The Only Man in the Bible Who Asked for Neither

There is exactly one prayer in Scripture where somebody asks God about their income level, and almost nobody has ever heard it preached.

The man's name is Agur. He gets one chapter near the end of Proverbs and then he is gone. And he opens by saying two things he wants from God before he dies, which is a strange and specific way to pray, and then he names them.

The first one is honesty. Keep lies far from me.

The second one is this: give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with food that is right for me.

Both. He is scared of both. He is not asking for the safe middle because he lacks ambition and he is not asking for it because he is holy. He is asking for it because he has looked hard at both ditches and he knows what is in each one, and then he says exactly what he is afraid of in a way I have never been able to shake.

He names both dangers out loud

Here is the prayer, and the second half of it is the part nobody quotes.

Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain. (Proverbs 30:8-9, King James Version)

Lest I be full and deny thee. That is the danger everybody in my world knew about. Get comfortable, forget God, ask who the Lord is. That one got preached.

Lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain. That one never got preached anywhere I ever sat.

And it is right there, in the same breath, given the same weight, by the same man. He is saying that lack has a spiritual danger in it too, and he names it: desperation makes a person do things, and then makes them lie about God to cover it.

You have been warned about one ditch, and Scripture has never once pretended there was only one. That is not me balancing the Bible for it. Proverbs 30:9 names both dangers in a single verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person hear the half of a passage their whole tradition skipped.

What poverty actually does to a person

I want to be careful and I want to be honest, because this is the sentence people get wrong.

Agur is not saying poor people are thieves. He is not saying anything about anybody's character. He is saying something about pressure, and he is saying it about himself, in the first person, as a fear about what he might become.

Anybody who has been genuinely broke knows exactly what he means. Being short does something to a person's judgment. It shortens the horizon. It makes a bad option look reasonable at eleven at night. It makes a person defensive in rooms they used to walk into easy.

That is not a moral failure. That is what pressure does, and the man praying knows it, and rather than pretend to be above it, he asks God not to put him in that position.

You are not a weaker Christian for finding lack hard, and God has never once required you to be unbothered by it. Proverbs 30:9 has a wise man name that pressure as something to be spared from, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes shame off a person who has been quietly struggling.

The house that only taught one ditch

In the church I grew up in, we had a complete theology of the first danger and nothing at all for the second.

Everybody knew what money does to a man. Everybody had a story about somebody who got some and lost their way, and those stories were true, and they were told with real grief and not with envy. That is worth saying plainly: nobody in that room was bitter. They were watchful.

But there was no corresponding story about what the other ditch does. Nobody ever said out loud that being short has its own set of temptations. So the whole scale tilted, and a place that was really a ditch got treated like a safe road, and people settled into it and called it home.

And I have to say the fairest thing I know here: the people who taught me that were guarding something real. Money has ruined people I know. My father is not wrong about the danger he names.

He is right about the ditch he warns about. He was just never told there were two.

You are allowed to look at both sides, and honest examination has never once been disloyalty. Proverbs 30:8 asks God about both directions in one prayer, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person the freedom to think about something their family settled long ago.

Food convenient for me

Now the phrase in the middle, because it is the most freeing thing in the passage.

Feed me with food convenient for me. Not food convenient in general. For me. The old word carries the sense of a portion, an assigned share, the right measure for this particular person and their particular life.

That is not a number. It is not the same for everybody. A man with four kids and a sick parent does not have the same portion as a single man in a room, and Agur does not pretend they do. He asks God for what is appropriate to him.

Which means the prayer is not for a modest amount. It is for a right amount, and only God knows what that is for a given person on a given year.

You have a portion that is yours, and it has never once been assigned by comparison with anybody else. Proverbs 30:8 says food convenient for me and puts the measuring in God's hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who settles a person about their own portion when they are looking sideways.