Proverbs 23:4

Labour not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom.

Mammon

All the precepts of Scripture have their origin in the benevolence of God. Man labours to be rich because he is voluntarily ignorant or forgetful of the requirements of his nature.

I. Labouring to be rich implies the consecration of our powers to that one object in particular. But this is not the end for which we are endowed with an intellectual faculty and all the susceptibilities of a moral nature. The accumulation of riches as an end is no more worthy the noble powers of man than building a pyramid of sand. Infinitely beneath the dignity and Divine origin of man is the labouring to be rich.

II. Whatever tends to widen the distance between God and man must be regarded as an aggravation of our fallen and ruined condition. We are so constituted that we cannot be engrossed with the successful pursuit of two objects at once. You cannot be labouring to be rich, and to be wise unto salvation at the same time. By our own wilful act to alienate the heart from God must be the most inconceivable of all misfortunes, since the highest object of man’s existence is to hold communion with God. For this his nature was originally framed, and in this alone will his nature ever find contentment or repose.

III. The ruinous effects that the passion under notice occasions in all the moral powers of its victim. People imagine that riches confer greatness. A man is honoured according to the abundance of his capital. The tendency of this is to inflate the mammon-worshipper with personal vanity. But the greatness which is the exclusive offspring of opulence is a hollow, spurious, and mere visionary greatness. Unsanctified riches tend to render their possessor vain, proud, impatient of restraint, forgetful of the sources of true greatness, and insensible to the wants or respect that is due to others. And the pursuit of riches always ends in disappointment. “Godliness with contentment is great gain.” The true riches, like an overflowing stream, irrigate the heart, and make it bear fruit for eternity, but avarice of gold rushes like a torrent of scorching lava--it may excite the wonder and attract the common attention of mankind, but it leaves behind its devastating march a solitude, and barrenness, and ruin, and death. (W. H. Hill, M.A.)