God is a spirit. We know that God is invisible, but He's a spirit being. We are made in His image. We are spirit beings. We're made for intimacy with God. We're made for relationship with God. We're made to love God, enjoy Him, and then live a life that reflects Him and serves Him.
That's what we're designed for, so anything that competes with the place of God in our heart, is obviously going to have behind it some demonic spirit, some demonic power.
So it says: you can't serve God (God is a spirit) and Mammon (Mammon must be a spirit). He's contrasting one with the other; so Mammon is a spirit being. It's a very real spirit, a demonic spirit, associated again with wealth, riches and assets, or coveting more.
In Colossians 3:5, it warns us about coveting. Coveting is: I see what someone else has, that I don't have, and I want it. Coveting becomes idolatry when it starts to control our life.
So very clearly, when we're looking at this issue of Mammon, we're looking at a spirit which seeks to get hold of your life.
Of course we just love Jesus. We're here to worship God, so it would never occur that perhaps we might be serving this God.
I remember being in a Bible school, and teaching on the video games and how they open the door to the occult - some of them, in the role playing of occultic games; and 200 students came up.
They were committed to serving God, but actually in their private time they were bowing down to a demon - and we'll see that behind this thing always lies deception.
So the first thing to see then, is that there are two spirits that long for our heart. God longs for your heart - so He can bless you. Mammon longs for your heart - so he can control you; and so we see that there's a conflict goes on between the two. The first thing to recognise: there is a conflict.
Money itself has no power. See, this is just a piece of paper. Lovely piece of paper, $20 piece of paper; but it actually has no value at all, unless you can trade it for something. The value is what I put on it; and of course I could have hundreds and hundreds of these, and overnight they could lose their value.
If you watch what's happened to money over the last decade or so - it's lost its value. They've just printed more and more of them, they've just lost value; meaning by that: it takes more to buy the same thing than what it did a while ago.
We call it by a fancy name, 'inflation' but the reality is, it's just a piece of paper that lost its value. It takes more pieces of paper to buy the same thing - so the dollar lost its value; and for many years now there's been the spirit of greed operating through financial sectors. It has created huge problems globally in the financial area, and has eroded the value of money - and behind it has been greed.
Anyone who looked at the recent financial issues in America, and the world, you do understand, that the problem is greed – ‘not enough money’.
The issue's not the money; the issue is the greed, and the spirit power that manipulates and controls people through the money.
This is just a piece of paper, which is neither good nor bad. It can be used to bless someone; or it can be used for evil.
What really determines it, is the spirit that's on it - the spirit that motivates how it's used; so all money has a spirit associated with it, because money is a form of trading in the world.
This money, originally they used to trade gold - so real wealth was gold. If you had gold, you had real wealth; but then it was inconvenient, so they made the gold into coins, and so people traded gold coins. I've got a gold coin on this ring here, so that was a form of trade at one point.
Then it become inconvenient, so then they made paper money, pieces of paper that originally, if you're old enough (and my generation), you could redeem this for a pound of gold. Do you remember that?
Then they took away the pound of gold, and just made more pieces of paper - and the money lost all its value. So this is money - so the thing then is: money is just a way of trading.