Who’s Serving Who? (Hix)

Matthew 6:24-“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.

Have you ever been in a situation at work, when you had two supervisors, or two bosses or (like me had a father and son who was my boss) telling you to do two different things, disagreeing about how you should do it. Talk about frustrating!

Your relationship with God is an exclusive relationship.

There’s a throne in your heart that is only big enough for one.

Either Christ is on the throne or money is on the throne, but both cannot occupy that throne!

Now "mammon" is an Aramaic word which literally means "confidence", one's confidence in riches.

Jesus will refer to such things as clothing, food, and drink.

His list was not exhaustive, but more in the way of examples.

But in our world there are some powerful distractions, some types of mammon, that can enter our life.

That would include cars, boats, houses, travel-trailers, trips, relationships, and anything else of this world on which people might focus themselves and their lives upon.

Jesus chose the universal and most frequent focus of human concern (Wealth or riches) to make His point.

When you see a dog following two men as long as they walk together, you do not know of which of them the dog belongs but let them come to a parting road and there separate from each other. It will soon be seen who is the owner, for the dog will follow his master, wherever he goes.

An individual may pursue the world and God at the same time, and it may even be hard for people to tell, if God or the world has that persons heart. But sooner or later that person comes to a fork in the road, where God calls him one way and the world calls him another way. But if God is his master, he will follow Him, but if the world is his master, he will follow the world, and in doing that he will show who is his master!

The Reason God Doesn’t Have Some People’s Wallets Is Because He Doesn’t Have Their Hearts.

A man in New York City had a wife who had a cat. Actually, the cat had her. She loved the cat. She stroked it, combed its fur, fed it, and pampered it. The man detested the cat. He was allergic to cat hair; he hated the smell of the litter box; he couldn’t stand the scratching on the furniture; and he couldn’t get a good night’s sleep because the cat kept jumping on the bed. When his wife was out of town for the weekend, he put the cat in a bag with some rocks, dumped it in the Hudson River, and uttered a joyful goodbye to the cat. When his wife returned and could not find her cat, she was overwhelmed with grief. Her husband said, “Look, honey, I know how much that cat meant to you. I’m going to put an ad in the paper and give a reward of $500 to anyone who finds the cat.” No cat showed up, so a few days later he said, “Honey, you mean more to me than anything on earth. If that cat is precious to you, it is precious to me. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll buy another ad and up the ante. We’ll increase the reward to $1000.” A friend saw the ad and exclaimed, “You must be nuts; there isn’t a cat on earth that is worth $1000.” The man replied, “Well, when you know what I know, you can afford to be generous.”

If you understanding about our treasures and what will last and what will fade away, you can afford to be generous with what you have down here!