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Our Magnanimous Lord, June 2
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
.
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