The Most Misquoted Verse in Business
I have heard it in boardrooms. I have heard it in church hallways. I have heard it from people who have never cracked a Bible in their lives, offered up as a reason to feel guilty about wanting more.
The text most people quote goes like this: money is the root of all evil.
Except that is not what it says.
The actual text, from 1 Timothy 6:10, reads: For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.
One small change. A world of difference.
The biblical warning is not against wealth. It is against a particular posture of the heart: the one where money becomes the thing you orient your entire life around. Where acquiring it, protecting it, and displaying it crowds out everything else. Where it becomes your identity and your security and your god, in the most literal sense of that word.
When I started building companies in my twenties in Utah, I carried a quiet guilt about wanting financial success. Good women, I had absorbed somewhere, were not supposed to want that. Ambition was coded as selfishness. Profit was coded as greed. The faith tradition I grew up in had complicated feelings about wealthy women especially.
It took me sitting with scripture on my own, reading past the pew-filtered version I had been handed, to realize that the Bible has a far more nuanced, and frankly far more demanding, view of money than the idea that it is bad and you should feel bad for wanting it.
Here is what the text actually says.
Stewardship: The Core Principle That Changes Everything
If you want one word that holds the entire biblical framework for money together, it is this: stewardship.
The idea appears throughout scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, and it rests on a single foundational claim. Everything you have, your money, your time, your skills, your land, your relationships, belongs to God. You are the manager, not the owner. You are holding assets on behalf of someone else, for a purpose that extends beyond your own comfort or status.
This is not a comfortable framing. It is actually more demanding than giving everything away. Because stewardship means you are accountable for what you do with what you have been given.
If you bury your resources and produce nothing, that is not humility. According to the text we are about to look at, it is failure.
If you hoard them and build walls around them and serve them rather than deploying them for good, that is not prudence. That is the very idolatry the scriptures warn about.
And if you deploy them well, multiply them, use them generously, and hold them with an open hand, that is faithfulness.
Stewardship does not make wealth a sin. It makes wealth a test.
The Parable of the Talents: A Mandate to Build
Matthew 25 contains one of the most misread parables in the New Testament, particularly in faith communities that are uncomfortable with ambition.
The story: a man going on a journey entrusts his servants with sums of money (talents) according to their abilities. One receives five, one receives two, one receives one. The first two go out and double what they were given. The third, afraid of losing what he had, buries his in the ground for safekeeping.
When the master returns, he praises the two who multiplied what they received. He calls them faithful and promotes them. To the one who buried his talent, he gives a different response. He calls him wicked and lazy. He takes the talent and gives it to the servant who already has ten.
This parable is not about money in a narrow sense. It is about every gift, every resource, every opportunity you have been given. But it is also, plainly, about money. And the message is unmistakable: you are expected to deploy what you are given, not just protect it.
Safe is not the goal. Fruitfulness is.
The servant who played it safe did not lose anything in the obvious sense. He returned what he was handed, intact. But the master judgment was not: you kept it safe, well done. It was the opposite. The sin was not risk. The sin was inaction.
I think about this every time I am in a room with someone (often a woman, often a woman of faith) who has real talent, real resources, real opportunity, and who is quietly holding it back because she has been told somewhere that wanting to multiply what she has is unseemly. That paragraph was written for you too.
The Proverbs 31 Woman Nobody Talks About Fully
The Proverbs 31 woman gets quoted at bridal showers and Mother Day sermons. People lift the verses about her household, her family, her husband trusting her. What gets left on the table is the part where she is a fully operational entrepreneur and investor.
She considers a field and buys it. She plants a vineyard from her earnings. She sees that her trading is profitable. She makes linen garments and sells them. She supplies merchants.
This woman is running multiple revenue streams, making capital allocation decisions, building a small business, and doing real estate deals. All described approvingly, in scripture, as part of what it looks like to be a woman of strength and wisdom.
I am not making a self-serving argument here. I am just reading the text.
The idea that ambition in business and faithfulness in life cannot coexist is not biblical. It is cultural. Sometimes it is well-meaning tradition. Sometimes it is fear. But it is not the text.
Proverbs on Diligence: Work as Dignity
Proverbs has more to say about work ethic than almost any other part of scripture. The lazy person who sleeps through planting season and then wonders why there is nothing to harvest. The diligent hand that brings wealth. The person skilled in their work will serve before kings.
This is not prosperity gospel, the brand of theology that promises God will make you rich if you believe hard enough. Proverbs is more honest than that. It acknowledges seasons of hardship. It warns against easy money and quick schemes. It holds diligence and wisdom together as a package, not as a magic formula.
But the core conviction is clear: work is dignifying, not degrading. The Bible does not romanticize poverty or idleness. It honors the person who shows up, does the work, and does it with integrity.
For me, that landed practically. It meant the fifteen-plus years of showing up, building companies, managing real estate, and recording episodes of The Broker Table when I was tired were not in tension with faith. They were an expression of it.
Generosity: The Other Half of the Equation
None of what I have said above is a license to accumulate and keep.
The biblical framework for money is not just deploy. It is deploy and give. Generosity is not an add-on to the stewardship model. It is part of the foundation.
Proverbs 11 describes one person who gives freely, yet gains even more, and another who withholds unduly and comes to poverty. This is counterintuitive in the purest sense. The tightly closed fist does not build more. The open hand does.
Throughout the Law, the Prophets, and the New Testament, the measure of a person and a community faithfulness is connected directly to how they treat people who have less. The widow, the orphan, the stranger. What you do with the margin matters.
This is not sentimental. It is structural. The ancient Jewish concept of gleaning, where farmers were instructed to leave the edges of their fields unharvested so the poor could collect food, was built into the economic system. Generosity was not left to personal virtue. It was written into the rules.
For practical application, this means: build the margin on purpose. If your financial plan has no giving built in, it is an incomplete plan. Not because giving guarantees returns (see: not prosperity gospel), but because holding resources with an open hand is part of the model, full stop.
A few things that have helped me hold this practically:
- Decide your giving percentage before the money arrives, not after. The check has a way of feeling smaller once it lands in your account.
- Give where it hurts a little. Token generosity from surplus is easy. Generosity that requires something of you is the kind the text describes.
- Stay close enough to need to care. It is easy to be generous in the abstract. Stay in rooms where you can see the actual impact of what you give.
The Warnings: When Wealth Becomes Identity
The Bible is also plainly honest about how wealth curls back around and distorts the person who holds it, if they are not careful.
Jesus says it is harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. This is a jarring image, and it is meant to be. The point is not that wealth is disqualifying. The point is that wealth builds a particular kind of insulation from dependence on God, from community, from the truth about your own fragility. The more money you have, the easier it is to believe you do not need anything you cannot buy.
This is the greed warning. Not that profit is wrong, but that profit accumulating past the point of need and into the territory of identity becomes spiritually corrosive.
I do not have a clean personal resolution to this tension. I think about it often. I try to build things that produce real value rather than chasing accumulation for its own sake. I try to stay uncomfortable enough that I remember what depending on something other than my own resources feels like. I fail at this sometimes. The temptation to build walls around what you have worked hard to build is real.
But naming the warning is part of holding it correctly.
What This Actually Looks Like in Practice
Bringing it together: if you take the full biblical framework at face value, here is what a faith-informed approach to money looks like in practical terms.
- You are a manager, not an owner. The resources in your hands are on loan for a purpose larger than your comfort.
- Deploying what you have been given is faithfulness. Playing it safe is not the default faithful position.
- Work is dignifying and diligence is honored. Showing up and doing the work well is not in tension with faith. It is an expression of it.
- Generosity is structural, not optional. Build it in before the money arrives.
- Wealth without an open hand and a watching eye is dangerous. It curls inward. Hold it loosely.
- Your identity cannot be your net worth. The moment it is, the text says you are in the exact place the warnings are about.
The Proverbs 31 woman was not apologizing for her business acumen. She was deploying it in the service of her household, her workers, and her community. The servant who doubled his five talents was not called greedy. He was called faithful.
You can be both faithful and financially serious. The text is not in conflict with your ambition. It just asks you to hold it with the right posture.
For me, that is the work. Fifteen-plus years in, I am still figuring out what it looks like day to day.
One More Thing
If this landed somewhere useful for you, two places to continue the conversation.
Operator Notes is my newsletter where I write about building companies, investing, and navigating the intersection of faith, family, and entrepreneurship. No content calendar fluff. Just what I am actually thinking about. You can subscribe at estherstowell.com.
The Broker Table is the podcast where I sit down with founders, investors, and operators who are doing the real work and telling the real story of how they built it. New episodes drop weekly. Find it wherever you listen.
Both are free. Both are worth your time, or I would not be sending them out.
