Matthew 6:24
This morning as we move forward in the Sermon on the Mount I want to remind us that the key verse to the sermon continues to be Matthew 5:20, “unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will be no means enter the kingdom of heaven.” Everything after that verse is Jesus revealing what“surpassing righteousness” is. He does not desire for us to live in fear or for us to attempt to attain some form of righteousness that we believe will make us acceptable to God; He is revealing that the condition of our hearts will determine the outcome of our actions and that our hearts can only be made righteous through the acceptance of His love and obedience to His Word and His identity. Our text verse for today centers on money and yet the sermon centers on our hearts and this section of the sermon continues to center on worship and so our challenge today is not to learn how to handle money but how to manage our hearts; how to guard them from inferior affections, how to lead them into eternal satisfaction and how to choose love by whom and what we serve. Two weeks ago I shared that our heart follows our treasure; our mouth reveals our heart and our eyes fill our heart. Several weeks ago I shared that treasure and worship are closely connected because we worship what we treasure and we treasure what we worship. Today I pray that we can build upon these places and learn that we are servants of what we love and that love is our greatest act of worship.
In the context of worship we have studied giving, praying and fasting over the last few months. We have determined that for something to be worship it has to be initiated by God, given to God and done for the glory of God. Worship is about the posture and direction of our hearts far more than it is about a specific action or outcome. In Mark 7:6-7 Jesus quoted Isaiah 29 when speaking to the Pharisees and scribes, “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. And in vain they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” Jesus is revealing to them what He is teaching us in the Sermon on the Mount, that worship is not first an action but worship is first and foremost the position of our hearts and that position produces action. Singing is not worship unless the heart is being led by the Spirit of God and the songs are all for the glory of God through His presence; giving is not worship unless the heart is being led by the Spirit of God and the gifts are given only for the glory of God revealed in His generosity; praying is not worship unless the heart is being led by the Spirit of God and the prayers and their answers or outcomes are entrusted to the glory of God; fasting is not worship unless the heart is led by the Spirit and the fast is for the glory of God in intimacy and chosen weakness. We are honestly not being taught how to do anything, we are being taught to examine our hearts, guard our hearts and surrender our hearts fully to God in every single aspect of life. We are being taught that worship is not what we do it is where our hearts live, what our hearts treasure and then today the combination of two verbs that we rarely put together, what our hearts love and who our hearts serve. Love and service are ultimate revelations of our worship; Jesus reveals here that we love what we serve and we serve what we love.
“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.”
Worship has been revealed through “righteous acts”, giving, praying and fasting. Now Jesus reveals that“serving” is worship. The word used here in the Greek is douleuo, it means “to be a slave, serve, do service; to obey; submit to.” It is the word that the oldest son in the parable of the running father in Luke 15 used when he said “I have served you all these years”; it is the word that Paul used when he referred to himself as a “bondservant of Jesus Christ” in Romans 1:1. In these circumstances it is not a slave in the manner we think of it, someone forced into service and treated selfishly by his owner, it is someone that has chosen service. In the older brother’s case his choice of service was not worship; he did not serve his father with love but rather for the purpose of what he could gain for himself. In Paul’s case, his choice of service was a response to what Jesus had done for him; his service was worship because his service was a response of love and a response to being loved.
Many of you have heard me refer to John 15:12-17 on this topic before. Jesus, on the night of His arrest, in one of His last and most urgent teachings to His apostles said “This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. You are My friends if you do whatever I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you. These things I command you, that you love one another.” I want to address verse 15 in a way we never have before. When Jesus said “I no longer call you servants” He was not ending the servanthood of the apostles, He was elevating their relationship. Up until this point they saw themselves as only servants, they were disciples in the cultural sense of the age, they followed Jesus’ teaching, they did His bidding, they attended to His needs and served Him almost as a form of tuition. In those days if you followed a Rabbi or a teacher it was like attending college, you served in exchange for being taught. Jesus was revealing that while they served Him He was now changing how they identified themselves, they were no longer His servants, He was now calling them, revealing to them that they were His friends because the Father was, through Jesus’ death and resurrection about to make them His sons. For the disciples, servanthood didn’t end, the reason for serving would change, they had served to receive from Jesus, and they were soon going to serve because of what Jesus had already done for them. The beginning of our journey with God, for all of those that will ever be saved by the blood of Jesus, is God choosing us. God wills that none would perish; Jesus said that no one comes to the Father except through Him and that no one can come to Jesus except through the Father. What this means is just what Jesus said in John 15, “You did not choose Me, but I chose you”. Salvation is the realization of being chosen by God; worship is choosing to serve God because He has chosen to save us. The apostles friendship with Jesus did not end their servanthood, it changed the focus of the servanthood from receiving a wage to living in the reality of being loved by being loving.
As we talked about last week, when Jesus says “No man can serve two masters He is saying, first and foremost, as the Creator to the creation that we were created to have a master, our hearts were made to be dependent upon the Creator, we were not created with the capacity of independence but with the purpose of complete trust upon the One that made us, loves us and promises to provide for and protect us. When Jesus says “No man can serve two masters” He is also saying that all of us will choose a master, we will all choose to give our hearts to the service of someone or something. Then He goes on to tell us the terms of our service: “for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other.” The reason we can’t and won’t serve two masters is that our hearts were not created to be divided; in fact, the idea of a divided heart is a revelation of the deceitfulness of our hearts. We were created with one heart that is given to one master, it is a lie to believe that we can divide our allegiances and loves. A divided heart is a deceived heart and it is usually a selfish heart, it desires everything it wants at the same time rather than realizing that to truly love is to freely choose; the absence of priority is actually the prioritizing of self. The rich young ruler didn’t want to choose between his wealth and following Jesus, he wanted eternal life along with his riches, but no man can serve two masters and ultimately he chose his riches, possibly still convinced that he could have his wealth, keep the commandments and inherit eternal life all at once but Jesus had laid the ultimate test of worship before the young man when He said the two words that everyone that has ever walked on earth has and will hear in some form, “Follow Me.”
Let’s briefly deal with the love and hate comparison because I believe this causes people to often justify having a divided heart because they don’t believe they actually hate anything so they feel they are serving well. The contrast of love and hate as Jesus uses it here is a common Hebrew idiom, just like when Jesus said in Luke14:26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.” R.T. Kendall explains by writing “To hate one of the alternatives and love the other simply means that what is loved is what is preferred; what is hated means to love less.” Jesus is revealing that our hearts will always have to choose, we may not exhibit active hate for anything but if we try to divide our hearts we will always, eventually, have to make a choice as to which we will be loyal; the only way to have an undivided heart, to stay in the state of the ungrieved anointing of the Holy Spirit is to be wholly devoted in heart, united to God in our worship by not allowing anything at all to ever exalt itself to the point of being loved by being served. When Jesus says “You cannot serve God and mammon(or money)” He is not saying that we cannot have money, that money is evil or that poverty is the way of the kingdom of God. He is not even saying that we cannot enjoy or be thankful for money and the things of earth. Let’s remember the sermon is about our hearts and this portion of the sermon is addressing our worship and so, the issue here is not money it is the position we have given money in our hearts and the worship we have afforded money in our lives.
II Timothy 6:10 is often misquoted by Christians and unbelievers alike, what we often here is “money is the root of all evil”. Paul actually wrote, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” Do we see the difference? Money itself is not a root of evil and money itself has not caused people to wander from the faith, the love of money is the root and eagerness or a longing for money is the reason for wandering. The question today is not do we need money it is do we love money? How do you know if you love money? Let’s use Jesus’ lesson in the text, we love what we serve. Is our money a gift from God to use for His service or have we become servants of our money, doing what we believe is necessary to pay for the way we want to live? Do we work because we need a paycheck or do we work for the glory of God? Are our lives prioritized around our responsibility (meaning our need to pay for the way we have chosen to live) or our opportunity to glorify God in places and to people that we would not have the opportunity otherwise? All of these questions are important because they reveal the place that money has taken in our hearts through seeing the place that we have given it in our lives. To me, all of this raises some questions not merely about where money sits in our lives but as to our level of trust in God as our providing and protecting Shepherd.
David wrote in Psalm 16, a psalm of lament and prophesy of the coming Messiah “The LORD is the portion of my inheritance and my cup: You support my lot.” In Psalm 73:26 Asaph sang “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever.” My favorite verse on this topic is Lamentations 3:24, as Jeremiah looks over the ruins of Jerusalem and prepares to be taken into captivity to Babylon he declares “The LORD is my portion, says my soul, therefore I have hope in him.” God being our portion means that all I have is from Him, all I need is found in Him and all my trust is offered to Him. The Lord is my portion means that my heart belongs to God and so I live for His glory and my wage is in His hands according to His protective love for me. The LORD is my portion means that the effort of my life will not be for temporary gain but for eternal benefit. The LORD is my portion means that I am content and satisfied in Christ and I will let Him order my steps, which also means I will trust Him to provide for His will and my needs in those steps. The LORD is my portion literally means I trust God that He has provided me with everything that I need and if He has not provided it then I can trust that it means He has determined that I have not needed it. Let’s just put this out there, we would all like more. In some area of our lives there is something that we would love to have more of, the LORD is my portion means that even though I would like to have more, I will be satisfied with trusting that you have given what I need and you will provide what is best. I will work for your glory and I will trust you for my wage. In that place we are glorifying God by believing Him to be fair, just, good and righteous. I don’t need to work harder to get more, I need to work obediently that the first fruit of all of my work would not be what I receive for it but that God would be glorified through it.