Many times when I read Acts 2 and 4, I get the impression that our so-called real assets such as properties and houses must somehow be sold. The church did this then. Acts does not speak of many other things. Yet it does say that they had all things in common. No one held on to anything for himself. God’s children should always let go of what they have when it comes to supplying other children of God. If we have any possession, we should either sell it or give it away to the poor. Our feeling should always be to share our possession with others, whether it is a knife or a pen. We should not keep anything for ourselves. Everything can go. If we do this, God will not allow us to go into poverty. In fact, He will multiply what we have.
New believers should realize this principle. The early church practiced this. From the beginning, the twelve disciples told the Lord that they had abandoned all to follow Him. By the time of Pentecost, in the first revival, three thousand and five thousand spontaneously sold what they had. They were saved, and like Zaccheus, they did it without many teachings.
The twelve disciples did not hear many teachings before they forsook everything to follow the Lord. The Lord did not tell them to sell all that they had to follow Him. He only told them to follow Him (Matt. 4:19, 21). When the Lord called them, they spontaneously dropped everything. In the same way, the apostles did not tell the first group of three thousand people to sell all that they had. They sold all their possessions in a spontaneous way. Neither did the apostles tell the five thousand to sell all that they had; they did it spontaneously. Today we have to do the same. We have heard and believed in the gospel. We should do what the three thousand and five thousand did; they were also new believers. This is how the church goes on generation after generation. What a pity it would be for this “family tradition” to stop with us. We should always bring the church back to its original course.
Let us turn to Matthew 6, which shows us that our heart must be single in order to serve the Lord. We cannot serve God and mammon at the same time.
Mammon is an idol. We have served it for many years. It has imprisoned our heart for many years. Today if we are to serve the Lord, we have to make a choice between the two. We cannot serve God and mammon together. The Lord said, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (v. 21). A brother said to me once, “My treasures are on earth, but my heart is in heaven.” I responded, “You are surely a museum piece, not of the London Museum, but of the ‘Christian Museum.’ The Lord said that no one can do this, yet you have come up with something that is more miraculous than a miracle.” The Lord said that where our treasure is, there will be our heart. The heart always follows the treasure. We cannot change this. No matter what we say, our heart will always be where our treasure is.
If we lay up for ourselves treasures on earth, we will always be serving mammon and not God. It is true that we can keep some occupation and engage in some work of production. But everything that we have should be offered up to God. We have to live by the lowest possible standard of living. We cannot serve God and mammon together. Do we choose God or mammon? We have to choose between the two. The Lord said that it is not wise to choose mammon, because mammon rusts, and moths consume it (v. 19). The account in our bank may be getting bigger and bigger, but thieves will come and steal it away. We have to learn to serve God alone and to lay up our treasure in heaven.