Servitude and Mastery

Mat 6:24 "You cannot be a slave of two masters; you will hate one and love the other; you will be loyal to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

What is your relationship with money?

One of my students made this comment the other day:

“You can stand in one of two relationships with money: Either money serves you, or you serve money.”

Matthew Blewett once made a comment that, you should never work for money; money should work for you.

If this is a study of time, then why bring money into it? For three reasons:

- I have always found that money and time seems to be related. When my budget is in a mess, my schedule tends to also be in a mess.

- Most of us spend most of our time, working for money. We get paid every month, which is a time period, for working a certain amount of hours every day – once again, time.

- Effectively, we have sold a certain portion of our time to an employer. There is a contract that x-amount of my hours belongs to that employer every month, for a certain amount of pay. This is not quite the same, but also not totally different, to slavery. It’s just part-time slavery and the person doing the selling is the slave himself.

So should I not spend my time working at all, then?

Jesus said that I couldn’t serve God and money. The image He used was that of slavery. A slave belonged wholly to his master. I made a comment above, about the fact that working for an employer, is not very different from slavery. But we have to work. We have to sell some of our time and energy to someone, to earn the money to put bread on the table. Surely, Jesus was not proposing that we should just pray and go around preaching the gospel all day?

Choosing the right Master makes all the difference

I want to propose that the difference really lies not so much in what you do, as in the attitude of your heart. The “Master” that you serve, has nothing to do with who signs your pay-cheque. It has to do with who, or what, you are really doing it for. When I work another hour, because I really want the money, then I am serving that money. However, when I work another hour because I really believe that God wants me to get that work done, for His Glory, then I am working for God.

I am doing exactly the same thing, but for two different masters, and that makes all the difference.

This seems to be aligned with the concept of slavery and freedom. The effort in the Promised Land might have been the same. They could still have been carrying stones and bricks, mixing mortar, etc. but in the Promised Land, they were doing it to build their own cities, whereas in Egypt, they were doing it as slaves to build the cities of others.