Undivided Allegiance

For eight issues we have been doing one thing together. We have been naming the split. We named it in the bloodless religion of the comfortable, in the way a nation can keep God's name on its money and lose Him from its rooms, in the slow trade where conviction gets sold for the price of belonging. We diagnosed the divided heart. We held it up to the light and kept it there.

Now the series ends. And it ends the way every real diagnosis should end: with a door held open.

Here is the truth this whole arc has been walking toward. The divided life is exhausting. Serving two masters is slow starvation. You give your Sundays to God and your Mondays to fear. You worship on your knees and strategize on your feet, always calculating who you can afford to be in which room. That kind of life will wear a soul down to the grain.

There is another way, and it is lighter. One Master. One direction. One face to seek instead of a hundred to please. This issue is about that relief: the relief of finally setting the second master down.

A Christian university torn between staying open and staying itself.

Oakland City University, an Indiana school tied to the General Baptist denomination, told the state it would lay off all 167 employees effective June 1, 2026. The reason was a financial crisis years in the making. Staff paychecks failed to arrive on May 8 and simply went unpaid while leadership scrambled, saying it was working with donors to cover back wages and keep the doors open. The IRS filings tell the rest of the story. Multimillion-dollar operating deficits. An endowment that had bled from roughly $10.6 million down to $5.4 million, cut nearly in half. Days after the layoff notice, the school announced it would suspend undergraduate classes for the coming year while keeping its online graduate programs alive.

Sit with what that institution is feeling, because you have felt it too. Here is a place founded to form Christians, and to survive, it has to weigh its mission against its bank balance every single morning. The money is not the enemy. The money is real. Bills are real. People with families went unpaid. But watch how the pull works. The thing that was supposed to serve the calling slowly starts to govern it. Survival becomes the master that mission has to answer to.

That is the exact mechanism Jesus warned about: you cannot serve two masters, because you will end up loving one and despising the other. A school loses its mission one safe choice at a time, payroll over purpose, quarter over calling, until one day the mission is a line in an old brochure. The same drift happens in a person: one safe choice at a time, until God is second.

Source: Warned of layoffs, Oakland City U. workers aren't paid, Inside Higher Ed

"No one can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and money."

Matthew 6:24

The Ten Commandments are going back on the classroom wall, and the real question is who is first.

On April 21 and 22, 2026, a divided en banc Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 9 to 8 that Texas Senate Bill 10 does not violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. The law requires every public-school classroom in the state to display the Ten Commandments. The majority held that the Supreme Court's 1980 decision in Stone v. Graham, which struck down a nearly identical Kentucky mandate, no longer controls. The challengers, a coalition of multifaith Texas families, plan to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The case is far from finished.

The reason this story belongs in an issue about undivided allegiance is the first words on that contested poster: you shall have no other gods before me. Strip away the lawyers and the appeals and you are left with the oldest demand in Scripture. One God. First. Before the others.

Here is the part worth sitting with. A commandment can hang on every wall in Texas and never reach a single heart. You can win the display and lose the allegiance. The first commandment has always been about the throne inside a person, the seat where only one thing can sit. A nation can argue for years about putting the words on the wall while quietly seating money, status, and approval on the throne the words point to. Keep your eyes on the question beneath the headlines. The real question the commandment asks is what rules in you.

Source: Texas can force schools to display the Ten Commandments, federal appeals court says, NPR

"You shall have no other gods before me."

Exodus 20:3

A denomination drew a line it knows will cost it.

At the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting on June 10, 2026, messengers voted to give initial approval to the "Truth and Unity Amendment." If finalized, it would write into the SBC Constitution that a cooperating church does not affirm or appoint a woman to the office or function of pastor. The vote passed decisively, with about 77 percent, 6,028 of 8,074 ballots, clearing the two-thirds bar. Because constitutional amendments require approval at two consecutive annual meetings, it has to pass again in 2027 to take hold. The convention knows the price. Churches will leave. Some already have.

Wherever you land on the theology, watch the spiritual thing happening here. Set the debate itself to one side for a moment. Watch the posture. An institution looked at the surrounding culture, understood that its position would be unpopular, would cost it congregations and goodwill and headlines, and chose conviction anyway. Whatever you think of the conclusion, that posture is rare. Most of us bend the other way.

Paul named the divide exactly. Am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? He framed it as a fork with no middle lane, because there is no middle lane. You cannot tune a life to two frequencies. The moment you start managing what the culture will think, you have hired a second master, and that master is relentless and never satisfied. The freedom Paul found was relief. When you stop auditioning for the world's approval, you can finally stop performing. That is the rest on the other side of the divided life, and it is open to anyone willing to choose one audience.

Source: Truth and Unity Amendment receives initial two-thirds approval, Baptist Press

"Am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God?"

Galatians 1:10

"Choose this day whom you will serve. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."

Joshua 24:15

Picture the scene, because the setting carries the weight. Joshua has gathered all Israel at Shechem. He is old. The conquest is behind them, the land is theirs, and the danger is no longer enemy armies. The danger is comfort. Now that the people have homes and harvests, the gods of the surrounding nations look harmless, even neighborly. So Joshua stands before them and does something striking. He gives them a choice and tells them to make it.

Notice the verb. Choose. It is an act of the will. Everyone at Shechem would have said warm things about the God who brought them out of Egypt, so Joshua asks the harder thing. Who will you actually serve, day after day, when the choosing is invisible, and the harvest is good? Allegiance is a direction you walk in the morning after the feeling fades.

This is exactly where our three stories meet. The university feels its mission and serves its survival. Texas can hang the words and still seat other gods on the throne. The convention chose, knowing the cost. Each one is Shechem in miniature. Each is the daily question Joshua put to the people, dressed in modern clothes: whom will you serve.

And hear the heart underneath the demand, because this is the whole point of the book and the whole reason for this series. God stands at Shechem the way the Father from Luke 15 stands at the road: scanning it for the child who left, ready to run. The call to choose Him is the voice of a Father saying, come home, you have been exhausting yourself out there, and there is rest at this table. Choose this day. Then choose it again tomorrow. That is the way home.

So bring it down to your own week. Forget the institutions for a moment. The divided life almost never announces itself. No one wakes up and decides to serve two masters. It happens in small, reasonable choices, each one defensible on its own.

It is the prayer you cut short because the day is loud. The conviction you soften in the room where it would cost you something. The quiet calculation about which version of yourself is safe to show here, and which to show there. The career decision you make as if God were a consultant to be heard and overruled rather than the Lord to be obeyed. Each one feels small. Together they are the divided life.

And it is so tiring. That is the part we rarely admit. Managing two masters means you are never off the clock. You are always reading the room, always hedging, always keeping one eye on God and one eye on everything you are afraid to lose. The divided heart carries both loads and collects rest from neither table.

Here is the relief the gospel actually offers. One Master is lighter than two. When Christ is Lord of the whole thing, the Monday and the Sunday, the boardroom and the prayer closet, the calculating stops. You do not have to perform for a dozen audiences anymore. There is one face to seek, and He already loves you. The yoke is easy because the second master was the heavy one all along.

This week, start with one room. One place where you have been quietly serving a second master: money, comfort, the approval of certain people, a fear you keep feeding. Name it honestly before God. Then make one undivided choice in that one room and let it stand, even if it costs you something.

That is how allegiance is actually built: in Shechem after Shechem, one daily choice at a time, until the direction of your whole life points one way. You will simply notice, weeks from now, that you are less tired. That is the sound of one master instead of two.

And if you read all of this and realized you are the divided one, hear this before anything else: that ache you feel is the Father on the road, already running. Come home.

Somewhere in your life there is a person who is exhausted and does not know why. He would never call himself far from God. He still believes, still shows up sometimes, still means it. But he is worn thin, and he cannot name the reason, because no one ever told him that trying to serve two masters is what is eating him alive. He is divided, and he is tired.

That person needs this book.

You Can't Serve Two Masters: Undivided Allegiance To Christ In An Age of Cultural Compromise, by Drew Reitzel, is written for him: to name what he has been feeling and to show him the door he has been walking past. It traces the divided life with honesty, then it does the harder, kinder thing: it shows the rest waiting on the other side of choosing one Lord. It is the relief this whole series has been pointing to, put in his hands instead of yours.

So put it in his hands. The divided one needs to be found by it. Buy a second copy and give it to the prodigal who does not yet know he is divided. That is what this book is for.

Available in Kindle ($9.99) and Paperback ($16.99) on Amazon.