No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Matthew 6:24.
It is plainly written on the unrenewed heart and on a fallen world, All seek their own. Selfishness is the great law of our degenerate nature. Selfishness occupies the place in the soul where Christ should sit enthroned. But the Lord requires perfect obedience; and if we truly desire to serve Him, there will be no question in our minds as to whether we shall obey His requirements or seek our own temporal interests.
The Lord of glory did not consult His convenience or pleasure when He left His station of high command to become a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, accepting ignominy and death in order to deliver man from the consequence of his disobedience. Jesus died, not to save man in his sins, but from his sins. We must leave the error of our ways, take up our cross and follow Christ, denying self, and obeying God at any cost.
Those who profess to serve God, yet really serve mammon, will be visited with judgments. None will be justified in a course of disobedience for the sake of worldly profit. If God would excuse one man, He might all. Those who disregard the Lord’s express injunction for personal advantage, are heaping up for themselves future woe. Christ said: “Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves” (Mark 11:17). The people of God should inquire closely if they have not, like the Jews of old, made the house of God a place of merchandise.
Many are falling into the sin of sacrificing their religion for the sake of worldly gain, preserving a form of piety, yet giving all the mind to temporal pursuit. But the law of God must be considered first of all, and obeyed in spirit and in letter. Jesus, our great exemplar, in His life and death, taught the strictest obedience. He died, the just for the unjust, the innocent for the guilty, that the honor of God’s law might be preserved and yet man not utterly perish…
God has withheld nothing from man that could promote his happiness or secure to him eternal riches. He has clothed the earth with beauty, and furnished it with everything necessary for the comfort of man during his temporal life.—The Signs of the Times, June 2, 1887.
Ellen G. White,
This Day With God, June 2
