(the following message was preached by one of our teachers, Richard Boyce)
If you’ll turn with me in your copy of God’s word to Matthew chapter six, we’re going to spend a few moments this morning at the feet of Jesus. If you’ll recall from the beginning of this series, or if you flip back to the beginning of chapter five, you’ll read that Jesus, “Seeing the crowds… went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him.”
Just a few verses before in chapter four, we find that by now Jesus’ fame is rapidly spreading, he’s healing people, proclaiming the kingdom of God, and great crowds are following him from Galilee, and the Decapolis, from Jerusalem, Judea, even from beyond the Jordan River.
Some in this crowd are following Jesus out of curiosity, some are seeking miracles, some are trying to discredit his teachings…and some have come to believe that he is the long-prophesied Messiah. It’s a crowd that may not look too differently from ours this morning.
So there’s something of an odd crowd with mixed motives following Jesus, and he went up the hill a ways and sat down as a Rabbi would in preparation of teaching. We find that initially his disciples followed him- by the time Jesus is done teaching, the crowds are there in full, astonished at what he’s said.
Now what Jesus teaches over these three chapters has filled countless books and perplexed even more theologians. Some of what he says is designed to bury Israel beneath the weight of the Mosaic Law- some of it provides a deeper look into the heart of God with regard to Christian ethics.
Some of what he teaches is designed for his audience to think to themselves, “There’s no way I can live like this…” and some of what he taught can and should be followed.
But…today we can all breathe a sigh of relief, ‘cause Jesus is about to address something we don’t have: treasure. I like it when Jesus digs his nails into rich people. Rich people need it!
I was playing around on Zillow and found a house right in the middle of Bel Air. Eleven bedrooms, eighteen bathrooms…it can be yours for the low price of $195 million. And that’s a steal- last year it was listed at $245 million.
Showed that house to a kid at school- he told me “Keep working- you might get it!” Yeah…a monthly mortgage payment on that bad boy is only about 900k. Rich people.
Bill Gates was recently dethroned as the world’s richest man. Now that honor belongs to Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon. He’s worth about 131billion dollars. May not sound like much, but he’d have to spent about 9 million dollars every day for forty years before he’s broke. Rich people.
Richest actor in the world right now is Jerry Seinfeld, worth a cool 950 million dollars. Athletes have it pretty good, too. Russel Wilson is making about 35 million this year to throw a football. I swear, rich people.
I’m glad Jesus is talking about money today, ‘cause I have none and what he has to say clearly doesn’t apply to me!
Except…except for the part where nearly half of the world’s population- that’s more than three billion people- live on less than $2.50 a day. Eighty percent of the world population lives on less than $10 a day.
A forth of all humans live without electricity. 805 million people do not have enough food to eat. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due directly to poverty. While the average person in the United States lives to be 78, the average person is Sub-Saharan Africa lives to be 60.
We live in the richest country in the world. In fact, if you make minimum wage in Virginia and work a full time job, you’re in the top 10% of wealthiest people in the world.
Rich people.
I’m not going to have Sarah McLachlan playing in the background or pictures of kids in Africa for the rest of the message this morning. There’s no Compassion International table waiting to ambush you- this isn’t about making you feel guilty or demand you do what I tell you to with your money. I’m simply trying to highlight the fact that we have money. Lots of it.
We don’t like to acknowledge the extreme poverty around the world because it’s so easy for us to feel broke compared to others we see, but we have to realize this morning that whenever Jesus speaks about wealth, he’s addressing us. When he said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God,” he’s talking about us.
So as we follow the crowd up the hill to listen to Jesus speak about money, don’t fall into the temptation of thinking that we have none. The poorest of us are richer than most.
We’ll pick up in Matthew 6:19, as Jesus tells his listeners,
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust[e] destroy and where thieves break in and steal…”
Read on its face, Jesus seems to be saying this: don’t stockpile your wealth here on earth, because it isn’t going to last forever. Paper money- eaten by moths. Precious metals? Ruined over time. Personal vault? Not theft-proof. It isn’t going to last.
When you think about it, money is weird. It’s metal and paper, and we do the craziest things for it. I had a window busted out of my car when I lived in Chattanooga so someone could steal about a buck in change from my cupholder. We literally work ourselves into an early grave to accumulate pieces of green paper that we value more than other pieces of paper.
That wealth that means so much to us? Moth food. Don’t lay it up, don’t store it, don’t accumulate it. It’s not going to last. It’s not the point of our existence.
Now here’s where we get a little antsy and the questions begin to tumble around in our mind. What about my savings account? What about surplus money at the end of the week? What about retirement?
What about my IRA? Is it wrong to make money now for the future? Is having money sin? Should my car be worth more than most people make in a year? Should I have a mortgage that could save the lives of hundreds of starving children? Is that what Jesus is saying?
Consider the Spirit-inspired words of King Solomon who, by the way, had an estimated net worth of 2 trillion dollars (that’s 136 million a day for forty years).
One of the wisest men to walk the earth, he said in Proverbs 6 that we should take a page from the ant’s book and work hard while we can to have food when we can’t work. I can’t say that investing is wrong, or that retirement accounts are evil. There’s wisdom in preparing for the future.
When we read the text, we’ll find that Jesus isn’t condemning wealth- he’s speaking to where our affections lie, where our focus really is. Which world we’re living for- this one or the next.
Jesus is painting a contrast- here’s the rest of his thought: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust[e] destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.”
Earthly treasures that will not last versus heavenly treasures that last forever.
Ever stop to think that God doesn’t need your treasure? Think about it. God does not need us, or our money. Period. The Bible tells us in Proverbs 21:1 that
“The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will.”
The top 1% of the world population controls almost 50% of the world’s wealth. If God’s greatest desire was financial equality, don’t you think that God could stir the hearts of that 1% to freely distribute their wealth to those around them?
If God is sovereign, and you’d better believe that he is, do you reallythink that God absolutely, without a doubt, needs you to move heaven and earth by your shiny coins and pieces of green paper? No.
The apostle John describes the coming New Jerusalem as having streets made of gold. Rather ironic that we’ll devote our lives accumulating paper that’s backed by gold and Jesus uses the stuff as asphalt.
God doesn’t need your money. I’d argue that he doesn’t want your money- he wants your heart. And if you’re in Christ this morning, you’ve received a new heart. But…sometimes it takes a while for the reality of who we are in Christ to sink down into the very depths of our affections, our will, and our thinking.
Look at what Jesus says next:
“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Now this is an interesting statement. If we understand the heart in this context to be the seat of affection, the place where we value things and hold them near and dear, it almost seems like Jesus has it backwards.
It seems to me that it would make more sense reading it like this:Where your heart is, there also your treasure will be. I mean- doesn’t that seem reasonable? If you love football, your treasure, your money, will be spent on game tickets and team merchandise.
If you love to hunt and fish, your money will be spent on gear. If you love video games, your money goes toward video games. We’ve probably all heard the adage that says “look at your checkbook to see what you value.”
But what if it’s the other way around?
What if what we do with our money in some way determines what we then come to value? Jesus tells us that our affections follow our money, which means that what we choose to do with money in turn impacts the affections of our heart.
What if Jesus is saying, don’t get wrapped up in the money game on earth, because the more you do the more you’ll want to, and the more you want earthly wealth and the more you do to accumulate more, the less you’ll want Jesus or to make an eternal difference in his kingdom?
Our attachment to Jesus can often be measured by our attachment to our possessions. Later in Matthew’s account of the life of Jesus he records an occasion when wealthy young man approached Jesus and asked him what he must do to have eternal life. Jesus’ response was to keep the commandments of Moses, which this narcissistic young man thought he could do.
Jesus then said, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
Choose me over your finances. Invest in my kingdom and forsake your own. Let go of your earthly treasure and have treasure in heaven. Release your hold on what I’ve allowed you to have and love me instead.
Matthew tells us that “When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.” It would appear that at that moment, the allure of his earthly wealth outweighed his desire for eternal life.
Now it’s possible that in this Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is revealing to his audience the corruptness of their heart by attacking their attachment to their finances, but what if there’s more? What if there’s a positive aspect?
What if Jesus is giving us who are in Christ an invitation to join him onhis mission of kingdom building, and the key to doing that is choosing to lay up treasure in heaven, rather than on earth?
Consider Jesus’ next words:
“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, 23 but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”
What you set your eyes upon determines the extent to which the light of Christ shines in and through you. What is your gaze fixed upon- the bottom line of your bank statement, of the kingdom of God?
When I was studying this passage, what came to mind was a privacy screen protector for cells phones or computers at a doctor’s office. Perhaps you’ve seen them. When the device is viewed from the side, all you see is a dark screen, but if you see it face on, you can clearly see the screen. Whether we have the right perspective determines if we can really see what’s in front of us.
If our eyes are focused on kingdom work and laying up treasure in heaven, we exude the light of Jesus in a darkened world. But if all we focus on is us in our little kingdom, we make absolutely no difference in our communities, our schools, our workplaces, or our home.
As if Jesus wasn’t making his point clearly enough, he begins to press the issue more deeply in verse 24:
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”
You cannot singularly live for both earthly and heavenly treasures, because both require all of you and stand in opposition to each other.
You cannot love opposing sports teams equally. You cannot love your bank account and giving generously to the things of God. You can not pour your life into making money and pour your life into furthering the kingdom of God.
Now, does this mean we can’t earn wealth? No. But there’s a difference between being kingdom-minded with regard to our vocation and experiencing the blessings of God versus being earthly minded and looking nothing like Jesus while acquiring as much wealth as we can for the sole purpose of increasing our little kingdom.
It’s not the possession of money that we need to be wary of, it’s having the accumulation of money as our driving factor. Paul told Timothy in 1 Timothy 6:10, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.”
So here we are sitting on a grassy hillside listening to Jesus teach and perhaps you’re wondering what the “ask” is. You know what I mean. We’ve spent the last twenty some minutes trying to detach your heart from your wallet- where’s the ask? Is this about a building fund? Tithing?
I kid you not- I was listening to a well-respected preacher work through this passage and it wound up becoming a sales pitch for a building fund faith initiative. This isn’t that.
I want to go back to this simple question: What if Jesus is giving us an invitation to join him on his mission, and the key to doing that is choosing to lay up treasure in heaven, rather than on earth?
What if the invitation is into a life of deeper worship made possible by deliberately laying up treasures in heaven? And what does that even looklike?
It looks like obedience to the Spirit of God.
Now, there are plenty of passages in the Bible that talk about how various things we do have accompanying rewards in heaven, and no doubt there is much we can do in the way of our time and talents, but in this context it seems as though the invitation here to specifically and deliberately make a move that involves worshipping God through what we do with our money.
Perhaps it’s giving to the needy, as Jesus mentioned earlier in this passage. You heard the stats, you know the needs. Maybe it’s investing into
the ministry of Village Church. It could be something as simple as giving Pastor Robert a gift card to a restaurant so he can spend some quality time with his wife.
So here’s the challenge: I challenge you to ask God how He would have you make an intentional investment into his kingdom, using your resources. Again- it’s not because God wants your money. He wants your affections.
Where we stockpile treasures, our heart follows. What treasure are you going to devote your life to this week- physical, or spiritual? Yours, or Gods?
Perhaps you’re here this morning and over the course of the morning the Spirit of God has revealed to you that your heart hasn’t been transformed, that you’ve never come to the place in your life where you’ve become a follower of Jesus.
So much of what Jesus taught in this sermon on the mount was designed for his followers to understand that the key to eternal life wasn’t their performance, or their giving, or their rule-following.
So much of his message was intended to bring his audience to their knees in repentance and confession that they will never been good enough for his kingdom.
But that’s why Jesus came. He came to live the perfect life we never would to die a sinner’s death that we all deserve, so that whoever would simply believe on him would have eternal life.
If you need Jesus this morning, the invitation to you is to trust Jesus alone as your hope of salvation.
This message was preached by Richard Boyce at Village Church in Churchville, VA on September 22, 2019 as part of our “Thy Kingdom Come” series.
Live Well. Lead Well. 