Friday, May 9th
Here's Today's Devotional from The Vine...
"No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can't serve both God and Mammon. - Matthew 6:24
We had better look very carefully into the meaning of these words, remembering that it was our blessed Lord who spoke them. “Mammon” means riches. To “serve”means to be the slave of. Paul loved to call himself the servant or slave of Christ. Now Jesus says here that we cannot be God's slave and mammon's slave too. We cannot belong to any two masters at the same time. If we are mammon's slave, that ends it, we are not God's. If we belong to God, mammon is not our master.
Think, too, what a degrading thing it is for any one bearing the image of God to be the slave of money. To use the word “serve” in its mildest English sense, no man should ever be the servant of money. Riches are meant to be man's slave; now think how degrading it would be for any man to become servant or slave to his own slave. A man should be ashamed to call riches his master.
Money is meant to be man's servant, and so long as he is its perfect master it may be a blessing to him, and an instrument with which he may do great good. But when he gets down on his knees to it and crawls in the dust for its sake, and sells his manhood to get it, it is only a curse to him. Thus it is easy to see why any one who serves God cannot serve mammon. God must have all the heart and must rule in all the life. He will not share His throne with the god of gold.
God's true servants may have money, and may even be very rich, but they must use their money as a means for honoring God and blessing the world in Christ's name. They must own the money; the money must not own them. They must carry it in their hands, not in their hearts. This is a very important thing for us to learn. Many Christian people are in danger of forsaking the sweet, blessed service of Christ for the servile, slavish service of mammon.
