NO MAN CAN SERVE TWO MASTERS

No man can serve two masters……Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

There is a stage that many people reach in life when they profess to believing in God. In and of itself that seems good. But in Christian terms it may actually be bad and it is certainly lacking in completion, for it tells us that a crucial question has not been asked. That question is, what kind of God?

Bhudda is a very different God from the God of Christians. The Allah of the Mohammedans is a very different God from the God of Christians In a recent Voice of the Martyrs Newsletter I read that Allah has 99 names and not one of them is “love” or “father”.

But I am not actually talking about followers of such religions. I am talking about those who may have had something of a Christian upbringing and have fallen by the wayside, or those who are making the journey from unbelief and have arrived at a theist position. That is, they have come to believe in the existence of a god.

At some point they have to ask that question, What kind of God do I believe in? In fact we all have to ask that question, because without asking it we can never be sure that we are trying to serve God and not mammon. Notice, please, that I used the word, trying.

In order to be sure that we are serving the true God, we have to know who that God is, or at least we have to know what has been given for human beings to know about that God.

To put it simply, we have to know Jesus Christ. By asking what kind of God do I believe in?, we bring ourselves face to face with Jesus Christ. There is no other source of answers. Through His Incarnation, life and death, and only through them, can we discover the true God. Even then, we can in stubborn humanity, turn from Him and many do exactly that. But many more find themselves drawn into the loving arms of Our Lord and find it very much to their liking.

C.S. Lewis went up to Oxford as an atheist, but in his book Surprised by Joy, he describes how he became a Christian. I am quoting now not from that book, but from the Rev. Murdo Macdonald’s book, The Need to Believe. He wrote of Lewis, At first he felt like a man of snow beginning to melt. The powerful rays of some invisible sun had started a softening up process in the hard core of his unbelief. He could almost hear the drip, drip, and trickle, trickle of his abandoned agnosticism. At length he gave up the unequal struggle and admitted that God was God.

But Lewis still did not believe that Jesus Christ was the incarnate Son of God. He was a theist and nothing more. Interestingly, he was going to church, but only because he felt religion demanded some sort of discipline and obedience. The change to fully fledged Christian I will let C.S. Lewis describe in his own words. “I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When I set out I did not believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and when I reached the zoo I did.”

From that moment on, there was no doubt about the God Lewis served. Through that service we have the remarkable legacy of his inspired writings. But he was in no doubt, and neither should we be, that the author of his faith was Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the way to God. Jesus gives us our knowledge of God. Jesus teaches us to love and serve God and shows us exactly how to do it. He is our Redeemer, our Saviour, our teacher and friend. He taught us that we cannot serve God and mammon. He showed us the choice to make and the consequences of making the wrong choice.

The Cross shows us what kind of God we should believe in. It promises an eternity with our God, but for those who choose to serve mammon, it also allows no hiding place and no excuses. The choice is ours.

No man can serve two masters….Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Peter Jardine+

Trin XV, 2005, mini.