The Kingdom of God | Hidden Treasure

Today's teaching scripture comes from Matthew chapter 13 verse

Matthew 13:44

44. The Kingdom of heaven is like

treasure hidden in a field which a man found and reburied.

Then in his joy he goes and sells all he has and buys that

field. This is the word of the Lord.

Caravaggio was a street brawler, A fugitive, and a man living

under a death sentence from the Pope for murder.

And he was also painting at that exact moment some of the most

luminous sacred art in the history of Western civilization.

His painting here, The Calling of Saint Matthew, depicts the

moment when Jesus confronts the tax collector and calls him to

follow after him. It was completed while

Caravaggio was simultaneously wanted for killing a man.

And it shows this instant that he looks up from his money and

realizes that something out of the frame is calling to him, is

reaching out to him. There's light cutting across a

dark room and everyone sort of looking around and can't quite

locate the source of this call. One of my favorite artists,

Makoto Fujimora, went to Tokyo as a graduate student in Western

realism, sort of following in the tradition of Caravaggio,

expecting to refine what he already knew about painting.

He was going to continue to cultivate this skill of painting

in a particular style. What he didn't expect was his

teacher pressing some thin gold leaf onto a sheet of glass and

holding the glass up to the light.

Pure gold is nearly transparent at its finest in this form, and

so it doesn't reflect light the way that you'd expect it Let's

light through and casts sort of a soft bluish Halo.

And Fujimora has written that he initially experienced gold as

sort of an outdated, pre modern material that was irrelevant to

his own artistic practice. This is some of Fujimora's work.

And then he saw what it did with light and everything changed

about the way that he thought about gold leaf in his art.

He spent the rest of his career working with crushed minerals

and layered gold, completely departing from the style that he

was familiar with and fond of going into this school.

And he describes the materials as symbols of the city of God

descending into the world. And if you would want to go a

little bit deeper into the way that Fujimora thinks about art

and life and culture, we're going to read one of his books.

Actually, we're going to have a little book club coming up in

May. So if you'd like to join us on

Thursday mornings, maybe before work, we're going to read

Fujimora's book Culture Care. But he was, he was in a

classroom, and the classroom became like a field, and there

was treasure in it that changed the course of the rest of his

life. And of course, if we're going to

talk about masterpieces, when Bruce Springsteen inducted Bob

Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he described his

first time hearing Like a Rolling Stone, coming through

the car radio as a teenager riding with his mother.

He said that the snare shot at the beginning of that song

sounded like somebody kicked open the doors to his mind.

His mother looked at him and said that guy Can't Sing.

But Springsteen knew that she was wrong, Not because he'd

reasoned his way to a conclusion about Dylan's music, but because

he recognized something in it before his mind caught up to the

moment of experiencing something new.

And he went home a different person than the one who got in

the car. And he points to that moment as

the moment that made him the artist that he would become.

All three of these little vignettes, these people, we're

finding the thing that they were not looking for.

They were without seeking, without searching for an

epiphany or a moment of transformation, just going about

their everyday business. And these moments found them,

these extraordinary little glimpses of inspiration found

right in the middle of the everyday.

And as we continue this little series that we're in on Jesus

parables of the Kingdom, that is the texture of the text that

we're looking at this morning. Jesus characteristically refuses

to make this little teaching super straightforward.

These simple stories that he tells are packed with a life's

lifetime's worth of meaning to uncover.

And friends, as long as we read these parables and we think

about them and we pray through them, I I'm just convinced that

we still won't arrive at the full depth of the meaning of

what Jesus is trying to describe to us.

Because the reality is that the beauty of the life of the

Kingdom of God that Jesus is describing is so multifaceted.

It's it's so deep and rich with the beauty of the love of God

that a lifetime will only, it'll only be like dipping a toe into

the the, the truth and the beauty of what's there.

Robert Capon wrote that any understanding of the Kingdom

that Jesus hearers could come up with from a single parable would

be a misunderstanding. Because if we take one of these

little stories, if we take one of these little teachings on its

own and we try to sort of turn it into a pithy explanation of

what life and the Kingdom of God is like, it'll fall short of the

full meaning because we need all of them together.

And so that's one of my, my favorite things about this

little series that we're doing is hopefully over the course of

several weeks, we'll just get looks from different angles as

Jesus describes and he says the Kingdom of God is like this and

the Kingdom of God is like that. And he pulls all of these

examples from everyday life. And hopefully by the end we have

just a little bit fuller picture of the kind of thing that he's

trying to describe. We're challenged to go deeper

every time we take a closer look at one of the parables of Jesus,

and this one is no different. It's short, it's one verse, but

it's packed with dense meaning. We live in a world of deliberate

optimization, productivity, and spiritual self improvement.

And living curated lives sort of dominate the way that a lot of

us are thinking about our day-to-day.

And the short passage that we're looking at this morning, it

surfaces many truths. But the one overarching thought

that I would just offer to you as we read and think about

what's happening in this text is this, that the most important

things that will ever happen to you will not be things that you

planned for. Can anyone who's lived just a

little bit of life concur? The most important things that

will ever happen to you will not be the things that you planned

for. You know, friends, sometimes I

get this thought that like I could sort of sit down and take

an inventory of what's going on in my life and where, where I'm

at. You know, my, my bank account

balance and the amount of time that I'm working and what my

family's up to and all these things that I can sort of plan

for the next few years. Like I think I know about how

this is going to go and I just got to tell you it doesn't work.

So I'll leave it at that. We've turned, we've turned

Kingdom seeking into a project, into a thing that we think we

can sort of if we read the right books and we develop the right

approach and we adopt the right methods, we will be able to

cultivate a healthy life with God.

We'll be able to arrive at some sort of comfortable conclusions

about the spiritual life and what it looks like for us to

have a healthy life with Jesus. And the truth is that right

theology and right practice and right searching and then

presumably arrival at a destination is precisely the

opposite of the kind of thing that Jesus is describing in

these parables that he tells throughout the Gospels.

We talk about wrestling often in the Christian life.

We talk about wrestling with a text or wrestling with a

question or wrestling even in a relationship, which suggests to

us that the result of this wrestling will be that one

participant in the wrestle, presumably us, will emerge the

victor. And I don't think that's how it

works. We, I don't think, I don't think

we conquer our hardest questions or our gravest in certainty,

uncertainties or insecurities. I think we often find that we

emerge with a sense of having wrestled and the depth and the

beauty of the question that it is that we're trying to take to

the ground. But the truth is questions, the

hardest questions of life and faith remain.

The chapter that our text comes from this morning, Matthew 13,

is the parable chapter in the middle of this gospel narrative.

So in other words, some things happen before it, some things

happen after it. But Matthew 13 is basically just

7 short parables about the Kingdom in quick succession that

Jesus tells. 7 parables. The last three are privately

spoken to the disciples in a house.

So in other words, this week and next week, the treasure in the

field and the Pearl of great price are not crowd material.

Jesus is saving those for the people who are already following

them and trying to understand what it is that they've

received. So these parables arrive right

after the Pharisees have accused Jesus of working by the power of

the devil. So in Matthew 12, he heals on

the Sabbath, He challenges the Pharisees on some of their

assumptions about the core purpose of the law, and he casts

out a demon from a man who couldn't speak.

And all of this, according to Jesus, was to demonstrate that

the Kingdom of God had come among them.

And so I think the next chapter full of parables of the Kingdom

is to further demonstrate this point that Jesus is making.

He says all of this crazy stuff that happened in the prior

chapter is so that you would understand that the Kingdom of

God has come among you. And then he goes on for an

entire chapter to say the Kingdom is like, the Kingdom is

like the Kingdom is like. So your homework is to go back

and read Matthew 12. But the religious professionals

in the story in Matthew 12, the ones who were searching, the

ones who were looking for the Kingdom, the ones who were

watching, the ones who were waiting, the ones who were

supposed to recognize when it came, missed it entirely.

Jesus shifts to parables. He tells his disciples to hide

this truth in plain sight because these teachers of the

law, these Pharisees, have missed the meaning of the

Kingdom when it was right in front of them.

The Kingdom seems to sort of have a way of concealing itself

from those who think that they already know what they're

looking for. And then when we come to our

text for today, Jesus begins. The Kingdom of heaven is like.

So right away we know a few things when what Jesus is about

to say about the Kingdom is an analogy.

We can read over this really quickly.

I thought Carl gave a description that was pretty apt

a couple weeks ago. It's easy to just read right

over this language. But Jesus is clearly telling us

at the beginning of each of these parables, He's not about

to give a definition of the Kingdom.

He's about to give an analogy for what the Kingdom is like.

He's giving us a lens into the good and just and kind rule of

God, but he's not giving an equation to solve for God's

activity in the world. So often we read these parables

and and we can think about them almost like a, like a, an

algebra equation. And so you just sub the treasure

for this thing in your life and you sub the man for this other

thing in the field for this thing.

And then you arrive, you know, you kind of get out the other

end an output that explains to you what the Kingdom is like in

your life. And Jesus is is not doing that

here. So what is the Kingdom of God?

Excuse me? Jesus uses this phrase

constantly and he rarely defines the Kingdom, which itself I

think is instructive because he seems to want to do this in a

not so straightforward way. But the simplest way to say it

is this, that the Kingdom of God is what the world looks like

when God is in charge. It's the active rule and reign

of God breaking into real time in space, so not a place that

you go when you die, not a political program, not a

geopolitical nation, but it's the living reality of God's good

power at work in our present circumstances.

So the thing that makes the parables of Matthew 13 so

strange and so interesting is that Jesus is saying that the

Kingdom of God has arrived in him.

It's present in the world now, and it's hidden like leaven in

dough, like a seed in the ground, like treasure buried in

a field. So this theme of hiddenness

keeps coming up as Jesus describes the Kingdom.

And we live between the arrival of the Kingdom and the

completion of the Kingdom, which means we live in the overlap of

two ages, the world as it is and the world as God is making it.

How how many of you know that that's central to what Jesus is

teaching about the Kingdom, that the world as it is is not

ultimately the world as God is making it.

And so where we see God's love and God's kindness and the

justice of God and the righteousness of God and all

those things coming into the world, those are like, it's a

little sampling of the world as God is making it.

But by and large what we see is just the world as it is.

And the parables are Jesus attempt to describe what this

paradoxical way of seeing the world looks like from the

inside. And so he says the Kingdom of

heaven is like treasure hidden in a field.

So a few things here, because this sounds sort of archaic to

us or a little bit fantastical, the idea of hidden treasure.

But buried treasure was actually a normal occurrence to the to

the audience that Jesus would have been speaking to.

To our ears, that feels a little removed from anything remotely

normal unless you're into like, what's it called?

Like geocaching or something like that.

I don't know if we have any. I don't want to insult your

hobbies. Yeah, there you go.

So we've got at least one geocacher in the room.

But 1st century Palestine was an occupied land that was unstable,

and there were no banks as we know them.

Burying wealth was how you preserved it, how you protected

it. And we actually know this.

Ancient Jewish law codes included instructions around

legal questions that had to do with finding buried treasure.

So this this was common enough that the the laws of the day and

sort of the society structure of the day accounted for it that,

you know, would say, well, it's entirely possible that you find

buried treasure and here's what you ought to do when you find

it. So this is far more commonplace

than it sounds to our modern Western ears.

Finding buried treasure was the peasant lottery.

It was possible it was extraordinarily rare, but it did

happen and it it would have been it would have landed with with

immediate force on Jesus audience because he's mostly

speaking to poor people. And so people would hear this

and go, Gee, would that that would happen to me.

You know, it's it's something that they could kind of imagine

and say like, you know, the monopoly card, you know, bank

error in your favor, right. It's like, Oh, well, that kind

of stuff does happen, but not all the time.

So we know the man that we're imagining in the parable is

almost certainly a day laborer who is plowing a field that he

does not own because that wouldn't be something that

someone who owns a field would do.

And commenting on the context of the parable, the New Testament

scholar Gusto Gonzalez, reading the parable through the lens of

the marginalized, argues that the Kingdom arrives in the most

marginal circumstances to people working fields that belong to

someone else. And so friends, I just, I think,

you know, as we sort of think through the layers of context

here and we bring it to our level, most of us live rather

ordinary lives working for someone else or going to school

or, you know, whatever it is that you sort of fill your days

with. And part of what's immediately

communicated to the hearers here is this is an ordinary person

just like you. The Kingdom of God is like this

for, for one of us, so to speak. So what's Jesus saying then

about the Kingdom of God, that the, the rule and reign of God

in this present age is like this?

It's like a thing that's been put in the ground for

safekeeping. It was there before you started

plowing and it was found by an ordinary person.

And so look what it says next. The Kingdom of heaven is like

treasure hidden in a field which a man found, not which a man

searched for for a long time and eventually located after years

and years of discipline seeking. That's not what it says his plow

hit something. It's a completely passive

discovery. This person was not plowing the

field looking for buried treasure.

They were going about their ordinary life that was probably

rather mundane and even possibly sort of oppressive.

And this encounter just happens to him.

So the parable on its face is almost offensively simple.

A guy plowing hits treasure, stumbles, hides it, sells

everything and buys the field. This is the opposite of elitism

in our spiritual life. We're not talking about some

kind of secret knowledge that's only available to a select few.

This is a mistake that we can make sometimes when we read

Jesus parables that have this theme of hiddenness.

Remember we said like this, like the leaven in the dough or like

a seed buried in the ground or like hidden treasure.

And one of the ways that our human brain can sort of hear

those things. And we, we go off in this

direction of, oh, it must be super secret knowledge that only

special people can attain or that I have to have some, you

know, special spiritual epiphany to find.

And if I haven't had that, or if I don't push the right buttons

and pull the right levers, I will never arrive there.

And this is precisely the opposite.

Jesus is saying it's easy to get hung up on the, the hiddenness

of the treasure, but we miss the way that it's found completely

by accident. And you know, I just this is the

this idea that the most important things in our lives,

the most important things that God orchestrates in our lives,

we stumble upon completely by accident.

They're not things that we plan for.

And so this parable is good news specifically for those who have

been told that the Kingdom of God is for other people.

There are many who we encounter in our day-to-day lives,

probably many in this room, who at one point or another have

been told that that this, this Kingdom of God, the activity of

the Kingdom, God's activity by his Spirit in the world is for

other people. For one reason or another.

Whether that's, I don't know what your life has looked like

or the way that you think about one thing or another particular

belief that you might have or the job that you work or

whatever it is the Kingdom is for the ordinary person.

And then look at what he does next.

He finds this treasure, he reburies it.

He doesn't announce it. He doesn't run back to town.

He doesn't start telling people what's just happened to him.

He puts it back in the ground and goes to handle his business

quietly. I listen to a really interesting

podcast this week that was sort of about like focus and

attention and how all of those things work in our brains.

And it was with a a researcher who had done some work around

the effect of social media, particularly on creative thought

and ideation. And one of the things that that

this lady named was, you know, when we have a particularly good

idea strike us and our immediate reaction is to just sort of

release it out into the world to like begin telling people or to

immediately tweet it or to start, you know, active acting

upon that thing right away. We, we might actually be sort of

undercutting some depth of creativity that God would want

to cultivate in our lives. Some depth of, of even spiritual

formation, some depth of some of the things that God would want

to point out to us about our relationships or about our

relationship to prayer or our relationship to the Scriptures.

When we just immediately sort of release the thing that we found

out into the world. And I love this about this

parable that this, this thing sort of goes about in secret.

The early church fathers read this as wisdom in the parable

and, and several different places they would say, you know,

don't, don't perform the thing that you've just received

moments ago. There's there's a kind of

formation that needs to happen in us before we begin declaring

that thing publicly, something that I wish I had known when I

started preaching at 18. I think maybe that was just a

bad idea on its face. I'm not sure.

But guys, you know, there were plenty of things that I did not

hold on to for very long before I started declaring them in

public. And thank God that much of that

isn't on the Internet. So what you found needs to take

root in you before it gets broadcast to the world.

And this treasure. Was already there before the man

started plowing. God has been at work in the

field of your ordinary life long before you went looking.

Origin writing in the 3rd century said the field

containing the treasure is Christ himself.

Which is really interesting because when we read these

parables, we can be a little bit short sighted and we could sort

of want to read ourselves into the parable in ways that maybe

weren't intended. When you buy the field, you're

not purchasing access to some kind of a reward that's beyond

the field. You're purchasing the one in

whom all the treasures and knowledge and wisdom are hidden.

Paul writes this to the Colossians and his prayer at the

beginning of his letter. I want their hearts to be

encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the

riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God's

mystery that is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of

wisdom and knowledge. So this is the way that the

early Church thought about this treasure hidden in plain sight.

The field is. Jesus.

The life and. The ministry of Jesus lived out

in the open for people to just grab a hold of and run with and

and say I have found something worth selling everything.

The priest Robert Kapin pushes this a little bit further.

He wrote that God becoming human in Christ is a mystery present

in creation from the very beginning, finally and fully

manifested in Jesus. Which means that when we make

the mistake of thinking if I can't, if I can't see it, it

isn't happening if I can't see. The kindness of.

God, the promises of God coming to fruition in my daily life.

It's not happening. That's that's a mistake.

We have a profoundly short sighted view of what God is

doing in the world and what God is doing in our lives.

The Kingdom of God was not launched the moment you found

it. I, I find that to be a

particularly helpful reminder for myself sometimes I'm part of

a thing that is so much bigger than anything that I know.

Anything that I've experienced, anything that's ever happened to

me, anything that that I've even, you know, helped, helped

to build. The Kingdom of God was not

launched the moment you found it.

It was, it was buried in the field of our ordinary lives,

each one of us. It's been buried in the ordinary

field of human history for people to keep bumping up

against with their plows and have sort of the presence of

mind to stop and go, what is this thing that I just hit?

And so the question was never whether or not there was

treasure there for you to find. The question is whether we'll

stop the plow when it hits something or we'll just keep

going. Because I think, you know, when,

when we read the parable a few weeks ago about the sower or the

soil and the weeds of the, the cares of our life sort of choke

out some of the seed, I think this is the same thing.

I think it's the thing that causes us to just keep going.

When the plow hits something, you know, we run into what might

feel like an obstacle to us at 1st and there might actually be

a tremendous richness of the kindness and the love of God in

that thing. But we just kind of keep going

because we've bumped up against an obstacle.

There's a thing we didn't expect.

I was here to plow the field. So.

Let me maneuver around this and continue about my business.

Can I mean, does anything come to mind for anybody?

Right. This is the way that God shows

up in our lives. And so there's another way to

read this multifaceted parable. I want to give you just lots of

ways to think about this so that when you go back and read it,

you can think about all the possible meanings and all the

ways that, you know, God might have something to say to you in

this. And, and you know, heaven forbid

that we walk out thinking we've, we've attained the, the meaning

of this parable, right? What if the man?

Finding the treasure isn't just a a picture of us stumbling on

the Kingdom. What if it's also a picture of

God? What if God's?

Plowing the field. So think about it this way.

If the treasure buried in the field is humanity.

Then the one who? Finds it and sells everything to

buy it. Is Christ the cross.

Is God's sell everything moment and so I think this is a helpful

picture for our lives, but it's also a helpful way to just

understand the whole story of the scriptures that's unfolding.

We see throughout the the Hebrew Bible, you know, right up to the

moment of Jesus death on the cross.

God is trying to communicate to humanity, I love you, I care for

you, I'm turned toward you. I have your best in mind and

humanity at almost every turn sort of doesn't want to hear it.

God plowing the field of of history, hits this thing, this

treasure humanity and sells everything.

Paul writes in Philippians 2 that Jesus, who was in very

nature God, didn't consider equality with God something to

be held on to. He emptied himself, took on the

form of a servant, was made in human likeness, and humbled

himself to the point of death on a cross.

This is what theologians call kenosis, the self emptying of

God. And I think selling everything

is sort of an apartment picture for what's happening here.

He he liquidated the riches of divinity, the the riches of

power, to purchase the field that contains your life and

mine. Sit with.

That for a moment, you know, I know, I know that it can sound a

little bit corny. I know lots of.

Preachers who take this in a direction that just feels a

little bit like, I don't know if I need to hear that again, but.

We were the. Treasure the humans in all of

our sort of confusing brokenness.

I mean, my life is messed up. And so is.

Yours. I'm aware that this is true and

guys. We're the treasure in the.

Field God looked at humanity and counted it worth everything.

Not because we had made ourselves valuable, not because

we had attained to some kind of worthy status of being

considered treasure in the field, but because we're we're

inherently bearers of God's image.

God sees the beauty and the love of the imprint of God's likeness

on humanity and says that's worth saving, that's worth

selling everything for. And this text does something

remarkable. Look at how Matthew describes

the man's motivation. He sells everything and buys the

field. And the word that drives the

whole transaction is what joy. It's not an obligation.

It's not something that God finds God's self bound to.

It's not a grim necessity, but for joy.

The treasure in the. Field is found.

The selling comes after the finding.

And the finding? Produces a delight that's so

complete that everything. That the that.

The farmhand is releasing barely registers as a loss.

It's so. Completely worth it.

And so this sacrifice is done out of delight.

It's the engine of the entire parable.

He doesn't sell everything in order to get joy.

It's not. Joy is on the other side of

this. And once I've, you know, made

this tremendous sacrifice, once I've sort of overextended myself

way beyond my limits, then there will be joy on the other side.

And. Paul describes this same

experience again. You know, it's just this, this,

these themes keep getting reiterated.

He writes that he considers everything he once valued as

lost compared to the surpassing value of knowing Christ.

And this is precisely the thing that he's talking about.

The the the way that the math works has permanently shifted

for us. What looked like.

Wealth before. Now looks like.

Nothing compared to what we found in the ground and so.

Where does that leave? US.

The Kingdom found. The man in the field before he

went looking for it. God has already sold everything

to buy the field that contains you.

Which means this sell everything attitude of discipleship or

spiritual formation. It's not the price of admission.

And so often it's presented to us that way, you know, sell

everything and then you can have in return sell everything and

then you'll experience. But it's working the other way

around. It's the response of someone

who's already been found. It's the response of someone

who's already experienced just a little bit of something in their

life that they can't quite shake.

You know, the reason that I opened with those 3 examples,

the, the Caravaggio and Fujimura and Springsteen is because I

think on some level, I hope on some level, each of us can

relate a little bit to that, that experience of running up

against something that we can't quite shake, that sort of

changed the trajectory of our lives.

And for you, it might be very easy to just index that to the

moment that you, that, that Jesus became real for you, that

you began to have a life with God.

For some of you that might feel very real and alive in your

vocation, in your career or in a, a particular skill that

you've honed or something. But at the end of the day, I

love this picture of the Kingdom because it illustrates the way

that God desires for the Kingdom to just sort of crash into our

ordinary lives. And think about a friend of mine

and his epiphany in a diner about spending the rest of his

life telling people that God loves them.

Or another friend's story of healing and then giving away her

life to make community and resources and encouragement

available to other people. I think about a friend of mine

who lives near Cincinnati who walked away from an opportunity

to work as a main contributor to NASA's Space Shuttle program

because God gave him a vision for a non profit performing home

repairs for low income homeowners so that they could

remain in their homes and pass their homes to their children as

an asset. These are the.

Things that get a hold of us and won't let go.

And there's a difference between the person who gives everything

because they're trying to get something, and the person who

gives everything because they've already received something

that's so real that almost nothing else feels worth holding

on to. The Kingdom doesn't.

Always come to us because we've searched for it.

Jesus says the Kingdom of. God is like, because next week

we're going to read a parable about someone who is searching

for it and found it. But this is one of the ways

sometimes just plowing a field and your plow hits something.

And the the man in this parable didn't become a different person

before he found the treasure. He was just working and he found

it. The Kingdom breaking into your

ordinary life, your ordinary circumstances, your ordinary

Tuesday. It's what Jesus is.

Describing when he talks about the Kingdom of God, it's not a

future destination that you can earn your way toward.

We're talking about a present reality that has already broken

into the world in Christ. And that is?

Buried in the field of your ordinary life.

So. I just want to repeat again the

arc of what Jesus is saying in this parable.

That's singular and brief and almost a little bit offhand.

The treasure was already in the field before the man arrived.

God has already paid the price for the field, and so now we are

living in the response time to that reality.

This is what the already and the not yet of the Kingdom feels

like. We can talk about that in a way

that feels sort of trite, but at ground level, it's not this

idea, it's not this theological abstraction.

It's that the Kingdom is already here, hidden in the ordinary,

and the purchase has been made. We live.

In between the the finding and the full possession, so to

speak, we found the thing. The transaction hasn't hasn't

quite taken place to buy the whole field, but.

This is where the. Disciples were when they were

sitting in this house listening to Jesus tell this parable as he

was explaining to them, this is what you've signed up for.

They had recognized Jesus. They had made the decision to

follow him, to listen to his teaching and to put it into

practice. But that whole thing hadn't

quite yet completely come to fruition.

Jesus hadn't gone to the cross, hadn't been raised the the fruit

of the Kingdom wasn't yet fully visible.

So the question that this parable leaves us with is not

whether you've searched enough or believed correctly enough or

done enough to deserve the treasure that's buried in the

field. The question is simpler than

that. What do you do when your plow

hits something? And friends, I, I just want to

say this as an encouragement to some of you.

You know, we live, we live in a, a cynical secular age.

And some of you might be 1020, thirty years, 50 years removed

from the moment when your plow hit something and you can sort

of point and go, that thing changed me forever.

And I just want to encourage you.

It's OK to still be excited about that.

I think some of us have sort of bought into this idea that it's,

it's somehow sort of uncool to like really want what God wants

to do in your life and really like talk to people about it and

think about it and pursue it in a wholehearted way.

And I just want to say I don't believe that.

So if you want to talk to somebody about it, you can talk

to me and I'll be excited with you.

You know the thing that the place where God has met you,

whether it was recently or a long time ago, it's worth, it's

actually worth organizing your life around that thing.

It's worth looking at this, this moment of encounter, this sort

of call it an epiphany, or if it feels more ordinary than that,

don't. I guess it's worth it to lean

into that thing and to really be excited about it.

Don't let the. Reality of the cares of life

your everyday steal from the. The weight, the.

Joy. Of the ways.

That God has met you in the ordinary.

So as the worship team comes up. And I'll invite Jared.

If he has a thing or two to add for ministry.

I want to ask. Just a a few questions for

ministry time and we'll have our prayer people around the room.

We'd actually invite you to stand while we do this.

I'm going to pray for all of us as we prepare to worship.

Are there? Things.

That you are. Clinging to that, you're

clutching in your life that the joy of the Kingdom is inviting

you to release. Inviting you to.

Let go of and is there a moment that comes to your mind?

You know, when we when we talk about finding treasure in the

field? This thing happened to me a long

time ago and maybe it feels a little bit dull.

Maybe the the shine of that moment has worn off a little

bit, but can you point to that and go?

I think I found the treasure in the field.

I think there's a few of you that that God might be inviting

to just embrace that wholehearted joy that came to

you in that moment.