Always Choose God over Mammon, Part 1

David W Palmer

(Matthew 6:24 DKJV) “No one can serve as a slave to two masters; for either he will hate one, and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other: you cannot serve as a slave to both God and mammon.”

Jesus boldly declared a very powerful principle in this statement: you cannot “serve as a slave to two masters.” He implied that we have to choose to serve either God or mammon, because serving both simultaneously is impossible.

The Bible shows us that God is a real, personal, distinct, moral, spiritual being who thinks, feels, chooses, and speaks. Therefore, the idea of serving him as a slave is easy to understand; he can think, make decisions about what he wants us to do, and communicate them to us. What does this say about mammon?

If Jesus said that it is possible to choose mammon as a master, then he too must be able to think, make decisions, and communicate them. Yes, Jesus is talking to us about a personal, living, thinking—but absolutely wicked—spiritual being. He is a complete counterfeit master or lord. Jesus calls him the “ruler of this world,” Paul calls him the “god of this world,” and John says he is the “evil one”—the controller of the whole world system. (See: John 14:30, 2 Cor. 4:4, 1 John 5:19 NLT.)

What then is serving as a slave to mammon? To answer this, we read on. As we do, we note that Jesus followed his warning about serving mammon with the words, “Therefore … don’t.” This implies that he is now about to show us what serving mammon is—and, more importantly, how to avoid serving him:

(Matthew 6:25 DKJV) “Therefore I say to you, don’t be distracted by thoughts about your life—what you will eat and drink; nor about your body—what you will put on. Isn’t life more than food, and the body than clothing?”

Submission to the counterfeit lord, “mammon,” involves allowing him to distract your mental focus with “thoughts about your life”; Jesus specifically mentioned anxious worry about basic provision. With this in mind, we must ensure that we know precisely what Jesus meant when he said the phrase, “thoughts about your life.” Let’s investigate further:

The original Greek word translated here as, “distracted by thoughts,” is translated as, “take no thought,” in the KJV, and as, “do not worry,” in the NIV. The Literal Translation of the Holy Bible has it as, “Do not be anxious.” The original Greek word means, “anxious,” from the idea of thoughts that distract, part, or partition your mind. Therefore, we see that mammon’s objective is to divide our thinking through worry and anxiety. He wants us to be “in two minds” about whether or not to trust God. After all, that’s all it takes to make us unstable everywhere else in our lives. We note what the Holy Spirit says in James’s epistle along this line:

(James 1:8 KJV) “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.”

Mammon injects thoughts into our intellect with the objective of making us “double minded”; and thus destabilizing us, making us ineffective for God’s kingdom. This has always been his strategy:

(Genesis 3:1 HCSB) Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You can’t eat from any tree in the garden?’”

Mammon, the deceiver, wants us to be distracted from our single focus on heaven and its revelation. He wants to introduce doubt about the wisdom of trusting God enough to obey him. In other words, mammon tries to get us “off balance” in our thinking, so to speak. Scripture says that this completely prevents us from receiving from God. Mammon’s strategy is simple, but can have devastating consequences if we allow it to dominate us:

(James 1:7 ISV) “Such a person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.”

Jesus wants us to resist serving mammon by fighting his anxious, focus-breaking thoughts. Therefore, being “distracted by thoughts” is evil’s active, full-power assault on us in the major battle of life! Instead of serving mammon as a slave to worry, anxiety, divided thinking, and mental pressure; let’s serve God by wholeheartedly putting all our focus on him, and allow no opening for mammon’s focus-breakers to get a foothold in our lives.

Today, no matter what evil thoughts try to take hold of you—making you focus on ways to get provision apart from simple trust in God—follow the Holy Spirit’s solution:

(1 Peter 5:7–9 NLT) “Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you. {8} Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. {9} Stand firm against him, and be strong in your faith …”

“Give all your worries and cares to God”; and do it now! We may find this not to be as easy as it sounds—or indeed, as easy as we feel it should be. But we can do it; we can cast all our cares on him in focused prayer, standing on the promises of his word. Complete victory in this process may be challenging, but we have no good alternative: it’s either do this and serve God; or by default, we take the worry and responsibility for basic provision onto ourselves. And that would mean serving mammon; his objective would be achieved: we would become unstable, unable to receive from God, and ineffective in his kingdom.

Right now is a good time to begin giving over everything that causes you to have mental pressure, undue care, worry, or anxiety. You may have to make a complete list of everything that’s worrying you today; pray about each item individually, and keep standing on God’s perfect promise for it throughout the day, until God’s peace rules in your heart. Then you’ll be back to serving the right master.