Generosity

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” Matthew 6:24

As you read the words of Jesus, you find that there is a consistent theme to His teachings: the heart. Every commandment sinks beneath the surface of action to motivation. Matthew 6:24 falls right in the middle of Jesus’ most famous sermon, the sermon on the mount. A few verses before, Jesus wraps up the heart behind the spiritual disciplines and moves into our relationship with money. Verse 21 says, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” 

Is that true of your life? It’s true of mine. 

Jesus sums up his point with a zinger. He says, “no one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24). 

There are two masters in this parable. God and money. Master here is the Greek word kurios and means a person exercising absolute ownership rights. In other words, God owns you or money owns you. 

Look around, we live in a world that is consumed by the love of money. We know how we’re going to spend our money before we even receive it. There are commercials for banks whose selling point is that you can receive your paycheck two business days early. We have entire holidays dedicated to shopping. Jesus puts it plainly…you love God or you love money. You cannot love both. 

Jesus is a brilliant teacher. Immediately following His discussion on money He moves on to teaching about worry. Why? Because money and worry have the tendency to go hand in hand. But He tells us “do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Matthew 6:25-26). 

The best test of the heart when it comes to money lies in our ability to show generosity. If you’re wondering if your money owns your or not, practice trusting God with your money, practically. 

Some of my dearest mentors practice this regularly. Every time their family begins to worry about money or find themselves holding their money a little too tightly they give some away. If they don’t know how they’re going to pay a bill, they buy someone’s dinner, donate to a local charity, send someone a gift, etc. To them, generosity isn’t just the means to a tax break come the end of the fiscal year, generosity is a discipline they put in place to keep their paycheck from sitting on the throne of their hearts and an act of faith, trusting God as their provider.

In 2022, in an Amazon addicted society, in the consumer capital of the world and one of the wealthiest cities in our nation, how do we keep ourselves from the love of money? We practice generosity. We give our money away so that it doesn’t have the power to own us, we relinquish our false sense of control and security to God.