May 4,
2003
NO
ONE CAN SERVE TWO MASTERS
"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
6:24, NKJV).
"Christ
does not say that man will not or shall not serve two masters,
but that he cannot. The interests of God and the interests
of mammon have no union or sympathy. Just where the conscience
of the Christian warns him to forbear, to deny himself, to
stop, just there the worldling steps over the line, to indulge
his selfish propensities. On one side of the line is the self-denying
follower of Christ; on the other side is the self-indulgent
world lover, pandering to fashion, engaging in frivolity and
pampering himself in forbidden pleasure. On that side of the
line the Christian cannot go.
"No
one can occupy a neutral position, there is no middle class,
who neither love God nor serve the enemy of righteousness.
Christ is to live in His human agents and work through their
faculties and act through their capabilities. Their will must
be submitted to His will, they must act with His Spirit. Then
it is no more they that live, but Christ that lives in them.
He who does not give himself wholly to God is under the control
of another power, listening to another voice, whose suggestions
are of an entirely different character. Half-and-half service
places the human agent on the side of the enemy as a successful
ally of the hosts of darkness. When men who claim to be soldiers
of Christ engage with the confederacy of Satan, and help along
his side, they prove themselves enemies to Christ. They betray
sacred trusts. They form a link between Satan and the true
soldiers, so that through these agencies the enemy is constantly
working to steal away the hearts of Christ's soldiers.
"The
strongest bulwark of vice in our world is not the iniquitous
life of the abandoned sinner or the degraded outcast; it is
that life which otherwise appears virtuous, honorable, and
noble, but in which one sin is fostered, one vice indulged.
To the soul that is struggling in secret against some giant
temptation, trembling upon the very verge of the precipice,
such and example is one of the most powerful enticements to
sin. He who, endowed with high conceptions of life and truth
and honor, does yet willfully transgress one precept of God's
holy law, has perverted His noble gifts into a lure to sin.
Genius, talent, sympathy, even generous and kindly deeds,
may become decoys of Satan to entice other souls over the
precipice of ruin for this life and the life to come.
"
'Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone
loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For
all that is in the world--the lust of the flesh, the lust
of the eyes, and the pride of life--is not of the Father but
is of the world' "(1 John 2:15, 16).--Thoughts From
The Mount Of Blessing, pp., 93-95.
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