“No Man Can Serve Two Masters”
By Ellen G. White
SINGLENESS of purpose, wholehearted devotion to God, is the condition pointed out by the Saviour’s words. Let the purpose be sincere and unwavering to discern the truth and to obey it at whatever cost, and you will receive divine enlightenment. Real piety begins when all compromise with sin is at an end. Then the language of the heart will be that of the apostle Paul, “This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” “I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but refuse, that I may win Christ.” But when the eye is blinded by the love of self, there is only darkness. “If thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.” It was this fearful darkness that wrapped the Jews in stubborn unbelief, making it impossible for them to appreciate the character and the mission of Him who came to save them from their sins. Yielding to temptation begins in permitting the mind to waver, to be inconstant to our trust in God. If we do not choose to give ourselves fully to God, then we are in darkness. When we make any reserve, we are leaving open a door through which Satan can enter to lead us astray by His temptations. He knows that if he can obscure our vision, so that the eye of faith can not see God, there will be no barrier against sin. The prevalence of a sinful desire shows the delusion of the soul. Every indulgence of that desire strengthens the soul’s aversion to God. In following the path of Satan’s choosing we are encompassed by the shadows of evil, and every step leads into deeper darkness, and increases the blindness of the heart. No soul is ever finally deserted of God, and given up to his own ways, so long as there is any hope of his salvation. “Man turns from God, not God from him.” Our heavenly Father follows us with appeals and warnings and assurances of compassion, until further opportunities and privileges would be wholly in vain. The responsibility rests with the sinner. By resisting the Spirit of God to-day, he prepares the way for a second resistance of light when it comes with mightier power. Thus he passes on from one stage of resistance to another, until at last the light will fail to impress, and he will cease to respond in any measure to the Spirit of God. Then even “the light that is in thee” has become darkness. The very truth we do know has become so perverted as to increase the blindness of the soul. Christ does not say that any man will not or shall not serve two masters, but that he can not. The interests of God and the interests of mammon have no union or sympathy. They divide just where the consecration of the Christian warns him to forbear, to deny himself, to stop, just where the worldling steps over the line to indulge his selfish propensities. On the one side is the self-denying follower of Christ; on the other is the self-indulgent world-lover, pandering to fashion, engaging in frivolity, and pampering himself in forbidden pleasure. On that side of the life the Christian can not go. No one can occupy a neutral position; there is no middle class who neither love God nor serve the enemy of righteousness. Christ is to live in His human agents, and work through their faculties, and act through their capabilities. Their will must be submitted to His will; they must act with His Spirit. Then it is no more they that live, but Christ that lives in them. He who does not give himself wholly to God, is under the control of another power, listening to another voice, whose suggestions are of an entirely different character. Half and half service places the human agent on the side of the enemy, as a successful ally of the hosts of darkness. When men who claim to be soldiers of Christ engage with the confederacy of Satan, and help along his side, they prove themselves enemies of Christ. They betray sacred trusts. They form a link between Satan and the true soldiers, so that through these agencies the enemy is constantly working to steal away the hearts of Christ’s soldiers. The strongest bulwark of vice in our world is not the iniquitous life of the abandoned sinner or the degraded outcast; it is that life which otherwise appears virtuous, honorable, noble, but in which one sin is fostered, one vice indulged. To the soul who is struggling in secret against some giant temptation, trembling upon the very verge of the precipice, such an example is one of the most powerful enticements to sin. He who, endowed with high conceptions of life, and truth, and honor, does yet wilfully transgress one precept of God’s holy law, has perverted his noble gifts into a lure to sin. Genius, talent, sympathy, even generous and kindly deeds, may become decoys of Satan to entice other souls over the precipice of ruin for this life and the life to come. “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.”