God, Mammon and Advent

Matthew 6:24

Preached by Dan Brown on December 10, 2006 at Stony Brook Community Church

We’ve been asking the question, “What is most likely to steal your hope, your joy at this time of year.” The answers are quite obvious. Last week we talked about time. Today we’ll talk about money. Advent is quite obviously a point of financial stress for a lot of people in our culture. Now many of you may be exempt from that; you may live such disciplined financial lives that this has absolutely no effect on you. Nevertheless, I ask you to sympathize with people in our culture even if you don’t feel the stress right now, because so many people are feeling it. You’ll hear reports about people who have mounted up credit card debts of $50,000 or more. Much of that burdent has to do with lavish spending at this time of year. The burden that is placed on us during the Christmas season is huge. We are supposed to go out and spend in order to keep our retail economy alive. If we don’t all show up at the stores on Black Friday, then what will happen to our economy? Whether we like it or not, we are caught up in a culture of excess.

Our problem can be illustrated simply enough with a plumbing analogy. In any ordinary plumbing system, water comes in and water goes out. And no more water can go out than comes in. This is a simple picture of the common-sense way one might think about a budget. At Advent all the taps go on for a lot of people in our culture. But where is all the water going to come from? Well, fortunately we have helpful organizations in our society – banks, credit card companies – and they have a wondereful offer: “We’ll run a fire hose into your house. You will have all the water that you want, just as long as you pay it back through the rest of your life, and maybe beyond.”

So that’s our problem. It’s actually pretty simple to understand, and it’s bound to create some stress in our lives, if not now, in January or February. The solution is also simple: Just cut off the flow. Turn the taps off or find the leak and plug it. If this were a plumbing problem, that’s what we’d do. We’d find the leak and close it off. But we have a really hard time doing this--and that indicates that there is a deeper problem. If it were so easy just to turn off the taps and stop the flow, then more of us would do it more readily. But many, if not most of us, struggle with this problem. It might not be at Advent, it might be at some other time of year, but we struggle with this problem. So if this is the problem, and if there is somehow a deeper spiritual cause to it, what is that cause?

In Matthew 6:24 we read: “No one can serve two masters. 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 both God and money.” (Older translations read, “God and mammon.”)

God and mammon, God and money, Jesus says here, are direct rivals for our hearts. Our hearts are made in such a way that they can only whole-heartedly pursue one thing—they can’t pursue two things at once. So money is on one side, and God is on the opposite side. You can only face one direction. You can’t go both directions at once. You may be caught in between. You can be ambivalent, not knowing which way you want to go, but you can’t wholeheartedly pursue God and wholeheartedly pursue money at the same time. The message Jesus gives here is quite simple: you can’t pursue both. This warning is one that is given over and over again in scripture, and one we like to bleep over. God and mammon are rivals to one another. You cannot serve two masters. If you serve one, then you won’t be serving the other. Here’s an exercise for you, find an older Bible that you don’t care about much. Take that Bible and cut out every verse that has to do with money, especially warnings about money. You will be amazed at how little is left. In the New Testament especially, you will find in just about every book some kind of explicit warning about the dangers of money, the dangers of materialism, and the dangers particularly of money taking our hearts, of the love of money controlling our hearts. This indicates that God was so concerned about it that He put it that often in scripture. It also shows us that this is not just a problem for us in our culture. It’s a problem for all time and all cultures and all human beings. The society that Jesus was speaking to was not a wealthy society. The early church was not a wealthy church. Yet over and over again we get this warning: beware of the love of money. Do not give your hearts to money.

Jesus is constantly forcing home this theme. A rich man comes and speaks to him with a really good spiritual question. He asks, “How can I inherit eternal life?” Jesus answers, “Well, what do you think?” He says, “I’ve kept the whole law.” What does Jesus tell him? “Go, sell all your possessions, and come, follow me, and then you’ll have eternal life.” He fastens onto that one thing that is keeping him from wholeheartedly following Jesus—a love of money, that is, an attachment to the things of this world.

Jesus tells another terribly frightening story about a rich man who has a poor man begging outside his house. He pays no attention to the poor man during his life. The rich man dies, and where are his riches then? He sees the poor man across a great chasm with Abraham, and he cries out, “Please send over just a drop of water to me.” But Abraham can’t help him. These are the kind of stories Jesus tells.

The New Testament over and over gives harsh warnings to those who are rich. I Timothy 6:10 tells us, “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” James cries out “Listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you.” In Luke 6:20, Jesus says, “Woe to you who are rich.” Throughout the New Testament we get these repeated, often harsh warnings, about the danger of money.

Our challenge is this: how can we obey the scripture’s command to keep our hearts free from the love of money, to keep our lives free from the love of money? In Hebrews 13:5 we get that command explicitly: “Keep your lives free from the love of money.”

How can we keep that command? The first step in trying to apply this in our lives is a diagnosis. If you have the money disease, if money has a grip on your heart in some way, how would you know it? How can you do an MRI to figure out whether this is the case or not? If you were to do an MRI on a heart captivated by mammon, what would you find?

A heart given to mammon would manifest three primary symptoms. First, anxiety. If you are anxious, if you find yourself worrying about financial things a lot, then it’s an indication that money has a grip on your life. Jesus makes that connection explicitly in the passage we began with, Matthew chapter six. He immediately follows with teaching on worry. If your heart is given over to mammon, then one of the symptoms will be worry. Second, discontent. You find yourself restless, restlessly seeking to fill gaps in your life with things. You’re feeling kind of bad about something; you’re feeling depressed, what’s your instinct? It’s to go out shopping to make yourself feel better. That might be an indication that money, material things have a grip on your heart. Third, preoccupation with money. You might not have anxiety about money. You might really love to think about money as much as you can, all the time. You love to go over those stock reports. They make you feel really good, especially when they’re going up. That kind of preoccupation with money might be an indication—if an adrenaline rush comes when you’re thinking about money or how much you’re earning—then that might be an indication that your heart is captivated by it.

Let’s say you have some of these symptoms—I’m not saying you do, you may be free of them. Or let’s say you’re trying to help me with my symptoms. I have a bit of anxiety over money. It’s fairly regular. I often feel myself discontent with what I have. Sometimes I get preoccupied with money. I don’t have too much to be preoccupied with, but what I have, I sometimes get preoccupied with it. Let’s say I have some of these symptoms and I want to do something about the underlying disease. What should I do?

I find it useful to divide the problem into two parts. Think back to our plumbing analogy—there is money flowing in and money flowing out. Let’s think first about the inflows—what’s coming in. How we should think about them as Christians? Matthew 6:31 - 32: “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.”

“Your heavenly Father knows that you need them,” is the great chorus of the New Testament with regard to where things come from. God is the provider. God has given us—and He has given it to us so often that we shouldn’t be able to ignore it— an ironclad promise that He will provide for our needs. Jesus just expects us to believe this. Notice, He does not say He will provide for our wants. That is a different thing. If your wants grow and grow, God may very well not provide them. But God has promised to provide for your needs.

How does God provide for our needs? Sometimes He provides supernaturally and we have plenty of examples in scripture of God providing supernaturally when people were at the end of their resources. And we have plenty of examples in history. George Mueller ran an orphanage in London. Day by day, God provided miraculously, in amazing ways for the needs of this man and the orphans in his care. God sometimes provides in this way. Sometimes He provides through other believers. This is a more normal way that God provides. Someone in the church has a need, and someone else sees that need and they want to provide for it. Most often, though, God provides through work. That is, He gives us work to do, and that work becomes the means of His provision in our lives. For this reason it is right and good to pray that God will give us productive work. It’s right to ask God to give us work in which we can glorify Him and that will provide our needs and the needs of our families. That is the means, the primary means that He has chosen to provide for us. Ephesians 4:28 affirms this:

“He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need.”

2 Thessalonians 3:7-10 affirms the same principle:

“For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s food without paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you. We did this not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to make ourselves a model for you to follow. For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: ‘If a man will not work, he shall not eat.’”

Work is the primary means by which God provides. But whatever the means of God’s provision, the source is always the same. Whether it is supernatural, through other believers, or through the work that He gives you to do, it is God who is providing for your needs. God is the provider and He has promised to provide for you. He said in Hebrews, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” That is the ground, the reason to trust in Him. If you believe this, then this becomes the first remedy for a heart that tends to be grabbed by money. That remedy is a radical trust in God, a trust that it is God who provides, no matter how He does it. Everything that can come to you comes from Him.

Here is a useful test to see if we’re trusting Him to provide. Think back to the plumbing analogy. How much do you think about where your water is coming from? You don’t! You don’t have to think about it because you simply trust that the water department or the pump connected to your well is going to work. So you don’t think about your plumbing system at all most of the time -- unless there’s a terrible leak that you have to fix. The reason you don’t have to think about it is because you trust that the source is there to provide your water. So if we really trust that God is our provider, we won’t have to be preoccupied with money. We don’t have to think about it. We don’t have to worry and say, “Oh no, what if we don’t have enough to eat tomorrow!” We don’t have to do that because God has promised. It simply comes; He provides, perhaps in surprising ways, perhaps in ordinary ways, but God simply provides.

So much for the inflows. What about the outflows? What does God call you to do with the money He gives you? In Ephesians 4:28 Paul told us not to steal; work with your hands, he said. Why? In order to have something to share. That is the first indication of what God wants us to do with the outflows – give money away. There’s another indication in the 2 Thessalonians passage. We’re told not to be idle; we should work. And what does Paul say is the reason he wasn’t idle? He wasn’t idle when he was with the Thessalonians so that he could pay for his own food. In doing this he wanted to be an example to them by not being a burden to anyone. Note the two reasons here that God gives you money. First, He gives you money so you won’t be a burden to other people, so that you can care for yourself and your family. Second, he gives you money to give away. These are the two main reasons we find in scripture that God gives us money. The Bible doesn’t talk about many other reasons. These are the two reasons: He gives you money so you won’t have to burden other people, and in order that you might have enough extra so you can give something away.

So we deal with the love of money at the source with a radical trust. And we deal with the love of money at the output with radical generosity. Those are the two scalpels God gives us to excise the love of money from our hearts. They are connected with one another. If we are giving away more than we’re really comfortable with, then we’ll have to trust. And if we trust, and we know it all comes from God, then one of the outcomes will be that we’ll say, “It all comes from God.” And we’ll ask, “How do you want me to use it, God?” So radical trust and radical generosity become the two scalpels, the two ways that God gives us to fight the tendency to grasp onto material things with our hearts.

What, in the end, does any of this have to do with Advent? Well, during Advent Season we remember a story. That story is one of God in the flesh entering the world in poverty. He comes in poverty, He is welcomed by poor shepherds, He lives a life of poverty, His disciples live in poverty ,and in the end He dies with only one possession, a garment that ends up being gambled away by onlookers. And what do we do with this story? At the time of Advent the world takes this celebration of Jesus’ birth and twists it into a feast of self-indulgence, a festival of Mammon. And the Church has been infected with the world’s perspective. All of our lives have deeply influenced by the world in this area. It seems to me that there’s a pretty clear reason why Jesus comes in poverty and isn’t born into a palace. It’s in part because throughout his whole life He is sending this message that He wants to free us from this idolatry to money. So Jesus lives a life that we can only look at and say, “How different that is from the life that I live and the lives of people around me.” It seems to me that He is calling us to a radical departure from what has become the norm. And what does the world do? It takes a celebration of God’s great spiritual gift to us and makes it a celebration of our dependence and reliance and love for mammon. God will not share our worship with anything else. He wants us for Himself. He wants to be our Provider. He wants our trust. So He calls us, and I think He calls us especially at this time of year, to apply these scalpels: the radical scalpel of trust in God and the radical scalpel of giving, of generosity. That doesn’t mean giving to ourselves, or giving to people who already have more than they need. What that means is giving to those who are truly needy in the world, many of whom are not in this country, although some are. It means giving to those things which build His Kingdom most directly. That’s the kind of radical generosity He is calling us to. These are hard words to hear. Yet the scriptural message is so clear and so consistent that we who desire to be followers of Jesus cannot ignore them.