Mountainview International Church

This week my eye was caught by an article about the happiest place on the earth.

Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, has been voted the happiest place in the world! Many of the inhabitants have no electricity, no running water, no radio or television, and their only mode of transport are rowing boats. They have little money and few opportunities to make any. But here's the thing, they are really happy! Their happiness has been attributed to two factors common with the inhabitants of Vanuatu; strong family ties and a general absence of materialism. The article ended with this telling comment: “The simple things in life, it seems, really do make you happy!”

Just to recap. For the past few weeks we have been looking at the Sermon on the Mount found in Matthew chapter’s 5 to 7. Jesus’ teaching on the mountainside takes a central place in Scripture. Augustine of Hippo noted that within the Sermon on the Mount lies all the teaching we need to live the Christian Life. Indeed, if we were only allowed to keep 3 chapters of the bible then these would be the chapters that we would keep.

More recently we have been looking at the part of the sermon where Jesus focuses in on what was considered by the Jews to be the heart of faith and practice namely; giving to the poor, prayer and fasting. Because the Jewish “Big 3” were considered to be signs of great devotion, their public expression had become hugely important. Their practice had become somewhat like a Christmas-light competition, with everyone determined to out do one another and put on the best show in town. Jesus says to his listeners. Jesus says to us! “Turn off the show! Make sure that your giving, your prayer and your fasting are done for the benefit of God - not for the sake of those around you!”

Jesus now takes the sermon into an area that has dominated the lives of people since the beginning of time. It dominated the lives of the rich and poor in Jesus day and it dominates our lives today. It is the subject of money and the financial concerns that lie at the heart of everyone seated here this morning. Jesus’ challenge is that our heartbeat not be money, but God and life itself!

Matthew 6: 19-24

Do not 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 moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not 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 eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.

Here are some challenges from the passage.

1. Set Your Heart on God

Did you know that storing up treasure can be harmful to your health? That’s what a 62 year old man in France discovered in 2002. He suffered from a rare psychological disorder called “pica” where one has a compulsion to eat things not normally consumed as food. (It is rated among the top 10 most bizarre psychological disorders in the world). The man died after complications that arose following surgery to remove a 12 lb. mass from his stomach comprised of coins, necklaces and needles. He had swallowed approximately 350 coins. That’s a picture of his x-ray!

We can laugh, but Jesus is reminding us in our text today that most of us have a serious, life-threatening compulsion to store up earthy treasures; material treasures that as Jesus points out, do not last. Do you remember, from a few weeks back, the lesson we learn from the game of Monopoly? At the end of the game it all goes back in the box!

One of the difficulties that we have with understanding Jesus’ call to store up for ourselves treasures in heaven is that Christian tradition has tended to view heaven as pretty much a future reality. We have developed the idea that Jesus is saying we need to resist every temptation to store up our consumer goods and guitars and Star Wars memorabilia so that when at last we make it to heaven our piece of heavenly real estate will be the envy of all our friends.

However, it’s important we understand than in the Hebrew mindset heaven was not some future state of bliss, but the present place of God’s dwelling. His Jewish audience would have grasped that Jesus was not asking them to delay gratification until heaven, but to live in such a way that they welcomed the Kingdom of God into their lives and experienced the blessings of God in the here and now.

Gerard writes:

This is not a choice between live now and live later, so much as an invitation to live differently. Our treasure in heaven can be accessed now, because heaven, in Christ, is made accessible…a heavenly life lived on earth now. It is a richly imaginative life, a life in which the spark of our humanity meets the oil of God’s spirit to bring warmth and light to the world.

I came across a Celtic Prayer that echoed the same sentiments about welcoming the purposes of God into our lives and experiencing his blessings right now – particularly the huge blessing of being more aware of God’s presence in your life

O thou who are wisdom and pity both, set me free from the Lordship of desire. Help me to find happiness in my acceptance of my purpose: in friendly eyes, in work well done, in quietness born of trust and most of all, in the awareness of your presence in my spirit.

I have recently started reading Isaiah in my devotions. In Chapter 5:8 God laments the way that people add house to house and field to field until there is no space left to live and they are all alone in the land. God is not lamenting their loss of treasure in the next life, he is upset because of the way that materialism, present tense, boxed the people in and stifled their ability to really live. He’s upset because materialism had left them alone, isolated from God and from one another.

Please don’t hear me wrong. I am not saying that materialism is not the greatest challenge to our love for God, because it is. But, I just want to make it clear that God is not just concerned that we will have enough rewards when we get to heaven. He’s just as concerned, maybe even more concerned, we will miss out on the life that he is offering us right now. I think that just maybe we will have a greater success in mastering materialism if we understand that one of the reasons it upsets God is that it robs us of the life God wants us to experience right now.

Our hearts set the direction of our lives. In this first section Jesus is calling us to set our hearts in a direction that leads towards God and his blessings – both now and forever. And to face our greatest challenge, our tendency to set our hearts on material things.

Over the past few months I have had the joy of getting to know Jason and Becca Risley and their daughter Katie. I’ve discovered that God has given Jason a big passion when it comes to setting right priorities with finances and I have asked him to come and take a few minutes to share some of that passion with us.

[Jason - share]

2. Set Your Sights on God

The next section about the eye being the lamp of the body is at first glance a little harder to get our minds around. Indeed, if you read commentaries on this section, they give a variety of interpretations.

We spoke in the last section of how the heart sets the direction of our lives. I think it can be safely said that the heart more often than not follows the eyes. What we see is what we want!

An American sociologist Juliet Schor demonstrated that there was a statistically provable link between what we see and what we want. She discovered that for every hour of television viewed per week consumption was raised by an additional $208 per year. TV inflated our sense of what is normal.

Throughout the bible there is a strong correlation between what we see and what we want. All the way back, at the beginning of time, we read this about Eve:

The woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, [so] she took some and ate it. (Genesis 3:6)

So the women don’t feel that we are giving them a hard time, here’s one for the men!

One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and [so] David sent someone to find out about her. (2 Samuel 11:2-3)

Seeing led to desiring which led to sinning!

I am reading a book by Dallas Willard on Spiritual formation he reminds his readers how ideas and images can be a stronghold of Satan that lead us away from God. He writes:

Ideas and images are the primary focus of Satan’s efforts to defeat God’s purposes with and for humankind.

False images about God, ourselves and reality can be used by evil, as Jesus points out in our text, to bring a great darkness to our lives.

On the other hand eyes he reminds us that when we feast on Godly images and allow them to take root they will lead to lives that are full of light and life.

Think about the way that Jesus so powerfully used images in the parables to convey profound truths. If you were here a few weeks ago you will remember that Gerard Kelly showed a picture of the prodigal daughter. Well of all things someone gave me a card of the same image. I have stuck it above my computer, not just because I am already terrified that Jordan is well on the way to becoming a prodigal daughter, but because when I look at it feeds my soul with an image of God that is so incredibly loving and accepting and forgiving.

Dallas Willard writes in the same section of his book:

The process of spiritual formation in Christ is one of progressively replacing destructive ideas and images with the images and ideas of Jesus himself.

Several of us know Danny Wickham. He is the son of missionaries to Spain (his parents have been serving God in Spain for over half a century). Danny has lived in Spain for over 50 years. For many years he worked for the British Embassy, but when they started laying off their older and more costly staff he decided it was time to take early retirement. Danny spent months asking God how he is to spend the rest of his days. He believes that God has given him a vision to provide resources for the extension of God’s Kingdom in Spain. In a real way God has lit up his life with new and driving image of how he can make a difference for God in Spain. We were hoping that Danny would come and share about his ministry, but he needed to go and be with his Mum in Valencia who is having open heart surgery. However, with the help of our interns Nicole and Kate we were able to catch up with him this week and interview him.

1. Set your heart on God
2. Set your sights on God

Finally,

3. Set your heart on God, for safeties sake

Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount:

No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

Once while lecturing in Utah, Mark Twain got into an argument with a Mormon on the subject of polygamy. The Mormon confidently asked Twain, "Can you find a single passage of Scripture that forbids polygamy?" "Certainly," Twain replied. "No man can serve two masters."

It would not be out of line at this point, especially in light of the challenges offered by the likes of Jason and Danny, to challenge you to press into God and fill up the church coffers in the process. But in keeping with the grace that I believe comes through in Jesus’ challenges to us concerning wealth I offer one more thought on the grace I believe that Christ is offering to all of us.

The word translated by “masters” refers to a slave owner with absolute control over his slaves. So when Jesus referred to a master, He was referring to the one who holds absolute authority over our lives.

You see the major problem with wealth is not owning it, but that it all too quickly starts to own us. We become its slave and it robs us of the life that God wants to give us. Unless we set the direction of our heart and eyes towards God in heaven we will become Mammon’s slaves. Materialism is a slave owner that will challenge the place of God in your life, again and again!

It’s not a question of “if” we will serve, for we will all serve something or somebody. Jesus is calling us away from serving the spiritual power behind materialism that is hell-bent on our destruction, to serve God, a master no less, that is heaven-bent on blessing us.

Our text this morning could be viewed as a freedom speech like the one William Wallace gave to the Scotts before they went into battle against the Scots. It’s a great cry offering us “freedom” from our slavery to materialism

When Jesus calls us to hold lightly onto our wealth and cling strongly to God, with grace he is offering us the chance to really live, both now and forevermore.

(Pray and intro worship team)