Money
By David Branker
Matthew 6:24 NLT
No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.Jesus made it very clear who is on the other end of the “money” rope. The KJ Bible uses an Aramaic word for money in this passage – MAMMON. Mammon was a Syrian deity – a god.
When Jesus uses the Aramaic term mammon to refer to wealth, he is giving it a personal and spiritual character. When he declares, “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt.6:24 KJV), he is personifying mammon as a rival god… Mammon is a power that seeks to dominate us. Richard Foster; The Challenge of the Disciplined Life; ©1985; HarperCollins Publishers; p.25-26
Money – in and of itself (currency), is not evil. As a matter of fact, money can be used for some pretty outstanding causes. God blesses us financially so that we can become a financial blessing to others through having a generous heart.
The idea of money as a competitor for first place in our lives is where we find its potential danger. If we allow money to grab hold of our hearts, then we’ve opened the door to all kinds of dangerous influences.
If money – and all that money can buy – becomes the power in your life, it will eventually overshadow everything else in your life with greed & selfish ambition. The love for money can lead to all kinds of evil. God, our Father, is obviously not against us having things, even nice things. What He is against is things having us. The real concern with money or the things money can buy is not what we hold, but how tightly we hold it. It’s not what we’ve gotten, but how we got it.
How do we counteract that? We make our money a servant to the one to whom our hearts really belong. Simply put, we put God first in the way we use and spend our money through tithes and offerings. Seek God today for what this means to you personally and practically, and let’s use our money to serve God.
David
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