The Bible Top 40
Matthew 6:19-21
A man on vacation
was strolling along outside his hotel in Acapulco, enjoying the sunny Mexican
weather. Suddenly, his attention was
attracted to the screams of a woman kneeling in front of a child. The man rushed over, and he knew just enough
Spanish to determine that the child was choking on a coin. Seizing the child by the heels, the man held
him up, shook him a few times, and after a few tense moments an American penny
dropped out of the boy’s mouth. A few
coughs later the boy was crying in his mothers arms.
The mother was
overjoyed. She said, “Thank you,
Senor. Are you a doctor?”
“No,” said the man,
“I’m with the IRS.”
On this April 14,
just a little over 36 hours from the tax deadline, it seems only right that we
talk a little bit today about our treasury.
Now, before you grab your wallet and run for the door, let me remind you
that this is a church that has never taken an offering at one of our services. In fact, the only time we took an offering
was when a guy from Jews for Jesus came to do a Passover Sader demonstration,
and he wanted to take an offering – and we had nothing to take it in!
We do not want you
here at Gateway Community Church for your money. You will never receive a bill from us, you will never see your
name and the amount you gave (or did not give) listed in the program. We believe very strongly that your level of
giving is an act of personal worship, and Jesus said that we should give only
to be seen by God, not by other people, so we allow you to put your offering in
the box at your convenience, so that no one else knows what you gave – just the
Lord.
Now with that being
said, we would not be a church that addressed the practical application of
God’s word if we did not talk about how we manage our treasures.
Jesus spoke more
about money than any other issue. He
spoke about money more than sin, more than love, more than heaven. But when he spoke about our personal
finances he never focused on the amount that was given, rather, He
addressed the attitude with which giving occurred. And in our continuing study of passages
everybody ought to know, we are going to look at one prime example of that
today.
Turn in your Bibles
to the book of Matthew. Matthew is the
first book of the New Testament. It is
the first of four Biographies of Jesus that we have in our Bibles. We are going to be focusing this morning on
a couple of verses from chapter 6.
Matthew 6:19-21, to be exact.
Matthew was,
coincidentally, a former Roman IRS agent.
He had worked for the Roman government as a tax collector for an
undisclosed period of time before He met Jesus. If you think IRS agents are unpopular now, you can’t imagine what
it was like back then. The Israeli
people were under the thumb of the Roman Emperor, and Rome demanded high taxes
of its subjects. So as a tax collector,
Matthew not only was seen with disgust because of us job, but it was multiplied
by the fact that he took the tax money to support an oppressive, occupying military
dictatorship! Imagine someone today in
Israel employed by the Palestine Liberation Organization to collect money, and
you get a little idea of Matthew’s popularity.
But it all changed when Jesus showed up. One day Jesus walked by Matthew’s collection booth and said,
simply, “Follow me,” and Matthew got up and left it all behind to follow
Jesus. Maybe it was the first time in a
long time that anyone had spoken a kind word to this tax collector, but he was
impressed with Jesus.
Perhaps it was Matthew’s
government work caused his biography of Jesus to focus on the battle of
kingdoms - the kingdom of God, and the kingdom of this world. Matthew goes to great lengths to show that
Jesus did not simply call people to a superficial “religious experience,” He
called people to abandon this earthly culture, with it’s selfish, hedonistic
values, and embrace the kingdom of God, with its own set of values. In the economy of Jesus, a person who gives
a million dollars to the church out of their excess is not as righteous as a
widow who gives a penny out of her need.
It’s not about the money, folks, it’s about the heart.
Today in our study
of “The Bible Top 40 – Passages Everyone Should Know” – we are looking at three
verses that make up a great example of Jesus’ call to really experience the
kingdom of God in our lives. Please
follow along as I read from Matthew 6:19-21.
“Where your treasure
is, there will your heart be also.” A
simple concept to understand, a difficult principal to embrace. No big theological terms here. No vague stories from which we need to try
to decypher some hidden meaning.
Actually, it’s pretty straight forward, isn’t it?
When we store up our
treasure on earth, it’s gonna’ deteriorate.
The most expensive cars in the world still rust, they still accumulate
miles. We heard a story at the Fireside
Theater the other night. It seems Ole
had this old car, with 340,000 miles on it, and he was trying to sell it, but
he had no takers. So Sven, Ole’s buddy,
said, “He dare, Ole, I gots a friend who can fix dat dare car for you. You just take it to his garage, and he’ll
roll dat number back down to 40 tousand miles lickety split.” So Ole took the car there, and sure enough,
for 50 bucks the guy rolled the odometer back to 40 thousand miles. Six months later, Sven saw Ole and asked him
how much he got for the car. “I didn’t
sell dat car,” Ole said, “It only had 40 tousand miles on it don’t you know!”
No matter what games
we play, the fact is that our 20-, 30-, 40- or 50-thousand dollar car is going
to put on miles, and it’s going to rust; eventually the motor is going to
deteriorate, and the interior is going to fade. Just like Jesus said, moth and rust is going to corrupt it.
But it’s not just
cars that get eaten away right before our eyes. How many of you have watched your stock portfolio or 401(k)
retirement plan evaporate over the past 18 months? When Jesus talks here about “thieves breaking in and stealing,”
He could just as easily be offering commentary on the Enron scandal in 21st
Century America as about a crooked tax collector in 1st Century
Israel. No matter how much care we
take, regardless of the careful planning and disciplined saving we practice,
all our possessions are subject to evaporation. The markets crumble, companies down-size, unexpected injury,
illness or even death can cause our once-secure financial status to vanish
right before our eyes.
I’m sure I don’t
need to tell you that. You have seen it
happen too often. Perhaps you have
experienced it on a personal level to a small or larger degree. When Jesus tells us that the treasures of
earth are prone to decay, it’s nothing new.
And I’m sure it was well known to a society that saw everything from
bread to chariot wheels grow moldy or deteriorate. It is the nature of things.
Our “stuff” gets old, it rots, it wears out. Nothing new there.
What is new
in these words is the importance that Jesus attaches to our stuff, and in
particular the relationship between our treasure and our heart. In this statement, Jesus raises money and
all of the associated issues that are related to it, to a level that directly
competes with God for our attention and our loyalty. Our possessions, as Jesus
describes them here, are a very important part of our spiritual lives.
We all know that a
thermometer is an instrument that will give us an accurate measure of
temperature. In the food industry, I
use thermometers many times every day.
There are thermometers in every cooler.
My cooks use little pocket thermometers to make sure that foods have
been heated to a safe level before serving.
My dishwashers have thermometers that indicate the temperature of the
hot water rinse, because if that water is not 180 degrees, or higher, harmful
bacteria will not be eliminated. Every
restaurant you enter will have similar tools in them. Thermometers are critical in those operations. And they are critical in our bodies as
well. A thermometer will help us
determine if our body is engaged in a battle against foreign invaders. Even a low-grade temperature for an extended
period of time can indicate a serious ailment.
Jesus tells us in
these verses that our treasure is an indicator of the condition of our
heart. Did you know that our
check-books are a thermometer of our spiritual health? It is an instrument that measures where our
priorities lie. By doing a simple
inventory of our possessions, by taking a critical look at what we are spending
our resources on, we can determine what we really value. We can see in just a few moments of review
what we really think is important.
Each of us would say
that we value a college education for our children. But does our check book show it?
Each of us would quickly agree that the wise person is carefully investing
in a plan to provide for their needs after retirement, but few of us are. We know what we should do, but we get
distracted, we chase after the wrong things, we lose sight of the
important. On March 3, 1995, a 38-year-old
man was walking to his temporary job at a warehouse in Rosemont, IL. For some
reason he must have thought that the quickest way to get there was to cut
straight across all 8 lanes of the busy Tri-State Tollway. If you’ve ever driven to Ohare airport,
you’ve been on this stretch of highway.
After he managed to carefully cross the four northbound lanes a gust of
wind blew off his hat. The hat flew back across the northbound lanes, and he
chased it. Unfortunately, that’s when a semi-truck struck and killed him. A person can lose everything by chasing
after nothing.
Jesus tells us that
if we are storing up treasures that are made up of earthly things, then we are
chasing nothing. We are risking all to
gain nothing.
If, however, we are
laying up treasures in heaven, then we are gaining that which will never
perish. Imagine having something that
would never wear out, never rust, never fade, never be diminished. I thought about that this week, and you know
what, I couldn’t think of a single example of an earthly treasure that won’t one
day evaporate. It used to be said that
a legacy is the only thing you can leave behind that will last forever. Tell that to Christopher Columbus, who at
one time was a brave explorer and hero, but in our day of revisionist history,
he is seen as a destroyer of nations, a symbol of European dominance and
oppression.
The only things that
we can seek after that will never diminish, never deteriorate or be devalued,
according to Jesus’ words, are treasures in heaven. So how do we lay up treasures in heaven?
Well, how do we lay
up treasures on earth? I thought about
that a lot this week. I thought of a
couple of examples from my own life.
About a year ago, our family was anticipating a trip to Orlando Florida
at Christmas. The High School band was
going to march down Main Street at Disney World, and we had been hoping to
go. Last April, a company that I had
previously worked for asked if I would come on board with them for a few weeks
during the summer and assist them with some training of new salesmen at the end
of the school year. With the blessing
of the Leadership team of the church, I agreed. I did it with one thought in mind – this will pay for the trip to
Florida. It made the extra work
worthwhile.
Earlier in our
marriage, when we first decided to have children, we felt very strongly that we
wanted to have a Carol at home with the children. It was a tough decision, and as we watched our two career friends
by their new cars and homes, we drove old cars that we were able to pay cash
for. But the sacrifice was worth the
end results.
My point is this –
when we have our heart set on the right place, we won’t have to worry about
where our treasure is – it will naturally follow. The money trail will always follow the path of the heart. Remember I said before that our check book
was like a thermometer? If your child
had a fever, you wouldn’t take the thermometer and put it in the fridge to reduce the temperature, and in the
same way, changing our giving will not change where our heart – but changing
our heart will change the location of our treasure. It is only when we place a strong enough value on the things of
God that we will begin to store up heavenly treasure.
Laying up treasures
in heaven means to use all that we have for the glory of God – not just
our money. It means that the work of
God becomes a joy for us because we know the results are worthwhile. Helping with Children’s Church is not a
chore, it’s a priveledge! Giving of
ourselves to help with the youth ministry becomes an investment in the Kingdom
of God, not just another meeting on our social calendar. Giving regularly to the church goes far
beyond dropping a few bills in a box or plate, it becomes an exciting, joyful
experience because we can’t wait to see what great things God is going to do
with our money!
It means we hold our
possessions loosely, rather than allowing them to hold us. All other pursuits become secondary to our
pursuit of God.
The song “I Can Only Imagine,” which Larry sang for us this morning, is an amazing song. It causes us for a few moments to stop and think about what it’s going to be like to stand before Jesus, or kneel before Him, or sing hallelujah, or not be able to speak at all. The message of Jesus words’ this morning is that we spend far to little time thinking about that future. We spend our time worried about our earthly treasure – getting the next toy, having the nest egg, keeping up with the Jones’; and we don’t think at all about our heavenly treasures - investing in the spiritual lives of our children, our neighbors, our community.
JIM ELLIOT had always wanted to be a missionary. He was a man who spent many hours in prayer, and felt a real burden for the South American Amazon Indians. After his studies at theological college, he went to Ecuador, where he linked up with Nate Saint in an effort to reach the Auca Indians. When Jim and Nate, along with three other missionaries landed their airplane on a river in the jungle to reach a village they had seen from the air, but had never been reached with the gospel, they were savagely killed by the native tribesmen. A few months later, Nate Saint’s wife led a group of missionaries who went back to that same village, where they were welcomed and eventually the men who killed Nate and Jim and the others became Christians.
In Jim's journal, a few weeks before his death, he wrote these words, after reading our verses from Matthew Chapter 6:
Compare that with the guy from Chicago who was killed chasing his ball cap across a busy highway.
That’s what its all about. Will we spend our chasing after that which we cannot keep, that which will rust and deteriorate, that which is truly value-less? Or will we invest our lives in something that we can never lose, that will last forever, and has eternal value?
This is not about money – it’s about heart.
It’s not about what we possess, it’s about what possesses us.
It’s not about the investment of our resources, it’s about the investment of ourselves.
These words of Christ call us to make a commitment. They cannot be ignored. This is not a passage that we can read and walk away from without making a decision. They call us to a point of crisis. We dare not say we are healthy when the thermometer shows we are ill. We dare not say we are part of the kingdom of God, when the thermometer shows our loyalty lies elsewhere. Jesus concludes this section in verse 24 by saying, “You can’t have it both ways, you either are loving God, or you are loving the world.” Which will it be?
If we claim to be children of God, part of His kingdom, then our lives should reflect it in what we value, what we invest in, and what we are willing to work for.
What’s your thermometer read?
Prayer.