Coming Out of Egypt

   

  "But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you
  wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted.
  You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness"
  (Rom. 6:17-18).

  Becoming a new person in Christ is part of a life-long journey that begins
  at conversion. Before coming to Christ, we were living (in a metaphorical
  sense) in Egypt, in the land of bondage. Just as the people of Israel
  toiled as slaves in Egypt, we were slaves to sin and worldly ambition.

  Before we came to Christ, we sweated and toiled to build our career and
  acquire material possessions. Work was our idol. Greed was our taskmaster.
  We may have had all the trappings of power in the business world - a
  corner office, a staff of our own, a key to the executive washroom - but
  we were living as a slave in the land of Egypt. We didn't run our career;
  our career ran us.

  Jesus once said, "No servant can serve two masters. You cannot serve both
  God and money" (Luke 16:13). In the original language, the word translated
  "money" was an Aramaic word, Mammon. This does not refer merely to money
  as a medium of exchange but also to a demonic spirit designed to promote a
  mind-set of ambition for riches, power and worldly gain. The word is
  capitalized in the original text because the people of Jesus' day thought
  of Mammon as a false god. Jesus was saying that those who spend their
  lives seeking worldly gain are idolaters. No one can serve two masters. No
  one can worship both the true God and a false god.

  We cannot experience the grace that God gives to His children because we
  are too busy striving for riches and enslaved to Mammon. The only way we
  can be free is to turn away from Mammon and allow the one true God to
  transform us into a different person.

  Ask yourself today if your life is best represented as Egypt or the
  Promised Land.