Who is your master? Are you devoted to God whose endless devotion to you is captured in the cross of Christ? Do you love Christ with all of your soul? Is Jesus your master?

In Matthew 6:19 – 24 Jesus says…

19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, 23 but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! 24 “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.

Over the last few weeks we learned that:

  1. Your treasure is what you fix your eye upon and what your eye is fixed upon becomes your master. 19-24
  2. If you treasure earthly things then you treasure rotten things and rotten things make you sick. 19
  3. If you store up treasure in Heaven then you are investing in living things instead of rotten things. 20
  4. The visible behaviors of your life point to the invisible desires of your heart. 21
  5. The eyes are the windows to the soul. 22-23

The question today is: Who is your master? This is a question of slavery. Who are you enslaved to? Who is your boss? Jesus says in verse 24 that “No one can serve two masters… you cannot serve God and money… you’ll inevitably hate or despise the one and you’ll be devoted to or love the other”. It’s not just that we need to examine who our master is, we need to choose who our master is. We must choose who we will hate or despise. We must choose who we will love and be devoted to. Just as Joshua challenged the people of Israel to “choose you this day whom you will serve”, Jesus challenges us to choose this day whom we will serve. Choose whom we will hate and despise and choose whom we will love and give our devotion to. I want to be a person like Joshua who says “but as for me and my house, I will serve the Lord”.

Whenever I tell the story about how God saved me in the middle of the street after being hit by that SUV I always tell people about my 7 children. And whenever I get to our second oldest daughter I always tell everyone that when she was born we named her after the two things I loved the most. Harley Davidson motorcycles and myself. We named her Harley Jo! The reality of that season of my life is that I loved motorcycles and I loved myself but the deeper truth is that I trusted in my material wealth. I trusted my earthly possessions to be the source of my joy. I served inanimate objects to serve the boss of me and the “boss of me” or my master at that time was money and material wealth.

When Jesus says, “you cannot serve God and money” he actually uses the word Mammon, which is another word for trusted wealth. What Jesus is saying is that you cannot be enslaved to money and serve God. If money and material wealth is what you love and are devoted to then you will hate and despise the God who spent His son Jesus so that you could rest in the hope of a new life. Do you hate God? Do you despise God? Is God like a cruel taskmaster who doesn’t pay you enough? Is your picture of God like the dad you could never please? Do you believe that God is just an angry person who wants to withhold everything you want to have?

I want to paint a new picture of God for you in this moment. A picture of a loving God who is a great Father who went to the ends of the earth to spend himself on your behalf so that you could gain everything of true eternal value in the cross of his son Jesus who sacrificed himself. He emptied the bank account for you. He wrote the check to pay the price of your sin with his life. He handed the slave master a wad of cash in the form of his death so that you and I could be set free from the bondage of slavery. He died to set you free from the slave master called money. Who is your master? Are you devoted to God whose endless devotion to you is captured in the cross of Christ? Do you love Christ with all of your soul? Is Jesus your master? “Your treasure is what you fix your eye upon and what your eye is fixed upon becomes your master”. I pray that Christ would become your master today.