Quote Source – Jarrod Scott
Money makes a lousy god and a decent tool. Flip that order—make it your god—and something ugly happens fast: the people around you start looking like assets, obstacles, or line items. Jarrod Scott’s line names that reversal with a precision most sermons take twenty minutes to reach.
Notice the quote doesn’t warn against having money or loving people intensely—it warns about which one you’re willing to sacrifice for the other. That’s the test. When the bank balance and the relationship both need your loyalty, only one wins.
The Heart Behind the Wallet
Jesus put it plainly: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” (Matthew 6:24) He wasn’t talking about accounting. He was talking about allegiance. Money has a way of promising security, control, and freedom—the very things only God is actually able to deliver. When it becomes the master, everything and everyone downstream gets evaluated by what they can produce.
What the Bible Says About Money’s Pull
Paul’s warning to Timothy doesn’t blame money itself; it blames the love of it, and traces the wreckage that follows.
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. [1 Timothy 6:10]
That word “pierced” is not decorative. Paul is describing self-inflicted wounds—the kind you get from treating relationships as transactions long enough that eventually nobody trusts you, including yourself.
People Are Not a Means to an End
Scripture keeps circling back to this: people carry the image of God (Genesis 1:27), which makes using them a kind of small blasphemy, whether you’d ever call it that or not. Paul’s description of love could double as a definition of the opposite of using someone: love “does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful” (1 Corinthians 13:5). Every con artist, every manipulative boss, every parent who calls only when they need something is running the same operating system Jesus warned about. The reversal Scott names—love people, use money—only works if people are worth more than what they can do for you. That’s not sentiment. That’s theology. It rests on the fact God loved people enough to spend His own Son on them (John 3:16), not to gain something from us, but to give.
Living the Reversal
This isn’t just a warning for the wealthy. Somebody scraping by can love money just as hard as somebody with a portfolio; the temptation doesn’t care about your tax bracket. The question worth asking this week: when a person and a purchase compete for your resources, which one usually wins? Stewardship, at its core, is money serving relationships instead of relationships serving money. Get that order right and everything else—budgets, generosity, work, rest—starts falling into place behind it.
Salvation – Eternal Life in Less Than 150 Words
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