Seeing Through Good Eyes

We're in a series of messages right now called the Sermon on the Mount.

Sermon on the Mount is in Matthew, the book of Matthew, first book of the New Testament, chapters five through seven.

Matthew is an eyewitness of Jesus, and so he saw these things firsthand.

These are all stories and teachings that you'll see actually sporadically throughout the other books of the gospel.

So Mark, Luke, and John share a lot of what Matthew says here, but Matthew's brought it all into one place.

And he's done it in a way that I hope that I've helped you to see that these aren't like these sort of random nonsequitur lessons, that they all actually run together.

There's some bigger themes and threads that Jesus is weaving through this teaching.

And ultimately what he's wanting to do is what he says in chapter 5, to fulfill the law.

To fulfill the law and the prophets, basically the left side of your Bible, to understand that what God intended for the law, what God intended for his word, um, how to that's to be interpreted and lived out.

And so we see it not only in Jesus' teaching, but if you kept reading past chapter seven, you would see Jesus living it out.

And so this is why we make much of Jesus.

We always come back to these texts.

And um, what I'm trying to do is show the relationship between these, and uh I hope I'll be able to do that today.

If you uh have been here the whole time, I think that'll help a little bit because I'm going to kind of reference some of the other things we've talked about in shorthand.

Uh, but if you today are like just sort of here for the first time, I'll try to not uh lose you in the process, but I would encourage you, it may be worth your time and it may be valuable to go back and to watch some of the previous weeks because again, these are all connected.

It's too much to talk about in one day.

All right, here we go.

We're gonna go Matthew chapter six, and we're starting in verse 19.

It says, Don't store up treasures here on earth where moths eat them and rust destroys them, and where thieves break in and steal.

Store your treasures in heaven where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal.

Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will be uh will also be.

I want to set that aside for just a moment.

We're gonna come back to it, but I think to better understand it, we actually need to look at the next chapter and really understand that one first.

So verse 22, the next chapter, or next sorry, next uh paragraph says, the eye is like a lamp that provides light for the body.

When your eye is healthy, and some of you, if you have your Bibles in front of you, if you have a different translation, some of them say healthy, some of them say good, uh, some of them say clear.

Um so if your eye is clear or good or healthy, then your whole body is filled with light.

And when your eye is unhealthy, and again, some of your translations would translate that unhealthy or bad or even diseased, your whole body is filled with darkness.

And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is.

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

You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money.

All right.

Let's start out with this.

I I mentioned week one that Matthew um has an agenda in the writing of the book of Matthew, and he has a target audience.

His target audience is he's writing to first century Jewish Christians.

And um it's a little bit of a difference between Matthew and the other gospel writers.

The other gospel writers were writing to broader audiences, and one of the ways we know that is because whenever they um spoke about a Jewish tradition or ritual, they would go on and explain it so that you wouldn't lose the person who was unfamiliar, people like us.

But Matthew doesn't do that, he just assumes that you know what he's talking about.

It's very much insider language.

And so don't take that to mean that Matthew in this book isn't relevant to us because it is, but actually, the more we understand and can dig a little deeper into some of his shorthand language or some of the assumptions that he makes with his audience, the more deeply we can understand that, the more that we'll really get the point that he's trying to make.

And so that's what we're gonna do here.

You notice in this second paragraph, he talks about the eye, and so he talks about um the good eye or the healthy eye and the bad eye.

So he talks about a good eye.

Um in uh Jewish metaphor, one of the metaphors they use is a good eye or a bad eye.

In Hebrew, okay, this is aeen tovah, ain is eye, and tovah is good, or ain hara, which is a bad eye.

So this is a metaphor.

What's it talking about?

It's not talking about, you know, your actual vision, it's talking about how you see the world.

So a person with a good eye would be somebody when they look in the world, they see promise.

They look at the world in an optimistic fashion.

They see good.

When they see people, they see Genesis 1, that people are made in the image of God, man and woman made in the image of God.

And of course we have flesh, and of course we make short-sighted, selfish decisions, but in general, they'd be like, you know, there's so many good folks out there.

There's a lot of good folk, man, a lot of good opportunity.

They see opportunity in the world, and so they would look through what they would call Aim Tovah, a good eye.

The bad eye is quite the opposite.

It's it's it's the evil eye.

It's you're cynical, okay?

You look in the world, it's everybody's bad.

You go right to Genesis 3, the fall of man.

It's only a matter of time before people fall.

It's only a matter of time before they cheat on you, quit on you, mistreat you, every man for himself, okay.

You just get it's bad.

It's bad out there, it's evil.

It's all bad.

Everything's bad.

It's bad.

How bad?

Real bad.

I mean, it's real bad, it's it's terrible and it's awful, and it's only a matter of time before it all goes to hell in a handbasket and it's it's it's it's bad.

I mean, it's bad.

How bad?

Super bad.

That's a bad eye.

That's Ain Raha.

And so ultimately, this is also sort of a metaphor for someone's attitude to the world, because if you have a good eye and you generally see people as good and you generally see the world as good, you'll tend to be more generous.

Why would I give and be generous to someone who's ultimately going to do me dirty or to be bad to me?

And of course, you you become stingy if you think everybody has it out for you.

Well, Jesus is going to take this a lot deeper, and and he's going to ultimately talk about like we don't want to be caught in darkness, because he says, you know, the way you look at the world essentially brings light or darkness to your soul.

Right?

So he's like, and by the way, if you start to cascade into like ultimate Debbie Downer mode where just everybody's bad and it's only a matter of time before the other shoe drops, then what you're going to do is that that's going to be a very dark life.

Like you're going to color every opportunity that way.

You're going to repel people.

It's just, it's going to swallow you up in the darkness of that way of thinking.

Um, he's so he's going to encourage us to a good eye, but he's going to better define what this means.

And he's going to use a term that's a healthy eye or what we would call a clear eye.

In other words, you see things clearly.

You understand that weeping will endure for the night.

There is going to be hardship and hard things, but joy comes in the morning.

Um, uh, my wife, actually, most people don't know this.

My wife Shaylin was born legally blind.

So she, uh, when she was a little kid, couldn't see anything.

And so from a very young age, um, they literally couldn't put glasses on her because her nose was too small to hold them up.

And in that day, the technology, the Coke bottle uh lenses, or the glasses were so big, they're too heavy for her face, they'd fall right off her face.

So from a very young age, her mom was putting contacts, sticking her finger in her eye, okay, for this little tiny girl.

So I marry Shaylin, she's still putting in contacts and um, you know, uh legally blind.

So again, at night she'd take her eyes out, she couldn't see anything.

Uh, not her eyes, but the contact lenses.

And so um, that would have been a tricky trick, right?

There was whoa, okay, all right.

Uh so she would sort of muse about, hey, someday, you know, I'd love to get LASIK eye surgery, you know.

And I was like, Yeah, that'd be cool someday, but that junk's expensive.

You know, you know what I'm saying?

And so, you know, like, hey, someday, you know, that'll be great.

And um, so she started to get sort of a sense of urgency about this a few years ago, and she came to me and she said, Hey, Greg, I I think I found a solution for LASIK.

I said, What's up?

She goes, I found LASIK eye surgery on a groupon.

She's here today, so I can vouch.

I didn't make this up.

She's like, uh, I found LASIK eye surgery on a groupon.

I was like, Groupon is great for like restaurants.

Um, groupon would be great for like top golf.

Um, LASIK eye surgery?

I don't think groupon is the way you don't want to cut corners financially on LASIK eye surgery.

Like, you don't want to go to Groupon for tattoos or LASIK eye surgery.

And so she's like, you know, no, I think we can afford it.

And so I happen to know a LASIK eye surgery from my hometown a couple hours away up in Akron, Ohio.

This guy, our families uh grew up together.

And so I called him, I said, you know what, before we go have a groupon, stick a laser in your eye.

I'm gonna call this doctor that I know who's a renowned eye surgeon.

So I call him and I explain and I send him the group on.

And he goes, Absolutely not.

Okay, Greg, you're not, you guys are not doing that.

And he said, Um, send me your wife's uh prescription.

Let me see what her eyes are.

You know, so we send the thing from the doctor, and he goes, Oh my goodness, yes, she is blind.

I told you, you know, she's a terrible vision.

He said, I tell you what, you've been doing a lot of good for some folks.

I want to do some good for you.

And so go ahead, you come to Akron, and I'm gonna, you know, put this one on the house and I'm gonna take care of your wife's eyes.

And then my wife, it was very sweet, very kind of me.

They said, I'm gonna take your wife, your, your, your, my wife will take your wife back to our house, she'll take a nap, and once she does that, you and I will go golfing.

I was like, you know what, for the sake of the call, I'll do it.

You know, I mean, this this good husband stuff is tough, but I'm in.

And so they he did it, he takes care of her eyes, she goes and goes and takes a nap.

We go play some golf, and the plan was to meet up at a restaurant at the end with our wives, and we'd all have dinner together.

So, sure enough, get done, go to the restaurant.

I see my wife, she's walking towards me, and she walks up to me and she looks at me and she starts crying.

And I was a little nervous because I wasn't sure what the tears meant.

Thinking, Doc, I might need you to undo this surgery.

I think she liked me better, blurry.

But she was crying.

I'm like, what's up with the tears?

You know, what's going on?

She's like, I've never seen you this clearly.

Even with my contacts, and I couldn't see this clearly, it's crazy.

And she she couldn't stop crying.

So then for the next like several weeks, everywhere she went, she's just like marveling at everything she sees.

She's like, I can see the details on this leaf.

Like, I didn't even know this was possible to see like this.

Now, what what gift was she given?

She was given the gift of clear sight.

She was able to see the truth, she was able to see reality.

What it didn't do was give her rose-colored glasses to where now everything is good all the time.

And I think if you think about the extremes of good eye, bad eye at its worst, it would be the bad eye would just be all pessimism.

We know where that goes in terms of that.

That really is an abyss.

But then there's the uh toxic positivity, you know, la la la la la, everything's good, it's gonna work out.

And churches are even famous for this where, you know, we get together and almost turn it into superstition, like, hey, you know what, whatever you're hoping for, it's gonna be fine.

God's gonna work it out.

Just trust him, exactly what you ordered up is gonna happen.

And the problem is that's not the truth.

And it's also, by the way, if we go back, now hang with me here, and we're gonna go back just a little bit to what we've been talking about, we're gonna see that Jesus takes this attitude and he deepens it into clear, healthy sight, 2020 vision.

Last thing before I do that, this is what we have to know.

In their paradigm, their belief about God was that if you were good with God and God was good with you, and you gave God what he wants, he would give you what you want.

So, whenever they saw health, healthy, wealthy, and wise, they attributed that to the blessing of God.

Okay?

This is why in John 9, when Jesus and His disciples see a man born blind, and they said, Jesus, who sinned that he was born blind?

Not, hey, did someone sin?

No.

Their paradigm was if he was born blind, it was a result that someone ticked God off.

And so God cursed that family.

They he did the opposite of blindness, he cursed them with blindness.

So he goes, Who sinned?

And Jesus is like, no one.

He didn't sin, his parents didn't sin, it has nothing to do with sin.

Um, it's just his condition.

This is why let's go back to week one.

We opened up with the Beatitudes, and in the Beatitudes, we Beatitudes means blessed ones, blessed are the and what does Jesus do?

He's looking at a group of people who are needy, they need money, they need healing, they they need their diseases to be healed, they they can't walk.

So everybody with a need, needy people came to Jesus.

What was their paradigm of bless?

Well, if you if you have all these needs, if your needs aren't met and you're not healthy, wealthy, and wise, you are not blessed.

So Jesus opens the whole thing with blessed are those who are poor in spirit.

Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed he goes to those who hunger and thirst for justice.

So those who are essentially in a place where they want justice, but it's not there, and that's frustrating.

So, so what he's teaching them is, hey, before I heal you, when I heal you, I'm gonna deal with your current issue.

But I need you to know moving forward, you're blessed even when you're sad.

You're blessed even when you grieve.

You're blessed even when you broke when you're broke.

That it's not healthy, wealthy, and wise, you give me what I want, I'll give you what you want, and that's what blessing is.

He's deepening that your blessing is beyond circumstantial.

It's not exterior, it's not possessions, it's not positions.

He says it's much deeper than that, so you can be simultaneously grieving and blessed.

So that's where he starts it.

Then he goes into what we talked about the other day about the backhand, right?

Turning the other cheek.

And what that meant, right?

The backhand was it was to show someone they're inferior.

So he says, a right hand on a right cheek.

It's it's this boom.

And so if you were my equal, I would hit you with an open hand, and that's how you hit an equal, but someone who's inferior, you would backhand them.

So he says, when someone backhands you, turn the other cheek, and turning the other cheek isn't just offering yourself to get slapped around, um, you know, because you're some sort of doormat.

He's like, No, that's not what it is.

It's showing your dignity.

It's saying, I know you meant that to tell me that I'm inferior, and you see me as inferior, but I don't see myself as inferior.

And if you're gonna hit me, hit me like an equal.

It's he talks about the lawsuit.

He talks about someone who's literally getting the clothes sued off of their body.

And within the law, you could sue everything from someone.

You could take their house, you could take their animals, you could take um their clothes, but you couldn't take their coat.

That was the only thing you couldn't take.

And so he's like, You're standing there and they've sued you everything, all your possessions.

And he creates this provocative image of your standing in court in your underwear with your coat, and they've taken everything from you.

And that feeling of having things taken away against your will makes you feel powerless.

And now you you feel like your dignity's been taken away, just like a backhand, and you're you you're you're feeling weak and you're embarrassed.

It's an embarrassing, it's like the type of stuff you like a fever dream.

You wake up like, you know, honey, I dreamed last night.

I was in court, my underwear.

You know, it's it's like the worst nightmare come true.

You're standing there, and he says, You know what?

Your dignity doesn't come from that.

They you're not attached to your stuff.

He's like, you know what, you're in that position, give up your coat.

You can have my coat too.

I don't need it.

I don't find my dignity there, I don't have my value there.

I'm not attached to this stuff.

I've put my anchor in the one who's got plenty of backup coats.

So you can have this, it's just stuff.

And and and so you reclaim your dignity.

It's you knowing where where your honor ultimately comes from, where your strength comes from.

Then he mentions Ongaria, and Ongaria is um a Roman civil uh law where the the uh uh soldiers could come up and basically force you to carry their gear a mile.

And it was pretty degrading.

Like I'm out with my family, my kids, my wife, and this, and we're having a family day, and the and the soldier just comes up and gives me a stuff that says, walk a mile.

And so now I'm in front of my family.

It's I've got you know, I've got to carry this.

I'd be I would be gritting my teeth, I'd I'd be upset.

And so this was the dynamic that they had to deal with.

It was the system that they had to deal with.

And he said, Look, you're always gonna have some system, they'll trade ongaria for something else.

At some point, there's got to be something bigger inside you.

Now it made you feel like they overpowered you, but don't let that cause you to believe you're powerless, you're powerful.

And so, so you know what?

Instead of starting to feel insecure and weak and vulnerable, you need to go, you know what?

First mile's on Ongaria, second mile's on me.

Why?

Because I can.

I'm gonna keep going.

No, go, we're good.

No, I'm gonna keep going because I can.

I'm doing this, I'm a free man.

I'm a free man and a free will, and I'm strong, I'm strong.

And so he says, if you'll do this and you'll stop living for fear of the backhand, fear of being inferior and insecure, of what they'll take away from you and how they can overpower you, the next verse, verse 42, he says, then you'll become generous.

And so you'll people you see a need, you'll feel a need.

Somebody needs something, you'll you you'll you'll share with them.

But think about what would happen if if my bad eye of the world was that when they backhand me, that means I'm inferior, or what man can take away from me means I'll be destitute.

If I go, no, my life is in God's hands, and guess what?

You you might take stuff from me.

And you might either literally or figuratively backhand me, or you might take things away because I don't have the power.

Instead of me seeing you as my provision or you having the power to do that to me, I go, no, it's deeper than that.

Now I see clearly these things could happen.

See, this was a big deal because up to this point they thought if you were good with God and God was good with you, nobody would backhand you.

You'd be in the power position.

No, the lawsuit would fail, and and we would overtake Rome, and we would be the powerful ones.

And what he's saying is, look, I want to do something in you deeper that regardless of where you fall in the social strata, you don't look to that for your confidence, that you can be generous because you go, There's nothing a soldier can take from me that God can't replace.

So he's telling them the there are these threats are legit.

You you're gonna have to look at it with a clear eye, not some rose-colored optimism.

So now we go back to what we just read, like the the verse that we set aside, let's come back to.

He says, Don't store up treasures here on earth where moths can eat them, rust destroys them, and thieves break into steel.

So now he introduces in chapter six moths, rust, and thieves.

Okay?

And what is what what would they have thought if you're good with God and God's good with you and you're blessed, what would they have thought?

Well, your business will be moth-proof.

That your your money is rust-proof, that your endeavors, right?

He uses the term some of your Bible, you can't serve both God and mammon.

Mammon is like your net worth.

It's like not just your money, it's everything you've accumulated, the accumulation of your assets and your goods.

And so you would think, again, what they thought was through a good eye that if I'm good with God and God's good with me, that no one would, no moth will succeed and no thief would ever be able to steal.

And what does Jesus say here?

He says, Don't store up treasures on earth where these things can happen.

Now, what does that mean?

Let me be clear.

When Jesus says don't store up treasures on earth, he's not saying don't have a savings account.

That is not what he's saying.

So go ahead and save some money.

Okay?

Don't go, well, you said don't store up.

No, go ahead and go to Heartland Bank right here.

Go ahead and open it up.

He's not saying don't have assets, he's not saying don't have investments, he's not saying don't have a business.

He's not saying don't have money.

He's not saying don't make money.

That's not the point.

He's saying don't store up your treasures in heaven.

In other words, don't make this your ultimate treasure.

And the diagnostic that he uses is worry.

So he says next, he says, Don't worry about he says, that's why I tell you, verse 25, this is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life, whether you have enough food, drink, or clothes to wear.

So that when God, when Jesus talks about money.

When Jesus talks about money, in this passage and in other passages, it's not about money.

He's never really talking about money.

He's using money as a diagnostic for your heart and your attitude and your your mind.

So think of the verse where Jesus says, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

What is that?

Money is a diagnostic.

If you look at the distribution of your money or your resources, all it does is just show you what matters to you.

What's valuable to you?

This isn't to make you feel guilty.

It's just to define reality.

So he's like, look at this.

These are where your values are.

Just make sure that you're proactive about it.

Um he says that another part of scripture, it says that the love of money is the root of all types of evil.

The love of money.

Well, what does that mean?

The love of money, like, am I not supposed to have any affection toward money?

Am I not supposed to care about money?

Am I not supposed to how am I supposed to feel about it?

Am I supposed to be emotionally neutral?

No, what he does is he uses a picture of something that's an inanimate object becoming human and us loving it.

He's he's causing you to evaluate your relationship with money.

So, for example, when I fell in love with Shaylin, my wife, I thought about her first thing in the morning.

I was in communication with her all day.

I thought about her at night.

And the reason I asked her to marry me is because I couldn't imagine life without her.

I knew we were gonna go through hard times.

I didn't know exactly what those hard times were.

I didn't see autism coming.

I didn't know anything about going to Columbus and starting a church, I didn't know about the ups and downs.

I but I knew there would be ups and downs.

I'm just like, look, I'll take the ups and downs with her.

I cannot imagine life without her.

And if your affection with your money is I wake up thinking about it and I talk to it all day and I think about it all day, and I lose sleep over it, and and I can't imagine life without.

I can't imagine life without my standard of living.

I can't imagine life without my proof of value.

I can't imagine life without my mammon.

All he's doing is saying, it's a diagnostic, man, and now you'll do anything to keep it.

You'll do anything to keep it.

It's the root of evil.

So what he does here again is he uses worry as a diagnostic for your relationship to your mammon, to your net worth, to your work, your business, everything that you're working for.

It's not, he again, he's not saying don't have it.

What he's doing is he's saying, look at it.

Because if you're looking for that if I have enough money or enough security that now I will be at peace, he goes, it doesn't work.

Because it doesn't matter how solid you think your business is, natural disasters can take a moth and rust can get it, or a thief can come and get it.

And what Jesus is not promising is that if you love him and he loves you and you give him what he wants, that now you will be moth-proof and thief-proof.

He's saying the deeper work is that you came to a place that if the moth eats your stuff and the thief robs you blind, that you're in a place that you still have peace because I wasn't looking to my stuff and my mammon for my identity, my worth.

I don't love it like that.

I don't love it like that.

I care about it, but I'm not dependent on it at that level.

I can imagine life without it.

And so he's showing that these scenarios, by the way, sometimes moth does eat your stuff.

Just because you give in the offering bucket, and because you worship Jesus and because you're pretty moral, doesn't mean that God owes you to kill all the moths on your behalf.

I know it would be so much better for me to just promise you all the left side would be just be neutralized, but that's not the word.

That's not the word, and that's not what Jesus is saying here.

He's saying, I want to do something deeper.

I want to do something deeper that you find your confidence, that you find your identity.

And he goes, What'll happen is if you go, you know what, if the moth takes my business out of it, if they come up with some sort of artificial intelligence or some sort of new technology that is so disruptive that the stuff that my grandpa built and I built and we all built and I've been working for, and now all of a sudden it's obsolete overnight because now something else does it and it's gone.

Okay, you know what?

I'll be fine.

God will open the door.

I'll have food, I'll have clothing, I'll have God will provide.

So I have a sense, a sense of dependence and trust on him.

But at some point, everything rusts.

Everything gets eaten by moths.

Everything eventually sometimes gets stolen.

Sometimes you have some unscrupulous human being that comes in and they undercut you and they deceive people and they lie about you and they steal your clients or they steal your customers or they say stuff that's not true, or they promise and they have a false promise over here, and everybody jumps over to them and leaves you, even though you've been faithful to them for all these years, and now they're gone, and they've got them, and then they bait and switched them, and you lost money.

Don't think that just because you love Jesus, that's not gonna happen.

What what happens?

Here's the beautiful miracle that God does, is even when that happens, you operate in a sense of peace.

Um, I I was my wife and I were watching a documentary recently, and it was of a guy who was this one of the richest men, uh one for one of the richest families in America.

And um, long story short, the guy killed people, and he killed his first wife.

And um, because he was slick and he had a bunch of money, he kept getting evading the law.

And so his first wife, they they had her family, and a lot of people were very suspicious that he had been the one to do it, and they just couldn't nail him down.

But her brother did what brothers do, like he wouldn't rest until justice was served.

And it took 40 years, a little over 40 years.

In fact, they finally got the man convicted in his 80s, and and right after his conviction, so finally, the moment her brother had been waiting for, boom, the gavel goes down, he's he's he's declared guilty, he dies.

The convicted man dies within like a month or two months, he dies.

So now you have this brother whose whole life has been around this obsession about getting justice for his sister.

And so they were talking to his wife, and kind of this little brief moment, she's like, you know, this whole thing has wreaked havoc on our marriage because it's been really hard for us to have moments, it's been hard for us to have intimacy, it's been hard for us to really live a good normal life because my brother cannot rest, he can't find peace until he gets justice, until the judge judges um this man guilty.

And so what happens is 40 years go by, he gets what he wanted, the man dies, and now he's standing there.

And we press pause and we discuss that and we talked about it, and it's like, man, you can't fault a guy for wanting to get justice, right?

Jesus says, Blessed are you who hunger and thirst for justice and righteousness.

So you can't blame that.

I mean, any one of us, man, if it was our sister, our brother, we would be in the same spot.

But here's the reality at the moment that the judge declares guilty, the man had to come to the reality of this.

That guy took my sister's life, and in some ways, he took mine too.

40 years, 40 years of not being able to watch a sunset with my wife, 40 years of not being able to be in a place at a core level that I have enough peace and stability that I can smell the roses, that I can appreciate what I have.

And so, in some way, you have to be able to hunger and thirst for righteousness, you have to be able to lock into, and I have to be able to lock into a good cause that we care about.

At the same time, having a deep sense of peace around who I am in my relationship with God, that even if justice never gets served, I'm not waiting on some judge in some courtroom to bring me my peace.

My peace comes from somebody deeper than that.

This is what Jesus is saying.

Friend, I can't promise you no moth will get your stuff.

I can't promise you rust won't happen.

I cannot promise you that unjust people won't get the upper hand on you in some way, in some moment.

Rain falls on the just and the unjust.

But the reality is when I put my anchor in something and somebody much deeper, it enables me to walk through these things that if I put too much in them, if my my relationship with them is that they are my stability, then I'm unable to find peace.

So Jesus says, Hey, I like where you're going with the good eye, bad eye thing.

You don't want to fall into everybody's bad, everything's bad, doomsday.

It's never gonna get any better.

Why even try?

That's a dark place, he says.

It's a dark place.

You don't want to go there.

But a good eye isn't rose-colored glasses either.

It's a clear eye, it's 20-20 vision.

I can see it all.

Weeping may endure for a night.

I had a dark night, but I believe joy is gonna come in the morning.

They might make me feel inferior, I might catch a backhand either literally or figuratively, but I know who I am.

I turn the other cheek.

These things are not catastrophic.

And here's what I know.

If I was to pass the mic around and we started turning this into testimony hour, there's a whole bunch of people in this room right now, people at the sound of my voice that are listening to this, that could give personal, personal testimony of things that they were terrified, they had no peace, they lived bound in worry that moth was gonna get their stuff and rust was gonna destroy their stuff, and it was their worst fear.

And guess what?

The moth got them, and the thief got them, and they could tell you that that moment took them to a place of depth.

They started thinking thoughts they'd never thought before.

They started praying prayers they'd never thought before.

They found out that God was all they needed when God was all they had.

And so they started learning about who they were and who he was, all the stuff that that would not have been part of their formation had all of this just gone up and to the right.

I end with this thought.

I'm gonna go just a little, Debbie Downer, and I promise I'll pull the nose up before we hit the earth, okay?

But one of the things you have to keep reminding yourself when you read the Bible and you read about these things Jesus did for people, you gotta be reminded that everything, every person that Jesus healed, helped, and saved eventually died.

So the the the men in the storm, they think they're gonna die.

Jesus calms the wind and the waves, and they all make it.

And so we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's what I want Jesus to do.

I want him to get the wind and the waves and to keep me alive.

Well, you know what?

All the men that survived that storm eventually died.

Jesus fed the 5,000, he met their needs.

All the people at the Sermon on the Mount, he met all their needs, all of them died.

The man he touched with leprosy, you know, he freed him from leprosy, but eventually the man died.

Lazarus died twice.

I mean, we love that story, you know.

Lazarus died, Lazarus means God is my help.

Jesus calls him out.

Lazarus come forth.

He's in grave clothes, he's like, you know, and Jesus like unwrap him and he's like, ah, and then he dies again.

Jesus is gonna go on here to say, hey, when you're having a bad day and you know you have a threat, I can't promise you the moth won't get your stuff, the thief won't get your stuff, and the lawsuit will fail.

I can't promise you that.

But when you're struggling, look at the birds.

And look how clothed they are and watch those things flap their wings.

They're more beautiful than Solomon's clothing and all this.

Okay, but those birds die.

The lily of the look at the lily, it's clothed, it dies.

He's in fact, he says it, so eventually they get thrown into the fire or they wither.

So the point is do you want, like we all know we're gonna die?

And and don't view that the greatest work God can do in your life is to make you so comfortable that you arrive safely at death.

The great work that Jesus does is we anchor ourselves to Him and we have a clear eye.

I can see the threat, and even if it happens, I will not fall into despair because my provision is greater.

I look to the hills.

Where does my help come from?

It comes from the maker of heaven and earth.

I don't look to the government, I don't look to any human system, I don't look to any human being.

The courtroom might get it wrong, the thief might get my stuff, they might not even be held accountable.

I'm not waiting for that to settle my heart.

I find peace that passes all understanding to guard my heart and mind in Christ Jesus.

This is where Jesus is taking us.

So, yes, we pray for good things and we pray for miracles and we pray that you know the disease will go away.

And sometimes that happens, and sometimes God brings us through something else.

But what we have to understand is that He wants to do more than just save you from this sickness, He wants to give you peace in the middle of it so you don't live 40 years waiting on something you could have right now.

It's a deeper sense.

So let's take a moment right now, let's calibrate to a clear eye.

Let's have a faith and an anchor that we can be blessed when we mourn.

We can be blessed when we're sad.

I can be sad and blessed.

I can hunger and thirst for righteousness and be so frustrated by injustice and be simultaneously blessed.

That the backhand is not what's true about me.

You're not inferior.

You're made in the image of God.

That the lawsuit, they may do the thing that you would in your mind horrified you at the idea of being so embarrassed, but your dignity is given to you by God.

That even when somebody is forcing you to carry something against your will and it you it feels so it feels like it's taking away your your dignity.

It may it feels so wrong.

You know what?

I'm strong.

I know it makes me feel weak, but I'm not.

That I know moth and rust, there's a real threat of something being taken away.

I'm gonna find something deeper that no thief can rob me of.

So let's calibrate our eye to a clear eye, to a clear eye.

Not doomsday, not rose colored glasses, 2020 vision.

Then we can see the detail on the leaf and to look at all the possibilities and to anchor ourselves in God.