Sermon on the Mount- storing treasures in heaven

3 Aug 25 Sermon

Over the past several months – in fact since last last year, we have been studying Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Why? Because the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ summary of how to live as his disciples. These three chapters in Matthew’s gospel are a very practical series of instructions to people who are following Jesus or who want to follow Jesus, telling them, telling us how to do it. And if we as individuals, and as a church can live out the teaching of these few pages of the Bible, this one sermon of Jesus, then we will be building solid Christian lives. Lives that will please the Lord.

The Sermon on the Mount, is simple, its understandable, its practical, but its not easy. Jesus has high expectations of his followers. He has high standards. But the rewards he offers are also very high. 

He is speaking to Jewish people who were living with a set of moral laws already given to them by God through Moses 1500 years before. He is speaking to people who already have a God given code of morality. 1500 years before, Moses went up a Mountain and God met him and gave him ten commandments to give the people to live by. Actually God gave Moses not just the 10 commandments but 619 other laws for the Jewish people to live by. 

But now Jesus comes, and he goes up this mountain and he is giving his commandments and they are at a higher level. They are similar but more demanding.

Among the people listening to Jesus were people called Pharisees and others called teachers of the law. They were people who tried really hard to obey God’s commands given through Moses. 

And he says to his disciples. For I tell you, that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. 

Jesus is saying, but I’m calling you to a higher level of living than the Laws of Moses. I’ve got higher standards. And if you want to enter the kingdom of heaven, I’m calling you to live these out.

And so that is why we have been going through the Sermon on the Mount, so we really know what Jesus is asking of us. What that higher standard looks like. 

The Old Testament said you can’t murder. But Jesus tells us don’t even get angry with your brothers, don’t curse them, you are committing murder in your heart.

The Old Testament laws say, don’t commit adultery, don’t sleep with someone who is married. Jesus says, don’t even imagine doing it, don’t lust after them. It’s a higher standard.

The Old Testament says- if someone hurts you, you can get a certain amount of retaliation- an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Jesus says no, do not resist an evil person. Turn the other cheek.

It’s a high standard.

That’s why we need the Holy Spirit in us, the empowering of the Spirit to enable us to do it. Human beings without the Holy Spirit, even if they want to obey the Sermon on the Mount, can’t do it. We don’t have the power. Morally we are not strong enough. But Jesus doesn’t make the demand to be holy, without also giving us the ability. He offers us his Holy Spirit. And when the Holy Spirit enters in, he starts imparting to us more and more love, joy, peace, patience – the things we need to live out Jesus’ teaching.

My friends we and in fact every church are called to be a ‘Word and Spirit’ church. That means we follow the Word the Bible and we do it in the Power of the Holy Spirit. We need both. The Word, the Bible, which tells us how to live, the Holy Spirit who gives us the ability to actually do it. 

So that is why last week I was emphasising, asking God to fill you with his Spirit. I don’t want you to think, wow Jesus is asking a lot of me, I don’t think I can do it. Yes you can, but you need to ask God to fill you with his Spirit. You need the help of the Holy Spirit.

Martin Luther the founder of the Lutheran once remarked that every Christian undergoes three conversions: the first of his mind, the second of his heart, and the third of his wallet. 

Jesus really cares about what we do with our possessions and our money. 15% of Jesus’ teaching was about money. 

He wants to give us some investment advice. I know that some of you are quite switched on when it comes to where to invest your money- and some of you understand the stock market and some of you have good business brains, which is great. Well Jesus wants to give us, his disciples some advice in where to invest. 

This is what he advises:

‘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.’ 

That word ‘rust’ is actually the Greek word for eating- so it could mean eaten by corrosion, but it could mean eaten by insects of any pest. In those days, people didn’t store their money in bank accounts or in bitcoin or in stocks and shares, but their savings were in physical possessions- and all these possessions were open to being lost. Moths could get into people’s clothes or cloths, rats and mice could eat the stored grain, worms could take whatever they put underground, thieves could break into their home and steal what they kept there. 

This is an uncertain world we are living in. Our savings are never hundred percent secure, no matter where we put them. 

On my mother’s side of the family, my great grandparents or great great grandparents, I forget, they invested in the Trans-Siberian railway, they bought a stake in that great railway being built across Russia. That looked like a good investment, until unexpectedly there was a revolution in Russia and the Communists came along and took over and nationalised the whole thing. That meant the stocks became valueless. In my uncle’s house in Belgium there are dozens or hundreds of paper stock certificates –which were once worth a lot of money and now have zero value. 

On my Father’s side of the family, my great grandfather invested his savings in stocks and shares, he wanted to buy a certain farm. This was the 1920s. Unfortunately the great depression came along and he lost it all, or a lot of it. And suffered a stroke, probably due to the stress, poor man.

We are living in an uncertain world. And any investment in this world is a risk. 

But Jesus offers an alternative. Invest in Heaven. Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where nothing comes to eat your money. 

What he is saying is – if you use your money to be generous to other people, if you help other people with your money, if you serve God with your money, if you give to projects that the Lord loves, the church, mission organisations, charities that do good work, then you are storing up a reward in heaven. Your heavenly bank balance will grow. God will reward you in proportion. And it will never be stolen or taken from you. The bank of heaven is totally secure.

What you give to God and his work, you get to keep for eternity. 

You know our lives are short. We live such short lives on this Earth, maybe 70, 80 or 90 years if we are blessed. Then we leave all our possession behind, all our money. But Jesus is saying be generous with your money and spend it on God’s projects and God will reward you in heaven.

There is a verse in Proverbs in the Bible that says Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the LORD, and he will reward them for what they have done.

If you lend to the Lord, he will always pay his debts!

You can’t take your money with you when you die, but you can send it ahead, by being generous to those in need. 

Now when Jesus tells us not to store up treasures for ourselves. Saving for a rainy day is ok. Having a pension plan is ok. The Bible praises the ant who stores up food in the summer to get it through the winter. The Bible says that a Christian who doesn’t provide for his family is worse than an unbeliever. And God says we are to enjoy the good things that god has put in this earth.

So neither having possessions, nor making provision for the future, nor enjoying the gifts of the earth are being banned when Jesus says don’t store up for yourself treasure on earth. But lets not overdo it. Lets be wise, but no greedy, not selfish. We are called to be generous and yes sacrificial in our giving.

My encouragement to you is speak to God about your finances and ask him for wisdom about how much to save and how much to put in a pension scheme. Bring him into it, if you ask for his wisdom and direction, he will give it.

But lets remember Jesus called us to love our neighbours as ourselves and our in this global village that we are living today, millions of our neighbours are living in absolute poverty and many are starving in Gaza, in Africa.

Loving our neighbours must affect our wallets. 

Let me mention tithing quickly. Tithing is something we see commanded in the Old Testament of the Bible. The Jews were commanded to give 10 percent of their crops, livestock, and income as an offering to the Lord, which supported the group called the Levites. (Leviticus 27:30-32).

Tithing one tenth of your wealth was something commanded in the law of Moses. But tithing is not commanded in the New Testament. Jesus frees us from the Law of Moses but calls us up to a higher standard. He calls us to be generous, not to tithe but to give voluntarily and generously and cheerfully. So what you give is up to you. What you give to the church is up to you. I don’t ask you to give 10 percent, we are not under the Law of Moses. The Lord might want you to give less than 10 percent or he might want you to give more. Have a talk with him about it. 

But I’d encourage generosity.

Being generous to others and to God, it does good to your heart, it directs our passions. Jesus tells us this in verse 21 of Matthew 6- ‘Where your money is, there your heart will be also.’ 

I read of a lovely story of a little boy in a church and one day a missionary came to that church called Mr Burt. At the end of the missionary meeting, there was an offering to help Mr Burt and his work overseas. This little boy put a penny in the offering. A year later, Mr Burt came back to the church and the little boy said to his parents, ‘I want to go to that meeting.’

He was so enthusiastic that they asked him ‘Why are you so keen to go?

He replied ‘When he was here last time, I gave him a penny and I want to hear what he’s done with it! 

Where you put your money, there your heart will follow. 

You know you can tell who a person really is, what they really believe in and what they really value by looking at their monthly bank statement. What you spend your money on, says a whole lot about where your heart is. 

Someone I read online a Christian reflecting on this and he said- Some might say that my heart is more focused on my hobbies than my Lord. 

What does your bank statement tell you about your priorities?

But Jesus is not just saying that our spending tells us where our hearts, our desires, our values, our priorities lie, our spending also influences where we put our hearts. Our hearts follow our money. As this little boy giving Mr Burt his penny showed us.

So if you choose to give more to the church, the poor, to charity and less on luxuries then your heart will tend to value these things more. 

Actually I read a couple of psychologists online saying something similar. They wrote “When we give to others, we don’t only make them feel closer to us; we also feel closer to them.”

You know that if you are generous, it will affect your whole life in a very positive way. But if you are not generous it will affect your life in a negative way.

This is what Jesus is meaning with his follow up comment- verses 22 and 23.

²² “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. ²³ But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!’

The eye is the lamp of the body. This is not literal of course, as if the eye were a kind of window letting in light in the body, but it does make sense. Almost everything the body does is dependent on our ability to see. We need to see in order to run, to drive a car, to cook, paint, everything. The eye illuminates what the body does through its hands and feet. 

Now that phrase ‘healthy eyes’, sometimes translated ‘sound eyes’, that is a metaphor in that culture for being generous. Somebody with sound or healthy eyes was someone who was generous. 

What Jesus is saying is that if you are generous, it will enlighten your whole life. Generosity floods your life with light- mental light, you get purpose, you see what is important more clearly and moral light, you tend to be better in other areas also. 

Conversely, eyes that are unhealthy or not sound is a metaphor for being selfish and not generous. If you are someone who hoards up and isn’t generous, that will negatively affect the rest of your life. Your life will fill with darkness. You will not see what is important to God, what is truly important, you will not value that which is valuable, you will be in the dark. You will turn inwards and cut yourself of from others.

Non Christian sources agree with Jesus that generosity fills your life with light.

The Dalai Lama famously said, ‘If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.’ 

Scientific health studies are highlighting the benefits of generosity on both our physical and mental health. Not only does generosity reduce stress, support one’s physical health, enhance one’s sense of purpose, and naturally fight depression, it is also shown to increase one’s lifespan.

Being generous also makes us feel better about ourselves. Generosity is both a natural confidence builder and a natural repellant of self-hatred. By focusing on what we are giving rather than on what we are receiving, we create a more outward orientation toward the world, which shifts our focus away from ourselves. 

I think of Ebenezer Scrooge, the hero of the Christmas Carol. Maybe you watched it at Christmas time on TV. Scrooge was very selfish and miserly and never gave any money to anyone and he was very lonely also, until he got a big fright one night when he was shown what would happen to him if he didn’t change. And he did change and he started being generous- giving a pay rise to Bob Cratchit and buying a Christmas turkey for the Cratchit family and so on. And when Scrooge starts living generous he becomes so joyful and he starts making new friends and he declares ‘I am as light as a feather as happy as an angel.’ Before Scrooge was unhappy, miserable until he became generous, then he got the joy!

Jesus is right, be generous and your life will be filled with light.

Well as I said before, Jesus loved to preach using pairs. Two roads with two kinds of destinations, two trees with two kinds of fruit, two houses with two foundations. And today he is talking about two locations for your treasure, on Earth or in Heaven, two kinds of eyes, generous and selfish eyes and now two masters- God or money. 

He says:

²⁴ “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.’

You know its possible for a person to work for two companies and have two bosses. Some people here are doing that. You maybe work part time for one company in the weekends and work for the other through the week or something. And so today we can have two bosses. But Jesus is talking in a society where slave owning was normal and he is talking about slaves and their masters and he is saying a slave can only have one master. A slave was owned by one master and was a full time servant to one master.

You see a Christian is a person who is totally committed to God. A Christian is a slave to the Lord. You couldn’t have a better master, a master who loves you and who actually gives you freedom, but he does demand total commitment. 

And so Jesus is talking about undivided loyalty to the Lord. That is what being a disciple of Jesus involves.

Jesus call is to follow Him is a call to abandon all other masters. He called Matthew from the tax collector’s booth (Matthew 9:9). Matthew obeyed and walked away from the extravagant wealth and dirty deals of his previous life. Jesus called Peter, James, and John from their fishing businesses. To obey Jesus’ call meant that they had to leave behind everything they knew, everything they’d worked for, their boats and gear. Jesus called Paul, a successful Pharisee, with the words, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name” (Acts 9:16). Those words will never make it into a mass-market ad campaign for Christianity—but maybe they should, because that’s what it means to follow Jesus (Luke 9:23). We must be willing to forsake everything else, no matter the cost (Matthew 10:34–39).

Remember the rich young ruler who wanted to follow Jesus. And Jesus challenged him and said first you must give all his money away to the poor. And the young man didn’t want to- because he was very rich. He was possessed by his possessions. His possessions were more important to him than the Lord. 

That young man thought he could serve both money and the Lord Jesus. But actually Jesus knew that was impossible and the young man would end up putting his money about him, unless he made a total break with it.

Jesus’ claim to us is exclusive. He bought us with His own blood and delivered us from our former master, sin. He doesn’t share His throne with anyone. We cannot serve two masters because, as Jesus pointed out, we end up hating one and loving the other. It’s only natural. Opposing masters demand different things and lead down different paths.

So lets put Christ first and put our money at his disposal. When we are generous to those in need and to things that matter to him, we will start to break the hold that money has on our souls, we will cause our lives to filled with light, we will invest in heaven and in eternity we will get a reward.