"Add a Little Silver and…the Lord’s Calf is Dead!" 

Sermon by Pastor Dennis Gleason - February 9, 2003

One day a certain old, rich man of a miserable disposition visited a rabbi, who took the rich man by the hand and led him to a window. "Look out there," he said. The rich man looked into the street. "What do you see?" asked the rabbi. "I see men, women and children," answered the rich man. Again the rabbi took him by the hand and this time led him to a mirror. "Now what do you see?" "Now I see myself," the rich man replied.

Then the rabbi said, "Behold, in the window there is glass, and in the mirror there is glass. But the glass of the mirror is covered with a little silver, and no sooner is the silver added than you cease to see others, but you see only your self. "

This anecdote illustrates our text for today in an interesting way. For our text is found in Matthew 6:19-24. This is what this passage says to us:

¹⁹"Don’t store up treasures here on earth, where they can be eaten by moths and get rusty, and where thieves break in and steal. ²⁰Store your treasures in heaven, where they will never become moth-eaten or rusty and where they will be safe from thieves. ²¹Wherever your treasure is, there your heart and thoughts will also be. ²²"Your eye is a lamp for your body. A pure eye lets sunshine into your soul. ²³But an evil eye shuts out the light and plunges you into darkness. If the light you think you have is really darkness, how deep that darkness will be!

²⁴"No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. (New Living Translation).

Money is the stuff that dreams are made of. While I am not encouraging you to play the lottery, suppose for a moment that you win the lottery tomorrow and hit it big.  15 Million dollars is the prize. And you take it home in a lump sum; and after taxes are all paid you have a mere 5.5 million dollars. What are your prospects for happiness? The look pretty good don’t they? I mean after all you will now be able to do anything you ever want. Your family is now set for life. You can quit that job that has been the bane of your life. You can have anything you ever wanted. That house, the car, the trip you have always wanted are now within reach. You can have it and you can have it right now.

What do you suppose happens when you get that kind of money? Let’s look at what a few people with "real" money had to say about it: "I have made millions, but they have brought me no happiness." – John W. Rockefeller.

"The care of $200,000,000 is enough to kill anyone. There is no pleasure in it." - W. H. Vanderbilt.

"I am the most miserable man on earth." – John Jacob Astor.

"I was happier when doing a mechanic’s job." – Henry Ford.

"Millionaires seldom smile." – Andrew Carnegie. 

 Now, that does not sound too good does it? What about Rose Grayson of Washington . Columnist Jim Bishop reported what happened to people who won the state lottery: she won $400 a week for life. She hides in her apartment. For the first time in her life she has "nerves". Everyone tries to put the touch on her. "People are so mean," she said. "I hope you win the lottery and see what happens to you." (Clovis Chappell).

When the McGugarts of New York won the Irish Sweepstakes, they were happy. Pop was a steamfitter. Johnny, twenty-six, loaded crates on the docks. Tim was going to night school. Pop split the million with his sons. They all said the money wouldn’t change their plans. A year later the million wasn’t gone; it was bent. The boys weren’t speaking to Pop or each other. Johnny was chasing expensive race horses; Tim was catching up with expensive girls. Mom accused Pop of hiding his poke from her. Within two years, all of them were in court for nonpayment of income taxes. "It’s the Devil’s own money," Mom said. Both boys were studying hard to become alcoholics. All these people hoped and prayed for sudden wealth. All had their prayers answered. All were wrecked by the dollar sign.

Ah, you say, I am different. I have a different approach to the thing. I won’t have to worry about as much as they did. I want to have just enough for myself for the rest of my life. I can retire and be happy. Right?

While we recognize that money in itself is not evil, we do realize that the love of money is! It is the love of money that is the source of all kinds of evil. If you don’t have any money you want some. If you have money, you want more. And of course the problems come with the desire for more and the things people will do to get it .

How we see things is vitally important. It is the way we view the world and the things in it that will make the difference in our lives. When Jesus was teaching his disciples about turning the cheek, giving your cloak as well as your coat when sued , walking the second mile, he was telling us not to be concerned about ourselves at all. The trouble in life comes to us when we are concerned about our own self-interest. Jesus taught his disciples to become self-less. Jesus describes a situation in which a man who is self-less cannot be hurt. Live for others. Die to self and then watch what God is able to do in and through you, your life and ministry.

We need to be reminded that Jesus is speaking to his disciples. They are to be people with the characteristics of the Beatitudes dominating their lives. It is to them , to those who follow Him, that He speaks. In our text Jesus speaks to two temptations that come to us all.The first is the temptation to worldliness, an outright, positive love for the world. The second temptation is an anxiety of spirit of anxious care with respect to the world. In verses 19 through 24 He deals with the temptation of love of the world and then in verses 25 to the end of the chapter He talks about anxiety with respect to the world. He treats both of these in terms of our relationship with God our Father.

He deals with the these temptations with a negative and a positive principle: "Don’t store up treasures for your self on earth…Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven" It is an exhortation with the reasons and explanation to follow. He makes it clear that should we come into His presence and receive a poor reward we will be without excuse. He has encouraged us to get our perspectives right and focus on the right things here.

We also need to recognize that, while we have focused on money to this point, that this issue is not really about money. Money makes it easy to get the focus on the right thing. Jesus is concerned about our attitude toward our possessions. The issue is not about what a man has, but what he thinks of his wealth or possessions; secondly, the issue is about our attitude toward life in this world. Jesus is dealing with people who get their main, or even their total satisfaction in this life from the things that belong to this world only. His warning goes to those who confine their ambition, interests and hopes to this life. And this affects poor people as well as people with means. We all have treasures of some sort. Our treasures may be our money, our jobs, our house, car, family, power or prestige or the status we hold in the community. Our problem comes when we live for that thing. It is then that the thing become our treasure. It has become the thing for which we are living that stops in this life and in this world. Jesus tells us to be wary lets these things become your treasure; avoid anything that centers on this world.

Why is this so? It is because our center has moved from pleasing God to the things that will one day cease to exist. We will have traded the eternal for the temporal. Do not think only of this world because when we do we always have an empty bag. The things of this world bring no ultimate, satisfaction. We always want more or something different when we have our focus on the worldly and not the eternal things of life.

There is a positive spin to Jesus’ exhortation in this passage: He tells us us to "…store up for ourselves treasures in heaven." We can send treasures on ahead of us and they will be a blessing there. If we have money we can use it in such a way that when we get to heaven the people who benefited from it will be there to receive us! It is there in heaven that we will receive the reward for our stewardship of our possessions, our gifts and talents.

If we are going to get this thing to work for us, it means that we have to have the right view of life and heaven. The life we have here is such a short thing. Before we know it we have used up sixty, seventy or eighty years. We are just pilgrims here. We are only passing through this life on the way to the next. We need to see ourselves as walking through this life under the eye of God. He sees us. He knows us. The Heroes of our Faith found in Hebrews 11 were people who lived as if they saw Him who is invisible; they saw themselves as strangers and pilgrims on earth, and they were making for a city which had its foundations, whose builder and maker was God. The disciple of Jesus is ultimately going somewhere else.

When we view our lives in this perspective then we can get the right view of our possessions. We have them for such a short time. God expects us to use them for His glory and the needs of His people to make the world a better place. When we see ourselves as stewards who are accountable for what we do with what we have been given we will not live for ourselves. The godly person knows that these things are not his. We only have them on loan. We cannot take them with us. Have you ever seen a U Haul truck following the hearse? Of course, not! We wonder how we can use these things for the glory of God.

It is God I have to face. It is God who is the eternal judge and Father. It is to Him that I will have to give an account of my stewardship of everything with which He has blessed me. I have been placed here with a purpose. It is not just for my self but for Christ and those whom He would have me bless. He has left me here with a purpose and with the privilege of living in this world as a caretaker of the treasures I possess. I do not cling to those things. They do not become the center of my life and existence. I do not live my life for them or dwell on them constantly. They do not absorb my life. I hold them loosely so that I am not governed by them. As I do, I am storing up treasures in heaven for myself.

However, the worldly person believes that he owns them all. He clings to them and they possess him eventually. And with it comes dissatisfaction, unhappiness and lack of true fulfillment.

Things never satisfy. There is always something wrong with them. They don’t last.

Jesus gives us the reasons why we should be sure that our treasures are in the right place. He says that here on earth there are three things that are wrong when we store them in the wrong place: First of all, there are moths that eat away at the things we store up. In the time of Jesus one of the great measures of wealth was to be found in fabrics. Beautiful fabrics were a measure of your wealth and what do moths do…they eat cloth! Those were the days before mothballs!

And then there was the problem of rust. We live in a corrosive environment where there are natural, chemical attacks on the things we try to keep. Decay is a natural part of the process of the world in which we live. Look around you and watch it happen. Why do you suppose that we have just two seasons here in the Chicagoland area? We have winter and construction! Why? Because of the natural processes of decay. It is that decay that Jesus identifies with the word rust.

And of course there is the third reason why we shouldn’t store up treasure on earth…thieves who will break in and steal. They are always working on ways to take what you have. I heard this past week of some people who were recently taken in by thieves who tricked them into investing millions of dollars in a get rich quick scheme. One man alone lost 1.8 million dollars in the scheme. And it happens all the time because of greed. People try to amass a treasure here on earth and discover that there is always someone who will try to steal it from them. And we cannot prevent them from stealing.

There are also other kinds of thieves in this world: illness steals away our health and vitality, war is always stealing from us, and death itself to mention only a few.

Store up your treasures in heaven where there are no thieves; they don’t get in; nor moths or rust and decay to deal with. Your treasures will be safe there. Heavenly things are imperishable and secure. God is the guardian watching over them.

It is at this point that Jesus gives us the second argument for his exhortation. He says "where your treasure is there will your heart be also." The world pulls us from God toward the possession of things. Why is the heart important? It is because these things are spiritual in nature. They grip and master our feelings and we love them. They grip our hearts and our minds and our wills. How we look at things will ultimately determine our relationship with God.

We are faced with a choice. It works like this: Both God and Mammon demand our entire devotion. They both make totalitarian demands on us and we cannot serve both! It becomes an either or proposition. Compromise is utterly impossible. If a materialistic outlook controls us we are godless. Whatever else we may say to the contrary, we are godless. Why? Because material things control our life. When our lives are controlled by worldly, materialistic things we make bad choices. For example,

A farmer’s best cow had given birth to twin calves. One was red and the other one was white. He told his wife that he had a feeling that they should dedicate one of the calves to the Lord and that when it came time to sell them they would keep the money from the sale and give the money to the Lord. The man’s wife asked him which calf he was going to dedicate to the Lord. He responded, "there is no need to decide that now. We will treat them both alike and when the time comes we will do as I say. And off he went about his chores.

Several months passed and one day the man came into the kitchen depressed and very unhappy. When his wife asked him what was wrong, he answered, " I have some real bad news for you. The Lord’s calf is dead!" "But I thought you had not decided which one belonged to the Lord?" He said, "I had always decided that the white one was to be the Lord’s calf and the white one died. The Lord’s calf is dead!"

It is interesting that the Lord’s calf is the one that always dies when we view our life from the perspective of the world. When we have fallen into the temptations of the world and the cares and anxieties that come with life in it. These things tend to come between us and God.

Jesus put it this way…"You cannot serve God and Mammon." We cannot serve two masters.

If our life is under the control of God, we will have the right perspective on material things and we will choose to store our treasures in heaven where they will last.

Storing treasures is an OK choice we make.

Where we store them is up to us…but the location will have some consequences for us.

The choice is ours.

Will we choose wisely?

---Dennis Gleason