Who rules over you?

Another takeaway from men’s Bible Study this week was the concept of carnal Christianity… where we live wantonly in the gray area of faith and failure, when we profess Christ while tethered to hypocrisy of the flesh.

In the sermon on the mount, Jesus states in Matthew 6:24, “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.”

And in 1 Timothy 6:10, the apostle Paul writes, “For the love of money is the root of all evil.”

So is money, and our love for it, what we are to avoid making an idol of and we’re all good? No, it’s representative of independence, and a currency toward control. And if we develop a love for that, for money, suddenly you’ve got freedom from Christ, even if you already thought you had freedom in Christ. Money, as a currency, is just a means toward or substitute for power, influence, control, our effect, our desired outcome, our satisfaction. This freedom from Christ is fleeting, and we know it, otherwise why repent?

In Pslam 39, David gets it. In verse 4 he writes, “Show me, Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is. You had made my days a mere handbreath; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Everyone is but a breath, even those who seem secure.”

For those who know Christ and consider the Bible inerrant and true, all the above begets a binary existence. 1 or 0, all or nothing, in or out. His way or your way.

Well be encouraged, Jesus showed us all in. He defeated temptation by the devil, devoted himself to God the father, and accepted the fate that exchanged our sin with his righteousness, accomplishing for us what we could never do on our own.

As Job learned, you can’t argue yourself to God, because you weren’t there when He put word to creation to wisdom. You can’t argue your case to God, no critique against the Father holds water, no appeal outside of repentance preserves our fleeting flesh.

You can however criticize your idols and they retreat in defeat!