Eva and I had just come back from North Carolina where we had seen the movie, The Gospel of John. Although it was eight hours away, it was the nearest place it was playing at the time, so we made a weekend out of it. What a moving picture it was! We got home early Sunday morning and I couldn’t sleep even though we’d been traveling most of the night and we were going to church in a few hours. So I laid there, on my bed, praising God. Suddenly, in a flash, God showed me a phrase which I knew was from the Bible. “If your eye is sound..” I leapt up to look it up on my computer Bible and found it in Matthew 6:22. I was thrilled. It was God highlighting a portion of the Bible that he wanted me to review. I had never had that happen before (although I understand it is a regular occurrence to some Christians). I was excited about the message from God and the corresponding Bible verse He showed me and wrote…
Matthew 6:22 The light of the body is the eye. Therefore if your eye is sound, your whole body shall be full of light.
6:23 But if your eye is evil, your whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
6:24 No one 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. You cannot serve God and mammon. (MKJV)
We see how important it is that we focus only on God and His attributes because the light of the body is in our focus, in what we see, in our eyes. If our eyes focus on the negative darkness of the world, we are giving power to that darkness and determining that the darkness is possibly insurmountable. But nothing is insurmountable with Christ so, as quickly as possible, we must return our focus to Christ and forget the darkness. At this point, it will be seen that nothing can withstand our focus on Jesus. The darkness will disappear as we focus on our Lord.
We cannot serve (or follow or focus on) God and mammon at the same time. We are always showing our love either to one or the other. When our minds and hearts are preoccupied with God and in deep worship on Sunday, worldly interest will have disappeared from our focus as we stand before our Almighty God. However, the next day we may be standing before an associate at work or our boss and trying to deal with the darkness of a back-stabbing relationship or cowering under the boss’s demands and haughty, unbending attitude. At this time, it appears completely unfeasible to switch our focus to our Almighty God and trust Him with regard to the apparent injustice that is happening in our dark focus. Yet, it is just that we must do in order to be set free (as Jesus said we would when we knew the truth).
The truth will never be found in our focus on the darkness of appearances of injustice. The truth will only be found when we deliberately take our focus out of the devil’s clutches and lay our focus on the Lord. Only He will set us free. If we choose to fight the injustice ourselves, we will succeed only in ballooning the evil, shutting out the Lord, and serving mammon big time. It will be a losing and awkward battle. There will be many setbacks as those whose hearts had even the slightest inclination toward the Lord, are flung backward onto the world’s harsh and unforgiving pavement to writhe in pain and we, who know the Lord, are to blame. There are no winners when those focusing on the darkness do battle with one another.
But God is forgiving and we get many chances to find that His truth will set us free where ever we are. And when we do realize that this applies to everything, not just when we are at church on Sunday, there will be many people, currently focused on the darkness, (mammon) who will be compelled to walk in Christ’s light simply because we made a decision to trust the Lord. We will draw others to Christ when we choose to walk in love, peace and mercy, rather than entering into a worldly battle. With Christ in our focus, things DO work out as the Bible promised, to those who love the Lord.
In Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible we are given a better understanding of the word “Mammon.”
“Mammon is a Syriac word, that signifies gain; so that whatever in this world is, or is accounted by us to be, gain (Phil. 3:7), is mammon. Whatever is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, is mammon. To some their belly is their mammon, and they serve that (Phil. 3:19); to others their ease, their sleep, their sports and pastimes, are their mammon (Prov. 6:9); to others worldly riches (James 4:13); to others honours and preferments; the praise and applause of men was the Pharisees’ mammon; in a word, self, the unity in which the world’s trinity centres, sensual, secular self, is the mammon which cannot be served in conjunction with God; for if it be served, it is in competition with him and in contradiction to him. He does not say, We must not or we should not, but we cannot serve God and Mammon; we cannot love both (1 Jn. 2:15; Jam. 4:4); or hold to both, or hold by both in observance, obedience, attendance, trust, and dependence, for they are contrary the one to the other. God says, ‘My son, give me thy heart.’ Mammon says, ‘No, give it me.’ God says, ‘Be content with such things as ye have.’ Mammon says, ‘Grasp at all that ever thou canst. Money, money; by fair means or by foul, money.’ God says, ‘Defraud not, never lie, be honest and just in all thy dealings.’ Mammon says ‘Cheat thine own Father, if thou canst gain by it.’ God says, ‘Be charitable.’ Mammon says, ‘Hold thy own: this giving undoes us all.’ God says, ‘Be careful for nothing.’ Mammon says, ‘Be careful for every thing.’ God says, ‘Keep holy thy sabbath-day.’ Mammon says, ‘Make use of that day as well as any other for the world.’ Thus inconsistent are the commands of God and Mammon, so that we cannot serve both. Let us not then halt between God and Baal, but choose ye this day whom ye will serve, and abide by our choice.” 1.
We can begin to see the tremendous application of Matthew 6:24 as we realize we cannot serve both God and mammon and have the miracles God wants to give His children. We must serve only God and keep our focus on Him. Our God is very involved in every aspect of our lives. All thoughts and desires we have impact our relationship with God but not His relationship with us. His love is always full and complete for us but if we ever feel He does not love us, it is we who are sidestepping Him by focusing on mammon. There is no luck involved with God and our relationship with Him. He loves us and He knows us intimately.
So, the next time you’re out and about and you are confronted with an uneasy or awkward situation or you are about to blow your top, instead smile, refocus on God and say to yourself, “If my eyes were God’s camera, what would He want me to focus on?“ He will say, “My Son” Then focus on the Lord, Jesus Christ. And the entire situation will be bathed in light—God’s Light! He will not fail us.
1.Henry, M. (1996, c1991). Matthew Henry’s commentary on the whole Bible : Complete and unabridged in one volume (Mt 6:19). Peabody: Hendrickson.
Oh, the Deep Deep Love of Jesus 