Now you would all realise that the world is full of trivia all pulling on you to waste your time and your energy, so if you have a look at your life, then you look at how you spend your life, so how you spend your energy, how you spend your time and how you spend your money; if we were just to have a look at what you did with that we would know what you value with your life, because your choices will always reflect what is important to you. It's inevitable. The decisions you've been making over the last few years come out of what was important to you, and of course as you get older or you've been around a while or come to the Lord, you realise man, I made some bad choices back there. We were talking to one young guy on the ship there and he'd just been blowing all his dough. He had this huge chance to earn a lot of money, just blew all the dough, until he got married - now he's careful with his money.
See now why is he careful with his money now and he wasn't before? Now there's a higher priority. Before it was having a good time; now I've got to provide for a wife and family, my priorities have changed, therefore choices have changed. So your choices currently and in the past have been determined by what is important to you. Now you may think God's important to you, but have a look at whether any of the choices or decisions you've made have had any reference to God at all. Often we find that there are many other things in our heart determine what our choices are. The Bible says and Rob was sharing this morning, Proverbs 23:7, as you think in your heart, that's how you are. So your thinking in your heart and what you believe in your heart at the end will determine what's important for you, and so all of us, the Bible tells us very clearly in these verses Jesus says look, there's a lot of things will call for your attention, but there's something you need to make a priority.
You have to choose this every day. He said make it a priority, make the kingdom of heaven your priority - and I'll explain just a little bit about this in a moment. Okay then, now let's go have a look through it here, so it says seek first - that word 'first' means literally the first importance, the first in rank - of all the things you need to do, seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness, whatever all that means, Jesus said it's the most important. So underline the verse and He says seek it first, circle first. First means do this before everything else, first, so in case you have trouble working out what's important in your life Jesus laid it out in this verse. This is what's important: first thing, this is the first thing, the first thing, do this before everything else, this is number one. First! First! Not last, not if you can fit it in - first. I'll probably explain a bit more about it tonight, but let me just - I want to get this home first of all.
Now let's just go quickly through what He said in terms of this priority. He said - notice this - he said that you can't serve two masters. You can't serve God and money. That doesn't mean to say you can't have a heap of money; it just says you can't serve money. So basically at the end your time and your money actually reveal what your priorities are, so He says don't serve. You can't serve God and mammon, so God is a spirit; mammon must have a spiritual power behind that yells serve me! Serve me! Serve me! Now if you're a person who's got a lot of debt you are serving money. You're just serving. You're in slavery and bondage. The Bible says the one who owes the money, he's in bondage to the one who'll lend it to him. Now of course there are certain situations where you do need to get loans for appreciating assets like a house and so on, but if you're just running up credit card debt and you're living your life in debt, you are serving money. You are its servant.
And some people in church just keep borrowing and because they can get credit free or debt free - they get debt, free, but actually it costs you because in the end you pay all this interest on it. What happens is you mortgage your future so you've got no choices see, so one of the greatest things is to be able to get debt free, so then you increase your choices about your future. So He says are you going to serve money or serve God? So how do you know whether you're serving money or God? It's very, very simple. If money is ruling over your fears and concerns and dominates your thinking and there's never enough, then money is ruling your life. How can you tell if you've got a victory through in it? Well it will start to come into order and you'll begin to manage the money; but here's one of the key determinants. If you can give money, then you rule money. If you can give it you rule it. If you can't give it, then you know you haven't got rule over it, it's got rule over you.