianity for people who are unwilling to give of themselves, and this statement is made in love and for the sake of people themselves.”

Richard Byfield and James Shaw in Your Money and Your God (Garden City: Doubleday, May 1959) 55-56.

“When the funds are not coming in and the budget is not being met in the church, several temptations arise. One is to condemn and exhort the misers by publishing a list of contributions; another is to seek to squeeze out a bigger flow of funds by some new and more clever fundraising approach. The proper strategy is always to dig deeper and to use the Gospel, God’s dynamite, to blast open the way to an inexhaustible underground river of God’s grace.”

Harry G. Coiner in “The Secret of God’s Plan,” Concordia Theological Monthly XXXIV, no. 5 (May 1963): 274.

“There is no shortage of money in the church. There is a shortage of good stewardship. One of the obvious needs of congregations and of denominations is to overcome financial crises. Yet, the great predicament in the church is not a lack of finances, but a lack of stewardship understanding and training in God’s Word, which alone provides the direction and power for Christian giving. Provide a person with understanding, and he (or she) will likely make a proper response through the Spirit’s guidance.”

Waldo J. Werning in Christian Stewards: Confronted and Committed (St. Louis: Concordia, 1982) 1.

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. Mark 8:34-35

“I have experienced the fullness of one of the great paradoxes: We find ourselves only when we lose ourselves, in God.”

Charles Colson with Harold Fickett in The Good Life: Seeking Purpose, Meaning and Truth in Your Life (Tyndale, 2005) 132.

“It was at Drainside, Taylor learned one can trust God with his last cent. He had been called out late one night to witness to and pray over a sick woman with starving children. As he tried to pray, his words choked in his mouth because he had in his possession a silver coin that would answer his prayer and alleviate their sufferings somewhat.

“Hypocrite!” he heard his heart condemn him. “Telling people about a kind and loving Father in Heaven—and not prepared to trust Him yourself, without your money!” He gave them his last coin—only one bowl of porridge between him and poverty! As he ate that last meal he remembered the Scripture, “He that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord.”

The next day he received a package. In it was a gold coin—worth ten times the silver coin. Taylor cried out triumphantly, “That’s good interest! Ha! Ha! Invested in God’s bank for twelve hours and it brings me this! That’s the bank for me!”

J. Hudson Taylor: Pioneer Missionary (1832-1905) in Missionary Biographies by Fred Barlow (Profiles in Evangelism, 1976).