No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. (Matthew 6:24)

Jesus said this to people who were not rich. He was not standing before a gathering of wealthy merchants or landowners. He addressed an audience that was largely poor by economic standards. Yet he spoke to them as those who could fall under the mastery of mammon. This means that the worship of money is not a sin limited to the rich. It is a snare for the poor as much as for anyone else, and in many cases, it is the poor who bow to mammon most often.

There are more poor people who worship mammon than rich, if only because most people in the world worship mammon, and the poor far outnumber the rich. They strive to survive, to get more, and to secure their lives by their own power, by methods that bypass trust in the word of God. They measure their days by the pressure of needs and the pursuit of means. It is still idolatry, even if the idol is pursued in desperation rather than in luxury. A rich man may serve mammon from the seat of ease, and a poor man may serve mammon from the floor of need, but the master is the same.

There is only one escape from the service of mammon, and it is not poverty, frugality, or public displays of self-denial. There is no deliverance from idolatry in pretending to despise money while slaving for it. There is no freedom in changing the kind of work you do, even to something that appears more noble or less materialistic, if you are still fixated on human effort to supply what you need. Only faith in the promise of God delivers a person from mammon. Only by believing that God himself will provide, even to the point of adding wealth, can a person refuse the slavery of mammon without pretending.

Those who reject the truth that God will prosper his people do not escape mammon. They embrace him. They set aside God’s promise to prosper them and replace it with human ability, human connections, or what they consider luck. They replace the word of God with their effort and education, the promise of God with their strategies and investments. They may disguise it as wisdom, responsibility, or prudence, even what they call Christian faith, but it is the worship of mammon.

If you do not serve the true God, you will serve another. There is no middle ground where you serve both or neither. If you do not believe the true God to sustain and prosper you, you will depend on some other source. If you reject his word that says he will add all these things to you, including what pagans chase, you will live by another promise. The idol may be education, skill, relationships, or opportunity. The pattern is the same: there is an object of trust, a promise attached to it, and devotion to that promise. In the biblical sense, this is a false god.

The gospel of prosperity, when defined by Scripture, is not a scheme for greed but a confession of God’s character. It affirms that he delights in the good of his people, that he gives what they need and desire for life and godliness, and that he adds material wealth without making it their master. It teaches that God does not abandon his children to scarcity and anxiety, forcing them to scrounge from the hand of the world. It insists that abundance comes from the blessing of God, not from the blessing of mammon.

Those who reject this gospel of prosperity are not choosing spiritual purity over material desire. They are choosing mammon over God. They are rejecting one master for another, denying one message in order to follow another. They call it holiness or humility, but it is still service to mammon. The pretense may fool others, but the choice of master is plain before God.

To worship God is to receive him as the source of all things. To believe his word is to trust him for the whole of life. This includes money. There is nothing noble about claiming to trust God while depending on the systems of mammon for daily bread. There is no holiness in refusing to believe God for abundance while hoping that the world will grant enough to get by. True worship places every need and desire in the hands of God, and believes that he gives it as surely as he gives breath and strength.

The poor who believe God in this way are rich in the truest sense. They refuse to bow to mammon, whether in luxury or in desperation. They labor, but they do not labor for mammon. They receive, but they do not receive from mammon. They rest in the promise of the God who provides and prospers. They have faith that God will deliver them from poverty and give them the power to get wealth, and in doing so they prove that no one can serve two masters. They have chosen their master, and he is not mammon.