"Two Masters"

Two Treasures, Two Eyes, and Two Masters in Matthew 6

Well this morning we're back in Matthew 6 now and we finished the last of these three paired statements that we've seen over several weeks now. Of course we saw a few times ago two treasures as Jesus compares treasures on earth versus treasures in heaven.

Begins to dig at the things that we have our eyes toward, things that we desire, the place that we have our heart. Jesus says there our treasure is. Then we looked at two eyes, the eye that is good, the eye that sees things clearly and so the body is full of light as a result of that good eye, as a result of that good sight, that good desire.

Or the bad eye on the other hand that allows there to be only darkness within, it can only see as it were the things of the earth, it cannot see the one who dwells in light unapproachable and therefore there's no light to behold without and therefore there's no light within and Jesus emphasizes the darkness of such a state, oh how great is that darkness.

So two treasures, two eyes and this morning here in verse 24 we consider two masters, two masters. No one, Jesus says, can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other.

You cannot serve God and mammon. So there's a stark contrast again, two treasures, stark contrast. Two eyes, stark contrast. Here two masters, a stark contrast but the contrast is in the heart, in the service of the servant, it's in the loyalty.

So the contrast is not between the masters per se but the contrast is within the one who would serve, the one who's trying to straddle and appease and be pleasing to two different masters in his life.

The contrast is forcing this divided loyalty, this double-mindedness, this duality in the life of the servant. That's what Jesus is going to press. So we have to place the contrast in the right way. And again, in all of these paired statements, Jesus is getting at the revelation of one's spiritual state.

Is it well with your soul? Jesus has paired these statements in the Sermon on the Mount to get at that question. Is it well with you? Is it well with your soul? What is the state of your spiritual condition?

Are you truly my disciple? Will you truly follow me? Are you one who can be said to have entered into the kingdom of God? That's what these questions are designed to reveal. Jesus is speaking directly to his disciples.

If that hasn't been clear, just on the surface of the fact that it's a sermon that is first given to those gathered at his feet, then it's very clear here in verse 24 as he, in the third person, describes the one who seeks to serve two masters.

And then at the last part of verse 24, he shifts to the second person and he's speaking now directly to his people, you cannot serve God and mammon. So all the weight of these paired statements comes hurtling toward where you are, what you're seeking to do, what you desire, what your eyes are upon, where your heart is, how you're walking.

You cannot serve God and mammon. Well, real quickly, I just want to give a few details about the verse itself. This term mammon, it's an Aramaic term. It could be translated and is translated money, wealth.

In a roundabout way, it could speak to possessions. The point here, of course, is not that money is inherently evil.

That's not the point.

Possessions are somehow inherently wrong. But it can be that money becomes a lethal idol in someone's life, that possessions begin to drive someone away from God's will, away from God Himself, away from the life that God desires, a life of faith, hope, and love.

And mammon has that potential. Mammon, of course, here is personified. So while it's just speaking to wealth, just speaking to, at a base level, possession, here we could almost give it a capital M. This is mammon personified.

This is mammon now empowered to be an idol, a rival to God Himself, a master and a false God at that. The ancient church father, Jerome, he said, one cannot serve Christ and riches at the same time, but he notes Jesus does not say, he who has riches, that's not what Jesus says, he who serves riches, he who would serve mammon.

Not one that has mammon, in other words, one who has wealth or possession, but one who would seek to serve mammon. And now mammon is no longer your wallet or your 401K, now mammon is your God. It becomes personified.

1 Timothy 6, of course, reminds us it's not money that is the root of evil, it's the love of money, it's the desire and the service of money that becomes a root of every kind of evil in this life. Riches, of course, are a bookend to where we begin in these paired statements.

Jesus was asking about the state of our soul by causing us to examine how we treasure the things of the earth. So we come full circle, the treasures of the earth are here, mammon, mammon's become personified.

Jesus says, where is your treasure, what are you looking at, what are you striving after, who are you serving, is it your treasure in heaven, the Lord God Himself, or is it your treasure on earth, mammon personified.

This passage, of course, is not ultimately a condemnation of wealth, but it is a call for exclusive discipleship, a singularity of heart, a loyalty to the kingdom of God. Jesus says you can't straddle your way into the kingdom.

God will not harbor another master, some idolatrous service, He will not take second place, He will not have spiritual schizophrenia at His throne, it's a call for exclusive discipleship. God must be first, God must be served, and no man can serve two masters.

And so those are the details of the passage. A slave, of course, could attempt to serve two masters, there are some commentators that point out in antiquity we know of a few occasions where a slave was employed at the service of two separate masters.

I don't know if any of you have ever had a job where the authority structure was somewhat lacking and you ended up not having a clear delineation of who was the actual manager, who was the actual shift supervisor.

And so you just have two bosses, two managers, too many chefs in the kitchen, that is a hard place to work. Hey, whatever you're doing you need to stop and go do that. Well, he just told me to do this, yeah, you just need to, hey, why'd you stop doing that?

Well, he just told me to stop. That's a hard place to work. Ultimately, the servant cannot serve wholeheartedly, cannot serve with a single mind, a single purpose, a focused, consistent effort, undivided attention to the will of the master.

If there's another master barking out orders, that servant will be unable to serve in the way that he is desired to serve. If there are two masters, there will be no loyalty. Single-heartedness is impossible.

Again, what Jesus is after is an exclusive devotion to God Himself, an absolute prioritization of the kingdom of God. Where we're going in this passage, Jesus will say, seek first your loyalty, your principal focus, the boss of all bosses in your life is the Lord God Himself.

He demands an absolute priority. Now this morning, although I grant fully that the immediate context of verse 24 is warning against and speaking about wealth and possessions, I feel that we've already established that with the first of the paired statements about treasures on earth.

Remember, the insight of the Puritans that we are to use our possessions, use our wealth in this world rather than allow our possessions, the things of the world to use us, churn us up and spit us out.

I believe we've established enough about the importance of wealth and possession in the teaching of Jesus. What I'd like to do with verse 24 is enlarge this idea of servanthood. And so I'm asking for a little liberty to take a step back from the immediate context of verse 24 and think at large about how Jesus conceptualizes this idea of a servant.

Because this is not the only place in Matthew's Gospel or throughout Scripture where God's people are called to this idea of service, this identification of servanthood. And I feel that we'll miss the opportunity if we don't take it this morning to get at Jesus' conception of what it means to be a servant.

Of course this is difficult for us. I use the word servant because to use the word slave, which is just synonymous, carries a lot of baggage with it as a result of the history of chattel slavery in the West, which has had the effect of obscuring and muting a lot of the biblical import of slavery.

So slavery is automatically negative, something abominable. Because of the legacy of chattel slavery in the West, it's very hard for us to think positively about the idea of slavery. But in the ancient world, the term was a lot more neutral than it's become.

There was a lot of negative aspects to slavery. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul could say, listen, if you're a slave and you can get freedom, you should do that. Seek it. But if you can't obtain freedom, nevertheless, seek the Lord's will in that.

You're serving the Lord Christ. And so there's an idea that there's a negative aspect to slavery, even in antiquity, it's not something necessarily desirable, but there's a lot of positive aspects to slavery in the first century.

And that gets obscured and lost because of the legacy of our own history of slavery. Of course, what we react to is the inherent indignity of slavery. It chafes against our idea of liberty and freedom.

The painful legacy in our own nation causes this sort of stain of disgrace on the very connotation of having to serve. The idea of being someone else's slave, belonging to someone else, it outrages our modern sensibility.

But to that degree, we're not able to understand this as a concept biblically. I think this trickles down even into customer service.

I don't know.

This is my old man rant. I say it probably once a year, but customer service has fallen on hard times. You get the idea. It's no longer customer service. How dare I be a servant to any man? It's like, well, you're an employee.

I don't know why companies still try, you know, like you walk into Moe's and the employees there are supposed to, as soon as that door opens, have this big cheesy smile and go,.

Welcome to Moe's.

And you're all excited to order your burrito. And, you know, if they even say it now, it's like, welcome to Moe's. So much for service. Sometimes you put in your order at a place and it's like you've offended them.

I'm sorry. Do we know each other? Have I hurt your feelings or something?

Very cool.

So there's my old man rant. Customer service has fallen on hard times. The idea of service has fallen on hard times. If you're like me and you watch bizarre things in the wee hours, you could watch 80s training videos online that train for customer service at, say, Pizza Hut or one of my favorites, Old Country Buffet.

It is hilarious to watch how companies would try to train people to serve. And their expectations of what interactions ought to look like and their wild-eyed imagination of how someone would be so excited to serve customers and get behind that corporate interest.

But this is really at the heart of what Jesus is getting at. How do we think about service? How do we think about the identity of being a servant, of having a responsibility to be ever involved in the will of another, to always be looking to please our master?

That's at the very heart of Jesus' teaching here about what it means to be a servant. And so though it's hard for us because of what we know of modern slavery, the legacy of chattel slavery, though it's very hard for us to understand what slavery was in antiquity, we have to try to get at this larger picture of what it means to be a servant.

I want to give four aspects of what it means to be a servant this morning. And those four aspects are, first, the identity of the servant, secondly, the call of the servant, and I wrestled with which of those two I should have put first because in a way the call to be a disciple is the call to be a servant.

We're going to establish that and so I said, well, should I begin with the call and then from that call you receive the identity? But I actually think in our experience we have to begin with the identity.

And when we begin with the identity, then we can look and see the way that this is our.

Calling.

So that's why I put it in that order. So first, the identity of the servant, secondly, the call of the servant, thirdly, the desire of the servant, which really gets at the heart of what Jesus is saying here in verse 24.

What's the desire of the servant? And then lastly, what this all requires, the mind of the servant, which is a pointed way of getting at the heart, the instinct, the reaction, the outlook of the servant.

Okay?

So identity, call, desire, mind, and we begin first with the identity of the servant. Just at face value, when you start reading Scripture and start paying attention to this language of servant or service, a lot will begin to blossom.

We tend to just read right past it. We don't notice little statements, like I was just reading in Numbers 12, and you have God as He's rebuking Miriam and Aaron, and He basically says, you know, with the prophets they have to gather and sort of look into the things I'm revealing.

Moses, I speak to him face to face. Why then did you not fear to speak against my servant, Moses? We tend to just read right past that. But notice how Jesus is framing, or how the Lord is framing Moses' identity.

My servant, Moses. You're chafing against His authority as the leader of Israel. Who is He to me? He's my servant. So if you're chafing against Him, you're actually chafing against me. Which is why, though Miriam and Aaron think, you know, we could do so much better, boy, if we just had our shot in the sun, look at all these things that are against Moses, what a unprofitable and worthless leader he's become.

Just give us our shot, our day in the sun, you know, and who could disagree with the flaws that we're seeing? And they think God's like, yeah, you're totally right, Miriam and Aaron, let's just get, who even asked this guy to be a leader?

When Miriam and Aaron and Moses are all called to account at the Tent of Meeting, I think Aaron and Miriam fully expected somehow that God was going to be like, yeah, you're right, Moses, you need to sit in the corner, you know, you're going to have to hear this now.

It goes the entirely opposite direction. Miriam is struck with leprosy, Aaron is actually fearful, Moses, being the most humble man on the face of the earth, begins to intercede and cry for mercy. You see the issue of authority there, that they misunderstood the authority that Moses understood.

I'm His servant, flawed though I am, I'm His servant. And if you notice, the Lord constantly is doing this throughout Scripture, He's describing His people as His servants. My servant David, the King speaks of all those in His realm as His servants.

So, all those that are made by God belong to God, they're all at His employ, they depend on Him, they're provided for by Him, He is the master of all. All, therefore, owe a certain service to the Lord God, all were made by Him and therefore for Him, all are dependent upon Him, they belong to Him.

The cattle of a thousand hills belongs to Him.

So the idea of servanthood, the idea of being a servant is replete throughout Scripture. Revelation 22, verse 3, even where there's no more curse, even where the effects of the fall have finally, in consummation, been overturned evermore, there's no more curse, the throne of God, the Lamb is in it, established forever, and what do we read in verse 3 of chapter 22?

There His servants will serve Him. You don't graduate from being a servant. Angels who are peerless in glory, without sin or spot, are called His servants. In consummated glory, when the curse is removed, we are still His servants.

Romans 16, when Paul speaks to others in the church, when he thinks of himself, he speaks of them as servants. He mentions Phoebe, who's a servant in Colossians 1. He says, you've also learned from Epaphras, our dear fellow servant, who's a minister of Christ to you.

Colossians 4, he says, Tychicus, a beloved brother, a faithful minister, a fellow servant.

In the Lord.

He speaks of himself as a bond-servant to Christ. He introduces himself to the Philippian church in that way, and there's a reason why. It's not his normal introduction. He normally reminds people, I'm an apostle of Jesus Christ.

He's coming to a church at Philippi where there's all this sort of tension and division over Euodia and Syntyche, and he's trying to get them to unity, but they're batting heads like rams. And so how does he introduce himself to the letter?

He doesn't jockey for position. That's probably what they were doing, jockeying for position. He introduces himself in this way, a slave to Christ. And by the time he gets to that issue, he says, you need to have the mind of Christ.

That's where we're going to end the message this morning. To the church at Corinth, he says in chapter four, men ought to regard us as servants of Christ. He's an apostle. One, as he notes, who was born untimely, but nevertheless, he saw the resurrected Lord in a very intimate and personal way.

It wasn't a Groupon experience of the resurrected Lord. It was a very personal, individual experience of the resurrected Lord. And he was made an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. A pillar of the church of God.

A foundation stone for the true Israel. And what does he say to the church at Corinth that loves pedigree, that craves stature? Give us your CV, Paul. Are you worthy of actually having us sit under your teaching?

You know, we've got these other super apostles, very, very impressive. You know, how do you compare with them? And Paul, seeing that worldly craving, seeing that they desire the wisdom of the world, the might of a fallen man.

And he's saying, you know, when I came to you, I didn't come with wisdom. I didn't come with might. I preached Christ and I'm crucified. You want to know how you should regard me as a servant? All men ought to regard us as servants.

So in Paul's mind, despite all of the things that he has given, he never graduates from this idea, from the self-identification of slave. Now, the primary issue at work with servanthood is belonging.

Grant Osborne makes this point that the primary aspect of the slave metaphor for first century readers was belonging. The act of service is only secondary. The central connotation of a slave is who you belong to.

My master, the will of my master. So we shouldn't begin with the acts of a servant, but rather the possession of the servant, who you belong to. That's the primary thrust. That's why everywhere you find this language servant, you'll almost always find it in a phrase like servant of Christ.

Men ought to regard us as servants of Christ. A slave, of course, is bound to the will of another in this position of servitude. But that relationship could often be very close. There were binding ties with a master.

There was a sense of belonging to him. In the ancient Roman economy, a bulk of that economy were actually freedmen. Those who had served their masters well and in their master's good grace, they were able to be freed.

Sometimes a master did it benevolently. You've been so loyal, I'm going to free you. You're now free. So you occupy this new status. You had an absolute freedom now, but never did the loyalty leave. Sometimes slaves would purchase their freedom.

They'd be able to have some money put aside over time and they could actually purchase their freedom. But sometimes they were just freed out of the benevolence of the master. And yet that freed person would show up every morning.

They would open up the doorway and walk down into the atrium and they would gather with all of the other workers and and servants and freedmen. And they would say, how can I serve you today? What can I do for you?

Not as a slave, but now more like an employee to be hired for certain work or certain tasks. So they were still in a way dependent upon their former master and they still were very loyal to their former master.

These freedmen would go on to have servants for themselves. This was very common in antiquity. So there's a positive aspect. But notice the loyalty, the sense of belonging. That's what's at the very heart.

The will of the slave, the will of the servant in time would become absorbed with the will of the master. Second Corinthians four and five. We don't preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus, the Lord, and ourselves, your bond servants for Jesus' sake.

So Paul recognizes not only do I belong to Jesus and therefore I serve him, but because I serve him, he has a certain role for me to serve you and I serve you for his sake. My service to you is actually the outflow of my service to him.

So I don't proclaim myself. I don't stomp around after my own reputation. I proclaim Jesus Christ, the Lord, and I'm a servant to you for his sake. Galatians 1 10. Do I now persuade men or God? Do I seek to please men?

If I still pleased men, I wouldn't be a bond servant to Christ. So in all the ways, first Corinthians nine, that Paul will be flexible, a Jew to the Jews, a Gentile to the Gentiles, that by all means he might win some, whatever that might have looked like, that sort of way of persuading, that way of taking thoughts captive to Christ, of being evangelistic.

He understood at the root of it all, it's not actually to please men. It's actually to serve God. To the degree that I'm living horizontally, I'm losing my identity. To the degree that I do all things horizontally in light of my vertical relationship with God, I remember at the root of it all, I'm a servant.

That's my life.

I belong to God.

I serve him.

Notice that in Matthew six, verse 24, Jesus takes for granted that all of us will serve. Jesus assumes you're going to serve someone. You're going to serve something. No man can serve two masters, but every man will serve something.

This is not something you opt out of. Your life is completing the will, performing the desire, seeking after the accomplishment or the goal of something or someone.

We're all serving.

Don't believe the lie of the New Hampshire state license plate that there's no absolute way to live free or die. We're all servants in one way or another, in the absolute sense. We're all serving someone or something.

So the question is not whether or not we're going to serve. The question is, who are we serving? What are we serving? That's the issue. The idea that we've never been. I used to be free and then I became a Christian.

I guess I had to learn how to be a servant. That's a myth. You go from service to service. You actually only replace masters when you become a Christian.

We're all servants.

The idea that we've never been and never would be a servant is what Jesus rebukes in John 8. Remember, the reply of the Jews to Jesus in John 8 is, we've never been enslaved to.

Anyone.

They're saying that literally under the shadow of Fortress Antonia. They have Roman overlords. We've never been enslaved to anyone. We're sons of Abraham. Like, do you know your own history? You've regularly been slaves to other people.

We've never been enslaved to anyone. And Jesus says in verse 34, John 8, most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits a sin is a slave to sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever. Whoever sins is serving sin.

He goes on to say, you're children of your father, the evil one, Satan.

You do the will of your father. You serve your father.

You accomplish his will. There, he's even pressing in that nature of belonging. You don't belong in the sense that a slave belongs without any real relational affinity, but rather just sort of a voluntary service.

No, actually, you're the spawn. You do what you see. You do how you are represented. That's what Jesus is getting at. And so if you're a Christian, you used to be a slave to sin. You served sin. Sometimes you hated serving sin, but you still served it.

Often you loved serving sin. You willfully, joyfully did so. Sin was your master. Sometimes that seemed to be a helpful, healthy, good relationship. In time, you realized those chains were quite thick, quite miserable.

You were enslaved to sin. You could not escape that slavery, the bondage and the tyranny of the evil one. And then as a result of becoming a Christian, now you've been freed from those chains, freed from that tyranny, but you haven't been freed from the idea of being a servant.

You've only obtained a new master who is infinitely good, infinitely wise. A master who's not only freed you, but has provided all that you need to flourish in a life of joy and peace, to give his own joy, the joy he has with his father, and to share that with you.

He calls you into his service. And yet he's the one who's actually actively serving you. He ever lives to make intercession for you. He has a servant heart. And therefore, when being a servant means you have a heavy burden, a yoke that is very hard to bear, he reminds you, no, no, my yoke is light.

My burden is easy. I've borne the thing that you could not carry. I've carried the weight that would crush you. I've actually allowed to crush myself. This is the one who calls us into his service. So the Lord has freed us from the bondage to sin.

And now we belong to him. It's not a tyrannical bondage. The chains don't slice our flesh.

It's a light yoke.

It's a burden we can actually carry. It's a joy to know him, to allow our wills to be absorbed into his will. We belong to him and it's our joy, our delight to be able to serve him to the degree that we behold him rightly and understand his calling upon our lives.

A new master, a gracious master. My point is, though, we're freed from the tyranny and bondage of sin. We're liberated from being slaves to sin, slaves to the evil one. But we're not liberated from slavery itself.

We're not liberated from servanthood. We just have a new master. Paul explains this in Romans 6, verse 15 and following. He gets to the point where he says, having been set free from sin. So there it is.

There's a liberation. You've been set free from sin. You became slaves to righteousness. You've been set free in one area. You've been enslaved in another. If slavery is automatically negative to you, you'll miss the whole point that.

Paul's after.

You used to belong to the bondage and tyranny of sin.

Now you belong to righteousness.

You used to haplessly perform the will of sin. Now you voluntarily perform the will of righteousness. So Paul presses it further. Now, present your members as slaves of righteousness to holiness. A few verses later, having been set free from sin, having become slaves of God, you now have fruit to holiness.

And the end of that is everlasting life. So Paul recognizes in a real way, we've been set free, liberated. The exodus has been ultimately realized in the redemptive work of Christ. We've been brought out of, as it were, the tyranny of Pharaoh.

God, as it were, pouring out his plagues, not on the evil one, but on the good one. The evil empire of Egypt, but upon his own beloved son. And he's liberated us. And we're reminded it's because we've been freed now that we can serve him.

And so when he gathers his people out of the land of Egypt to himself and he says, you will be my people, I will be your God, you will serve me in the wilderness. That's what Paul's getting at here in Romans six.

He, of course, he understands this. We're made to serve. Service is inescapable. The only question is, who are you serving? And Jesus here in Matthew six says no man can serve two masters. You can't serve sin and God, you can't serve Satan and the Lord Jesus Christ.

You cannot serve earthly treasure, the things of this world, the hopes and possessions of of of a cursed environment around you, and also serve the living.

Will. Of God.

Having been set free from sin, if you are a believer, you are now a slave of God, you have fruit to holiness. The end of that is everlasting life. So that's the identity of the servant. Well, secondly, the call, the call.

Paul also says to the church at Corinth, don't you know you're not your own? You've been bought with a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body. Now, it's implicit within that verse, but what metaphor is driving that language?

What metaphor is actually allowing the idea of being bought to function? It's the metaphor of slavery. You have a master that bought you. He paid money for you. You belong to him now. That's Paul's argument, it's a slave argument.

You're not your own.

You have a new master, your whole life is about his will now, you've been bought with a price, he paid good money for you. And here, taking that metaphor to its height, he says, you've been bought with a price, and of course, the price was the blood of the Son of God.

You've been bought with that price. He bought you with his own blood.

You belong to him.

Therefore, glorify God in your body. Paul expects us to have a certain power, a certain motivation in the believer's.

Life. You belong to him.

You're a servant of him. Why? Because he bought you with his own blood. How could you think to do anything less than glorify him with your body? That's the argument. It's your calling, Paul is saying.

This is why you were bought. This is your task. This is your purpose.

Now, I am entirely convinced that half of our trouble, I don't say all, but half of our trouble. In the life of faith. In overcoming the situations and circumstances that are so distressing to us. The relationships, the issues that are so discouraging and power sapping and faith disheartening.

Half of the issue is that we've totally lost our idea of calling. Calling. When Peter addresses the church and he says, of course, you're experiencing suffering, he doesn't elaborate upon the nature of that suffering.

There seems to be generally an idea of persecution, but it could have been suffering, injustice, maltreatment, all these things. And Peter actually says, you forgot your calling. He says, don't forget, you were called to this.

Christ himself also giving you an example that you would follow. So when Peter sees discouraged, weary, disheartened, weakened Christians, he says, you forgot your calling. You haven't been looking at Christ, he gave you this whole example to follow.

You forgot your calling, you belong to him now. He said you have to follow him by picking up a cross. He never said it was going to be easy. He said it was going to look like self-crucifixion.

You forgot that calling.

You forgot the example he laid down for you. That's the call of a servant. So I asked the question, if that's half the trouble, are you discouraged by the way things have taken shape in your life this morning?

Where are all my ambitions going? What have they amounted to? Either because they've fallen through my fingers or because I've achieved them and I feel as empty and hollow as I ever did. Where's my vocation heading?

What are these relationships going to bring about? All these relationships that are so costly and they've deteriorated. Why am I facing these things? What are the things that are weighing down on your soul?

What are the areas that you're so prone to grumble and kick? Half the discouragement, half the trouble is you forgot the calling. You forgot that you're a servant. You are in the place, in the time, in the relationship, in the circumstance that your.

Master has placed you.

It will be hard for you.

It will continue to be discouraging to you just because it's a hard place. It'll be hard to you. It'll be discouraging you just because it's a hard relationship. But don't make it harder than it has to be by forgetting I don't belong to myself.

I'm not in this relationship. Ultimately, I'm not in the circumstance ultimately because of my will and how I'm going to serve myself. I belong to God. I'm his servant. I need to do his will in this way, at this time, in this place.

Half the trouble is we've forgotten our calling. At an extreme, we can be so weighed down by difficulty and weariness that we begin to think, my master doesn't love me. My master is not that wise. If he was wise, he would never allow these things to happen in my life.