Walking With God – As You Live In This World          

Matthew 6:19-24

Sermon by Pastor Dennis Gleason -- November 26, 2006

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.

As we begin our consideration of this section of Matthew 6, we need to remember that God’s eye is always on us. He knows us and sees us better than we do ourselves. He has determined to leave us in this world; even as he has challenged us with the charge not to be of this world. He makes it clear that we are merely pilgrims, sojourners who are passing through on our way to a better place.

There are a number of things we do in secret: We pray, do good deeds and give our money in secret. But we have to live our lives openly in this world.

So we must live out our lives for Christ in this world. And as Christians, we live our lives out in a special relationship with God, as our heavenly Father. At the same time, we are involved in the affairs of this world to some degree. We cannot avoid it. As we are involved in the affairs of the world, we will feel the cares, strains and stresses of life here.

God makes it clear in his Word that our problem in this world is that we have to contend with the world, the flesh and the devil.

The admonition that Jesus gives us in verse 19 is this: “Don’t be storing up treasures here on earth…” That literally means…”stop doing this.”

The implication here is that if this is how you are living your life…stop it.

If you are not living that way…don’t start doing it.

And if you have overcome the temptation to live that way…go on refusing to store up treasures here on earth.

I think there are times when we don’t understand what we are doing, or what the treasure really is that we have.

A story is told of a man who loved old books. He met an acquaintance who had just thrown away a Bible that had been stored in the attic of his ancestral home for generations. "I couldn't read it," the friend explained. "Somebody named Guten-something had printed it." "Not Gutenberg!" the book lover exclaimed in horror. "That Bible was one of the first books ever printed. Why, a copy just sold for over two million dollars!" His friend was unimpressed. "Mine wouldn't have brought a dollar. Some fellow named Martin Luther had scribbled all over it in German." 

Our Daily Bread, June 7, 1994.

Unless you subscribe to The Atlanta Journal Constitution, you probably missed the story that was in the May 17, 1987 edition.

A rock hound named Rob Cutshaw owns a little roadside shop outside Andrews, North Carolina. Like many in the trade, he hunts for rocks, then sells them to collectors or jewelry makers. He knows enough about rocks to decide which to pick up and sell, but he's no expert. He leaves the appraising of his rocks to other people. As much as he enjoys the work, it doesn't always pay the bills. He occasionally moonlights, cutting wood to help put bread on the table.

While on a dig twenty years ago, Rob found a rock he described as "purdy and big." He tried unsuccessfully to sell the specimen, and according to the Constitution, kept the rock under his bed or in his closet. He guessed the blue chunk could bring as much as $500 dollars, but he would have taken less if something urgent came up like paying his power bill. That's how close Rob came to hawking for a few hundred dollars what turned out to be the largest, most valuable sapphire ever found. The blue rock that Rob had abandoned to the darkness of a closet two decades ago -- now known as "The Star of David" sapphire -- weighs nearly a pound, and could easily sell for $2.75 million. 

John MacArthur, Grace to You Newsletter, April 15, 1993.

Sometimes we misunderstand the real value of things. And one of the reasons for that is we get wrong messages about the true value of things from the world we live in.

What then is the world as Jesus sees it here?

The “world” is an outlook, a mentality, a way of looking at things that essentially excludes God from anything that is important. The world is a system of life in which man elevates himself to the position of God over his own life and everything that exists. That is the world system in which we live.

And in that world view, it is not an easy thing to be a Christian.  If we buy into that world view, we will fins ourselves at odds with God. On the other hand, if we reject that world and this system of life, the world system will work to destroy us. In this we find ourselves in the same position in which Jesus found himself. The world hated him and it will hate us too.

Jesus indicates that this conflict with the world will generally take two main forms:

The first thing that may challenge us is that we may develop a love for the world. What we treasure determines our heart attitude.

The second thing we have to deal with is that we may become anxious or worried in respect to the things of the world. Either one of these is dangerous to us.

The way Jesus deals with the problem is to deal with it in terms of principles related to our relationship to our Heavenly Father. We cannot reduce his teaching to a number of rules and regulations. But the principles Jesus refers to here will help us in our relationship with God our Heavenly Father.

Some people are so concerned about the cares and affairs of this life that they opt out of it and shut themselves up in monasteries and become monks or they live as hermits cut off from the world around them. This is not God’s way for us. God’s way for us is to show us how to overcome the world while living in the midst of it.

So it is that Jesus gives us a great principle and then shows us how to carry out his injunction. And it has a positive and a negative aspect to it. What is interesting is that the Lord puts the truth in such a manner that we have no excuse.

First of all the negative:  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.

Our interpretation here must avoid the idea that Jesus is only talking about money here. This is not merely a statement made to rich people. It is addressed to them but also to everyone else. Jesus in not even merely addressing the issue of our possessions. What he is addressing here is our attitude toward our possessions. It is not what a man may have, but what he thinks of what he has, that is his attitude toward it that is the issue here.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having wealth. What can be wrong is a man’s relationship to his wealth. This is a good indication that Jesus’ teaching here actually deals with a person’s attitude towards life in this world. Jesus is speaking to those people who get their primary or total satisfaction in this life from the things that belong to this world only. This warning then is for those people who confine their ambition, interests and hopes to this life only.

Therefore, it is a much bigger issue than mere money. Your treasure might be your job. It could be your wife and children or your house. For some people it is the house in the woods or the necessity they feel to go away every weekend.

No matter how large or small it is, if it means  everything to you and it is the thing you are living for, that is your treasure. Your heart will always follow after what you treasure.

So what Jesus means by “treasures on earth” could be an endless list of things: It is not only love of money, love of family, love of honor, love of position or status, or love of one’s work. Our treasure could be anything that stops with this life and this world. Be careful that what you treasure doe not end here with this life and this world.

How do we store up treasure on earth? If we are living to hoard and amass wealth; that could be what Jesus means by storing up treasure here on earth. The exhortation Jesus gives us here means that we should avoid anything that centers on only this world. And it is all inclusive. So there may be those who are not interested in money, but who are interested in other things which are entirely worldly.

There are people who will never be tempted by money. But they can be tempted by status or position or any number of other things. Whatever the form it might take; the principle is what matters here.

Earlier, I mentioned that there is a negative and a positive aspect to the injunction by Jesus. What is the positive side of this issue?

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.

Jesus cannot be talking about man achieving his own salvation here. That would negate completely the truth of justification by faith and faith alone. It is the person who is poor in spirit, who has nothing, who is blessed. It is the one who mourns because of his selfishness who knows that he can never achieve his own salvation. That is who is in view here.

In the process of doing your alms and your good deeds in secret, you will be building up your balance in heaven, where one day you will receive your reward and enter into the Joy of the Lord. As you live your life in this world, use what you have in such a way that you are building up a balance of blessing for the next.

How do we put this into practice?

First of all, we have to have the right view of life and also the right view of glory. Remember, we are pilgrims. We are passing through this world. This world, and this life are not all there is. And we have to live in such a way that we recognize this truth.

Go to Hebrews 11 and you will find what we call the heroes of the faith. These people had one thing in common: The lived “as seeing Him who is invisible”. Their focus was on God and the Kingdom to come.

God called out to Abraham to follow Him and Abraham responded and left Haran and followed God. His life was a life of faith. What was it the led Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, his son of promise? He desired a better country and chose the heavenly over the earthly. God turned to a man called Moses and called him out to leave everything, be a shepherd for 40 years and Moses obeyed God. He was willing to leave the great privileges of Egypt for something better that would last forever.

When we have a right view of everything we are and have, we will see ourselves as stewards who must give an account of those things to God. We are not permanent holders of these things we could treasure.

The worldly man believes that he owns these things. The Christian, who has his treasure in the right place, understands that he is but a custodian of whatever he has. He understands that he will one day meet God fact to face. How we use what we have been given for the Glory of God will be one of the issues we will be accountable for.

So we must be careful how we use the things we have been given and be careful of our attitude towards them.

These things must not become the center of our life or our existence. We do not live for them. They do not absorb our lives. Hold them loosely. Govern them and don’t be governed by them.

As we live this way, with the right attitude toward those things which we possess, we will steadily be laying up for ourselves treasure in heaven.

--Dennis Gleason