Transcript
As a church. We're going through the book of Matthew and we're in the part of Matthew where Jesus is preaching a famous sermon called the Sermon on the Mount. It's three chapters long for us and we have been looking at the part of this sermon where we just finished up these three different practices of righteousness. Some call them spiritual disciplines or spiritual practices. He is talking about living and doing a genuine spirituality rather than it being a performative spirituality. He talked about caring for the poor about praying and about fasting, and we looked at fasting last week and now we're coming to verses 19 through 24.
Jesus is teaching through this whole. The framework that is most helpful to understand is that Jesus is teaching about his kingdom and he's called it the kingdom of heaven. We know this from chapter four. It says that Jesus is traveling around the region of Galilee from synagogue to synagogue, and he's proclaiming the gospel. That's the term that we use the gospel, but it's the gospel of the kingdom. So we often talk about you need to go do evangelism as a follower of Jesus. We do evangelism and we have people, we present the gospel of that you're a sinner who needs the forgiveness of God that's brought to you through the person of Jesus, through his death on the cross. Our sins are forgiven. He's raised to show the victory over sin and that the sacrifice of the cross was acceptable and that if you'll receive the work of Jesus, you'll be accepted and forgiven and you'll experience new birth.
You'll be translated from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. But this is the thing that is the gospel, but the gospel is also the gospel of the kingdom and we do ourselves a disfavor if we are just preaching a point in which you pray a prayer and you just become born again. The gospel that Jesus preached, the gospel of the kingdom is what we are looking at and it entails a life, not that we are earning the favor of God, but we're putting in great effort to evidence the work of God in our life, having become a follower and adopting this kingdom ethic instead of living as Jews caught up in the Roman empire politics of the day or trying to climb a higher social standing through external religious practices like the Pharisees we're doing, Jesus is teaching his followers to adopt the framework.
A parallel framework of the kingdom here is very quickly kind of the way that I would summarize some of the ground that we've covered. The kingdom has a different lens for seeing the nobodies and the outcast of society that we call that the beatitudes, but really it's this inaugural statement where Jesus kind of throws open the gates of the kingdom and says, these are the kind of people that are welcome here in this new society. We see that the law and the prophets, which for this audience it was our Jewish core story, is meant to be fulfilled. So Jesus is like, no, no, no, I'm not here to abolish the law. There's a trajectory that you inherited by being Jewish. You inherited the law and the prophets, and I'm not here to get rid of that. I'm here to fulfill it. The trajectory of that story is continuing on and the promises are being fulfilled in me operating out of a genuine heart.
Jesus has been talking about versus pretending for a temporal audience. So in his society, he's really emphasizing this genuine heartedness, this pure heartedness, this sincerity, and then accepting the ethical standards of the kingdom at a heart level and not just a superficial level of behavior, but really being infected in our core by an ethical standard where anger is put on par with murder, lust is put on par with adultery, and it's this invasion of a society to the core of who we are. And then it's these activities in interpersonal relationships and the treating of enemies and the treating of the poor and prayer and fasting. All of that just flows out of this life that has adopted this society that runs in parallel to this earthly society where we live. One of the most important things to understand as we look at the text this morning is that the kingdom of heaven is not a future place only. So when I say heaven, what do you think of when I throw out the idea of heaven? What's your paradigm? What comes to mind?
The tradition is harps and angels and clouds.
Yeah, exactly like clouds playing your harp. And when does that happen? After you die. After you die. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's the answer I was hoping that you would give. But for Jesus, when he's teaching about the kingdom of heaven, it is not a future place. It's not a future which is a reference to time and place is a reference to location, and we're going to get into that. That is one of the most important pieces of understanding our text this morning. The Kingdom of Heaven is a present invisible society running in parallel to the earthly society where you and I live. How we live reflects one of those two societies. Let's look at the text briefly.
Don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in steel, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves don't 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 eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So if the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness? No one can serve two masters since either he will hate one and love the other or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. Let's pray together. Father, we give you the next few minutes and we give you permission to teach us.
We want to be shaped by your word and we ask that your spirit would teach us, help us to discern this passage rightly. Help us to have a proper relationship with the earth and the things that we treasure here on earth versus having treasures in heaven. Would you help us to understand this? I pray to God that you would maybe deconstruct in our lives some bad understandings of this passage. Maybe we grew up hearing about this and it's actually not what you're talking about. And so Lord, we just give you permission to teach by your spirit. We give you this time, we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
So I'm going to focus on verses 19 through 21 this week and then 22 through 24 next week. Very similar ideas but taught with a couple of different principles over the last couple weeks. Maybe in your social media feed or online or maybe in real life. You've seen the new Apple vision pro goggles that kind of look like this. And what's kind of somewhat of a breakthrough with Apple's technology is that it's augmented reality. It's not just virtual reality, but there is the ability to see the real world. But then what the technology is doing is it's layering on a piece of seeing something that is in the space, almost like putting a TV screen kind of in your space in front of you. And another version of that is kind of like when you pull open Google maps and you do satellite view and you're doing directions and it takes and sticks that blue line on top of the freeway that you're driving on, right? It's an augmented version of that satellite image. The Jesus is giving his followers an augmented reality. The kingdom of heaven is layered onto the present reality.
This passage, these first few verses, the case to be made here is that these verses 19 through 21 are concluding remarks tied in with verses one through 18. Now, I've not understood that until I studied this passage to preach this sermon. I had originally outlined my sermons for this first quarter of the year attaching verses 21 or 19 through 24 as its own teaching on materialism. But the more I studied this passage in read other commentators, I became convinced of this idea that this teaching here is Jesus concluding verses one through 18. So again, one through 18 was Jesus instructing his followers not to perform their religious practices like caring for the poor so that they can be seen in public and get a public reputation as being like, oh, you're the ones caring for the poor, good for you. And it's this only really doing a righteous act in a performative way in order to really kind of get some social standing.
And Jesus is you have your reward. And then in contrast to that, Jesus says, listen, what I want you to do is I want you to do that thing. I want you to care for the poor, but I want you to do it with God being the audience. I want it to be something that is deeply connected with your relationship with God and it's flowing just genuinely out of your life. Not so you'll get any kind of temporal reward, but God's going to reward you. And three times it says, related to caring for the poor to prayer into fasting, it says you'll have your reward. So just briefly to make the case, there's two strong reasons why verses 19 through 21 conclude this previous section. The first is that in verse 16, the person who is fasting as a hypocrite, Jesus says, that person disfigures their face so that it's really obvious in public that they're fasting.
And Jesus says, don't do that. Then you fast forward over to verse 19 and he talks about storing up earthly treasures and he says that moth and rust destroy or that word destroy is also disfigure. It's the same Greek word destroy or disfigure. It's an uncommon Greek word. It's not found hardly anywhere else. And yet Matthew is really kind of drawing our attention and saying, Hey, here's this word that's really a rare Greek word, but it's found in 16 and in 19. And so rather than there being discontinuity between fasting and then talking about materialism, I think that Matthew is or he's, he's pulling to the surface one of these teachings of Jesus and saying, Hey Jesus, this is one of his teachings that really concludes and ties in with these first three, three religious practices, but also the theme of verses one through 18 is about doing righteous deeds for earthly rewards versus doing righteous deeds for God and receiving a reward from him.
So I think it's helpful and appropriate in our minds to connect the idea of God rewarding us. And then Jesus talking about having treasures in heaven, storing up treasures in heaven. So let's look at verses 19, 19 and 20, if we can find it. Maybe we can't find it, but he says in 19, he says, don't store it for yourselves treasures on earth. And then he says, but store it for yourselves treasures in heaven. He talks about he kind of defines, gives a characteristic to treasures stored on earth, which is that they decay and they perish. They're finite, whereas treasures stored in heaven have this longevity. When I set out to understand this text, here's some of the questions or literally, these are the issues that I have with this text. And just so you know, that's not sacrilegious to say I am frustrated in studying the Bible.
Sometimes you come to a text and you're like, God, I wish you wouldn't say it like that, or I wish you'd give me more answers. And so this is a common part of my note taking. These are some of my questions in wrestling, is this text about not storing up treasures on earth? Is this opposing having earthly savings accounts or having some kind of retirement plan? And then another question I have is, what are treasures in heaven? What is that? What is a treasure in heaven? Another question is what activities on earth equate to treasures a treasure in heaven? What do you do on earth to get the treasure in heaven? What role will treasures in heaven play if heaven is all about Jesus? Why do I need treasures in heaven? If I'm only in heaven for a time leading up to the millennial reign with Christ and then there's the new heavens and the new earth and I come back with Christ to reign and rule on the earth with him, what's the point of heaven treasures up in heaven where what happens?
Are those fair questions? Yeah. Okay, so do you see some of the problems with those questions? There are two problems with the questions that I'm asking here, and it took me a little bit of wrestling to kind of identify my issue. The first issue is a problem of location and the second is an issue of timing. The problem of location. I'm seeing myself outside of heaven and thus absent from the treasure in heaven right now. So when I think you think of stor treasures in heaven, then I'm thinking I have historically thought of this text as like I don't have the treasure now because it's located in heaven. Okay? That's the first problem. The second issue that I am evidencing with my questions is that I have a problem of time. I'm seeing myself on earth now, but in heaven in the future after I die, I think I'm not just the only one that has a problem of viewing heaven in that way.
I've already alluded to the fact that to understand Jesus's teaching on the sermon on the mount, we have to be a bit, have our view of heaven dismantled a bit so that it's not clouds and harps and angels and us sitting there playing those harps, but heaven, the kingdom of heaven is a present reality on location right now. Let me kind of show you some scriptures that teach this. Just sampling, just sampling a bit from Matthew. We don't have to go outside of Matthew. We don't even have to really go beyond what we've studied so far as a church. Matthew three, two, here's what Jesus taught. Repent, because the kingdom of heaven has come near, the kingdom of heaven has come near. So where's it located? It's near it's close by. That's right. Look at another teaching from Jesus. When Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water.
The heavens suddenly opened for him. We could say, okay, maybe that's like the clouds parting. If we didn't read further, maybe it's like a picturesque because we talk about the heavens and the sky, but here is like the heavens opened and he saw the spirit of God descending like a dove coming down on him. So there's this crossover between heaven and earth like Jesus is here, the heaven's part and the spirit in the form of a dove is coming down on his head. But not only that, verse 17 and then a voice from where heaven said, this is my beloved son with whom I'm well pleased. Now, where was the location of those who heard this voice? They're on earth, but they're hearing a voice from heaven. So there's this crossover between heaven and earth and Jesus is teaching his followers that the kingdom of heaven is near. He's bringing it near and he's teaching an ethic. He's teaching a very real earthy lifestyle of the kingdom. The kingdom is here. It is in your midst.
Let me give you one more from chapter four verse 17. From then on, Jesus began to preach, repent. Why? Because the kingdom of heaven has come near. So again, when you think about heaven, where is its location and is the location that you give to heaven mean that it's inaccessible to you? It shouldn't be. It's different from the earthly realm in which you live, but just like a pair of apple vision pro goggles or your Google maps, it's accessible, it's present just as much as that blue line on the map is present if you hit the right button. And so Jesus is, it's so important because here's the thing, I grew up, I had a misconstrued understanding of treasures on earth versus treasures in heaven and wrestled and didn't like this passage because it's like, well, where's heaven? Location is one aspect and then timing.
It's present. It's present. At the end of this message, we're going to finish with the idea of true, but yet more to come. And I'm going to give you that theological phrase here in just a minute. The mistake so many Christians are making is to think of heaven as a future experience that follows death. Instead, Jesus is teaching his followers to live their earthly life as citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Now, so he says things like, I don't know if I have this in my text. Yeah, I don't. But he says things like, we don't foster anger and revenge because we now live as citizens of heaven.
We cherish the poor because Jesus just told me that theirs, they have the kingdom. We fast because temporal food doesn't have a grip on our soul like it once did. Oh yeah. We use honest, trustworthy, wholesome sentences to communicate because we're part of a society where words are an extension of ourselves and reflect the authority of God. So the kingdom of heaven is erupting, and I've used this, I always cringe when I say this, but sometimes like I had a kid who's sick, my wife's not here because she's taking care of one of our kids that's sick yesterday, so he's probably got strep throat or something like that, and we didn't want you all to get it, but for a moment he had a rash that broke out and the rash was raised bumps and it was this eruption of an internal illness that was being evidenced on the surface of his skin. And the kingdom of heaven is very similar in that it is this deep in working that the Holy Spirit does in our life through the word of God. But then it evidences itself in our interpersonal relationships, how we treat the poor, how we deal with our earthly possessions. It is this society that runs in parallel to the one in which we dwell. For Christians. Death is a transition of the body, but a continuation of the soul.
The soul you have and interact with every day will continue on at death. One of the things that needs to be deconstructed in our own thinking about eternity is that heaven will be dramatically different from earth. It would be more helpful for you to realize that there will be great continuity between your eternal existence and your present existence. There will be some substantial things that change. One of the most substantial will be the body that you have, but you will have a body. Your soul will be an embodied presence. And so doing life through a body and having an identity in a body will be very much contiguous with your earthly experience.
When you get into the arena of investing, we often talks about horizons, short-term horizons, medium-term horizons, long-term horizons, the choice of time horizon as an investor. It influences various factors including the investor's age, risk tolerance, investment goals and liquidity needs. Understanding your time horizon is key to crafting an investment strategy that aligns with your goals and comfort level with risk. The time horizon that we do life on as citizens of heaven is this eternal time horizon. And so all of a sudden the calculations, the risk factors that we can take as life investors, interpersonal relationships, what we spend our time on and our resources on the way that we steward over our lives, it is done differently from somebody who is not a citizen of heaven because their time horizon is different. And so we can afford to do things like a Mother Teresa who wasted her life on the poor.
If you're not a citizen of heaven, and if you think there is no eternal reality, then you would look at that person and say, what a waste of a life. Now she had some earthly praise and I believe she had great joy, but not every day was a happy day for Mother Theresa. There was a lot of pain and suffering that went with living and immense sacrifice. And there's many times where she could have just kind of said, I'm going to write my books and buy a retreat house in Vermont and live on my mountaintop and be happy. And yet she didn't. She faithfully did this life that was invested on a long-term time horizon that if you're not a citizen of heaven, you cannot engage in or it would be anybody would look at it and go, you're a fool. Why would you make that risk or take that sacrifice or forgive that person or let that wrong go.
If your time horizon is just your bodily death, if you see the kingdom of heaven as a place separate from earth and an experience that will occur after you die, then you'll find it difficult to understand what Jesus is teaching. You have a short-term horizon investment strategy. You'll not see continuity between your life in your body now and your future after you die. But Jesus's teaching is that we will when we die, when we're absent from the body, we're present with the Lord, but we are raised a new, we are given a new body and we will reign and rule with Christ on a new heavens, a renewed heavens and earth. Okay, so what does this mean? Let's go back to verses 19 through 21. Don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves don't break in and steal for where your treasure is there, your heart will be.
Also. What does this mean? Jesus has warned his followers against performing righteous acts before humans, before a human audience and being rewarded by society. Instead, Jesus instructed his followers to give to the poor, to pray to fast in a genuine way with a father watching. And he promises that the Father will reward these activities, these rewards are treasures. This past week, or maybe it was the week before, two weeks ago, I found out that my friend Steve passed away. He was one of the first people that came and stood in our line to get food, and he had been in decline for six months. I was angry at death when I found out that he had died because you could see him heading in that direction. He had become like a shell of himself. And I would talk to him like, what's wrong Steve? Why are you all of a sudden so quiet?
Why are you losing weight? Have you seen a doctor? And then a couple of weeks ago, Ronaldo came and said, Steve died. And as I was thinking about this idea of serving the poor and Steve was in a place where he was on disability, he took the food that we gave him and he fed. He would make meals for his parents. He was caring for his parents. And the reward in serving Steve was the friendship and the comradery. And I think that there is this not a storing up treasures that are inaccessible in heaven now, but there's an investment in a genuine investment in doing righteous things that then equate to earthly treasures, rewards that Jesus promises that we enjoy now and will enjoy in the future. I don't want to, this is the next paragraph that I'm going to read. I forget what I put on my slides.
This is a genuine right living that Jesus is calling to us a genuine right living done in the presence of God and the outcome, the reward is treasured by us as citizens. The heart is fully invested on a long-term horizon schedule where heaven is a present today and rewards from the Father have longevity. I think this is what when we go into John 15 and the whole vine in branches analogy, Jesus says, I've chosen you that you would bear fruit and that your fruit would remain that it would stay. I think it's the same idea. We are redeemed back to the image of God, that we're bearing the image of God, we're restored in our function, pre-fall function. We're being made more and more. We're being renewed in our minds. We're being transformed so we can be fruitful. That fruitfulness remains. We're enjoying it. We're treasuring it.
It's where our heart is at. I think all of that is the idea here of storing up your treasures in heaven and it's incorruptible. Nobody can take away from me the joy of serving Steve. Nobody can take that away from me. I mean the reward of just loving your neighbor and caring for somebody and being, and I don't have anything to offer him. That's the grace of God upon me. Where'd the food come from? I didn't even go and find it that got dropped in our laps. Just the joy of all of that stuff coming together and being able to participate in that. I believe that that is the idea of having a treasure and having your heart lined up with that treasure. I'm running short on time, but this is not the only place where this idea of being rewarded is spoken of. In one Corinthians three 12 through 15, the passage speaks of different materials people may use to build upon the foundation of Jesus Christ.
And it is suggested that our works will be tested by fire. So Paul's commenting on all the different pastors that have come through Corinth, and some of them were bad, they weren't great teachers, and they were kind of like just trying to get a following, and they were kind of the hypocrites that Jesus talked about. And Paul says, this stuff's going to be tested by fire and what remains is of lasting value comparable to gold, silver, and costly stones, similar concepts that the things you do in God's kingdom are the things that remain. And again, we're called to this long-term horizon where we're living a life where it's like what I do today has this longevity. Two Corinthians five 10, Paul mentions that we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ where we will receive what is due for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.
In Luke 14, 12 through 14, Jesus teaches about inviting the poor, crippled, lame and blind to a banquet instead of friends, relatives, and rich neighbors. He mentions that such acts of kindness will be rewarded at the resurrection of the righteous, highlighting the value of selfless, altruistic actions. So this is what we call the already, the already but not yet framework. The already but not yet framework. The kingdom of heaven is already, but there is also an aspect that is not yet the already. This aspect of the framework acknowledges that within the first coming of Jesus, key aspects of God's kingdom have already been inaugurated through Christ's life, death and resurrection, significant victories over sin, death, and the devil have been achieved. Believers experience the reality of God's kingdom now through the presence of the Holy Spirit transformation in their lives and preparation in God's mission. And then the not yet part, not yet, despite the current experience of God's kingdom, there is a future aspect that has not yet been fully realized. This includes the final defeat of evil, the complete restoration of creation, the resurrection of the body, and the full manifestation of God's glory. Believers live in hope and anticipation of this complete fulfillment, which will happen at Christ's second coming.
When I was a 15-year-old,
I was really starting my relationship with God and I was like, man, I like God was just meeting me. And I was like reading my Bible and I was like, God, I want you to have more of my life. But I had this picture of a pie chart in my head and I was trying to figure out, okay, how much of the pie chart am I supposed to give to God because he really wants to be the priority in my life, but then I know school is important and friendships with people, my family's important and I'm going to have to have a job at some point. Which part of the pie chart does God get? So I asked one of my teachers, I was at a Christian school, I said, what piece of the pie? And he said, Josh, he gets the whole pie. Oh man, my brain broke. I was like, but what do I do with all the rest of the, how do I do the rest of the time? And it took me some time. It took me some years to realize, no, no, there is this inaugurated kingdom, this kingdom reality where we're just doing normal life and this parallel kingdom is present and we are operating as just citizens in that parallel kingdom in the place where we live in our normal everyday life.
Serving God does not mean living in opposition to having an income, making a profit in a business, being dedicated and spending hours and hours on honing a skill, doing a job that is not profitable but is needed and something you're passionate about that is not an opposition to God, that's not storing up treasures on earth. It is very likely the realization of living out what God has called you to do. In closing, I think that this is partially the idea of having a legacy. When you think of Abraham, God made this promise to Abraham and said, I'm going to make you into a nation that will be a blessing.
And yet Abraham doesn't get to live to see it. He gets to participate in it being carried out by having a son named Isaac. But yet there is this, I don't think it's debatable that that's a great reward in the life of Abraham. That is like a treasure. Don't you think he treasured Isaac? He did. And then for David, you think of David being a man of God comes to him and says, I'm going to make you a royal lineage. I'm going to establish your house, and the throne will always be in your family line. Well, David doesn't get to see the full end of that, but he gets to participate. He hear that promise from God. Both of these promises are rewards from the Father. They're stored, treasure fulfilled in Christ. May we live our lives in Christ and experience the heaven and earth overlap where the Father is rewarding us with treasures that are indestructible.
Let's pray together. Lord, we ask that you would establish your kingdom in our hearts so that we treasure the rewards that come from living a righteous life in a genuine way. God, that wherever we may be distracted and storing up earthly treasures and just kind of off maybe faking it or performing it, and it's just some piece of our life that's not really lined up with your society, your kingdom, we just ask that you would work in our lives and that you would continue to transform us and bring us in further and further into your realm, the Kingdom of heaven. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.