“If you put your trust in riches, if money or Mammon be your master, the God of your idolatry, you will expect everything from it; you will give it your heart; you will make “gold your hope, and fine gold your confidence.” Your supreme desire will be to accumulate it; you will live for that; it will fill your thoughts and form your dreams; it will give color and shape to all your feelings, and direction and strength to every purpose: and, if so, and so long as it is so, your soul cannot repose with faith on God, nor your heart swell and beat with love to him. Nay, you will be incapable of seeing his glory, of appreciating or discovering his character…
The man whose trust is in money, whose exclusive confidence is in what he can touch and look at, and feel that he possesses, if he is destitute of that which constitutes his security—his sole security—against the calls of life, the realities of today and the possibilities of tomorrow; why, he will be just as incapable of receiving the kingdom of God, as the man who can fare sumptuously every day, and has much good laid up for many years…
He who “loves the world,” and who is manifested as such, either by the pride of success in “laying up treasure,” or by the canker of disappointment eating into his soul, “the love of the Father is not in him.” It is not only not in him, but while either mental condition lasts, it cannot be; by the very constitution of things, by all the laws which govern the mind and regulate thought, it must of necessity be excluded.” (cf. 1 John 2:15)
Thomas Binney (1798-1874) Money: A Popular Exposition in Rough Notes, excerpt from Sermon I.