Sermon Tone Analysis

Announcements

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There is a board meeting on Wednesday at 6:30pm.

Please pray for wisdom and direction as we meet to discuss church business.

Introduction

Thank you for that wonderful message of music and for you faithfulness week after week in bringing us before the Lord.

Good morning and welcome to FCC, where we worship God in Spirit and in Truth, one verse at a time.

I wanted to pause for a moment to say thank you for your prayers!

The Lord has made a way to allow my brother to come home.

He changed the hearts of all parties and a compassion-release was granted.

His wife will be picking him up on Tuesday and bringing him home in the care of Hospice.

Praise God, that he will be able to pass-away at home surrounded by family, friends, and Jett his beloved dog.

Share about Melanie and the number 13.

God is good and He hears the cry’s of our hearts!

We have come as far as Matthew 6:19, so let us open our Bible’s there:

Read Matthew 6:19-23

Prayer

Lord Heavenly Father, we thank you for hearing the cry’s of our hearts and for you allowing us to gather to worship in Spirit and in Truth.

We ask today, that you would be present, that you would fill us with a double portion of your Holy Spirit and that you would do a work in our hearts.

Father our desire is to not be hearers of the Word, but to be doers of the Word, so open wide our ears and may the teaching today turn into shoe leather and action.

May we receive joyfully the encouragement, admonition, and conviction that you will give.

In Jesus Name, We Love You! Amen

Review

Looking back over the past few weeks, we have learned about the spiritual disciplines of giving, prayer, and fasting.

And that when we do these in secret, that the Father will reward us openly.

However, we also learned that we are not to do these to be seen by men, like the Scribes and the Pharisees of the day for the have their reward and its earthly.

Church, even though this was a simple teaching, it is one that is difficult to do.

Here in Matthew, the Lord says when he sees us in secret, he will reward us openly 3xs.

Not once, not twice, but three times he repeats this phrase.

Then why don’t we do it more?

Why do we struggle to give, to pray, and to fast?

Do we have wrong priorities?

Spiritual disciplines

No spiritual discipline is more important than the intake of God’s Word.

Donald S. Whitney

Spiritual growth is not automatic.

It requires cooperation with God and the application of spiritual diligence and discipline.

Warren W. Wiersbe

The man who disciplines himself stands out and has the mark of greatness upon him.

David Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Church, it all comes down to our priorities, because we will always make time for those things that matter most to us.

Martyn LloydJones tells the story of a farmer.

The farmer bounded joyfully into his kitchen one day and confronting his wife with a great big grin on his face he announced to her that their finest cow had just given birth to twins, one brown and one white.

He said, I feel the impulse to dedicate one of these cows to the Lord, we'll bring them up together and when they are at a marketable age we'll sell them and we'll keep the proceeds from one and we'll give the proceeds from the other to the Lord.

His wife went right to the issue as wives are prone to do and said, which is the Lord's cow?

The white one or the brown one?

He replied, well there's no need to worry about that dear, or to decide that now since we'll raise them together.

Some months later he entered the same kitchen a little more slowly, looking very sad.

His wife asked why he was so sullen, to which he replied, I have bad news, the Lord's cow died.

Why is it always the Lord's cow, that dies?

I guess we laugh at that because we identify with that kind of approach.

We could even say, the Lord took His cow home.

I guess the fact is we all tend to lay up treasure on earth.

The pull of the sin that is in us drags us down to the earth, it is like a magnet, it is like a gravity, and we want to be rich towards self and poor toward God.

So it's usually God's cow that dies.

Jesus I believe speaks directly to this perspective on life in these verses, and I think He gives us a tremendous insight into ahow we are to really see the matter of wealth, the matter of money, the matter of luxuries.

Here, Jesus shifts gears and begins addressing an issue that was prevalent in His day.

He was surrounded by many who sought worldly gain.

They were often preoccupied with acquiring material wealth and possessions.

We too live in a culture that is consumed with possessions, wealth, or materialism if you may.

In fact, most are judged more by what they have accumulated than the character they possess.

It seems as if we can never get enough.

There is always something new, bigger, or better being released and we can never be satisfied.

Now as we begin our study this morning, let me say that having possessions in this life is not a sin.

The issue Jesus is addressing is not have possessions, but you possessions or treasures having you!

There is nothing wrong with working hard and achieving success.

The problem begins when we allow the love for our possessions and the desire to accumulate more and more dictate our lives, like the rich man who built bigger barns to store more...

That is the focus of the passage we have read.

Jesus deals with how we are to view and relate to that which we have.

Jesus switches gears on us and gives us an imperative in the Greek.

Does anyone remember what a imperative is?

It is a command, it is a responsibility that God has laid at our feet, because he will not force his way into anyone’s life.

So what is Jesus teaching here about treasures?

The word treasures is used 3xs in three verses, so that tells us right away that treasure is a focus of this text.

But what does Jesus mean by laying up?

Lay up-thēsaurizō-(thay-sow-rid'-zo)v.

— to store away (valuables) for future use, to heap up, to accumulate riches..

What treasure is Jesus talking of here?

Treasures-thēsauros-(thay-sow-ros')n.

— accumulated wealth in the form of money, jewels, or other valuables, the place in which good and precious things are collected and laid up, a store house, a treasure chest.

Layup (thēsaurizō) and treasures (thēsauros) come from the same basic Greek term, which is also the source of our English thesaurus, a treasury of words.

A literal translation of this phrase would therefore be, “do not treasure up treasures for yourselves.”

The Greek also carries the connotation of stacking or laying out horizontally, as one stacks coins.

In the context of this passage the idea is that of stockpiling or hoarding, and therefore pictures wealth that is not being used.

The money or other wealth is simply stored for safekeeping; it is kept for the keeping’s sake to make a show of wealth or to create an environment of lazy overindulgence.

Is Jesus teaching us that we cannot save?

NO

But he is admonishing us to beware where we are storing!!!

Let’s take a closer look at the text:

Jesus teaches us that there are two places that people store:

On Earth

And In Heaven church!

Jesus simply says, listen, don’t store you treasures on earth!

That’s simple right?

Not!!!

Many of us, if not all of us have more than we need!

We are more wealthy, than the rest of the world and yet, we keep building bigger barns to have more stuff, more treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy, and thieves break in and steal.

Covetousness-pleonexia- greediness n. — the excessive and immoderate desire of acquiring more and more (wealth), greedy desire to have more.

Coveting impacts the rich and poor alike.

The more of heaven there is in our lives, the less of earth we shall covet.