Trust and Obey | Matthew 6:19-24

So today's Bible reading comes from Matthew 6, 19-24.

If you're using the Church Bible, it's page 787.

Matthew 6, 19-24.

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,

where moths and firmen destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.

But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven,

where moths and firmen do not destroy,

and where thieves do not break in and steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

The eye is the lamp of the body.

If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light.

But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.

If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

No one can serve to Masters.

Either you will hate the one and love the other,

or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.

You cannot serve both God and money.

Thank you Eunice.

Good morning again everyone.

Wasn't it absolutely beautiful to witness what we witnessed this morning

with that baptism.

And as James said before, it's exciting indeed,

but every time we come together to worship, every time we come to pray together,

every time we read and come around the Word, it's a beautiful thing.

And so it's exciting to be together this morning.

So as we come to the Word, let us ask the Lord Jesus to help us understand

what has been read this morning.

Father God, we thank you that you are so gracious, so incredibly merciful,

and so in love with your children,

that indeed you are the one who comes to choose us and gather us,

and that you have sent the Lord Jesus for us.

This morning we ask as we turn our attention to these words of eternal life,

that you would help us to understand what is being said here by the Lord Jesus,

that you would work in our midst as you have been doing already through the Spirit,

and that we would understand these wonderful words.

Please change us in Jesus' name. Amen.

So for the last few months we've been somewhat sitting at the feet of Jesus,

working our way through this incredible sermon on what it is to be part

of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Now as we've been working our way through this sermon,

we've seen time and time again that Jesus has made it clear

that there was a popular teaching of the day that his disciples had been privy to

from the Pharisees that somewhat worked counter to what was revealed in their Bible.

Now it's not like the disciples of this time had a totally different Bible

to the one that God gave their people at Mount Sinai and through the prophets.

No, it was that the religious leaders of the time had led the people to practice

what was revealed in the Bible in such a dejected way through their oral traditions.

To put it simply, what Jesus has been doing in this sermon is he's been contrasting

what it is to be part of the Kingdom of Heaven over against what it was to be part

of the religious Jewish society, to be part of that society by taking his audience

to the intention of the law.

And as we've seen, the traditions of the Pharisees were found wanting on the scales.

For example, Jesus has shown that the law was given to cut people to the heart.

However, the Pharisees looked to the law and held it up exclusively to the actions.

In other words, they taught as long as you were seen to be doing the right thing

at the right time in front of the right people, then you were considered

a good member of the religious community.

Now he says, Jesus, when it comes to the law, it was revealed not to prune

and maintain the fruit on the tree so you'd look nice in the garden,

but revealed to transplant the entire root system.

The law was revealed to show that the whole tree is diseased,

or what he calls poor in spirit, so that one might repent,

call out to the Lord and enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

And for Christ's original audience, as he took them on a tour of how to view murder,

sexuality, vengeance, even their speech, it must have been, as it's been for us,

an incredibly confronting experience.

Then as we've seen over the past few weeks, Jesus shifted from what they had been taught

to what they had observed, because yes, the law was given to be obeyed,

yet it was hijacked in such a way that some in the religious community

used it as a way to promote and project their own righteousness before others.

No, says Jesus, when you fast, when you pray, when you give,

you use it as a platform to self-publicise.

These things have been given to you in order to help your discipleship,

help you in forming a greater bond with your Heavenly Father behind the scenes,

so that you will experience his blessing as you trust and obey.

And all of this teaching has been somewhat directed at helping us disciples

to understand what Jesus was getting at when he called us the salt and the light of this world.

Because that's what the disciples of Jesus are intended to be.

We're intended to be counter-cultural little salty lights who don't withdraw from this world,

but spread out into it to cause real and lasting damage against the kingdom of darkness.

Not just in a temporal way, in the way that we speak and act,

but to bring about a real eternal change with the message that we have about the kingdom of heaven,

the Messiah of God and how one might enter it.

That's what our Lord expects of his disciples.

He expects us to be a people that don't withdraw,

but engage with the world around us all the while being different to them.

And knowing that his disciples wouldn't just be contained to this little fishing village by the sea

where this sermon took place, Jesus shifts here in this part of the Sermon on the Mount.

He shifts here and starts to give a bigger picture, not just on the religious condition of the day,

but on the human condition for all time.

He peels back the gristle and muscle to more so reveal the heart of humanity.

To put it simply, Jesus shifts from the disciples immediate context in the Jewish community

in regards to outward actions to the inner human condition that they would meet

as the gospel spread out to the Gentiles as well.

And he puts on view what it is to leave all behind and trust God with all that's ahead.

We're going to see that in verses 19 through to 34 over the next couple of weeks.

So if you have your Bibles with you this morning,

we're going to get into the first part of this text starting in verse 19.

These are the words of our Lord.

He says, Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth.

Okay, so the first thing that we need to understand here is that the word that sits behind store up

is actually a word that is used in regards to when one collects something in this world of value

and then protects it.

Now in the immediate context, the ancient people would literally make for themselves a little box

in which they would put treasured things in like coins, clothes, precious metals

and then they'd bury it so that decay or thieves wouldn't take it away from them.

In fact, you might think of it as a modern day safe or a little treasure chest

which would be filled with valuable things and it would be done in order that a sense of blessing

or security would be felt by the one who was in possession of it.

Now we might not have a safe in our house or a little treasure chest that we bury under the floorboards,

but the principle that's being set forward here is just the same.

Disciples of Jesus, we must guard ourselves against setting our hearts on the things of this world

that we might look to, to define ourselves as being blessed and secure.

This is what Jesus is getting at behind the idea of storing up treasures on earth.

Now we all do this to a degree, don't we?

We all have a special place where we put our money. We call it a bank.

Some of us might have a special place where we put our little trinkets.

It's called a man cave. Some call it the pool room.

Some have rooms full of books or Lego collection, full of their Pokemon cards,

even their Star Wars action figures, just YouTube it.

It's phenomenal what people collect out there.

But there's something in this first principle that pushes on every single one of us in this room.

Every person has a treasure. Every person has a desire.

Every person has a thing that they're in danger of looking to in this life to define them as blessed and secure.

Maybe for you it's slightly different.

Maybe it's your place in the economy.

Maybe it's your status among your co-workers.

Maybe it's your career. Maybe it's your spouse.

Maybe it's your children.

These treasures, these delights come in different forms for all of us,

yet Christ is making us aware of something here.

And that's that we are to be very careful with where that treasure sits in the scheme of things.

That's what's on view here in regards to this treasure language.

Now if you're sitting there this morning and you're thinking to yourself,

oh no, I need to go close down my bank account and get rid of all my vintage Vegemite jars

that I've been collecting since the 50s.

And I just want to say from the get-go, Jesus isn't saying to not have any treasures at all, period.

Nor are we to walk around in a multi-purpose set of jeans that we've had since 1993

begging for help because we haven't been wise with our income.

That's not what's been said here at all.

What Jesus is directing our attention to is for us to make a very wise choice on this side of eternity

as to the things that we treasure the most.

There's an order in all of this that we disciples, the disciples of Jesus, that we must be aware of.

And so we must be very careful to make the right choice when it comes to temporary things.

Let me explain it like this.

We live in a very touchy, fearly world where we use our five senses

and know that the things around us are there because, well, we can touch and see them.

So Jesus is saying that the things that are seen, the tangible,

they mustn't become the things that we live to store up and put our trust in.

And that's the danger, right?

The danger of looking to that which we can see to feel like we're blessed of God or not.

I want to put a quick test out to you, Church.

If your spouse was to leave, your child was to depart, your house was to be taken away,

your things to go up in smoke, would there not be a sense that God was not happy with you?

Or am I totally alone in this?

You see, we have a tendency as humans to find contentment in the things that we have

and then feel blessed and secure because of the increasing abundance of seeing things,

these treasures, multiply before our eyes.

That's why the dangerous doctrine of the Word of Faith movement captivates

and drags so many people into its wicked jaws because it so attracts the carnal flesh of people

and preaches that if you have the best car, the best job, the best spouse, the best house,

the best clothes, the biggest bank account, the best health, then you are blessed of God.

This totally flies in the face of what Jesus is saying here.

What Jesus says when we collect and then look to the temporal churches of this world

in order to put on our Instagram accounts hashtag blessed, then our priorities,

they're totally misplaced, our hearts totally off track and in the wrong place.

Now I want to say there is a kindness in the preaching of Jesus that we've seen over and over

and over again in the Sermon on the Mount.

He always explains what he means when he says something with such direct force.

And make no mistake, the words do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth.

It's not a suggestion.

It's not a suggestion in any sense.

It's what we call an imperative, which simply means a command.

That's right, Jesus is saying to his disciples, I command you not to collect treasures

in this world and store them up so as to find your worth in these things.

You might say it's a command from headquarters and to ignore it is to go in totally the wrong direction.

But in his kindness, Jesus actually explains the logic behind why it's so foolish

to be Indiana Jones and become a treasure hunter for a living.

It's right there in our text, verse 19.

It's because moths and vermin destroy and thieves break in and steal.

Now, it must be said, without doubt, this applies to the material things that we've spoken about this morning.

But I also want to put it forward to you, Church, that what's on view here can also be applied in such a broader sense as well.

Let's really think about what Jesus is saying here.

He's saying that what you're attracted to, what you collect and store up as treasure,

well, satisfaction in them is only for a short time because it's going to corrode and deteriorate anyway.

And I don't know about you, but depending on what it is, I'm not even that patient

because I get bored or disappointed with that certain little shiny thing for it even to have the chance to turn into dust.

I certainly experienced this with my first drum kit that was made for me.

I waited for months and months and months for this thing to be built.

And then on its very first outing, its very first gig with me, the sound guy dropped a microphone on the kick drum and cracked it.

All of the drummers can feel my pain right now.

And then all of a sudden, all those dreams, all that hope, all that excitement was dashed in that thing.

And I started to think about the next drum set I could save for the very next moment.

I've heard the same thing about people's cars, their boats, their houses.

I've also heard from friends of mine who spent years at university to get that perfect job to find the disappointment

because being a lawyer, an accountant, a vet wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

So they started thinking about the next career move, the next degree.

I suppose what's on view here is something called the law of diminishing returns.

That's why we find ourselves wanting, collecting, daydreaming and desiring more and more

because we feel like if we only had that better car, if only we would win lotto, if only I had that career,

if only I would pay off that house, if only we'd, and I think you can fill in the blank,

then yes, then yes, then I would have satisfaction.

So that's certainly on view here. The logic behind not putting our hope and trust in our treasure trove

is that in its ultimate sense, it's all turning to dust anyway.

But in the here and now, contentment in these earthly things will really only last for a period of time.

And once that period of time is over because we get bored or it's stolen as Jesus says here,

we feel like we need to collect more in order to get back to that sense of satisfaction

because I just can't get none. I suppose Mick Jagger hit the nail on the head there.

At church, I also want to say that there is another danger in looking to the things of this world

in order to define if we're blessed or not.

Now without doubt, the Bible is very clear that it's God who gives and it is God who takes away.

There's no doubt when we turn to the Scriptures that God loves to bless his children.

That can come by way of wonderful material things and it's good to be a wise steward of what you have,

to good things and sometimes you can have a lot.

But we also see that sometimes withholding and dare I say it, in our Western world, taking away can also be a great blessing.

I know people who have lost great amounts of money, career opportunities, even their health,

so as to come to a place of complete humility, where they cried out to God from that place of despair

and were rescued in such profound and eternal ways and they wouldn't have it any other way.

So with the same breath, I also know people who have been incredibly materially blessed, yet felt completely lost.

They cried out and they found mercy.

All that to say, if our trust is in our treasures, then our compass will be spinning around all over the place.

Because if God in his kindness takes away, then your peace, joy, satisfaction will be torn from you as well.

Yet in the same sense, if you have a good innings, it doesn't mean that you're automatically saved.

What Jesus is doing here for us is showing us that there is an order that must happen in the disciples life.

Yes, though it's not a bad thing to have nice things, to be wise with one's money,

to even enjoy and share and bless others with your money,

our treasured things must not define whether you're blessed of God or not.

In other words, Jesus is asking us here, what do we take value in?

Do we have our treasure in the wrong place?

Have we fallen into the trap of cultivating possessions?

Are we guilty of coveting?

Do we worship the things we have?

Well, there's something so much greater, so much more wonderful that our Lord invites us to elevate our eyes to

so that the things of this world might grow strangely dim.

Verse 20, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and vermin do not destroy

and where thieves do not break in and steal.

Again, it's a command.

It's that same language, yet done in such a way that one might think about it like a child playing in filthy mud

with a parent saying, come on, get up, let's go to the beach.

I mean, that's why my kids play in muddy puddles because ultimately they desire playing on the sand

and running through the waves and like us, we have desires, yet our desires are so maligned

that they totally end up drawing us to the wrong places.

Stop, says Jesus, there's something so much greater, so much greater than a treasure trove, a nice house,

a good career, there's treasures in heaven.

Now, some of you might be thinking to yourself, but I didn't think Christianity had a reward system.

We need to do some thinking here.

In one sense, you're right, and I will explain, but in another sense, we need to think about

what Jesus is saying here in light of the whole council of scripture.

You see, he's book-ending the command, isn't he?

On the one hand, he's saying, don't store up earthly treasures, yet on the other hand, he's saying, store up heavenly treasures.

So these treasures that are on view for the Christian, they're not automatic.

So what is he saying?

Well, I want to propose to you this morning that the treasure in view here comes as a result of our obedience to the Word of God.

You see, God is consistently leading and guiding us through his Word and by his Spirit to advance the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

Remember, we're salty lights.

And so Jesus says that we lay up treasures in heaven by essentially investing in God's cause over our own.

Now, don't misunderstand me here.

This isn't Jesus saying that if we work hard enough on earth, we will have enough to earn our way into heaven.

That is not on view here at all.

What Jesus is saying is that obedience means something in the eternal scheme of things.

Let me give you a few examples of what's on view here.

You see, for all those who have put their trust in the finished and final work of the Lord Jesus Christ,

because of Jesus, because of God's mercy, because of his grace, because of his love,

we will be going to be with our Lord for all eternity.

But what we do now on earth has eternal ramifications because I don't think that we get divine amnesia once we get to heaven.

So brothers and sisters, it might be asked of you this morning, what are you doing with your finances?

Are you spending all your money on yourself or are you looking for ways to secretly bless others?

Are you spending all your time at work so that you can have bigger and better holidays and more me time?

Or are you ordering your day in such a way that you can go into that secret place and spend time with your Father in heaven?

Are you sharing the gospel with those around you?

Or do you go about your day with your head down and your bum up, not saying a word to anyone?

Because according to Jesus, our obedience to his word, our working to make a change in this world, means something in the world to come.

Our obedience in response to God's word means something eternally.

And Jesus says those blessings that you get from that obedience, they can't be taken away from you.

No, when you see someone come to trust in the gospel because you opened your mouth, that will never rot or be stolen.

When you see someone come into the kingdom of heaven filled with the Spirit, baptised, proclaiming Christ as saviour, that will never corrode or be nicked from you.

When you help that family who are going to lose everything but now have a roof over their heads because you stepped in,

that will never be diminished or taken away.

Even those times of deep prayer, sacrifice, adoration before the throne of grace will never decay or be run off with.

None of it will be wasted in the scheme of things, dear ones.

All of it will be seen in eternity as a great treasure.

So in reflection of that understanding, my dear brothers and sisters, Jesus is getting us to examine our hearts.

We're all, all of us are being laid open by the word of God here this morning so that we might see our own faces in the mirror.

We are so blessed in Perth, Western Australia, in so many ways.

But are you taking your earthly blessings and using them as instruments to fill your own treasure troves, property portfolio,

to maintain a social status or are you using what God has blessed you with, even the very breath in your lungs, to do His will as revealed in His Word?

You see, every single one of us, every single one of us in this room is tempted to take what God has given us,

what He has blessed us with and moulded in such a way that we end up using it to store up the temporal treasures in this world.

It's on view here and Jesus is asking His disciples, He's asking us through His Word this morning,

where do you find more enjoyment? In the earthly treasures that will come to an end anyway or in the God of heaven?

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Verse 21.

In other words, the things that you dwell on, the things that you daydream about, the things you spend your money and energy on,

that's showing us something. Charles Spurgeon, the great Victorian-era preacher, put it like this,

show me a person's receipt book and I'll tell you where that person's heart is. Wise words.

Jesus then goes on to compliment all of this with a type of metaphor in verses 22 and 23.

The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, but your whole body will be full of light,

but if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.

If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness?

This really reinforces all that's come before because what Jesus is saying is what we look to in this world really plays a part in what we're drawn to.

It's where we get the saying, the eyes are the windows of the soul.

That's been classically understood as people being able to tell that you might be having a pretty bad day or something.

The way that Jesus explains it is that the eye, what the heart dwells on, you might say,

which is the instrument we use to focus in on things, really does affect what we do with our body in regards to what we spend our time, energy and desires on.

So he says if your eye is spiritually blind, then no matter how bright the things are around you,

you'll never want to choose the right treasure. No, because you'll never see it as eye candy to behold.

And so you'll just continue to choose the temporal in this world to look to as the ultimate thing to work towards,

blinded to the eternal, to which Jesus puts forward to us a choice, a choice to live for one master or another,

saying no one, no one can serve two masters. Either you'll hate the one and love the other, or you'll be devoted to the one and despise the other.

You can't serve both God and money, verse 24. And notice that the choice is between two masters,

kind of between the two of them, so that you can serve both. Everybody has got to serve somebody, as Bob Dylan rightly put it.

And that's because Jesus says it's impossible to live in that gray area, because as you go to serve one, you'll end up despising the other.

The amount of musicians I used to meet who grew up in church, but felt like the Christian life got in the way of gigging and touring,

ultimately led them to throwing it all away. The amount of parents that I have talked to through the years

who saw church as an inconvenience on a Sunday, which got in the way of their child's sports dream,

has ultimately led many to walk from the faith. There's so many examples that could be said this morning,

but what's on view here is that anything which we obsess on, we find our security in and trust and work towards for contentment

and store up for satisfaction other than God, dangerously threatens us to not just leave Him, but despise Him,

and to sacrificially live for that idol that's going to rot anyway. Jesus is incredibly straight here.

You cannot love God and that thing, whatever it is for you. You cannot love them both equally. You cannot serve them both equally.

And so it's here, my dear brothers and sisters, as we end our time in this passage this morning, we're faced with a few questions, aren't we?

A few questions of ourselves. Where would you say your treasure is? What are you working towards? Who and what do you serve?

Because if we can answer that, we will know where our heart is at this morning. Is it for the earthly things? Is it for the heavenly things?

If you're sitting there this morning and you're thinking to yourself, oh no, I know exactly where all my time and energy goes,

and it isn't towards God's cause but my own, then I want to encourage you with the words that Jesus opened His entire sermon with.

These are the words of the Lord, and it was towards us, His disciples. He said,

blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

You see, Jesus knew that every single disciple throughout all time, He knew that there would always be something fighting for our attention.

Fighting to take us off track, fighting to destroy our witness in this world.

Our Lord knew that we would have the false prophets of the material world continually preaching to us that we must have more,

need more to be successful in this world.

And so dear ones, if you are here this morning and have come to the conviction that you have fallen into the trap of collecting

and trusting in your earthly treasures, that your heart is in the wrong place and that you're serving the wrong master,

then I want to encourage you here this morning. I want to encourage you in that battle. You're not alone.

The Holy Spirit never convicts without cause. The Lord Jesus never leaves any of His people on the battleground that call out to Him.

Now, if you were here this morning and you see where you have been drifting off,

where the battle for your eye and heart rages and it causes you to grieve over your sin,

then you are invited by the risen and victorious Lord Jesus Christ who was tested in every way like us, yet did not sin once.

His life for our life, our rags for His riches.

He invites us all to go to Him and confess our struggles to Him.

You are invited to share, confess those temptations.

I also want to say that as we've seen this morning, we live in a world where our five senses are always demanding

that we follow them over the faith that our Heavenly Father has given us.

And so it's never a wrong thing to go to our Heavenly Father and ask Him to change our hearts,

to ask, help me Lord to trust and obey, to trust that following your ways is better than storing up treasures in this world that make me feel so secure.

We'll look at this more next week.

It's never wrong, never wrong to go to our Heavenly Father through the Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit

to give us, to ask Him to give us the grace to desire what He is leading us to do.

And we have this promise straight from the throne of grace.

You will not be ignored.

You will be not, you won't be ignored in those prayers because of Christ, but you will be comforted in your mourning.

I want to say by saying this, if you really struggle with this, if you would say, yes, Michael, I really struggle to keep the material world in the place that it should stay,

then please don't go at it alone.

Lord Jesus, as we have seen this morning, He gathers people into a spiritual family.

I'm looking out at this wonderful congregation with every tribe, nation, tongue, people, different generations.

We are a spiritual family together.

We heard it confessed this morning from Raj.

We all struggle with various things, but we're never ever meant to do this discipleship alone.

And so please don't wrestle in this battle by yourself.

Cry out to God and then go.

Tell a trusted brother or sister in the faith where you fall short, where you struggle so that you might be an encouragement to one another.

And so you can pray for one another in your times of many and various trials.

Should we pray together as a church?

Please join me.

Father, these are incredibly amazing and difficult words simultaneously.

We thank you that your word is truth and that by your spirit, you are doing the work of leading us,

conforming us, loving us, nurturing us, comforting us in this journey.

But Father, these words are true.

And so we don't want to ignore them this morning, but we ask for the wisdom to put them into practice.

Please give us the wisdom, the conviction to know our left hand from our right hand.

Please, Lord, show us, give us eyes to see, ears to hear, hearts to believe that we might be ever conformed for your glory alone.

Please help us in these struggles and please lead and guide us, strengthen us as a church.

We ask for this in Jesus' name. Amen.