You Cannot Serve God And Wealth

So this morning we're going to be continuing our study in the Sermon on the Mount toward the end of Matthew chapter 6. In this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew records a collection of things that Jesus has said, not sequentially and not with a whole lot of context. Many of these things are just a verse or two, a short snippet, almost like a proverb, if you will. And our text this morning is just like that. It's a single verse. And it's not obviously connected to the immediate verses either before or after it. Though if we look back a few verses, we'll remember that Jesus talked about where our treasure is, there our heart would be also. And there is a connection to that in our text this morning. And so my hope this morning is simple. And it's just that God would convict us of the ways that we've fallen short in our devotion and our service to him and that he would help us.

Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now, there's a very simple thing to start out by observing here, and it's that Jesus says, one master you can only have one master he says it by saying you cannot serve two masters and we can infer three or four or ten but the point of it is that you can only have one master or you will only have one master and that master you'll serve this is such a simple truth if we just knew and that god was our master and if we served him with all of our hearts and souls and minds and strengths our lives would be So much easier and so much more glorifying to God, wouldn't they? If we could just get this simple thing into our heads and working it itself out in our lives, that we serve God. Above all else, we love God, we serve God. Anything that threatens our devotion and our service to him is cast aside. And this is the difficulty of being a Christian, and this is a Christian difficulty, that we're always having to put aside these other masters and return to Jesus Christ.

to be pursuing him. There are many, many things that get in our way, and that's some of what we're going to talk about this morning, some of what I hope to show you. But this reality that we can only serve one master, as soon as we realize it or feel that pressure, we start to try to trim that truth away and say, well, I do serve Jesus Christ, or most of the time, or as best as I can. We could give examples of children and their parents. Do you listen, children? Do you listen to your parents and do you obey them? What sorts of dangers, what sorts of temptations or hardships do you children face in listening to your parents? What does it take? Does it take a big, huge amount of pressure to get you to turn aside from what your parents said? No. Oftentimes, it just takes your parents turning their head away and not watching what you're doing. And that's all it takes. Or maybe it takes a sibling or a friend.

Or a classmate saying, come on, let's go do this thing. And you have this thought in your head and you say, but I'm not supposed to do that. And you go do it. They won't find out. It's what you tell yourself. It won't matter. Or they were wrong. Children are always having to negotiate this with their parents. If their parents have expectations for them and tell them what to do, who will they listen to? Who will they obey? Who will they serve? How important is finishing the game? When making your bed or brushing your teeth or taking a shower or setting the table or whatever chore is being required of you. When those two things come into conflict, all of a sudden it's easy for our, we can see it in our children, how easy it is for them to say, no, no, no, I have a different master. I have something else to do. And if your kids are older, what they'll say to you, or maybe children have said to yourselves, can I do it in just a minute? Can I finish this game? I'll do it later.

Can you get somebody else to do it? I always have to do it. He never has to do it. Isn't this what we say as children? Isn't this what we hear our children saying constantly? It's easy for us to take children and to use them as a foil and to see how similar we are to them. Because they're not sophisticated. They just say, well, I don't want to do that. I want to do this. They don't want to serve one master. Wouldn't their lives be so much easier if they simply did what their mothers and their fathers said to them? The first time? Cheerfully and well? Of course it would. You as parents know your children will actually be happier if they would do what you say. Right? And safer. But our kids live with this conflict. Who am I going to listen to? Who am I going to follow? What am I going to do? There's a conflict. A tension.

There's a question I heard this last week. It was a strange question to me, mostly strange because the person asking it, I think, had a very bad answer to the question. The question was, what should a believing wife do if her unbelieving husband forbids her from going to church? I thought it was pretty simple. There should be a conversation. They should work these things out. But if it comes down to it, she should go to church. But the man that was asking the question didn't think that. He just thought, Well, even if your husbands are disobedient to the word, they should be won over by your chaste and respectful behavior. And he applied that passage to this situation and said, well, I just don't think, I don't know. Now, why do I bring that up? I'm only trying to get across to you that there's another instance. It's not children and parents, but husbands and spouses, wives. Conflict. Who do you listen to? Who do you follow? Who do you obey? There's a conflict here. The wife says, I want to go to church. I love God. I want to go be with his people. I want to worship.

The husband says, no, I want to go to the lake or whatever. There's a conflict. Who's your master and who do you serve? What about a few years ago when there were restrictions on meeting and group size? All of a sudden there's a conflict. One group saying one thing, another group saying another thing, them disagreeing. What do you do? Who's your master? All of the discussion about COVID was about this question of who the boss was, who the master was, who could call the shots, and to what extent you as Christians were going to obey them. And so this reality of having more than one master is just constant around us. These are just a few of the lowest hanging fruits, the simplest examples that we can give of the pressures that we live in every single day about having more than one master. Who do we say yes to? And who do we say no to? These are really the questions of your life. Who will you say yes to? What will you say yes to? And what will you say no to? And they're constant.

Sometimes they're small questions. Sometimes it's just a passing quick thing. And sometimes the answer to the question could affect your life permanently, your livelihood. But no one can serve two masters. We will only have one. And so we live in this conflict. And we must choose. We do choose. When I say you have to choose, yes, I will serve this master, or no, I'm going to serve this master, you will make that choice. You make that choice every day. Not choosing is not an option. So how do we negotiate this conflict? What are the things that we do when we have conflicting people telling us different things? What do we do? One of the things we can do to negotiate this tension is to say yes to whoever's right in front of us. Because we know that saying yes to them will appease them. But we reserve the right, silently of course, to actually decide whether we're going to do what we said later.

If we were to go back to children and their parents, it's very easy for a child to say yes. Jesus even gave us the example of the father going to his two sons and saying, will you go out into the vineyard? Will you work for me? And the one son says, yes, dad. It's easy to say yes. But he decided later, no, I'm not really going to go do that. I'm not going to serve my father. I'm sure all of us can think of times where we've done that very thing. We have felt the pressure of someone telling us or expecting of us to do something that we don't want to do, that we think is wrong or would be sinful. And we're like, what am I supposed to do? I don't want to do it. I don't think it's the right thing to do, but they expect me to do it. What am I supposed to do? Okay, I'll do it. We see a path and we say, I'll just take it. I'll just tell them yes. The problem with this is that if you do it,

against your conscience, you've sinned. If you've done wrong, you've sinned. If you come back to them later, having not done what they asked, then you've lied to them. So this is not a solution to the problem of how to negotiate the tension between two masters. Lying to someone to get them off your back isn't the way forward. Another common way to negotiate this tension of having to serve two masters is to decide that you'll serve whoever makes your life more miserable. If you respond to pressure or manipulation or guilt, how many of us in our homes, when there's been conflict, have resorted to manipulation to get what we want? Saying rude or mean or hurtful things. Threatening the relationship. All in an effort to get the person we're arguing with or upset with to knuckle under and do what we want. Maybe we've been the one who's had that pressure put on us. But the question is, I decided based on who is going to make it more miserable for me. The master that I serve is the one who's the most brutal. Now, none of us like pain. None of us enjoy difficulty or hardship. And so it's natural that we would recognize the pain and the discomfort. But you have to also realize this, that if you respond by doing what somebody says because they've made your life miserable, you have taught them to make you miserable. That they will get what they want out of you.

if they only make you suffer enough. And so, in effect, what you've done, though you don't realize it at the time, and they tell you this won't be the case, is you've reinforced this way of relating. So you can expect greater pressure, worse threats, and more guilt-tripping in the future. And all of this is downstream of you having to sort out who are you going to follow, who are you going to listen to, who gets said yes to, and who gets said no to. If you were to think back on some of the worst conflicts you've had with other people, you've probably responded, as they put pressure on you, as they threatened, as they laid on the guilt, you probably responded with the same sort of tactic. In turn, you start guilt-tripping them. You start putting pressure on them. It gets really nasty. Because it's just a game of chicken to see who will give in to the pressure and the pain first. Who will say, uncle? Who will tap out?

It's worth noting that this is not at all the way God deals with us. These are not God's tactics for dealing with conflict and deciding who we're going to serve and why. So how do we negotiate the conflict between two masters, between our parents and our friends, between our bosses and our co-workers? First and foremost, by realizing that our love for God, remember that he says in this passage, Hate the one and love the other, or you'll be devoted to one and despise the other. You can't have two people who agree with you and like you. And this is very hard for us. Because Christianity today and being a Christian has come to mean that if people are upset with you, or if you've not pleased them or said yes to them, that you have failed. And I'll just tell you that negotiating life in this world as a Christian is complex. It's very complex to sort out how to love God.

How to love our neighbors, how to discipline our sins, and what role it plays in our relationships. It's very difficult. It's very difficult. As an example, think of our deacons for a minute. If someone comes in and they say, hey, I need money to pay my light bill. They're about to turn off my lights. Are any of us prepared to say, that's your problem, too bad. What did you come here for? No. And if you are, you should recognize that's an expression of an incredibly hard heart. Because you would never want your burdens dealt with that way, even if those burdens were your own fault. So then you're left going, well, what should we do? Well, there is an expectation or some pressure to simply always say yes. That really all the person has to do is ask, and if they ask, the answer will be yes.

Because if they don't say yes, if the deacons don't say yes, we'll pay your light bill or what have you, that they will be seen as not loving the person, not helping in the situation, having the means and yet refusing to do it. Our deacons have been in situations like this where they've sat down and they've talked with people and they've ministered to them and preached the gospel to them and then only for the people to go away saying, they didn't love us, they didn't care about us, they told us that everything was our fault. After spending an hour or more talking with the people, praying with them, listening to their story, trying to help them, you can understand how difficult being a deacon would be. To have someone whose light bill is really going to get turned off, you have the means, you have the money to pay it. You could simply say yes or say no. You have to judge what you think is best for this situation, for this person. It's very difficult. You say yes the first time, perhaps. Let's say you say yes the first time.

What happens if they come back six months later with a similar problem? I know that there would be a temptation to say, listen, we bailed you out once and you've went and gotten yourself all snarled up and in a mess again. Now it is your fault. Maybe the first time it was ignorance, but now we told you, you know better, so you shouldn't be doing this anymore. But they did. If only life were more simple. If only serving God was easy. If it was always clear what serving him would be. Should you pay the light bill a second time? I don't know. It really depends. It's hard. But the question before the deacons is not primarily, are you going to pay the bill? The question before the deacons is, what would serving God, serving our Lord and Master, require of us now? How do we express our love for God? That's what they have to work out. Pastors and elders and small group leaders, we face this sort of thing regularly in ministry. There are often situations where faithfulness puts...

Being faithful and saying what needs to be said puts the leader in a position where their devotion to God is tested. We think in our heads, if I say this, it is going to upset the person. They are going to get angry. They are not going to like it. But I know that it's what needs to be said. So the question is, who's your master? Who does the leader serve? Who do they love? I remember when I first became a Christian, I had Vanessa and I had a meeting with... a pastor and his wife. And their counsel to us was that we should break up. And it was good counsel. It was hard counsel to hear. I didn't live in town and I had to leave. And so I got in my car and I left and I went back to Chicago. And Vanessa and I were left with the question of whether or not we were going to listen to what we were told. And I decided, we decided that we would, that we would break up. And I was left trying to figure out

how to live life now. But there was something that was clear to me. And it's worth noting that this pastor and his wife, they didn't know me. Like we had not had a long relationship. They had not spent months or years pouring into me and loving me and caring for me. They just had this young couple show up on their doorstep trying to figure out life. Vanessa had been at their church for over a year or about a year at this point. And here I am, this new guy. And I'll tell you, what became clear to me, and this is not what I ever would have assumed I would have figured out, but what I did figure out was that the counsel they gave me was because of two things. First, that they loved Vanessa. And they cared about her like parents. And so they wanted what was best for her. And so they were willing to say something difficult to me because they loved her. But behind that and their love for Vanessa was their love for God.

Because the things they said were difficult for me to hear. They were difficult for us to hear. What? They only knew us for five months. So you were new to the church. That's right. It was about a semester in. Yeah. So you can imagine how difficult this situation is. She's living there in your first semester. I'm traveling down from Chicago. And they say, and essentially, your relationship's a mess. You guys need to break up. Which was not what we wanted to do. We went into the meeting wanting to ask, what do we need to do to move toward marriage? At least that's what I wanted to ask. And the counsel that came out was, run away from each other. And I remember writing them a letter not long after we broke up, thanking them. Because it was clear to me, not only that they had loved me in saying something hard, but that they had loved Vanessa because they were willing to say something hard to me. But ultimately, behind all of that, they loved God.

Because why else would you say something hurtful and painful to the people sitting in front of you? Unless you believe that this is what loving God required of you in that situation. And so they spoke with tears the things that they believed that loving God required of them. They had settled in their minds in that situation and in that council who their master was. And they spoke to us and thanked God for them. As painful as it was, we were both thankful to have somebody tell us the truth and be honest with us. To live by faith and to demonstrate to us, without ever saying, we're doing this because we love God, without demonstrating to us that they loved God. That Jesus Christ was not just their Savior, but their Lord, and that they were serving him. And that if serving him led them into difficult situations, where hard things had to be said or done, they were still going to serve God. And that was an incredible...

and strength and help to us. Contrast that with months before I had talked to another pastor and asked him, do I have to come clean and tell all of my dirty laundry? I've really learned my lessons. Do I have to tell what I've done? And he's like, well, if you really learned your lesson, I don't think you have to because it would destroy the trust in your relationship. Speaking about a situation between Vanessa and I. And I just thought, you're worthless. You're more than worthless. You're destructive. You're telling me that maintaining the lie is the way to maintain the trust. Keep up the lie to protect the trust of the relationship. It's just awful. That pastor cared more about what I thought of him than what God thought of him. And so in that moment, I was his master because he was beholden to my opinion of him. And he didn't do me any good. And so as we live our lives, we're going to face this issue of,

Who are we going to serve? What does our love for God actually look like? Do the people around us know that we love Jesus or do they have to be told that we love Jesus? There are some things. It's like in a dating relationship. The dating couple always wants to say, there's this question of like, when do you say I love you? I generally tell them, yeah, wait till you're engaged to say that. And they're all like, well, but if I wait that long, how will they know? And I'm like, they'll know. They'll know. You won't have to say it with words. They'll know that you love them because of the way that you care for them and treat them. It will be apparent. And if you have to constantly be saying, I love you, I love you, I love you, this is so wonderful. There's something broken in the relationship. Not that you shouldn't say you love your spouse or anything. Don't hear what I'm not saying. But there's this reality that in a dating relationship, you would know that the person you're dating is growing in their interest in you or not.

It would just be obvious if we would look at it clearly. And the same is true with our love for God. It will be apparent to the people around us if we love God or not. If they were to speak freely about us based on our behavior and our conduct, they would be able to say whether we love God to the extent that they know us. They'd be able to point and say, I've seen him suffer or I've never seen him suffer. He's very shrewd. He always avoids the trouble. He's figured out how to thread the needle of being a Christian and never having to suffer for it. So how do you negotiate this conflict of what to do and how to demonstrate your love for God? Here are some dangers that you should have worked to avoid. Assuming that you will naturally do the thing that honors God because you're a Christian is foolish. Christians do foolish, ungodly things all the time. If you doubt me saying that, read Paul's epistles.

and look at the sins that he's dealing with in their churches. It's incredible the unchristian things that they're doing that he's having to address in Corinth and Galatia and Ephesus. The things that these Christians were doing, it just blows your mind. And so we should never assume that just because we're a Christian, our inclinations will lead us into the right thing to do. Oftentimes, they'll do exactly the opposite. To assume that God will, whether what you did Because you're a Christian, what you did will please God because you did it in faith. No. As you live longer as a Christian, you'll realize that things that you did earlier on in life as a Christian by faith were wrong. You thought you were doing the right thing, but you ended up doing the wrong thing. You thought you were serving God. Turns out you weren't serving God. You didn't know it at the time. You figured it out later. Here's another danger. How do you negotiate the conflict? I just always say the hard thing.

It's just like what we do. It's what Christians do. They just do the difficult thing. They upset the person. And they call it suffering for Christ's sake. This is foolish. This is foolish. Where there are many words, there is sin. You think of Jesus dealing with the woman caught in adultery. How did he deal with her? Gently. Mercifully. Tenderly. And he told her, go and sin no more. But he was kind. How did he deal with the woman who had a hemorrhage that came and touched him and took... power from him and he felt it go out. Did he say, who did that? What'd you do that for? No, he was merciful. And so saying the hard thing and upsetting the other person, even that is not an assurance that you did the right thing. People being upset with you does not mean that you've said or done the right thing, that you've served God. Because sometimes people end up upset at you because you're a jerk, because you said the wrong thing, because you were insensitive, you were impatient, you were rude, you were angry, you were bitter.

Our aim should be to know the will of God and to speak and act in accordance with it. To speak the truth in love. Sometimes you're going to have to say hard things, but it's possible to say hard things without being mean about it. To say something difficult and have the person come away and know that you said it because you love them. That was Vanessa and Mai's understanding of the pastor who counseled us. They had hard things to say. We were all crying. And yet we knew they loved us. We knew they weren't being mean to us. We knew that they weren't disgusted with us. So up to this point, as we've been looking at this passage, we've only been talking about what it means to serve one master as opposed to two or three. And that master has been a person. I've described it as a conflict between serving God or serving someone else. But those aren't the only kind of masters that we have. They're not the only kind of masters that compete.

With our Lord. At the end of this passage, Jesus says, to put a finer point on it, he says you cannot serve God and wealth. At the beginning he says no one can serve two masters, and at the end he names the masters, God and wealth. Now it's worth noting here that wealth is not the only competitor, but a very common competitor to serving God. Wealth in this passage stands in the place of whatever our vices, our sins, or our desires, That are in conflict with the Lord. The love of money as well as actual wealth are ever-present dangers to us. The scripture warns us about them. Not constantly. It's not the only thing that it says. Proverbs tells us that the rich man's wealth is his wall. That it's a protection to him. But scripture warns us time and time again about the love of money and the dangers or temptations that attend wealth.

In Hebrews 13.5, it says, And again, James 1.11, the rich man in the midst of his pursuits will fade away. And then probably one of the more difficult passages, Jesus says of the man building bigger barns in Luke chapter 12, then he, Jesus, said to them, beware and be on your guard against every form of greed, for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions. And when he says that, he's warning, he's saying, you think that all the stuff you have is what life's about, and I'm telling you it's not. And then he told them a parable. The land of a rich man was very productive. He began reasoning to himself, saying, What shall I do since I have no place to store my crops? And he said, This is what I'll do. I'll tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I'll store my grain and my goods. And I'll say to my soul, Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come. Take your ease. Eat, drink, and be merry. But God said to him, You fool. This very night your soul is required of you, and now who will own what you have prepared?

so is the man who stores up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God. These passages warn us of the constant danger that we face to love money and to pursue wealth instead of loving God and pursuing him. In Matthew 19, they're questioning Jesus, and they said this. Someone came to him and said, Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may obtain eternal life? And he said to him, Why are you asking me about what is good? There is only one who is good. But if you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments. Then he said to him, Which ones? And Jesus said, You shall not commit murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. The young man said to him, All of these things I have kept, what am I still lacking? Jesus said to him, If you wish to be complete, go.

And sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Come and follow me. But when the young man heard this statement, he went away grieving, for he was one who owned much property. And Jesus said to his disciples, Truly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. And so this final passage brings into focus, the conflict that Jesus is getting at here between serving God or serving wealth. He says you won't serve two masters. You can't serve two masters. All of the passages I just read to us warn us that if we pursue these things and if we love these things and if they become our God, they will lead us away from God and they will lead us to hell. Where we would like to have nuance and explanation and details

Jesus simply says you cannot serve God in wealth. Period. And that's the end of it. You can't have them both as your master. If you spend your life trying to negotiate how much wealth I can have while still loving God, you will fail. In God's economy, some people are poor. And it's not because they have failed in life. And some people in God's economy are wealthy. And it's not because they're smarter or better people than others. It's simply because God gives to different people. Different resources. Our concern is not how much resource do I have versus the guy next door to me or my neighbor or the other person in the pew next to me. The question for us with regard to wealth or money or standard of living and all of that is simply, am I being faithful with what I have? That's it. Having more money doesn't make it easier to be faithful with what you have. It makes it more difficult to be faithful with what you have because you have more to manage, more to oversee, more to give an account for. So you can't serve God in wealth.

And as Christians, we shouldn't want to. We should be quick. Some of us are probably sitting here thinking, I'm sitting here thinking as I'm preparing it, how do I love wealth? How is it in conflict? How is that in conflict with me serving God? And it's actually hard to say. Because the love of money, it's almost like, what's the boogeyman look like? And you're like, oh, it's this big thing. And you're like, well, that's a boogeyman. I'm like, most of the time the boogeyman doesn't look like that. Usually it just looks like a normal person. What does the love of money look like? And you're like, oh, it looks like these greedy men who are taking advantage. It's the caricature of Donald Trump or of Warren Buffett or all of the area. Jeff Bezos are all like, they're just these greedy, you know. As long as I don't look like that, I must not struggle with this. That's a foolish thing to think. Because you'll never look like that. You'll never have those kind of resources. It does not mean that you're out of the danger of loving money or having it compete.

for your devotion to God. Most people's love of money looks very normal and even acceptable. I've said before, and I'll say again, stewardship is important, but it's often the banner under which our love of money runs. I need to be a good steward. I need to be a good steward. I need to have more. I always make a good decision. Never make a foolish decision. I'm not saying you shouldn't be a good steward of what you have. I already said you should be a good steward of what you have, but it's possible that there's a... There's a fly in the ointment. Another thing that we would say that I think often is a cover for the love of money is I need to provide well for my family. I need to provide well for my family. Okay, well, what's that mean? It's funny. We never can say this is what I mean. And there are nice things on the other side of that line that we're saying no to. That line never gets defined because I'm providing well for my family actually means getting as wealthy as I possibly can.

And so you and I have this danger, all of us, and have fallen prey to it more times than we care to admit, probably more times than we're aware, that we've left off following after God and serving God as our master because we have wanted something else. And we've baptized it and called it Christian and said, this is what good, faithful Christians do. But the irony of it is, the Christians that you have been most encouraged by in your life and you've admired the most probably have been very poor. Some of us were just at a funeral for Jim Striedelmeyer this last week. Jim grew up in the farm, on a farm in rural Indiana. Jim went to Moody Bible Institute up in Chicago. Jim went to be a missionary in South Africa right after apartheid was over. And Jim was involved with wealthy churches in Indianapolis in the beginning. Not because he loved wealth, but because these were the people he'd gone to school with or been in touch with. And at some point, Jim said,

The Bible says that blessed are the poor. And he said, then guess what? I need to go be poor. And so Jim went and lived his whole life poor. And it wasn't because Jim couldn't make more money. It wasn't because he wasn't smart enough to make more money. It wasn't because he wasn't creative enough. His church runs the largest free clinic in the country for poor people. IUPUI and Butler University, their law. their pharmacological school, their medical school, their counseling school, all of this stuff, they all come to Jim and say, can we be a part of this thing? It wasn't because he lacked the ability to do better. When I went up and saw Jim, Jim was in his casket. You know what Jim was wearing? He's wearing the thing he always wears. What are you supposed to wear when you die? You're supposed to wear something nice. You know what Jim was wearing? An old, worn-out black sweater.

And you know why Jim was wearing his old worn-out black sweater? Because that's always what Jim wore. When they showed his pictures of Jim doing this and loving that person and this other thing, there's the black sweater, there's the black polo, that's all Jim ever wore. He probably bought a semi-load of them for free. He's just like, well, that's just what I'll wear the rest of my life. That's the kind of guy Jim was. Toward the end of his life, Jim was on Moody Radio because he'd spent his life loving and serving the poor. And they said, hey, we need to talk to this guy about what it means to love and serve the poor.

Because he's actually done it, you know? It was clear to me that Jim loved God and he knew who his master was. I didn't agree with all of Jim's theology. He didn't agree with all my theology. But I'll tell you, you couldn't talk to the man and not have Jesus coming at you, his love. And so Jim is both very encouraging and very convicting. Because life's not nearly so simple for me as it was for Jim. Life was just simple for Jim. I don't think they had a church budget. They were given a building that you could stand and look up and you could see the sky. You want a building? Yeah, we want a building. Here you go. Stand in the sanctuary. There's no roof. Or at least there's no roof right there. We're going to fix it. Do you have a Jim Striedelmeyer? Do you have somebody in your life that you've known who's a Christian who it's been clear? You're like, this person loves Jesus. And the thing is, they didn't have any money. And they didn't care that they didn't have any money. Maybe you've met people who love Jesus and have money.

But I don't know that they smile as much or laugh as much or love as much. So this passage says you can't serve God and wealth, and it's true. But you can't serve God and anything else. I remember Jim teaching a men's retreat, and he said, you know, people get upset about the Bible talking about rewards and there being blessings and crowns and all this stuff in heaven. He says, you know, I think God put that stuff in there to motivate us. I want a reward in heaven, so I'm going to live my life now so I can have a reward in heaven. So Jim went without a lot of stuff. Some might say he went without a longer life because of the way he lived. But is it so different if you died serving as a missionary on the near east side of Chicago or Indianapolis? Is it any different than going and being a missionary in some far off country and being persecuted and dying early? Is there so much difference? The one we would honor and the other we'd look sideways at. But they both love God.

And so what we need is we need God to show us, to reveal our hearts to us, to show us the things that are the stumbling blocks, the things that we love instead of him. And we need him to convict us of them and to bring us to repent and to return to him. So what is the God that you serve that's not the Lord, Jesus Christ? That's the question on your mind. What is it? I don't know. Well, that's a dangerous place to be then. Because you've become so accustomed to the chains that you don't even hear them clink anymore. What do you love? It could be wealth. It could be comfort. It could be ease. It could be sleep. It could be yourself. It could be your strength. It could be your reputation. It could be your health. What is it? What is it? If you're like me and you get asked that question, you're like, well, I can see about a dozen of them. I'm just not sure where to put them in line. Because I seem to love all of these things instead of God.

Lord, help us to put them to death. So as you live your life and you want to figure out how to negotiate the tension about how to be a Christian and live like a Christian, you should ask yourself, is the thing that I'm doing an expression of my love for God? Is this how I express my love for God? And if the answer is yes, then praise God for his mercy and his kindness to you. If the answer is no, then stop. Then make it your purpose to stop. If the answer is I'm not sure, which was probably what you'll find to be the case much of the time, then ask God and people who love you to help you sort out whether it is or it's not. This is our life as Christians. What is the greatest danger in front of you that keeps you from loving God? What's the thing that your heart goes after? What do you love? What do you get excited about? What do you worry about? These are the things that will show you your gods. And then ask God to help you put those things aside.

Start looking in your life and examining for the places where your devotion to these things shows itself. I knew a story one time from our old church. It was sort of just an anecdote, but it was helpful. Just a story about a wife. She says, you know, whenever I'm upset at my husband and don't want to, you know, and I don't have a good, you know, it's not a good reason to be, but she'd just get mad at him. She'd just be grumbling, whatever, in her heart. You know, maybe he did something, maybe he didn't do something. The point is she was upset at him about something.

Well, what do you do, wives, when you get that way with your husbands? You just cultivate it and stew in it and churn and whip it up? What she did was she made him dessert because she knew he liked dessert. He loved it when there was dessert with dinner. And it got to be a point in their marriage, almost a joke between them when they have dessert, and he'd go, what did I do today? What were you upset about? But that's just an example of her disciplining her own. Temptations. And we can laugh at it and we can say, good on you. That's a simple little thing you can do to love God better and not let your bitterness and anger take over. So that's the kind of stuff that our lives should be marked by. Loving God. So that when we die and people come to our funerals, they'll say the sorts of things about us that were said about Jim. Everyone stood up and said, this is how Jim loved God. This is how Jim loved me.

This is what Jim gave up. It was really bittersweet to lose a brother like Jim, but it was sweet to know that Jim's getting his reward now. Let's pray.