Hi, and welcome to the Five Word Prayers Daily, a five-day-a-week daily devotional where we share the word, prayers, and our heart.

I'm Lisa Whittle, and I welcome you to just five minutes with me, which I trust and pray will be five minutes well spent.

Continuing our series today, the struggle is real, and today's topic is certainly a struggle for many of us.

I recently asked my social media family, what's one of your

biggest struggles? And I was overwhelmed by how many people answered money. I don't know why,

but I wasn't expecting that one really. But certainly in our family's life, in my family's life,

in our marriage, finances have not been easy. We've had some deep valleys and some smoother times.

And listen, compared to many in the world,

I know we are rich, though we're of average class financially. But regardless of where any of

us are, money is something so many of us struggle with. How to manage it, how to feel about it,

what God thinks about it, the whole thing. I want to talk about it a little on today's show,

so here we go.

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 pains. First Timothy 610.

It's a familiar verse that often gets misquoted, misunderstood, and just generally

abused, I think. Most commonly is when people leave out the words love of and just say,

money is the root of all evil and leave it at that. Money is not evil in and of itself. We know this,

right? Because we survive off making money and using money to pay for food

and a mortgage and things like this. Money does not have a soul, so it can't be evil in and of itself.

It's the love of money, the desire for it, which causes us to walk away from God or compromise

our faith. It's that over-attention to it, that lure of something that contain our focus

on holiness and instead cause us to do things we would have never otherwise done. Listen, the love

...