Luke 16:13 (NIV),
"No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money."
Jesus said, “you cannot serve both God and money”. We are told that this it is not a religious statement that applies only to believers, but a statement of a fact universally proven to be true. Here we understand that everyone we read about, even in the Bible, who served God faithfully could not have served (loved) money or endorsed materialism as lifestyle at the same time….This is significant because some of them were actually impressively wealthy (very rich)!…
Understanding Serving God.
Psalm 100:1-3 (NIV), “Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth. Worship the LORD with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. Know that the LORD is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.”
Please note, the psalmist’s audience is “all the earth” and he refers to the Lord as the One “who made us”, that is, the creator of all the earth. Here we also recall apostle Paul describing God as the One “who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will” (Ephesians 1:11). It means that everything God does is for a purpose, God does nothing without a purpose! All the earth exists for a purpose to fulfil….
Accordingly, the Lord (God) made all the earth (us) for a purpose (His purpose) which determined how He made us (“all the earth”) to function. We need to understand that He made us in order for us to do His will. In other words, doing the will of God is how we serve him or fulfil the purpose for which we exist. We serve God when our lifestyle or the way we function reflects His will.
Stating the Problem.
Interestingly, we hear the Lord Jesus saying: “You cannot serve both God and money”. The context suggests that he is speaking to his disciples (most likely the crowd that followed him), but what he said is relevant to people (“all the earth”) as God’s people by virtue of being made by Him (see “his people” in Psalm 100:3) who have become lovers of money (materialistic). It is most likely that people then did not see, as people now, incompatibility between serving God and loving money and how the one excludes the other.
As an example, Luke hints at the reaction of the Pharisees in verse 14: “The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus.” This is Luke’s way of telling us that these Pharisees did not serve God, despite giving the appearance of being highly religious, for they loved money. See how their love of money made them sneer at Jesus!
We see that although it was possible for someone to be both Pharisee (i.e. religious) and money’s lover, Jesus taught that it wasn’t/isn’t possible to serve both God and money. It is important to understand that this teaching of Jesus is not only challenging but revealing as well.
Challenging in clearly suggesting that anyone who loves money cannot serve God. Here the love of money is revealed as incapacitating in regard to serving God. It’s like apostle Paul, writing to believers, states (1 Timothy 6:10, NIV), “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” Clearly, the love of money adversely affects everyone, even those who are in the faith (Christians)!…
Please note, the love of money begets eagerness for money which in turn caused Christians caught in it to wander from the faith, not surprisingly for that is always the case, even for “all the earth” in terms of wandering from the creator (God), as noted above. Hence, Jesus said, “You cannot serve both God and money.”
We must understand that the love of money is the real issue. Simply put, the teaching of Jesus is not about having money, but rather loving it -it is about attachment to money on account of valuing it more than anything else, as if money were the key that opens all doors in life or the solution to all life’s challenges/problems.
See, Abraham was very rich, however he didn’t love money for his name figures among the people who served God in the book of Hebrews. We know that when God called him to leave… Abraham did not consider the financial cost for such a move but simply left, as the Bible says.
Obviously, serving money or pursuing materialism incapacitates us so that we cannot serve God, that is, function as God designed us. For example, It is rightly said that God made us to love people and use material things, but the opposite is rather happening all over the world causing so much pain and destruction in the process.
No wonder, happiness has become elusive for most of us…. The love of money, or following materialism, at every level of our societies, even institutions, accounts for crises all over the world with devastating consequences in terms of the impacts on health and the environment. The more human beings value material/financial gains, the more they seem to devalue what really matters, such as life itself and other human beings!
Jesus said, “You cannot serve both God and money.” It is important to understand that here Jesus means serving God in terms of doing His will as creatures (“all the earth”), that is, fulfilling the purpose for which He made us or function accordingly.
There are real benefits in doing so as the psalm so beautifully captures the picture in Psalm 1:3 where he talks about the man who delight in the law of the Lord his creator: He writes, “That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither -whatever they do prospers.” ….
May God help us all!
