The sayings of Jesus continue with another important teaching – on the value of God and money. As Matthew puts it, “No one can serve two masters. You can’t serve God and Money.”

In the ancient world, the master of the household often possessed slaves who were obliged to serve him completely, and over whom he had power of life and death. A slave therefore was expected to show absolute loyalty to the man who owned him.

Jesus says his disciples cannot have divided loyalties either. They cannot serve God and money. Both make absolute demands on the person, and one has to choose either or.

Money is a dominating force. It gives us power, prestige and control over others’ lives. We begin by using money to make life comfortable; we end up placing all our trust in it. And invariably, the more possessions we have, the more arrogant we tend to become. Material things are no longer our support, our servants. Instead they enslave us and make us their servants. They change the way we see the world. They become our gods.

Nevertheless, money is necessary in human life. We all know we cannot do without it. So what is the right attitude?

The right attitude is to see the limits of money, and to use it thus far and no further. That means, using money to help us, to serve us – not to dominate us, not to possess us.

The right attitude is to realize that it is God and God alone whom we must love and serve with “all our heart”, and to build up a relationship of trust and thanksgiving with him. We need to realize that it is this trust in God which will carry us through those critical times when all our money and power is of little avail – times of serious ill-health, for instance; or times of cataclysm and disaster.