I Timothy 6:9-10

So there are unique dangers involved in the love of money, and most of us are well aware of what they are. But William Barclay, in his commentary, expresses the dangers in five points.

1. The desire for money tends to be an insatiable thirst. There is a Roman proverbial saying that wealth is like sea water. So far from quenching a man's thirst, it intensifies it. The more he gets, the more he wants.

2. The desire for wealth is founded on an illusion. It is founded on the desire for security, but wealth cannot buy security. It cannot buy health nor real love, and it cannot preserve from sorrow and death. Security founded on material things is doomed to failure.

3. The desire for money tends to make a man selfish. If the desire for wealth drives him, it is nothing to him that someone has to lose so that he may gain. The desire for wealth fixes a man's thoughts upon himself, and others become merely means or obstacles in the path to his enrichment. True, that need not happen, but it often does.

4. Although the desire for wealth is based on the desire for security, it ends in nothing but anxiety. The more a man has to keep, the more he has to lose, and the tendency is for him to be haunted by the risk of loss.

5. The love of money may easily lead a man into wrong ways of getting it, and therefore, in the end, into pain and remorse that is true even physically. So he may push his body too hard in his drive to succeed, risking his health. He might realize too late the damage he has caused to others and feel burdened with remorse.