Agur’s prayer

Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God. (Proverbs 30:8-9) 

The verses mentioned above is the prayer of a man called Agur. Agur classifies men into three types. Firstly, people who disown God because of self-conceiting in wealth. Secondly, people who dishonor the name of God by stealing because of poverty. Thirdly, people who live lovable to God by receiving only for their needs. 

There are thousands of witnesses both in the Bible and in reality saying how wealth and poverty separate man from God. Let us see what truly separates man from God at the end of this article. But is it true that those who receive from God only what they need will love Him sincerely?

Not really! When God guided Israelites in the wilderness for forty years, he nurtured each of them by giving their measures. What we should know is, except Caleb and Joshua, everyone of them, subjected to the wrath of God and died in the wilderness. 

Therefore, the statement that getting our measures from God will help us to be together with him, is not true practically. It was said by Agur, not by God. 

We see a lot of people in the Bible who honestly served God despite being wealthy, which includes our forefathers in the Old Testament, women who served Christ through their own means (Luke 8:3), Cornelius, Philemon, and many other societal Nobles. 

Similarly, there are people who served God without disowning him despite their poverty, for instance, Job in the Old Testament, people of Macedonian church who gave generously inspite of extreme poverty, people like C. T. Studd, who shunned riches for the sake of God and travelled to poor countries as a missionary, and many more saintly ones of the last century. They sought God when they were wealthy and did not care about the riches, for they loved serving the Almighty God. 

What do we learn from this? The one who serves God will never change his love towards God because of the circumstances, be it poverty, riches or contention. The one who serves materialism, considers God secondly, in prosperity, misery, even when he is nurtured sufficiently. These are the ones who disown God in prosperity, dishonor the name of God because of thieving when they are caught in misery. 

This is why Christ Jesus says, “You cannot serve both God and money.” (Luke 16:13) 

The depth of our relationship with God is determined not by our financial state, but by our mental state! Heart matters!