Kevin Bennie
Dec 21, 2023 10:20 AM
22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! 24 “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” Matthew 6:22-24 After Jesus finishes talking about the heart, he references the eye. In fact, as the ESV study Bible puts it, these are a similar reference. If the heart or the eye, is healthy, then the rest of the person will be healthy. Similarly, if the heart, or the eye, of the person is bad, the rest of the person will be in darkness. The emphasis here is on priorities and the importance of how we prioritize our lives. There is a cascading effect when things in our life are out of order, or are not rightly ordered. We see this in his second statement, you cannot serve two masters. You cannot serve both God AND money. The option here is: serve God and have a healthy vision, a healthy heart, a rightly ordered life. OR serve money, have a disordered, incorrectly ordered, life. Money, will always be around, it will be a part of life. But when you serve it, it will lead to darkness in your life; when we prioritize what is temporary it will always lead to disappointment. You might think that you own money, that you possess money. But when it is a central focus of your life, you actually live in servitude to money. It becomes your master, and it is not a good master. God has given us money to steward on his behalf, not to own for our personal purposes. And when we serve Him we don't have to worry about our most precious possessions being stolen, because our most precious possessions lie with Christ, they lie in heaven, where they cannot be touched. God as our master, sends light to the rest of our life. Tomorrow we will talk about an additional effect of the stewardship mindset. But today… REFLECT Where is money in your list of priorities? Is God the top most priority in your life? Is he the one whom you serve the most? PRAY God open my heart to you today, help me to listen to you in honesty and openness to your truth and your heart.