“Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain.”
Proverbs 30:8-9 (KJV)
The direct deposit landed a little bigger this month, and for about ten minutes it felt like room to breathe. Then the mind got to work. A newer phone. The car payment you could trade up into. The trip the neighbors just posted about online. By the time the coffee was gone, the raise had already been spent three times over in your head, and the breathing room was gone with it. Money has a strange way of feeling like too little the moment there is a little more of it.
Long before pay stubs and banking apps, a man named Agur wrote down one of the most honest money prayers in all of Scripture. He did not ask God to make him wealthy, and he did not ask to be kept poor. He asked for something quieter. "Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me." That last phrase simply means daily provision, the amount that actually fits his need. He was asking God for enough.
Read the reason he gives, because it is the heart of the matter. He feared that riches might let him grow full and forget God, until he could say, "Who is the LORD?" And he feared that being poor might drive him to steal and so dishonor the name of his God. Notice what the prayer does not say. It does not call wealth a sin, and it does not treat a full pantry as an offense to heaven. Money is not the villain here. The danger is the pull it has on the heart, in either direction, away from the God who gives it.
Put it in this morning's terms. Say a raise takes your pay from $52,000 to $61,000, an extra $9,000 a year, or about $750 a month. There is nothing wrong with a raise, and providing well for your household is good and right. But there are two quiet ways to handle that $750. One is to let all of it disappear into a bigger everything, a nicer version of what you already owned, until the larger paycheck somehow feels exactly as tight as the smaller one did. The other is to decide first what enough looks like, and then choose on purpose where the difference goes. Some toward what you owe. Some toward what you are saving. Some toward a person who has less than you do this morning.
Agur was really praying for a line, a fixed sense of how much is enough, so that more money would become freedom instead of a faster treadmill. When you know where your enough sits, an increase stops being a threat to your peace and starts becoming a tool in your hands. Without that line, no raise is ever quite big enough, because the wanting always grows to match the having.
Today's faithful move: Write down one honest enough number today, the monthly amount that genuinely covers your real needs in a single category such as groceries, transportation, or housing, and decide that any dollar above that line will have a job you choose on purpose rather than a job the culture chooses for you.
You do not have to fear being poor, and you do not have to chase being rich. The same God who feeds the sparrows outside your window has promised to give His children exactly what they need.
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