Over the past three weeks we’ve been wrestling with a single question: what is wealth, really?

My friend called it a snake. And the warnings behind that metaphor are deadly serious -- Jesus and Paul made that clear. But we also saw that wealth isn’t a predator by nature. God gave us the ability to create it. It can be leveraged like the sun’s warmth, spread like fertilizer, and channeled like sap into fruit that outlasts us.

So which is it?

the both-and

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: wealth is all of these things, and that’s exactly the point.

It is dangerous. The rich young ruler proved that. The fool with his barns proved that. The warnings are real, and if you skip past them, you’re the man sleeping with the snake.

But it is a tool. Zacchaeus proved that. Deuteronomy 8:18 proved that. Every missionary funded, every church planted, every family fed proves that. If you run from wealth entirely, you’re a tree refusing to grow sap -- and a tree without sap bears no fruit.

The Christian financial life is not about choosing safety or generosity. It’s about holding both in tension. Saving for legitimate future needs and giving sacrificially now. Building the tree’s root system and bearing fruit every season. Stewarding the warmth of the sun and refusing to let it pull you into orbit around itself.

Wesley called it “earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can.” That’s not three separate instructions. It’s one rhythm.

so what do you do now?

I’ll leave you with a few questions I’ve been sitting with myself. Not as a financial advisor -- as a fellow tree trying to figure out how much sap is enough and how much fruit is possible.

What would it look like to set a finish line -- a number beyond which everything gets given away?

What is one act of generosity you’ve been putting off until you “have enough”?

If your financial life is the tree, what fruit did it bear last season? And what fruit do you want it to bear next?

The snake metaphor was never wrong. It was just incomplete. Wealth can kill you. But it was also designed to flow through you -- like water through roots, into sap, out through fruit -- and into the lives of everyone your tree was made to feed.

When was the last time my generosity actually cost me something I’d rather have kept?

Are there areas of my financial life I’ve quietly asked Jesus not to touch? Or have I drawn boundaries around what counts as obedience?

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