No one can serve two masters, for either he will
hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise
the other. You cannot serve God and money. Therefore I tell you, do not be
anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about
your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more
than clothing? …
And one of them, a lawyer, asked [Jesus] a question
to test him. ‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?’ And he said
to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your
soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a
second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two
commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.’
Matthew
6:24-35 & 22:35-40
The
Sermon on the Mount is the most complete description that Jesus of Nazareth
gave of how people should live. It does not include Jesus’ statement that the
first commandment is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength,
or that the second commandment is to love our neighbours as ourselves, but that
is the sort of lifestyle described. And, at the heart of the Sermon, Jesus
identifies money as the most powerful distraction.
Jesus knew
that the most powerful rival to influence his disciples would be money. That is
why he says, ‘You cannot serve God and money’. We tend to think that God’s
great rival is the Devil, also called Satan, but nowhere does Jesus say, ‘You
cannot serve God and Satan’. We know that the Bible repeatedly warns of and
describes the devastation caused by two terrible types of sin, sexual
immorality and financial corruption, but nowhere does Jesus say, ‘You cannot
serve God and sex’.
I have
taught personal finance for the past 12 years and almost everybody wants to
know how to organise their spending and maximise their saving; very, very few want
to understand and deal with the influence money has over their choice of
career, their spending and their saving. While they may be highly tuned to
various types of sexual misbehaviour, and quick to condemn it, they are often tolerant
of avarice, covetousness, greed and other financial vices.
I
finished the previous series of Reflection, An
Idol in Israel, with the observation that Christians today may not have
only Christian-like idols, like the gold ephod that Gideon made, such as
tithing and sowing and reaping, but an idol as bold and as uncompromising and
as alien as the shrine to Baal and Asherah that Gideon had previously torn
down. That idol is money.
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Copyright © All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans
2013.
Scripture
quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright
© 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by
permission. All rights reserved.
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