Greed is easy to spot in other people and nearly invisible on your own receipts. That gap is what this week is for. The question is practical: how can you actually see whether money is serving you or you are serving it? You will not settle it by reflecting harder. You will settle it by watching what you do. For seven days you will slow down your purchases long enough to name what drives them. Then you will ask whether your church could carry a need that is too heavy for one person.
You can work through this alone in about four short sittings. A small group can use it in two meetings, one to launch the week and one to debrief. Everything you write down belongs to you. Nobody needs to report dollar amounts, debts or balances to anyone.
Before the week begins: write down your starting answer
Take two minutes and answer this in a sentence or two: Do I have a problem with greed? Add one sentence explaining why you answered that way. Keep the page. You will come back to it on day seven.
Most people answer from a picture in their head. Greedy people are rich, flashy or cruel to employees. If that picture does not match your life, the answer feels like an easy no. Dr. Malcolm Foley, special advisor to Baylor’s President for Equity and Campus Engagement, co-pastor of Mosaic Waco and author of The Anti-Greed Gospel, suggests the picture is part of the problem. In his conversation with Lisa Fields on the Jude 3 Project podcast, he observes that “most Christians are not actually being equipped to deal with it.” Instead, he says, “We’re trained to play games with it, or to act like it’s just normal.”
You cannot repent of what you have filed under normal. The purchase discipline exists to pull ordinary decisions back out of that file.
Read Matthew 6:19-34 as one argument
Read the passage straight through once. Then read it again with a pen. This is teaching, not narrative, and the paragraphs are meant to connect.
Three verses form the spine. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21). “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). “Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on” (Matthew 6:25). In KJV English, “take no thought” means do not be anxious. Mammon is wealth treated as a master.
- Circle every word in verses 19-24 that has to do with ownership or loyalty. What picture of money do they build together?
- Underline “Therefore” in verse 25. Read verse 25 directly after verse 24 and say out loud how the second follows from the first.
- List what Jesus promises in verses 26-33 and what he does not promise. Be exact.
Foley reads that “Therefore” as the hinge of the passage. He says “there’s this close link between mammon, worship of mammon and anxiety and fear.” In his reading, the frantic pursuit of more is fueled by “the fear of poverty,” and he argues that fear runs down to the fear of death. If he is right, greed often feels less like desire and more like self-protection. That is a claim to test this week, not one to assume.
Your list of promises matters here. Matthew 6:33 says “all these things shall be added unto you,” and in context “these things” are food and clothing. Foley’s comment is plain: “The Lord will provide for you what you need.” The passage offers provision and freedom from anxiety. It does not promise wealth.
What the week is designed to catch
Foley’s conversation suggests three ways greed hides inside responsible-looking choices. Each becomes a label for your list.
Fear. Some purchases, and some refusals to give, are really attempts to feel safe. Lisa Fields names the belief underneath: we chase money “really because we think money is going to be our salvation.”
Habit. This is the normalization Foley describes, spending you no longer notice because it is simply what you do.
Inflation. Foley warns against “the temptation toward lifestyle inflation, where just the more that I get, the more I tell myself I need.” Your definition of need quietly rises with your income, so what you buy always feels necessary.
Against those three he sets one test: “if I have more than I need, then that’s actually meant to meet the needs of others.” The week is built so you can see where your own line between need and more actually sits.
The strongest objection: isn’t saving just wisdom?
Before you start, give the best counterargument its full weight. Scripture commends planning. Proverbs 6:6-8 holds up the ant that gathers food in summer against the coming season, and 1 Timothy 5:8 treats providing for your own household as a duty. For families who were shut out of wealth, building savings can look like justice rather than greed. Foley does not dispute this. He says sharing does not negate wisely stewarding what you have.
So the live question is what separates a faithful plan from fear-driven hoarding. Some marks worth testing: Does the plan have a point where it is enough? Can it coexist with open hands toward a neighbor in need? Is it held before God or in place of him? Paul draws his own line this way: “And having food and raiment let us be therewith content” (1 Timothy 6:8), followed by “But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare” (1 Timothy 6:9). “They that will be rich” is older English for those who want to be rich. The warning targets a desire, not a balance, so it reaches people with little money too. It is also no accusation against someone budgeting carefully to survive.
The seven-day discipline
Before day one, set a threshold: a dollar amount below which you will not stop to think. Make it low enough to catch more than rent and car payments, and high enough that you are not logging every pack of gum. Keep a note on your phone or a card in your wallet with four columns: item, amount, label, and one line of honest explanation.
Each time you are about to spend above your threshold, pause and ask: Am I buying this out of need, fear, habit, or because my sense of need has crept upward? Write the label. You can still make the purchase. The discipline asks you to notice, not to refuse.
- Days 1 and 2: Record only. Do not evaluate. If you catch yourself defending a purchase in your head, write the defense down too. It is data.
- Day 3: Watch for fear, and test the reading. Notice purchases you made and money you held back. Did a worry speak before you gave? What exactly was it? Then write what would have to be true for the fear reading to be wrong in your case: a purchase you made calmly that still looks excessive, or a worry that turns out on reflection to be ordinary prudence.
- Day 4: Read 1 Timothy 6:6-11. Next to your list, write your own honest version of “enough” for one category, such as clothing, eating out or subscriptions.
- Day 5: Test your inflation. Pick one item you labeled “need.” Would you have called it a need three years ago? Mark any that have moved.
- Day 6: Make one material act of love. Read 1 John 3:17-18. Find one concrete need in someone’s life, a person and not a cause, and meet it with money, goods or time. Foley draws his definition from this passage: “love is always a material investment in your neighbor.” Telling anyone is optional.
- Day 7: Read the list without defending it. Count the labels. Look for one pattern: a time of day, a mood, a category, a person. Then pull out the sentence you wrote before the week began.
If pausing starts to feel like losing control, write that down too. It belongs on the list.
The communal test: could your church carry a need?
Personal tracking can reveal a pattern. It cannot fix the deepest one Foley names. He observes that many people stay in toxic or exploitative jobs because they believe “the only person who cares about me and cares about my family is me.” In his account, the answer to that belief is a community, not a spending log.
He points to the early church in Acts 2 and 4, where believers shared their material goods. Acts 4:34 records the result: “Neither was there any among them that lacked.” Foley stresses that this happened because needs were voiced in a community committed to meeting them, where a person could realize, “wait a minute, I’m not the only one who cares whether or not my children eat.” Lisa Fields put it in her own words when she imagined God’s reply to our drive for self-sufficiency: “I’ve rigged your life. So you would need people.”
Foley names two habits a church has to build: the willingness to ask for help, and the conviction that “God only gives to us in order for us to share.” The exercise below works on both.
For the second gathering
Whoever facilitates should say plainly at the start that nobody will be asked for numbers, debts or specific purchases, and that passing is always fine.
First, invite each person to name one label that showed up more than they expected, explaining only if they want to. Record the labels on a sheet everyone can see, without names.
Second, list the kinds of needs people in your congregation actually face: car repairs, childcare, rent gaps, groceries at the end of the month, a job loss. For each, ask honestly: If someone here brought this to us, what would actually happen? Would they know whom to tell? Would anyone respond within a week? Would they feel embarrassed for asking?
Third, choose one small structure the group will actually put in place: a private way to voice needs, a shared fund, a rotation for meals or rides. Foley frames this kind of sharing not as a judgment on outsiders but as a witness that the world does not have to submit to mammon.
Someone who finds a lot of “fear” on their list may be carrying real strain. Follow up privately and kindly. And if the talk drifts toward criticizing rich people somewhere else, bring it back to your own room.
Questions for discussion
- Which label showed up most on your list, and did that surprise you? Answer only as much as you want to.
- Did your week support Foley’s link between money and anxiety, complicate it, or neither? What did your day-three test turn up?
- Where has your definition of “need” moved over the past few years? Is any of that movement legitimate, and how would you tell?
- Using 1 Timothy 6:8-9 and the marks above, where would you now draw the line between faithful saving and fear-driven hoarding?
- What made the day-six act of love easy or hard? What did it cost you, if anything?
- If someone in your church voiced a serious financial need next Sunday, what do you honestly think would happen? What would have to change for Acts 4:34 to describe you?
Back to your first answer
Return to the sentence you wrote before the week began. Do not rewrite it. Underneath, write a second sentence that begins with what you now know about yourself that you did not know seven days ago. It may confirm your first answer. It may not.
Foley asks groups, “how often do you hear sermons about greed?” He says the usual answer is “not very often.” If the pulpit rarely names it, the naming has to happen somewhere else, in lists like yours and in rooms like your group’s. So carry one question past this week: who in your life would you trust with a need, and who trusts you with theirs?