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
“Mammon is a genuine rival to God. The recurring biblical demand confronts us: “You shall not worship the work of your hands.”
At least three things follow from this view. First, this position confronts people with a decisive choice. Jesus challenged his hearers to choose one master or another—God or Mammon. Either we serve God and use money or we serve money and use God. Ultimately we follow what we have loved most intensely to its natural destination—eternity or death—“for where your treasure is, there your heart will be too.”
Second, money can never be treated as a purely economic issue. It is always a spiritual and moral issue first. Precisely to pretend that money is neutral and simply a medium of exchange is to leave ourselves vulnerable to its power as something more—an idol to which we can become enslaved.
Third, there are two roads toward slavery to money. The poor person’s road is via the confusion of need with entitlement, which leads to dependency; the rich person’s road is via the confusion of need with desire, which leads to the drivenness of insatiability.
…these explanations of the problem of money have direct implications for giving…
For those of us who see the problem of money as excess, we are to give to get rid of surplus wealth.
For those of us who see the problem of money as idolatry, we are partly to give because in giving freely we decisively repudiate the power of money. But [these are] secondary, not a primary motive. As the New Testament puts it, “The Lord loves a cheerful giver.”
In other words, God loves a person so freed from the grip of Mammon as to thumb his or her nose at it and thus to give it with a carefree abandon that is oblivious of its hold.”
Os Guinness in Doing Well and Doing Good: Money, Giving and Caring in a Free Society (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2001) 79-80.