Matthew 6:22-24 (NKJV) 22 “The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness! 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.
Matthew 11:28-30 (NIV) 28"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."
When we try to live with one eye focused on our treasures and responsibilities and the other eye focused on serving God, we get a little cockeyed. Our vision is blurred. Indeed, such divided attention keeps out the light of God and our whole body is full of darkness.
Mammon is sometimes paraphrased as money. But mammon is more than that. Mammon is the mystic power of money. Indeed, it could be called a spiritual force, one of the principalities and powers that Paul talks about, that we must battle against.
No one calls himself or herself a minister of mammon, but most of us regularly hear the message of mammon. You have got to make something of yourself. You have to amount to something. You have to be somebody. And underlying that pressure is the message that money will help you make something of yourself. Money will help you amount to something. Money will make you somebody.
Mammon never denies God. It simply teaches us to ignore God. How many people who are so bound to the economic wheel with children to support, debts to pay, and living costs to meet that they have no real prospect of freedom?
When we take the yoke of discipline of learning from Jesus on how to manage money, how do we know Jesus will really teach us? How do we know we will not suffer and be denied all kinds of good things we need? If we accept the discipline of giving, how do we know that some disaster is not going to befall us? There are difficulties and there are struggles. But the yoke of discipline is kind and fitting.
Do it. Take the yoke of daily listening to Christ. Take the yoke of spending as He leads you. Take the yoke of giving to Him, and He will give you rest. He will give you the rest of trust. He will give you the rest of experiencing His generosity. He will give you the rest of learning good money management. He will give you rest from the worries, and stress and concerns that mammon has laid on you.
From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope November 9, 1997
© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell Broyles
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