God or Mammon

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

Worldliness is one of those words that Christians use freely and define narrowly. For many in Lloyd-Jones’s generation it meant a short list of forbidden activities — the theatre, the cinema, the dance hall, the public house. The list varied from church to church, but it had one convenient feature: it usually consisted of things the speaker did not do. Lloyd-Jones would have none of it. In his exposition of Matthew 6, and in the sermon God or Mammon which can be read on Ochorus, he gave a far more searching account.

An attitude, not a list

Worldliness, he argued, is not confined to certain things. It is an attitude towards life — a general outlook that measures everything by this world and its values. It is so subtle and so pervasive that it can enter the holiest places. A man may avoid every item on the traditional list and be thoroughly worldly in his ambitions, his anxieties, his use of money, his desire for recognition. And a man may be worldly in his religion itself: in the way he seeks a reputation for spirituality, or measures his church by its size and prominence.

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. 1 JOHN 2:15–16

He stressed, too, that our Lord’s warning in Matthew 6 is addressed to believers. It is easy to hear it as a word against the materialism of the unbelieving world. But the peculiar danger, he insisted, is to Christian people, precisely because they assume it does not apply to them.

Treasures on earth

Our Lord’s command is plain: lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth.

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven. MATTHEW 6:19–20

Lloyd-Jones noted that the Lord does not merely command; He gives reasons. Earthly treasures are insecure: moth, rust and thieves take them. They capture the heart: where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. They darken the understanding: if the eye is not single, the whole body is full of darkness. And they enslave: no man can serve two masters. He found in this a gracious condescension. The Lord stoops to reason with us, because the matter is so serious.

He was ready to be very practical about it. He suggested, for instance, that a Christian might test himself by his political views. If he finds that he regards one party as wholly right and the other as wholly wrong, he might ask whether his conviction really rests on principle, or on the protection of some treasure on earth he has or hopes to have. It is an uncomfortable question, and meant to be.

The single eye

The heart of the passage, for Lloyd-Jones, was the connection our Lord draws between the heart, the mind and the will. What a man treasures governs what he loves; what he loves governs what he sees; and what he sees governs how he lives.

The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. MATTHEW 6:22

He described how worldliness blinds. A man whose heart is set on earthly things begins to see everything in their light. His judgment becomes distorted. He finds reasons for doing what he wants to do. He does not notice that he is being mastered. And so the danger is not only that he will waste his life on things that perish, but that he will come to be unable to see what he is doing.

A totalitarian claim

The final verse, Ye cannot serve God and mammon, he took as a statement of God’s absolute claim. God does not ask for a share of our lives. He asks for all of them. Mammon — wealth, possessions, the things of this world personified as a rival master — asks for the same. A man cannot give himself wholly to both. He must choose.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. MATTHEW 6:33

In the sermon, Lloyd-Jones tells a homely story of a farmer who promised to give one of his calves to the Lord, and how, when a calf died, it turned out always to have been the Lord’s one. The point needs no story to make it. When money grows tight, the first economy most of us make is in what we give to God. The things we truly love are the last to go. That, he said, is where our real master is revealed.

The positive remedy

It would be wrong to leave Lloyd-Jones as merely a critic of worldliness. His remedy was not a new list of prohibitions but a new vision. The man who has seen the glory of God and the treasure laid up for him in heaven will find that the world loses its grip without a struggle. It is not that he forces himself to despise the world; it is that he has found something better.

Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. COLOSSIANS 3:2

Where care is needed

Lloyd-Jones’s strictures can be applied in a spirit of suspicion that makes every enjoyment of God’s good gifts seem a sin. That was not his intention. He believed that all things are the Christian’s in Christ, as the previous chapters have shown, and that the problem is not the gifts but their mastery over us. The reader should also note that his remark about political allegiance was a test of motive, not an argument for indifference to public affairs. The question is always the same: who is master?

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write down what you would most hate to lose. Ask honestly whether it has become a treasure on earth.

2. Review your giving over the past year. When money was tight, what did you cut first?

3. Test your strongest opinions — political, social, professional — by asking what you might be protecting.

4. Identify one way in which worldliness may have entered your religious life: in a desire for recognition, influence or success.

5. Spend time meditating on the inheritance reserved for you in heaven, and let it loosen your grip on something here.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You claim the whole of my life, and I have tried to divide it between You and the world.

Show me where my treasure really is. Open my eyes to the subtle ways the world has captured my heart.

Make my eye single, my heart undivided and my will surrendered to You alone.

Set my affections on things above, where Christ is, and let the things of earth lose their hold on me. Amen.