The Best Storage Unit

Matt 6:19–21 The Best Storage Unit The Granger family, who used to attend Cornerstone and are still friends of ours, had to store their stuff in a nearby storage unit for many months while they were remodeling their beautiful family home right on Padilla Bay, inherited from Jonathan’s grandparents. And he told me I could tell this story. As if they didn’t have enough nightmares from living in a trailer on the property during construction with three small boys, and from making the million decisions that go into remodeling, they discovered that their storage unit had been broken into. They scrambled to find ways to prove to the insurance company what exactly they had in that unit. It took hours and hours of the most annoying and frustrating kind of labor during an already hectic time. To make matters worse, it turns out that their unit was broken into twice. A lady at the desk at the Storage place said to them, “Oh yeah—we noticed some broken glass out in front of your unit a few weeks ago.” Jonathan was understandably displeased. “You noticed broken glass and you didn't alert me?” They checked the security footage and found that, sure enough, the same people had broken in once, left the glass, waited a while to see if any alarm was raised, and had gone and done it again. “We don’t offer any guarantees against theft,” the lady at the desk told them. I was shocked when I heard this story, because I thought that was the whole point of a storage unit: it’s like a maximum-security prison for your stuff—a vault, a safe deposit box that measures in cubic yards rather than cubic inches. Nope. Your stuff isn’t really, truly, safe anywhere in this world. What’s safe is what you invest in the next. Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:19–21 ESV) I can’t see into your hearts, but I wonder if there are people here who have ever wondered how to make their lives into investments that last. Jesus has answers. Listen in. Context Before we can use Jesus’ answers in our own lives we need to understand them. We need to spend a little time understanding how this little paragraph fits into the context of Jesus’ sermon. And the key to helping us do that is the little word “reward.” Jesus states a principle about reward at the beginning of this section of the sermon. Look in 6:1. Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. (Matthew 6:1 ESV) 1 “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. 2 “Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. 5 “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. … 16 “And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 17 But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, 18 that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. What “treasures,” then, could Jesus be talking about in verses 19–21, this final paragraph of the section? The treasures are the rewards promised by the Father. Don’t lay up treasures on earth is another way of saying, don’t seek merely earthly rewards. They don’t last. Christ, as one writer [Jonathan Pennington] said, “is offering staggering and sure rewards that are treasures from God himself.” That gives us the context we need as we take a closer look at these verses, Matthew 6:19–21. 19 "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, 19 Μὴ θησαυρίζετε ὑμῖν θησαυροὺς ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς, The great British preacher David Martyn Lloyd-Jones often started his expositions in a way that you could use to start your Bible study. Ask yourself, what is this not saying? Jesus is not saying that wealth itself is evil. If someone were to say that to me, I would say, Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest. (Proverbs 6:6–8 ESV) I would say that God created foods “to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” (1 Timothy 4:3–4 ESV) I would say, God made Job rich again at the end of his story. Earthly wealth is not inherently, intrinsically, necessarily wrong to have. Or pretty much all of us would be sunk, because compared to the great majority of the people in the history of the world, we are fabulously wealthy. When we are cold, we pull a computer out of our pockets and connect to a device that turns up the heat in our homes. We are rich. And so are you. Jesus is also not saying that it’s wrong to save for retirement. A good man leaves an inheritance for his children’s children, Proverbs says. So if these words from Christ don’t mean wealth is wrong, what do they mean? Well look at the earthly rewards Jesus already mentions in this part of the Sermon on the Mount: he repeatedly says about people who do their good deeds to be seen by others, “They have their reward.” In context, that’s the main earthly reward he’s been talking about. It’s the reward hypocrites get. Pennington: The hypocrites’ problem in these verses is not that they are wanting honor from virtuous living but that (1) they are not pursuing virtue out of a whole heart (= hypocrisy), and (2) they are pursuing this honor not from the heavenly Father but from earthly humans.… He is appealing to his hearers to avoid the foolish and disjointed hypocrisy of non-God-oriented virtue. It is not wholehearted and therefore will ultimately disappoint; “they already have their reward in full,” the kind of reward that moth and rust will destroy and thieves will steal. Ill: has there ever been a time in history of the world in which it has been possible to be driven by hypocritical desire for empty reward more than now? Social media makes it possible to humble-brag about doing the simplest things, things that mothers have done for their children since Eve. I have to have my wife explain to me what this meant to women. I'll tell you what it meant: praise me, praise me! now, this woman has her reward. And what reward is somebody who posts something like this looking for? Likes. We can now quantify other people's approval of us. That little thumbs up is one of the most addictive substances known to man. Eating all organic may possibly be virtuous. I don't know. But this I do know: posting about it on Facebook in an effort to get likes is non-God oriented virtue. And this I also know: one day, all those likes will die. The binary coding storing them all will burn up, if moths, rust, or Russian thieves don't get them first. where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, ὅπου σὴς καὶ βρῶσις ἀφανίζει, καὶ ὅπου κλέπται διορύσσουσιν καὶ κλέπτουσιν· But precisely because Jesus brings up moths and thieves, I do think he is expanding his vision to include more than just the earthly rewards and treasures he’s already talked about in this section of his sermon. I think he is warning against the pursuit of all the empty “treasures” we humans are known to go after. Ill: Years ago an elder at my church, who was a business teacher, gave me some counsel about setting up a family budget. This was just before I was about to be married. One of the things he said was that me and my wife should have a small monthly budget category dedicated to each of us. Even if it’s just a few books enabling the purchase of one coffee per month, that’s what we should do. Hence began Mark’s book budget. For a long time, that budget was $20/mo. And if I wanted to buy anything—which was usually books—I had $20/mo. to spend. Then I began working for an ebook company, Faithlife, and got a bit of a raise. I started getting review copies of books that I would write about. I no longer have to buy all my books. So my budget at the same time grew in size a bit and ceased being needed for books. I started saving for other things. And about two years ago I knew what I wanted to save for: a mountain bike. I started saving. Mark’s book money, birthday money, and a little extra I got from doing some outside writing. After maybe six or eight months of saving, I had enough to buy a bike. I had $600. I went to the bike shop right down the street here, and I decided to go with a nicer used model rather than a not-as-nice new model. Dual suspension, disc brakes, and the cool name “Specialized” on the white frame. Nice bike. I took it out for a spin in the woods on my lunch break, and I came back with a sore neck having not had a very good time. Uh-oh. I spent $600 on something that suddenly didn’t seem like such a great idea. I cleaned the bike and parked it at work in our outdoor center with a bunch of other bikes, and I left it there. About a month later, I went to get it. It was gone. The security camera told the tale. One of my coworkers was carrying a kayak out the door in the late afternoon, and he propped the door open with a stopper as he did so. He kicked it out of the way as he stepped out, but he didn’t kick it quite far enough, and the door closed without latching. At 11 pm, a man came in off the street. You can see him very clearly in the video. He isn’t being furtive. His eyes just look dead. He spent four hours in there, probably taking a shower in one of the bathrooms. Then he walks out with a helmet, a jacket, a battery-powered skateboard for which he failed to grab the remote—and my bike. He unknowingly grabbed one of the least expensive mountain bikes there. He presumably grabbed it because it was clean. The real bikers had theirs covered in mud. A thief broke in and stole my treasure. They caught him months later. Who knows what he even did with the bike. He’s indigent, so even though the judge ordered him to pay me, I’ll never see a dime. At least the Granger family had insurance pay for their losses. I checked on my insurance deductible—and you want to know what it is? $600. I was completely out of luck. My bike, and the money I saved for many months, went “poof.” N.D. Wilson: Clichés are true. Time flies. You can’t take it with you. You don’t know what you got till it’s gone. Dust to dust. In the ground, we all have empty hands. Enjoy life now. And now. And now. Before the nows are gone. See the gifts. Savor the food, knowing that you will have to swallow.… Time strips us. Time keeps us from turning into minidragons, hunkering down on our piles of whatever we use to give ourselves some sense of worth. And when we go dragonish anyway, time knocks us off, and sends moths and rust and destroyers after our stuff. Let my experience be a parable to you. The point of the parable is not to refuse to get a mountain bike, nor is it to buy the mountain bike on credit rather than saving up. The point is Jesus’ point. The ease with which our stuff can break or vanish reminds us that there’s an alternative to storing up treasure on earth, to seeking merely earthly reward, to hunkering down on your pile of gold, to aiming for human likes, to engaging in “eyeservice as menpleasers.” 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 20 θησαυρίζετε δὲ ὑμῖν θησαυροὺς ἐν οὐρανῷ, ὅπου οὔτε σὴς οὔτε βρῶσις ἀφανίζει, καὶ ὅπου κλέπται οὐ διορύσσουσιν οὐδὲ κλέπτουσιν· Pennington: We have also become skittish about the promise of reward, especially in the Protestant tradition. But all throughout the Scriptures there is the constant offer of reward, recompense even, for orienting oneself toward God. Reward is all ultimately a grace-gift from God, as the New Testament emphasizes, but it is still reward from God for wholehearted righteousness. The Scriptures are not altruistic. “Well done” is a statement appropriate for a king to say to a servant or son (Matt. 25:21, 23). The PARABLE OF THE LABORERS IN THE VINEYARD shows that God doesn’t work on a quid pro quo basis. God doesn’t owe anybody. Rewards don’t work like that. Rewards are given by grace. But it’s not true to say that there is no relationship between the way I act and the way heaven will be for me. Jesus sets out a promise of reward. He doesn’t tell you right here how to get it. He doesn’t specify in this little paragraph exactly how it is that someone can lay up treasures in heaven. So I appeal back to the rest of the section of the sermon. What is it that the people Christ criticizes are doing? Well, they’re hypocrites. They’re performing their righteous deeds in order to be seen by others. Look again. They’re giving to the needy, praying, and fasting so that others will observe them doing it and think highly of them. Pennington: For most English speakers today, the word “hypocrisy” communicates a wrong way of life wherein someone is inconsistent in behavior and especially inconsistent regarding what they say is right and what they actually do in their own (private) behavior. This is certainly a kind of hypocrisy and deserves condemnation. But the kind of hypocrisy that Jesus is addressing here is, like the issue of seeking honor and praise, much more nuanced. The reason Jesus calls these practitioners of piety “hypocrites” is not because they really do not give alms, pray, and fast, but because they do so without a whole heart. Continuing with the same teaching in 5:17–48, Jesus again pushes the matter beyond mere externals to wholeness/integrity/virtue. The Pharisees’ problem here is not a morality problem but a virtue one. Their hypocrisy does not consist of commending piety but then not doing it themselves. More subtly and more dangerously, they are actually practicing righteousness, but not from hearts that are in harmony with their actions, which is lack of wholeness. These hypocrites don’t really love the people to whom they give charity. They love other people thinking that they love the poor. These hypocrites don’t really love the God to whom they pray. They love other people thinking that they love God. These hypocrites don’t really love the God before whom fasting is supposed to take place. They love other people thinking that they love God. They lack the whole-souled integrity Jesus is praising. The apparent message of their actions is out of sync with their hidden loves. And Jesus knows it. He encourages them instead to give in such a way that they aren’t keeping track, to pray in private, to pretend not to be fasting so there’s no danger that their motives will be mixed. So there are things I will not share on social media, lest I lose my reward! I don't tell everybody that I prayed this morning.  He encourages people to have hearts pointed firmly and unitedly toward the Lord. Those people, Jesus says, are laying up treasure in a place no one else can see it: in heaven. Those people, Jesus says, are getting a reward from God. Pennington: Desiring a reward is nothing to be ashamed of or any diminishing of virtue…. It is God’s built-in motivation for the difficult life that wholehearted, God-centered virtue requires. Pennington: The Jewish Scriptures, especially the Wisdom literature, offer constant promise of life, flourishing, safety, and security through their many asherisms and hopes. This is not the opposite of grace or covenant, but is the universal God-human mechanism of motivation. Even Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame, for the joy that was set before him. I want to spend a little time with you going through one of the most important paragraphs I’ve ever read, outside the Bible. It’s because the author so clearly understands what Jesus is doing here. It’s C.S. Lewis, in a sermon I’d strongly encourage you to read, “The Weight of Glory.” If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. 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 has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and 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. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 21 ὅπου γάρ ἐστιν ὁ θησαυρός σου, ἐκεῖ ἔσται καὶ ἡ καρδία σου. What does this mean? Again, let’s start with what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that your heart follows your treasure. Pick a treasure, and your heart will soon love it. No, you and I don’t have full power over our own hearts like that. This simply means that your heart, at its center, is a treasuring thing. The heart values things. That’s what it does. Something comes before it, and it reaches out to that thing. Or it pushes it away, as the case may be. And this comes in degrees: you might love something a lot; you might hate or reject something a lot. And if love comes in degrees, then love can come in an order. Jesus gave us the top two elements of the order: the top love in our hearts is supposed to be love for God. You’re supposed to love God with every bit of you. The second love in our hearts is supposed to be love for neighbor. You’re supposed to love your neighbor as much you as you love yourself. If your top love, yourt real and ultimate treasures, are on earth—your car, your mountain bike, your reputation, your work, even your kids—your heart is stuck on earth. And if, as happens in this fallen world, thieves come in and steal your work or even steal your kids from the life you planned for them, you will fall apart. Your treasure is gone, your heart is broken. But if your real treasures are in heaven—if your car and your bike and your kids are all arranged in your heart on your list of loves underneath your love for God, then you can lose those things and still have your real treasure. Now, I’m not saying that it’s wrong to feel sorrowful if you lose your bike, or certainly if you lose your kids. But there’s sorrow and there’s despair. And I have seen people whose treasure is so wrapped up in their kids that when those kids disappoint them, it’s as if their lives are over. They become frantic. They have nothing left. Listen, God is good to give us so many good things on earth. And he tells us we’re supposed to enjoy them as good gifts from him. But, as one writer said [France]: Each disciple’s priorities will be determined by his or her comparative valuation of earthly and heavenly benefits. Do you ever put the kids to bed and stand at a fork in your evening road, one road leading to a night of TV and the other to a night of reading a good Christian book from the list we have on our website? Sometimes, the right choice really may be to relax and watch a God-honoring show. That is your way of laying up treasures in heaven. But probably a lot of us would admit that the amount of evenings we’ve spent on TV haven’t all been necessary. We’ve gorged ourselves on TV in our lives; we’ve watched enough. Value heavenly benefits, and on some future evening you won’t want TV; you’ll want that Christian book. Calvin: If honor is rated the highest good, then ambition must take complete charge of a man; if money, then forthwith greed takes over the kingdom; if pleasure, then men will certainly degenerate into sheer self-indulgence. So look at what your heart and your mind turn to. Look at what you do in fact treat as a treasure. Exhortation: Thomas Brooks: Oh, then be ashamed Christians, that worldlings are more studious and industrious to make sure of pebbles, than you are to make sure of pearls. -----------------------------------------------------------------