So last week, we looked at Jesus’ take on good works, and on prayer, and on fasting. Things that we call spiritual disciplines, which means that they are things that are involved in the relationship that we are in with God almighty. But Jesus’ issue last week, that He was dealing with, is that people were taking these things that should be an intimate, healthy, parts of our relationship with the Lord and turning them into a show for other people. Jesus was calling out these hypocrites and dealing with the matters of our heart towards God. All of these things are good things, that hypocritical people were trying to leverage for pride and self-righteousness, when God simply desired to be the sole, the singular, the only, focus of our attention in these matters.
And Jesus made extremely clear that if you want to go the way of these hypocrites and put on a show just in front of people, then all of the reward that you are ever going to get for that, is the attention that people are giving you in that moment. God’s not going to pay no mind to the pride show, but Jesus says, that He actually intends to reward, and to bless those, that come to Him in the right way, with the right heart. That’s where I want to be at; and I hope that you want to be there to, and that understanding of God’s heavenly rewarding of earthly living carries forward into our passage today. So, let’s read this.
Read Matthew 6:19-24
Well right out of the gate I want to deal with something here. These passages usually lead to the questions of: “what are these rewards?” and “what are these treasures in heaven?” and “What EXACTLY are they?” And the simple and most direct answer I can give you is that we don’t know exactly. The Bible does speak quite a few times about various crowns that will be gained in heaven, but that may or may not be what is in view here. And quite frankly I think we may need to elevate our thought process past material rewarding, when we consider heavenly rewards. What good is whatever material thing going to be, when we one day show up in a place that has streets made of gold that shines due to the very glory of God lighting the whole place up. Are we really going to need, whatever material thing that we’re thinking about right now, in that situation?
I don’t think so. I really don’t. For myself, there’s biblical precedent for something that I want more than anything I could ever get in this world or anything that I could ever even imagine wanting. Jesus tells a story in Matthew 25, so one day we are going to get there, but for now, this story is called “The Parable of the Talents”. And in this story “the Master”, which is the Lord, gives three different servants, three different amounts of money, that He entrusts them with to use and to invest so that the Master would see a return on His investment. The Master does this right before He is leaving for a long journey and the servants can use the time that He is gone to do these things. And after a while, the Master comes back, and when He gets back, He goes to these servants to see how they did with what He invested with them.
And I promise you that this is leading somewhere, and I want us to understand this. Two out of these three servants did good with the Master’s investment. The third guy ends up saying that he was too scared to do anything with the investment, so he just buried it in the ground and did absolutely nothing with it. The Master looked at this servant and called him wicked and lazy and ended up casting him out of His house. But for the two that did good for their Master, they both doubled His money, they doubled His investment, and the Master looked at both of these servants and said:
“‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’”
And that’s it, that’s the point right there, that’s what I believe is truly more valuable than any material thing that you could ever possibly imagine. And maybe sitting here right now, there’s a thought of “I don’t really know about that, there’s some pretty nice stuff to be had”. But if there is, any thought process like that, then I would say that we need to go further in our understanding of exactly Who He is.
He is not just some person like the rest of us, it’s nice to have approval and favor of other people, but this is God, that we are talking about. The only God, the one true God, there is none like Him, not even close to Him, in all of existance. And we look foward to the heavenly places that as I mentioned a minute ago are literally illuminated with His glory. A place that is only heaven because of His presence there. He is what makes it heaven. And to come to that point, to meet Him, to stand before Him, to I’m sure to tremble in His presence waiting for Him to speak over our life, and then to hear “Well done, my good and faithful servant”. What could possibly be better than that? What material thing could we possibly want more than that?
And so that’s why Jesus’ first point is what it is. Let me read these first verses again. Verses 19-21.
Read Matthew 6:19-21
Jesus isn’t necessarily calling earthly treasures bad, but He’s saying don’t make them the goal, don’t hoard up for ourselves now, what we ultimately can’t keep. He is encouraging us to value more the things that will matter beyond this life. That will matter when we finally come to meet and be with Him for the rest of eternity. And He makes the point even clearer by pointing out to us, what should be obvious to us. That everything in this world is subject to decay or even theft, but not the things that are stored with Him in heaven. There’s no material thing in this world that won’t lose its value, or start falling apart, or rust, or be destroyed, or just get stolen, or you die anyways and can’t take it with you and then someone else gets it anyways. That’s with everything.
There’s an old saying that you won’t see a U-Haul behind a hearse. And people have tried, plenty of people throughout time, especially royalty, and pharaohs, and wealthy people have been buried with their stuff. But I guarantee you that it’s not doing them any good right now, because it’s literally still just in the ground, or it’s been dug up, and taken by other people. But what they didn’t learn, and what we really should learn right now, is what Jesus is talking to these people about.
It’s to get our heart where the real treasure is at. To get our heart off of all the material stuff and settle our heart down with Him. For us right now, real wisdom is learning from those that have messed up before us. Why do we need to mess up ourselves when we could just learn the lesson? Real wisdom is learning from the Master of the parable of the talents directly, that His rewards, and His treasure, are far greater than anything that we could ever get our hands on here.
But maybe we’re sitting here today, and we’re still not convinced. Maybe the all the stuff just has too much pull. And to that I would say that we just must not know Him well enough yet. We don’t know what the writer of Psalm 73 knew when he said:
25 Whom have I in heaven but You?
And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You.
26 My flesh and my heart fail;
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
This guy stands here and says that there is nobody, in heaven, or on earth, that I desire besides you God, and he calls God his portion, or all that he needs, forever. My body, my heart, might fail, but you won’t, you’re my strength, and you are all I need FOREVER. That’s where we need to get, like really, we really need to be in that place of seeing God in His glory, in His majesty, because when we begin to see that, like this guy did, then everything else, and honestly everyone else, in this world, starts to lose its shine a bit, compared to Him. And we’ll begin to realize and understand these things quite a bit better. But Jesus of course fully knows our weaknesses, He knows this one is going to be a struggle, and He gives us a little insight into how this works in the next verses. Let me read verses 22 and 23.
Read Matthew 6:22-23
He puts the root of the struggle with our eyes. And that’s really how it works. If we couldn’t see all this stuff, if we couldn’t see what everyone else got, if it wasn’t advertised to us, day in and day out, in every possible way, then we probably wouldn’t be all that worried about the material stuff. But the reality is that some of this stuff will get out attention, there’s probably a specific material something for all of us that we will gravitate to. And again, I’m not going to stay that all material things are bad, like I’m thrilled that God blessed us with this house, and we’ve got a couple extra things here and there. But we’re doing our best not to live for the stuff. But that’s when our eyes can mess us up. I want to go together to Ecclesiastes chapter 2.
Read Ecclesiastes 2:4-11 and verse 17
Let’s understand who is talking here. This was King Solomon, by God’s own mouth, the wisest and richest man to ever live. And so, what can we learn from a man like this? This man had it all, he had everything that any of us, might ever want to go after in this world. He had riches, he had servants, he had women, he had massive houses, he had prestige, he was known the world over. But in all of that stuff, you know what he didn’t find? He didn’t find satisfaction. It said there that he looked on all that he had accomplished with his hands, everything that he had gotten, and he said that it was all vanity, it was all pointless, it was like trying to grab hold of the wind, something that is literally impossible. He said that this understanding, caused him to hate his life, because the end of all of the work of his life, which was all of the stuff, became meaningless to him.
And he makes a profound statement, a statement which he says over and over again in the book. He says that “there was no profit under the sun.” And he is very specific in that statement, because he knows, and it’s a lesson that he teaches at the end of this book, that everything under the sun, everything of the world, won’t last, and it won’t bring ultimate satisfaction, it may bring temporary satisfaction, but why would we want temporary, when permanent satisfaction exists? There is no profit under the sun, because all of the real lasting profit, lies beyond the sun with our almighty God in the heavenly places. Solomon went through a lot, to learn this lesson, and we need to get it to. Solomon gets to the end of this book as an older man, and he addresses young people, with the wisdom that he has learned, and says, remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come, and he says that we are going to regret these days if we don’t learn the lesson and change things up before they get there.
But remember, Jesus, dealing with these same issues, is like be careful with your eyes, your eyes are like the gateway to the problems if you let them be that. And isn’t that what happened with Solomon? In verse 10 there, Solomon says:
“Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure”
I’ve always believed personally that this statement was the turning point to Solomon’s fall. And it lines right up, with what Jesus is teaching. That we need to be careful with our eyes. Solomon was a man that knew the Lord, God actually met with and talked with Solomon twice before this point. Solomon built the temple for the Lord, and there’s record of this incredible prayer and speech to the people that he made when the temple was built. But he let his eyes wander, he tried to play the fence, he tried to keep with the Lord, while giving into his eyes, and into pleasures, and it simply did not work out for him, and I guarantee that it won’t work out for us either. And maybe we think, “oh I’m strong enough to play around with this stuff, I can do what he wasn’t able to”. May I remind us, this is a King, a man that met and conversed with God, the wisest, and richest man ever, the very world at his fingertips, and he fell hard into sin, when he gave into his eyes and to his flesh.
If he could fall, then every single one of us can. And that’s why we need to be careful with these things.
Jesus is teaching us these things in Matthew 6, still in verses 22 and 23. Let me read these one more time.
Read Matthew 6:22-23
He’s saying that if our eyes are good, or that word can also mean “clear”, or “single focused”, or even “generous”, which is interesting, then it can let light, the Lord’s light, shine on into us, and we can be filled with that. But if our eyes are bad, or that word can also mean evil, if our eyes are stuck looking at everything else but Him, fixated on material things rather than eternal things, then the light is not going to be there, it’s not getting through, and instead in the absence of light, there is going to be darkness, and I don’t know about you, but I want to be clear eyed, letting the light in, focused on the things of heaven, rather than caught up with my eyes somewhere else, being filled with darkness. That’s what Jesus is teaching us here.
And material things, and money, are some of the things, that are going to get a lot of people caught up. It’s one of the things that is going to lead a lot of people astray. It has all throughout time and it’s not stopping now. There’s a lot of things to be careful of, there are a lot of things to watch out for, but don’t ever put your guard down on this one.
Because Jesus is about to put down the bottom line. He’s going to bring all of this materialism talk, to the last thing, that really, is like I said, the bottom line that we need to know about it. And let’s read verse 24 together.
Read Matthew 6:24
You can’t serve both. You can’t have God as your God and money or material things as your god at the same time. Jesus says that, at the end of the day, that you will hate one and love the other, and you will be loyal to one and despise the other. And maybe we’re like “I mean I just like this stuff and all the extras, and I put my time and energy and resources into it, but oh I really love God too”. It’s time to re-evaluate. Is God just being tacked on to our lifestyle, or is He the absolute focus of our very living and breathing? Where is our time spent? Where is our energy used? Where are our resources going? Again, it’s not wrong to have some things, but are we missing the main point? And we need to be honest with ourselves when asking this, because Jesus said that you can’t serve both. I don’t want for any of us to ever be in a position where God has been taken off the throne of our heart and of our lives and replaced by some no eternal warranty, probably going to break, or probably get stolen junk that this world is trying to give us, WHEN WE COULD HAVE HIM, and maybe one day hopefully hear, from Him, WELL DONE, GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT.
IS HE AND HIS FAVOR ENOUGH FOR US? Or have our eyes been darkened by all the stuff? Let’s get things right, if that’s the case today.