God Or Mammon?

You cannot serve God and mammon:

Matthew 6:23-25 NKJV — “But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness! “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?

Mammon, as a Biblical term for riches, is often used to describe the debasing influence of material wealth. The Greek word means "confidence personified." Mammon isn't limited to money. Money is a tool to buy mammon. Mammon is confidence in your material strength. You cannot serve God and mammon at the same time.

This concept is essential to fidelity... To seeing the kingdom come through you.

You cannot be a helpful part of the "kingdom coming" with a wrong view of what that means.

The kingdom is coming in a way NOT seen. It isn't a "mammon kingdom." A mammon kingdom is what we are living in right now unless we have come out in faith into the kingdom of God.

Joshua 5:13-14 NKJV — And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted his eyes and looked, and behold, a Man stood opposite him with His sword drawn in His hand. And Joshua went to Him and said to Him, “Are You for us or for our adversaries?” So He said, “No, but as Commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.” And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped, and said to Him, “What does my Lord say to His servant?”

God isn't "for the good guys." There are none. He is willing to save any who come out the world and into a totally different kingdom.

Most have not. God isn't saving this world. He is saving people OUT of mammon and back into CONFIDENCE in God alone, which is spiritual fidelity. Anything less than fidelity is infidelity, or what the Bible calls harlotry (i.e., harlot Babylon).

Your fear... The "therefore" of the Matthew 6 passage above ^... Determines what you see (eye, or the object of the warning of this passage) as the value that dictates your desired solution (the God/god you end up serving).

What Jesus is saying is that in between your vision and your fear is your God.

You cannot serve the material world and God at the same time. You cannot serve what you see, touch, and feel, and God at the same time. You have to settle on God, who is Spirit, as the vision, solution, and fear, or you will try to serve two gods, the God of heaven and the one of this world. That is the Biblical definition of spiritual adultery.

John 4:24 NKJV — “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”

The Pharisees were "experts" in the God of heaven... From the flesh's (mammon's) perspective... But they really served mammon. They believed in a "mammon messiah", not a "Spirit saver." Because of this, they couldn't see Jesus as the literal Messiah they were experts in. The light in their eye was deep darkness, because they feared the loss of this life, and ended up claiming Caesar, who hated them, as their king! This is true of most of the church.

If you fear political trouble, you will see a political solution, and serve a political false god, all because you wanted a god you could see touch, feel, and vote on, not the unseen God of the Bible who requires faith, not eyesight, as the vision you follow.

The God of the Bible requires... It isn't suggested but required... That you love enemies, pray for those who use you, bless those who curse you, give away your material wealth, stay faithful in relationships, don't parade yourselves, don't demand your own way, believe the best about people, and don't dehumanize people and call them names to stir up hate against them! This would take a lot of faith when "the other side" does these things. If you do what the other side of humanity does, you are serving their same god! You need to see the world the way the Spirit does.

If you fear financial trouble, you will see financial solutions and serve a false spirit of mammon. Same false god as the political one, but one that appeals to a different fear.

I could go on and on. Your fear determines what you worship because your fear determines what fills your vision and your vision determines who you will serve. Who you serve manifests in your behavior.

Galatians 5:17-24 NKJV — For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. And those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

Most of the American church (and the global church that has been misled by the American church) has chosen to serve mammon because it fears what everyone else is doing to "their world", their idea of marriage, their idea of sexuality, their idea of murder (abortion), and on and on and on...

None of these are ours. They are all God's. It's God's world! He made it!

Fear is driving impatient worship of mammon... Or trying to save "our" own world that we can touch instead of giving ourselves in faith to God, who is Spirit.

The problem with trying to save the world is that our standard of "good" is so much less than God's.

For example:

God's view of murder is much more refined than what we can touch and handle. The church feels self-righteous denouncing abortion, but doesn't at all see its own greed, selfishness, fear, and hatred, which Jesus calls the SAME as murder:

Matthew 5:20-24 NKJV — “For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder, and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment.’ “But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. And whoever says to his brother, ‘Raca!’ shall be in danger of the council. But whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be in danger of hell fire. “Therefore if you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, “leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.

If we served the unseen God of the Bible we would only see one good One, and we would mimic His behavior. He would be our fear, our vision, and our God (2 Cor 3:18).

This is the only way to rightly see Jesus coming the second time. Most believers will actually worship the Antichrist because they want to save the world rather than be saved out of it. I'm not talking about "them," I am literally talking about you and me.

John 8:38-45 NKJV — “I speak what I have seen with My Father, and you do what you have seen with your father.” They answered and said to Him, “Abraham is our father.” Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would do the works of Abraham. “But now you seek to kill Me, a Man who has told you the truth which I heard from God. Abraham did not do this. “You do the deeds of your father.” Then they said to Him, “We were not born of fornication; we have one Father—God.” Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and came from God; nor have I come of Myself, but He sent Me. “Why do you not understand My speech? Because you are not able to listen to My word. “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it. “But because I tell the truth, you do not believe Me.

Listen, believers, if you denounce abortion but don't confess, repent, and find deliverance for your own hatred, God sees you as a hypocrite, just like those pharisees who killed Jesus. Your judgment will be worse than the pharisee because you have the Holy Spirit in you. You should know better than murder!

This is just one example in a sea of our own fears, vision, and service to either this world or God.

The church erroneously believes God wants us to save the world. This is literally the Spirit of antichrist. We aren't even supposed to love the world! We are supposed to want out of it entirely! God loves the world. We can't. If we serve God, we will best let God love it through us. God loves the world because He knows what it could have been submitted to Him... Not attempting to self-save. Self salvation is what BROKE the world.

If the church took the Spirit seriously, no one in the church would care about politics at all... Or money, or our rights, houses, selfish ambitions... We would be like Jesus!

Those who learn to see by faith, come out of the world and all it's solutions, and serve God. Those faithful to God and not mammon see political solutions as trying to steal glory from Jesus, not the means he wants to use to "save our world."

No one is going to save the world. Jesus made a way for you to come out of the world... and He already finished it! He is simply waiting patiently to see who will.

1 John 2:15-20 NKJV — Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever. Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest, that none of them were of us. But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things.