Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church |
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Investing For the Future Matthew 6:19-21 by Sheri Blackmon 4-9-2000 You may have heard the story of the man who dies and goes to heaven. As an angel first shows him around, they go through the really nice neighborhoods up in the hills with the big, beautiful mansions. As they gradually walk downhill, the homes become more modest. Everything is beautiful, though, no slums, trash, or graffiti, just nicely landscaped and well-maintained homes. Finally they come to the home prepared for the man. It’s a beautiful, charming and cozy cottage with a lush garden. After inspecting it, however, the man says to the angel, "This is nice, but let me ask you one question. Why didn’t I get a mansion like the ones on the hill?" The angel answers, "This is the best we could do with the materials you sent up to us." It is easy for us to be too distracted to think much about heaven. This is true in hard times and prosperous times. We are currently living in prosperous times. Prosperity brings with it a spiritual challenge: the temptation to narrow our focus on this world. We can become so focused on the Nasdaq, our portfolios, accumulation and insuring ourselves against potential loss or on our many responsibilities and commitments, that we lose sight of the bigger picture as seen from God’s perspective of eternity. A spiritual apathy can set in when we no longer find ourselves really needing God, because we’ve got all the bases covered ourselves. If you look around you today you will see many people too distracted with life to think about eternity as reflected in today’s drama. Today we need the reminder from God’s Word to concentrate on the things which will last, the things of God’s kingdom, not the things that are fleeting which consume so much of our attention. (Read passage) To understand the message of this text it helps to know a little bit about its setting. Jesus uses three pictures from three great sources of wealth in Palestine. In the east, part of a person’s wealth often consisted in fine and elaborate clothes. This is what moth can destroy. Another sign of wealth consisted of the corn and grain stored away in great barns. The word translated "rust" literally means "eating away." This refers to the worms, rats and mice which could come in and eat away at the grain. A third source of wealth was homes in which treasures could be hidden. Houses were made of baked clay, and burglars could enter by literally digging through the wall while the owner was away. Grammatically and structurally this is a simple passage. Notice the contrasts: do not store up vs. store up; earth vs. heaven; corruptible vs. incorruptible investments. But when we look deeper at the passage, we find a rich message not just about monetary treasure but about all passions that consume us. Moth, eating away and thieves do not mean the perishability of riches only, but the fragility and vanity of human appreciation. "The context of this passage is the quest for esteem. And while it is certainly true that one main way we seek esteem is by money, the financial quest is by no means the only form of human treasure-seeking. We want money because we want the esteem it wins. At root is our addiction to human approval" (D. Bruner) offered by status symbols. Today’s status symbols might be different, but the message is still the same: don’t invest yourself in possessions and pleasures, which do not have any lasting value. Beware of greed, pride and vanity, which can become a trap for you. Here are some self-reflection questions, first related to money: Do you begin the day and the lunch break by checking your stocks and you’re not a stock broker? Do you have a tendency to buy only the best things? Do you go to the department store ads in the paper before your devotions? Do you regularly click on the Home Shopping Network? Is your consumer credit debt beginning to choke you? Do you believe that sometime in the future you will commit more of your money to God? If you answered "yes" to some of these questions, you may have a problem here. Now for questions related to image and vanity I will use John Ortberg’s vanity checklist:
Don’t misunderstand the passage. Jesus is not interested in extinguishing our passions, drives and ambitions, but in directing them toward a better end. This is the beauty of Jesus’ message to us. Notice that he does not say "stop storing up." Rather than uproot all human ambition and passion as the Buddha had taught, Jesus counsels us to make it our ambition to be a success before God, to impress Him and to accumulate the rewards of God’s approval and esteem. (As an aside, please note that these words are directed at believers who have found salvation through grace by faith. This is not about earning salvation by being good; that’s impossible to do. Instead, Jesus’ words have to do with sanctification, which means how we live our lives after we have been saved.) Jesus offers liberating news. Many world religions aim to move people beyond desire to an elevated state characterized by a lack of need or feeling, but Christianity aims to elevate our ambitions. C.S. Lewis says: "The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." (The Weight of Glory, 2) Jesus is not a killjoy who wants to deprive us. Jesus loves us and wants us to avoid the anxiety and despair that come from pursuing something that does not last. Doing well—financially, professionally, socially, personally—doesn’t last, and Jesus does not want his disciples to be disappointed. "Life lived for human impression is life misspent, and Jesus would liberate us from misspent life" (Bruner). Jesus calls us to be passionate, acquisitive, enterprising, and zealous—for the treasure of the Father’s approval, for the "well done" of God’s final judgment. Thus, Jesus’ ethic is a "vigorous athleticism" (p. 260). During the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln often found refuge at a Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. He would go with an aide, sit with his stovepipe hat in his lap, and never interrupt the meeting because the congregation would all be in a dither if they knew the president had come. He sat off to the side, near the pastor’s study, as the minister would lead in worship. The war was tearing the nation apart and tearing his soul. Having just lost his own son, Lincoln was on the bottom, and he needed solace and sustenance. As the pastor finished his message and the people began to leave, the president stood quietly, straightened his coat, took his hat and began to leave. The aide stopped him and said, "What did you think of the sermon, Mr. President?" He said, "I thought the sermon was carefully thought through, eloquently delivered." The aide said, "You thought it was a great sermon?" He said, "No, I thought he failed." "He failed? Well, how? Why?" "Because he did not ask of us something great." Jesus asks of us something great: to have no other goals before him, and he does it for a great reason. The Bible says there will be two judgments: the great white throne judgment seat to separate believers in Christ from unbelievers and the judgment seat of Christ for the purpose of evaluating the believer’s life and dispensing rewards. Here Christ will determine the value of our work. We won’t be evaluated by another’s standard but by what we did with the gifts entrusted to us. What is useless will be burned up, but what is not will remain. There will be rewards in heaven, the greatest of which is the approval from God. C. S. Lewis writes: "In the end that Face which is the delight or the terror of the universe must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or with the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised." We talk so much today about the importance of how we think of God. But how God thinks of us is infinitely more important! It is written that we will stand before him, will appear and be inspected. Some of us will actually survive that examination, find approval and please God. God will convey upon us a glory like the glory so obvious in a child who has done something to please a parent. "To please God . . . to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness . . . to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is." (Lewis 10) Whether our life is misspent or well spent will come to light in the future kingdom of heaven. The measuring stick will be how we did in this business of storing up treasures in heaven. Here is the paradox of Jesus’ teaching: storing up in heaven is done through giving away on earth. As Christ gave himself for others, so we are to use what God has entrusted to us in the service of others for the sake of the kingdom of God. At this point you might be raising an objection: "I already feel squeezed by so many demands; how can I possibly include heavenly goals when I can’t even meet my earthly ones?" Jesus says to us: "Make sure your heart is attached to the right ambitions, because where your heart is there your treasure will be also." The heart is the total person, the control center, the place of allegiance. If our hearts are in our materialistic ambitions, the building of our image, or the gaining of approval from people around us, we won’t really succeed in this matter of storing up treasures in heaven. Our hearts must be attached to pleasing God and loving people as God loves them. The fact is that we cannot love people as God loves them without God’s Spirit dwelling in us. When God’s love for humanity fills our hearts, then we are up to the task. And we can adjust our priorities on earth to lay up treasures in heaven. It’s not hard to determine how well we have heard Jesus’ message. Just look at your use of time. We have 168 hours in a given week. How much time is spent in Christian service, evangelism, spiritual training? What about money: what percentage was spent on the kingdom this past year? What about conversations: how much of what we say is geared to make a good impression, put ourselves forward or to get attention? I don’t ask these questions to make us feel guilty or puff us up with pride, but to say that storing up treasures in heaven is not a vague, otherworldly pursuit, but a tangible one with practical implications here and now. A realistic picture of where we are can be a good starting point toward making real progress in the future kingdom. What it all boils down to is that the most important thing we can do here on earth is to invest ourselves in people, because this is the only lasting investment and people matter a great deal to God. A minister in a hospital reports: I have spent long hours in the intensive-care waiting room. . . watching with anguished people . . listening to urgent questions: Will my husband make it? Will my child walk again? How do you live without your companion of thirty years? The intensive-care waiting room is different from any other place in the world. And the people who wait are different. They can’t do enough for each other. No one is rude. The distinctions of race and class melt away. A person is a father first, a black man second. The garbage man loves his wife as much as the university president loves his, and everyone understands this. Each person pulls for everyone else. In the intensive-care waiting room, the world changes. Vanity and pretense vanish. The universe is focused on the doctor’s next report. If only it will show improvement. Everyone knows that loving someone else is what life is all about. (Wes Seelinger, One Church from the Fence). The kingdom of heaven is like the IC waiting room. It is manifested today in the church of Jesus Christ and will be ultimately realized in heaven. As the drama reminded us this morning, in the kingdom Jesus cares about those in pain, those who mourn, those who are distracted by life’s cares, the greedy, and even the back-stabbers, and he wants us to care too. He wants us to go after them with God’s love and message of reconciliation through Christ. We are to spend our time, money, and talents to minister to people in such a way as to—by God’s grace—bring them into God’s kingdom. What materials are you sending up to build your heavenly home? Where are you laying up your treasures? |
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