A Greater Righteousness (20)

Greeting

Announce text: Matthew 6:19-21

Key Text: Matthew 6:19-21

Introduction (ME/WE)

Introduction — The Closet in the Trailer

It was shocking. It was horrific. It was creepy in a way that gets under your skin and stays there. What Carly & I were facing was traumatic, and we felt immobilized by what we were witnessing. It was chaotic, depressing, and shook our sense of safety—security. We didn’t know what to do.

How did we get here?

I was engaged to be married, and I needed to find a place for my soon-to-be bride and me to live. I was a Senior Airman. If you have never seen an Airman's housing allowance, let me just say it does not open a lot of doors. The waiting list for base housing was long. And I found a trailer in South Carolina for three hundred dollars a month.

Now, three hundred dollars a month buys you all the local charm of southern living—let me tell you.

It came with amenities. There was a radio built into the wall of the bathroom — and the toilet paper holder was built into the radio. One unit. Red-neck engineering at it’s finest. Why wouldn’t the radio have been placed in the shower? That seems more logical. I guess, you could plan on camping out there for awhile (easy, ladies … easy). Not miss an inning of the game, or maybe you needed classical or something soothing to help you take care of business, I don’t know, but that was a stellar feature.

One day, on a whim, I grabbed the cable that protruding through the floor and connected it to our 19-inch tube TV (teens don’t have a clue), hoping it might improve reception, at least. Boy, did it ever! I discovered I was getting cable TV for free! Toni, would you believe it? I turned to WGN, and the Cubs were playing the Reds! I’m not kidding! My friend, Mike, ripped the remote from my unbelieving—yet excited hands—and started machine-gunning through the stations at warp speed—like the pig from Toy Story—and settled on the station he was looking for. WHAAAAAT? You got the sin channel! HBO. He told everyone at church—”Cossins has got the sin channel at his house!”

I couldn’t get rid of him after that—I finally had to kick him out after Carly was there for a week. haha … jk

However, probably the best amenity of all—and the one that Carly appreciated most—was how close it brought us to nature.

Reeeeeeal close. Personal encounters. We had cockroaches down there that Montana cowboys could have thrown a saddle on and ridden around the trailer. On more than one occasion, in the middle of the night something moved under the floorboards or inside the walls, and I would get up in my boxers and my combat boots and stomp around that trailer trying to scare it back out into the yard — which, as a strategy, worked about as well as you would expect.

So that was the house. And I need you to understand something, because if you only hear the funny parts you will miss the point. We were not miserable in that trailer. We were young, we were in love, and it was ours. We had made it a home. We had put our things in it — some of the few good things we owned hung up in a closet with a door on it.

A door feels like protection. Walls feel like protection. We had done what you are supposed to do. We found a place, we put our life inside of it, and we thought we were fine.

And then one Sunday morning I reached into the closet for my favorite shirt. Now, try to imagine this ... As I grabbed the shirt and hanger, something bit me. A stinging fire on one of my fingers. Then something else bit me. Then a dozen somethings.

I yanked my hand back, and the closet was moving. Fire ants! Not a few. A multitude of them, pouring up through the floor and through our clothes, and they were still working.

There is no real dignified way to react to that. I yelled and Carly rushed over to see what was the fuss was about.

I reached for the shirt and found out that something had been eating our life from the inside all night long, twenty feet from where we were sleeping, and we never heard a thing.

My shirt had holes in it. Little ragged holes, up and down the front of it. They had eaten it while we slept.

Have you ever watched something you owned go from valuable to worthless in about a second and a half? Ten seconds earlier that was my good shirt. Now it was a rag full of ants.

I want to be honest with you about what that did to us, because it was more than an inconvenience.

It was shocking. It was horrific. It was creepy in a way that gets under your skin and stays there. We pulled everything out of that closet and hauled it into the yard. We shook it out. We washed it and washed it again. Bombed the place.

We felt violated. Unsettled. We did not feel safe in our own home.

◆ Slow down here. This is the emotional hinge of the whole message. Let the room sit in it for a beat before you go outward.

Now here is why I am telling you this. Because I have a feeling I am not the only one in this room who has had a version of that Sunday morning.

You go to the closet for the thing you were counting on — and it is not there.

For some of you it was a retirement account that was going to make the next thirty years comfortable, and then one year it was worth a great deal less and nobody ever really explained why. For some of you it was the job — twenty-five years of your best work, and a decision got made in a room you were not invited into.

And for some of you it was never about money at all. It was a body you took care of that quit doing what it was supposed to do. It was a marriage you thought was solid until the morning it was not. It was a reputation you spent thirty years building in this town that somebody took apart in a weekend.

Different closets. Same Sunday morning.

And here is what they all have in common. Every one of them was something we put our weight on. Not something we liked — something we leaned on. There is a difference between owning a thing and counting on it, and most of us cannot tell which one we are doing until it gives.

And notice — in most of those instances nobody broke in. There was no dramatic moment, no villain you could point at. That is exactly what makes it so disorienting. The damage got done quietly, in the dark, while you were asleep and thinking about something else entirely. And by the time you reached for it, it already had holes in it.

I think that is the loneliest part. Not the loss — the surprise. Finding out you had been feeling safe for a long time about something that had not been safe for a long time.

Some of you have lived that. Some of you are living it this week and you have not told anybody. And some of you have not lived it yet — and that may be the most dangerous seat in the room this morning, because right now you still believe the closet is safe.

So what do we do with that? Where are you actually supposed to put your life so that it holds?

◆ Transition to the Word. Slow your pace here; this is the turn.

In our text this morning, Jesus provieds the answer in three sentences, in the middle of the most famous sermon ever preached, about two thousand years before a fire ant ever found my closet. So let's go hear what God's Word has to say about it.

Announce text again: Matthew 6:19-21

Scripture Reading

Matthew 6:19–21 NASB95

19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20 “But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; 21 for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Prayer for added blessing to the reading of the Word

Let's pray.

Father, this is Your Word and not ours. We have all heard these verses before, and familiarity is its own kind of moth — it eats holes in the things we think we already know. So would You make these words new in this room this morning? Show us where our treasure actually is, and then do whatever You need to do with our hearts. In Jesus' name, amen.

Message

The title of this message is “Where Your Treasure Is: Investing in What Lasts.” And here is the one sentence I want you to carry out of this room. I am going to say it several times, so let it settle in:

What you store, moths eat. What you give, God keeps.

To see why that is such good news, we have to start where Jesus started — with the problem He was putting His finger on in that room, on that hillside, with those disciples.

Problem in the Text

Q: What problem is Jesus addressing with His disciples in Matthew 6:19-21?

A: Not that they owned things — that they were trusting what they owned. The storehouse had quietly become the security, and divided allegiance cannot survive contact with the kingdom.

The Greek word behind “treasure” is thesauros — nothing fancier than the noun form of the verb “to store up.” A stored-up thing. A hoard. A storehouse. It is the word we get thesaurus from: a treasury of words.

Which means when Jesus says “do not store up for yourselves treasures,” what He actually says is: do not store up your stored-up things.

Don't treasure your treasury. Don't bank on your bank. Don't secure your securities.

And notice what He does not say. He never says don't store anything. Scripture praises the ant who gathers in the summer. Providing for your household is wisdom, not sin. Saving is not sin. Hear me say that out loud, so nobody spends the next fifteen minutes defending a savings account instead of listening to Jesus.

The problem is not the storehouse. The problem is what a full storehouse starts doing to your imagination.

A surplus whispers. It whispers that you are safer than you actually are. It is wise to save. It is a lie to feel secure because you did. That is the whole ballgame.

Then Jesus names two threats, and most of us have only ever heard one of them correctly. The moth we get. But the second word in Greek is brosis, and brosis does not mean rust. It means an eating thing. An eater. In the Greek Old Testament it is what God sends against the crops in Malachi — the devourer. Some of your Bibles have already corrected it; the NIV says “vermin.”

So it is not moth and corrosion — two unrelated processes. It is moth and eater. Two hungry mouths, chewing on your security while you sleep.

And understand why He reaches for clothing, because this is where it stops being quaint. In that world your cloak was your wealth — your coat, your blanket, and your collateral. The Torah made a lender hand a man's cloak back before sundown, because he could not survive the night without it.

We live in the age of five-dollar T-shirts, so “moths ate my clothes” sounds like a laundry problem. His hearers did not hear a laundry problem. They heard: the market just crashed.

So the problem in the text is not wealth. Jesus is not scolding anybody for owning something nice. The problem is allegiance. A few verses later He says it flat out: no one can serve two masters. The problem is not the money. It is the whisper — the lie the storehouse tells.

What you store, moths eat. What you give, God keeps.

So where does He tell them to put it instead?

Grace in the Text

Q: What grace does Jesus offer His disciples here?

A: He tells them the heart is not the starting line — it is the finish line. Move the treasure, and the heart follows it home. Then He shows them the one place in the universe where nothing eats.

Verse twenty-one is the hinge, and we almost always read it backwards. We hear a diagnosis: wherever your heart already is, that is where your money ends up. True enough. But that is not the direction Jesus wrote it. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Treasure goes first. Heart follows.

And “heart” here is not the feelings drawer. In Hebrew thought the heart — lev — is your desire, your will, your intention. The command center of a person. What you want and what you decide.

So this is not a gentle warning that your money might someday drift toward your affections. Your money is steering your affections right now, this morning, in a direction you never consciously chose. Look at the transactions on your bank statement and you might be looking at a map of where your heart is going.

But here is the good news of the grace in our text.

We do not have to wait until we feel generous. Most of us have been waiting on a feeling that was never coming. Jesus says: move the treasure, and the heart comes along behind it. It doesn’t need to be a burden.

So He says: put it somewhere the eater cannot reach. Store it up in heaven. And the honest question in this room is — what on earth does that mean?

Let me clear some ground first, because most of us inherited a picture: heaven as a vault with your name on the door. Do good down here, accrue credit up there. That picture is funnier than it is true, and it quietly runs the gospel backwards.

Take Jesus at His own word. Matthew twenty — the workers in the vineyard. Hired at dawn, at noon, an hour before quitting time. The landowner pays them all the same wage, and when the all-day crew is furious his answer is essentially: I kept our agreement. Are you offended because I am generous? There is no merit ledger. Every one of us will receive immeasurably more than we earned, and that is what an indiscriminately generous Father is like.

So here is the turn, and it is the heart of this message:

Treasure in heaven is not something you accumulate. It is something you gain by giving it away.

You cannot hoard this kind of treasure. It only exists in the spending. The hour you gave to somebody that was lonely. The money that left your hand and never came back. The kid you kept showing up for.

And notice — Jesus never defines heavenly treasure as a thing. He reaches for images. Eternal life. An inheritance. Enter into the joy of your master. When He tells the rich young ruler to sell and give, He ties it to being teleios: whole, complete, undivided. Not an asset. A life.

So let me translate the command into the language we actually live in. “Store up treasure in heaven” means: love God and love people with your stuff.

That is the grace He handed them. Not a heavier yoke — a lighter one. Your Father already knows what you need. Seek first His kingdom, and all these things get added. You can put down the job of guarding the barn.

What you store, moths eat. What you give, God keeps. Now — do we still have this problem? I think we have it worse.

Problem in the World

Q: Do we still face the same problem today?

A: Yes — with better marketing. We took storing up, renamed it the American dream, and built a way of life on the whisper that a full storehouse is a safe life.

Here is how we know that is a lie. Jesus told a story about it — Luke twelve. A rich man has a bumper crop, and he says to himself: I have nowhere to store my crops. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones. Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease. Eat, drink, be merry.

Count the pronouns. I, I, my, my, myself, my soul. There is not one other human being anywhere in his plan. Not a neighbor. Not the poor. And not God.

And God says to him: you fool. This very night your soul is required of you. And the things you have prepared — whose will they be?

The eater came early. And he never heard it coming.

Now do not miss what is actually wrong with him. It is not that he planned. Jesus also told a story about servants who invested their master's money and were commended for it — and the one who buried his got in trouble for exactly that. Planning is not the sin.

The difference is not whether they had a plan. It is who the plan was for. The steward's abundance went back to his master and out into the world. The fool's went into a bigger barn with his own name on the side.

And that is the line I want to draw this morning. Stewarding is holding what is God's for God's kingdom. Storing is holding what is God's for mine.

Think about a currency that stops meaning anything.

Turkey

Jesus is not warning us about one bad currency. He is warning us that an entire way of deciding what the good life is — the whole system we have all been quietly keeping score in — will turn out to be worthless. And if you built your life inside that system, you arrive in the new one starting at zero.

◆ Guard: do not let this land only on the people with money. Say the next line.

And please hear me — this does not only catch wealthy people. You can have almost nothing and still build your whole sense of safety on the little you have. Scarcity grips a heart as hard as surplus does. The question is not how much is in the barn. It is what you are counting on when the lights go out.

What you store, moths eat. What you give, God keeps. So what does God do about that — for us, here, now?

Grace in the World

Q: What grace does Jesus extend to us today?

A: He guarantees the future you have been trying to buy — and then hands you your own heart back by telling you where to send your treasure.

Paul says it about as plainly as it can be said, in 1 Timothy 6. Tell the rich in this present age not to fix their hope on the uncertainty of riches — but on God, who richly supplies us with all things to enjoy.

Stop there. Richly supplies us with all things to enjoy. That is not a God who resents you having anything. He gives richly and He wants you to enjoy it. He just will not let it become the thing that holds you up, because He has watched it collapse on too many of His kids.

And then Paul says what to do with it: do good, be rich in good works, be generous and ready to share — and in doing that, you are storing up a firm foundation for the future, so that you may take hold of that which is truly life.

Did you catch that? Paul uses the storing language on purpose. He does not tell them to stop investing. He tells them to change banks.

Because here is the strategy Jesus handed us, and it may be the most practical sentence in this whole sermon: invest your resources where you want your heart to go. Your checkbook and your calendar are not reports on your spiritual condition. They are steering wheels.

You want to care about the widow down your street? Go mow her yard. The caring shows up on the way home.

You want to love this church? Give to it and serve in it, and then watch what happens to your affection for these people. The heart follows the treasure. Every single time.

And the reason you can afford to live that way is that your future is already secured, and not by you. Hebrews 13: keep your life free from the love of money and be content with what you have — for He Himself has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you. The contentment is not white-knuckled. It rests on a promise.

So put it together and you get the only economy that has never once crashed. In the world God is making, the thing you have been trying to buy with your storehouse — security, stability, enough — is simply there. It comes from an infinite source, not from a pile you had to build up, maintain, and defend. Nobody is guarding anything. Nobody needs to.

If that is true, then generosity right now is not reckless. It is realism. It is acting today like a citizen of the country you are actually going to live in.

What you store, moths eat. What you give, God keeps.

So, pj … What’s the point?

Conclusion

Conclusion — The One Who Emptied His Treasury

Now I have to tell you why this is more than good advice, because so far it is a better financial philosophy, and nobody was ever saved by a better financial philosophy. Jesus is not handing out investment tips He never had to take Himself.

Paul writes to the Corinthians: you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich.

Everything Jesus asks of us in Matthew 6, He did first — and further than any of us will ever be asked to. He held the only treasury in the universe the moth and the eater could never touch. And He emptied it. He did not cling to equality with God. He emptied Himself, took the form of a servant, and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross.

He stored nothing. He gave everything. And what He bought with it was you.

So when Jesus says store up treasure in heaven, He is not asking you to fund your own account. He is telling you the account is already full, it is already yours, and it was filled by Someone who poured Himself out to fill it. Every generous thing you ever do is you learning to move the way He already moved for you.

I still think about that closet in South Carolina. We lost the shirt. We lost a good bit of that clothing — you cannot get them out of the seams, and after a while you stop wanting to try. But I have been married to Carly for 33 years now. And nothing in that trailer the ants got to was the thing we were actually building that year.

They ate everything in that closet they could reach. They could not reach the one thing that lasted.

Application — One Name, One Thing

So here is what I am asking you to do this week. Not a life-altering decision. One small, doable, measurable thing.

Spend some treasure. One name, one thing, before next Sunday.

Pick one person — an actual name, not a category — and pick one specific thing you are going to give them that costs you something. An hour. A meal. A check. The conversation you have been putting off for three months. Something that leaves your hand and does not come back.

And pick the name before you leave this building. Not in the car. Not Tuesday. Right now, while the Spirit is doing whatever He is doing in you, put a name on it. Then go do the thing.

You cannot change your heart by deciding to feel differently. You have already tried. But you can move a treasure. And Jesus promises — promises — that the heart will follow it there.

Vision — Imagine What We Could Do

Now lift your eyes with me for a minute, and imagine this church living that way.

Imagine a Libby Nazarene where nobody is white-knuckling the barn. Where people in this room make decisions about money without that low hum of dread underneath everything, because their security quietly stopped depending on the number in the account.

Imagine what we would do with that freedom. Imagine the single mom in this town who never finds out who paid her power bill. Imagine somebody's kid getting to camp. Imagine this church known in Libby not for what it has, but for what it keeps letting go of.

That is not a stretch goal. That is just what happens when a room full of people quit guarding a closet that was never going to hold.

◆ READ HERE — excerpt from “The Road to Uttermost,” a poem by Michelle Jones of BibleProject.

Do you know the way to uttermost?

Yes, go down through the door marked up.

Then squeeze yourself through a gate called, straight,

and drink bliss from a bitter cup.

Walk forward into yesterday,

past there to the day before.

Then fill your bag by pouring out

and empty it with more.

That is the arithmetic of the kingdom: you fill the bag by pouring it out. Jesus said it Himself — give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, poured into your lap.

So church, one last time, and then let's go do it:

What you store, moths eat. What you give, God keeps.

◆ Close in prayer. Invite anyone who recognizes a grip they cannot loosen on their own to come forward — do not make it about money from the front; make it about the grip.

Closing prayer & benediction

Numbers 6:24–26 NASB95

The Lord bless you, and keep you; The Lord make His face shine on you, And be gracious to you; The Lord lift up His countenance on you, And give you peace.’

Scripture records the following words in v.27:

Numbers 6:27 GW

“So whenever they use my name to bless the Israelites, I will bless them.” 

So, receive and go with the blessings of YAHWEH!