Nowhere Man In Nowhere Land

Storm Clouds, Banff National Park, Canada,2010, taken by Martha Wiggins

“No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”   Matthew 6:24   

      Serving two masters is really quite a balancing act.  If you attempt to do so, you will not do it well and one or the other will suffer.  If one of them happens to be God, you cannot do it at all, for God will not allow it.

     Let us say you serve two worldly masters, love and money as a simple example.  You may be able to balance it for a while, but eventually it will wear you down.  If you spend all your time working to get more money, you will have little or no time left to spend with the ones you love.  If you spend all your time in loving someone, you will probably get fired from your job for being absent all the time.  Then you will have no money to support yourself, let alone the one you love.

     Let us say one master is God and the other is a worldly master, such as vanity or pride for example.  You may serve God publicly in order to receive many accolades.  However, God commands us to serve only Him.  If we are vain and serve Him only that others might see us, we may actually see success for a time.  Others surely will reap the benefits of our service to them, yet we will reap no heavenly reward.  The sin of vanity and pride will cost us dearly.

     As Matthew so clearly states above, you cannot serve both God and mammon.  When you try to do so, you get caught in between and are in nowhere land.  You will serve neither master well.  And so you must choose which master you will serve, God or mamon.

     As an aside:  I once attended a beautiful spiritual retreat where the priest who spoke left me with a little food for thought that I have never forgotten.  You see, I love music, all kinds of music, though I do especially like music from the my high school and college days.  His bit of wisdom was that if you like the ‘oldies’ from the 60’s and 70’s, you can often turn the lyrics into hymns of prayer by imagining Jesus as the main impetus for many of the songs.  It may sound a little strange, but I have often done it.  That said, the above Bible verse makes me thing of the following Beetles song.

Songwriters: LENNON, JOHN / MCCARTNEY, PAUL