You Cannot Serve Two Masters

Some Musings on  Matthew 6:24

The idea of someone having a master is really politically incorrect and repugnant to our modern sensibilities.  Yet, the reality is that we cannot escape having one.  We all have a master or a lord.  The question is who or what is your master?   If the word master is unacceptable to us the word slave is even more so.  Yet we all are slaves to some particular master in that we are either in bondage or beholding to some ruling power or influence. 

Bondage is the condition of being under some kind authority that is abusive and of course oppressive and destructive.  Yet, we must not confuse the bondage of abusive or tyrannical authority with being under obligation to inherently righteous and infinitely good authority. 

Jesus teaches here that as his followers we must be sure that our wills come under the influence and shaping authority of the kingdom of God.  He makes it very clear that God is the ultimate and rightful authority.   This means that we are not to see God’s authority as abusive, harsh, unpleasant or oppressive.  Yet this is exactly how we tend to see it through the lens of our sinful hearts and minds.   The grace God offers you in Christ gives you the true understanding of God’s inherent kind and righteous sovereignty.  Jesus lays this before us in the previous two images he gives of the kingdom.  God with his kingdom is the superlative treasure.  When one comes to see this then his whole life is flooded with light. So the kind of service one renders to God is not coerced or the response to threats or based on fulfilling certain conditions.  Rather the kind of service one renders to God rises from a transformed grace-filled heart that treasures God and whose mind is illuminated by the value of the kingdom and focuses on it as the ultimate goal for one’s life. 

So let’s take a closer look at what Jesus teaches about the impossibility of you serving two masters.

First Jesus states emphatically the impossibility of you serving two masters.  Now why does he do this?  He wants to address all those professing Christians who either consciously or unconsciously try to do this.  We all have tried to do this.  We have made attempts to serve God and something else with the same degree of allegiance and loyalty.  It can’t be done.  It is psychologically, morally and spiritually impossible. 

Then Jesus tells us why: “for 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 two masters who call for equal loyalty and obedience.  You must decide, you must choose and you will.  Yet you will decide and you will chose the master that your heart treasures and on which your mind and thoughts are fixed.  You will willingly give yourself to that master that best reflects the true nature of your heart and mind.  You will give yourself to what you want the most and what you want the most will rule your heart.  There can be no neutrality here.  If you are pressed between two competing masters who call for equal loyalty then sooner or later you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to one and despise the other.  There are no half way measures here. 

It is important that you understand that you ought to serve God as your greatest treasure.  Yet you cannot and will not do this unless your entire nature is transformed.  In our sin we abandon our rightful master but we don’t become free.  In fact being under the sovereign, benevolent rule of the gracious Creator/Owner is exchanged in our rebellion for the bondage of sin and idolatry.  Though in our sin we rebel against the authority of God we come under the bondage to false gods – we come into the bondage of sinful desires and passions that rule over us and lead us toward ruin and death.  

Do not fool yourself.  If you profess faith in Jesus Christ does that faith come from a regenerated and renewed heart?  Have you been born from above and thus by the grace of the Holy Spirit been given a new nature, one that finds growing appreciation for the value and priorities of the Kingdom so that it is this relationship you now have with Christ that is your greatest treasure?   What Jesus stresses here is that it is one thing to say that you treasure the kingdom and that you have a single devotion and appreciation for the kingdom but what do you do with your life?  How do you spend your time and what preoccupies your thoughts?  What kind of choices, decisions and actions do you carry out?  Your choices are the product of your will and these choices shape your behavior and your behavior determines the way you actually live – your lifestyle or manner of life. 

Jesus then makes a particular application that in essence becomes a case study for all masters that would usurp the place of the kingdom in your heart and mind.  He says you cannot serve God and mammon.  Now mammon is material wealth, possessions, property and money.  How do you serve mammon?  By giving yourself to the pursuit of mammon and living in such a way as to guard and keep what you have.  It spawns such heart sins as covetousness, greed, selfishness, uncharitableness, worry and care.  You serve mammon by giving yourself to mammon and the security, comfort that material wealth and possessions afford.   Well how do you serve God?  You serve God by giving yourself to God through faith and obedience.  The focus is on obedience – you serve God by obeying him but the only obedience that God accepts is that which rises from saving faith in Jesus Christ.   So what master you serve will be the master/treasure that ultimately shapes your will – your choices, your behavior, habits and then way of life.  

So Jesus wants you to really consider what he is saying.  Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are really serving God when in reality you are trying to serve God and mammon or for that matter any other treasure that has sway over your affections, mind and will.  Sooner or later the master you really have affection for will become evident and you will hate and despise the other (if not to you then to others and always to God).  

Another point that needs to be made is that what these two masters want from you is contradictory.  They want different things yet both call for ultimate allegiance.

Serving any other master than the True and Living God is bondage that leads to death.  Yet such bondage produces deceit in the heart and many think that they are free when in fact they are in servile bondage to their passions and desires. 

Serving God places you before the One who has inherent creative rights over your heart and life and who is the caring, gracious, kind, righteous, holy sovereign Master.  We are certainly beholding to Him but never under bondage to him.  We submit to his rightful authority only when we come to see how gracious his authority and rule really are. 

Now I do not want any one who may read this to become discouraged and distraught.  You may say I struggle with this matter.  I know that there are times in my life when I have tried to serve God and other masters.  It grieves me that I have and still do.  Okay, listen.  Every true believer has this problem.  One of the marks that you are indeed a genuine believer is that you struggle with this.  It grieves your heart.  The hypocrite on the other hand deceives himself- he thinks he is serving God but in reality the overall landscape of his manner of life shows that he is taken up with other concerns.  He does not see and he is not troubled in the least.  Jesus wants this one to wake up and to see how truly deceived that one is.

This does not mean that you will be free from temptations from remaining and competing masters.  You may even at times experience great turmoil inside your heart and your mind over who you will serve.   Your renewed heart will press you to do what you ought, yet the remaining sin that abides within will press you to give your allegiance to other masters who lie to you and promise the passions and desires of your flesh fulfillment in a variety of ways. 

Yet you cannot serve two masters.  You just cannot.  If you are truly born again by the Holy Spirit, while there remains a conflict and while you may have to do battle daily, you will not allow the masters of sinful desires to rule over your heart, mind and thus govern your will, priorities, choices and behavior.   In Christ you are not under the law any longer.  You are now under grace and Paul writes: For sin shall not have dominion over you for you are not under law but under grace. 

As believers in and followers of the Lord Jesus Christ we are also citizens of the Kingdom of God and as such that Kingdom and the way of life we should live as its citizens must take ultimate priority over our affections, our minds and our wills. 

Our affections are to be enamored with the Kingdom as our greatest treasure and this will be seen by storing up treasures in heaven and not on earth.

Our minds are to be illuminated by the reality of the Kingdom so that the darkness within us in minimized and the light is maximized.  

Our wills are to be increasingly shaped by the Kingdom.  We must see God as the kind, gracious and holy Master that he truly is.  So that through faith in Jesus Christ we see the true freedom that serving Him in obedience brings.  His authority is never bondage but a coming to terms with how we were created – to be under his kind, gracious, loving, righteous, holy and sovereign mastery.  It is only when we come to this mastery of the rightful creator and now redeemer that we really now freedom.  That is the paradox of the Kingdom!  To be free you must come under the gracious and holy authority of God, which is never bondage but a treasure worth possessing!

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