Not everything that can be measured matters and not everything that matters can be measured. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Suffice it to say that money is one measure of meaning but not the only one and definitely not the defining one in the scope of eternity. Contrary to popular belief, the one who dies with the most toys cannot enjoy them in the hereafter.

I am thinking of a couple of the world’s wealthiest men who recently divorced their wives after decades of marriage and multiple children, only to chase after more fleeting signifiers of success. As Jenny Odell writes in Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, “Productivity is not the ultimate measure of the meaning or value of time. To imagine a different ‘point’ means also imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside the world of work and profit.”

With tax filing time upon us all, it is tempting to think of our self worth in terms of our net worth but that is wrong. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud wrote, “It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement—that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”

And finally, author Craig Lambert writes in Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day, “Is time really money? Money’s value is real yet unquestionably finite. Work has many rewards, both spiritual and material. Time, in contrast, is ineffable, and its value infinite. Time is life. Now abide work, money, time, these three; but the greatest of these is time.” I could not have said it better myself!

Speaking from experience, money is a wonderful servant but a zealous master. As Scripture states, we must work to live, not live to work. It is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Linda and I have strived to live debt free our entire marriage and it has paid rich dividends for us. And a “money mantra” that we have adopted is: “Our bills are paid, our debt is retired, our taxes are accounted for, and we have savings to invest.”