Seeing Jesus: Money and the Kingdom

Huge day. A lot of funny things are happening today.

We're having the chili cook-off on the week of the election, so we're doing some voting. Lower stakes, I think. Maybe not. I don't know. There is a lot of honor in being the winner of the chili cook-off. I know Tony is the defending champion. Tony and Aaron. Or was it just Tony? Entirely only Tony. Just Tony's chili. Okay. Or something. You know, you don't want to use a big competition. So we're doing that. And then we're also, like, this is another weird thing.

We're continuing on in our series through the Sermon on the Mount. And I just need to explain because, like, just like it just so happened that we are doing voting on election week, something else has happened in this passage this morning. So I just want to apologize sort of and explain to you. As you may know, historically, I-90 has set aside the month of November for something that we call the month of giving.

Okay? Right? So the month of giving, it's a great thing. We have a super generous congregation, and people give faithfully all year long to this ministry to support it, to the church. But what we do in November is we make a financial goal to raise funds to support partner organizations. So we raise some money, and then we just give it to people who are not us, who have different bank accounts and different organizations entirely, right? So we have various partnerships.

We raise funds for organizations that are focused on things like homelessness and housing stability, international missions, church planting, various groups, and we'll feature each of those as we go through here this week in November, right? And we'll talk about them, the groups that we support. But what we're trying to do is raise $26,000 this month to give away to these organizations, right?

Which is great, and we've done it every November, and it's always a lot of fun to just focus in on some of the main needs and big things that are going on in this area. But where I feel a little awkward, and I feel like I need to explain and apologize a little bit, is that because we're making our way sequentially through the Sermon on the Mount—. This feels a little on the nose. I want it said and understood. This is not some planning on my part.

I didn't bring this together so that we'd be talking about this passage on this day, the kickoff to our month of giving, because honestly, it feels a little icky. When I read to you this passage, you'll be like, oh boy, that guy did not mess around with the fundraising goal, right? But I'm just saying, this just happened to land here. no thought or intention behind it whatsoever. So let's read the passage, okay? And then it'll kind of click.

Okay, so this is it. Matthew 6, 19. Don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust and where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves don't 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 eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.

But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So if the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness? No one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. So that's what God had decided for us to read through this morning. It's great. So let's just pray as we jump in here. Lord Jesus, we thank you for your word.

And we thank you that it is direct and clear to us. And it's sometimes difficult, Lord. And sometimes we see things and we understand them in your word. And sometimes we don't. So wherever we're at this morning with your words, Lord, I just pray for understanding.

I pray for wisdom, and I pray for clarity for us, that we would understand what we're being asked of by you, Jesus, what it means to step into your kingdom and live according to faith and live according to this kind of life that you invite us into, a life of fellowship with you. So we ask you that. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. So let's dig into this passage. And as we do that, I think it's really important to think about the context, right? Because, of course, we've just kind of put these up here and kind of isolated them from the rest of the sermon. But we have to remember that these verses didn't just drop from the sky. Jesus spoke these things. After he had spoken a bunch of other things that we've already looked at, and before he's about to speak some other things, right?

So Jesus is making an argument the way you do in a sermon. He's thinking through things with people and helping them understand and discover the meaning of what he's saying, okay? And so we really need to pay attention to context. Whenever we read scripture, whenever we try to understand what's going on, we have to pay attention to context because context is, it helps us to understand the meaning of something, right? Like these verses on their own, Like, what do we do with them?

It's difficult to think about. But when we understand the context of this sermon and what Jesus has been saying up to this point, things become a little bit more clear. And so two things that we need to keep in mind in terms of context. The first is that we need to remember that this is a sermon on righteousness. Right? That's been the major theme that Jesus has been developing in chapter five and in the earlier parts of chapter six. And in this section of the sermon, right?

Jesus has, in the first section of the sermon, he talked about righteousness in our relationships with other people. And then in this next half, like what we've talked about last week in chapter six, he begins to talk about righteousness in our relationship with God. What does it mean for us to have a right relationship with God? That's the context going on here. He's asking that question.

And so Jesus, I mean, he really pulls zero punches, right? He goes straight to this thing. He says this about money and your relationship with God. He says, no one can serve two masters since he will either hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

So Jesus makes it clear that your relationship with money and your relationship with God are connected in a way that might not seem immediately apparent to us, especially in our culture. We think of, well, money's over here and my spiritual life is over here. They're just sort of separate things. Jesus says, no, they're not separate things at all. In fact, the relationship is really important. This passage is about relationship with God. That is an important piece of context.

And the second important thing to remember contextually with this Sermon on the Mount is that Jesus has been making an argument. And he's made it clear, particularly in chapter 5, that righteousness does not come through law-keeping. He's presenting a vision for what righteousness is, true righteousness, that doesn't hinge on the righteousness that comes through keeping the Mosaic law. He's definitely pro-righteousness. He's not saying, oh, Moses was totally wrong, but he's making it clear that.

Keeping Moses' law is not meeting the standard of righteousness that he's calling people to. He believes that there is another and a better way for people to be righteous. And we talked about this in the context of the entirety of the New Testament last week. And I mean, Jesus knew this and the apostles knew it and they spoke this, they emphasized this point, particularly Paul.

They emphasize the point that righteousness for us is not going to come through law-keeping, but it comes through, as Paul says in Galatians, it comes through faith. This is my favorite little verse in Galatians. It's the second half of Galatians 5, 6. He says this, what matters is faith working through love. Faith working itself out through love is what is going to lead us to the kind of righteousness that Jesus calls us to.

The kind of righteousness where we'll be right with people and right with God. It's faith working itself out through love. And so we need to remember that context because it really matters for this passage, particularly on money. Why is that?

Because as Jesus says some serious things that are kind of startling to us, like you can't serve both God and money and don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth, I'm sure you, along with me, I feel this way too, would love to know, okay, then Jesus, what's the rule? What's the law so that I can be sure I'm not doing that? How do I know if I'm storing up treasures on earth? How do I know if I'm serving money over God? I would love a rule so that I can just say, I'm good.

Because don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth feels like it's a little open to interpretation. I mean, no one here is Jeff Bezos rich. And if you are, I would like to talk to you afterwards about the month of giving, okay? But I don't think anyone here has bazillions of dollars. Though, I mean, we live on the east side of Seattle. You probably do all right. But where's the line? Can you just say, well, I'm not the richest person in

Seattle, therefore I'm not store. I could store up more, so I'm good, right? Wouldn't it be nice to have a law? Wouldn't it be nice to have some rule? Jesus says you can't serve two masters, so how do we know if we're serving money? How much of my income can I save? How much can I store away? How much can I do in terms of investments? How much wealth can I build? What proportion of my income can I spend on my vacation? Or on my mountain bike?

Ooh, that one hurts, I'm sorry, I know. That was a joke, guys. $7,000 is the answer. Apparently you can spend that much money on a mountain bike. I didn't know. Now I know. You guys have taught me so much. It's amazing. It's amazing. That was a joke. Lighthearted joke. Any, I would love clarity on this question, right? But any of that clarity in terms of Jesus is like dealing with a serious thing. It seems to be missing. Or it doesn't, it's not actually missing.

Jesus does provide a ton of clarity, but he provides clarity that's not tied up in law and rules. I mean, he is unambiguous. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. He's not saying it might be. It could be. Watch out. He's saying, no, this is the reality of the human condition. The thing that you treasure, that's what your heart, that's what your love, that's what your desire is chasing after and being formed after. There's a ton of clarity there.

It's just a clarity on a level that makes us a little bit uncomfortable, right? The question Jesus makes us ask is not, how much do you have? You know, what's the rule? It's a question of, where is your treasure? It's a heart question.

We're not talking about laws. We're not establishing rules about how much we can have. And because of that, let's think about this from this angle. Because it's not just a set of rules, this is a serious warning that can apply to you whether you are wealthy or whether you're not wealthy. Because it's not about how much do you have or what's the proportion. It's about where's your heart? What are you chasing after? What's your ambition?

What are you serving in your life? Look, if we were to make it a contest to figure out who has the smallest net worth, I think I'd be pretty far up there. I think I'd be doing pretty good, you know? But let me tell you something. It is easy to treasure something that you don't have a lot of. It is easy for me, as somebody who doesn't have great means, to think a lot about money and to be concerned a lot about money. It's, I think, probably easier for me than people who have more.

So I don't consider Jesus's words here to be exclusively to wealthy people. He doesn't, in fact, he makes that really clear. He doesn't say, hey, listen up, all you richos, all you super, you money bags. He isn't saying that. In fact, it's very likely that the people who were gathered around Jesus at this point in his ministry, listening to his sermon, were the poor, the Christian movement, the people who followed Jesus all over Galilee and then all down into Judea.

They were just normal people, laborers, just poor people. The Christian movement we read about in the book of Acts is not made up of a bunch of wealthy people. It's just normal people who say, oh, I love what Jesus is teaching me about how I can trust God with everything, including my money, even the little bit I have. I don't need to treasure it and value it and prize it above all things. In fact, I can just give myself over in trust and surrender to God, no matter how much I have.

So he's inviting people in not to put their treasures on earth, but to put their treasures in heaven. He's inviting people not to worship money, but to worship God. And that's true for all people. The question isn't how much do you have? The question is where your treasure is and who do you serve? And these are very uncomfortable questions for us to ask. Just like last week, last week we talked about some uncomfortable questions like, Like, do you love God, right?

It's uncomfortable because it's a question that's directed towards our heart. And we oftentimes are unsure of what's going on within us. It's a very normal part of the human condition to not understand one's own motives, to not even have clarity on what you really are interested in and hoping in. But one other warning here, just because these are heart questions... Don't think that they are somehow not urgent. Heart questions are extremely urgent.

Jesus understood this because they're so tied up with our faith. They're so tied up with what we're serving and what we're seeking and what we're hoping to find in life. And when we know that the heart is important medically, if you have a heart condition, the advice is go to the ER immediately.

Don't mess around with it, right? But when it comes to our hearts, beyond the biological function, the way that we think about our hearts and our desires and our minds and like our inner lives, we find it hard to accept that what's going on within us is urgent. But Jesus makes it super clear throughout his ministry that it is super urgent. And in our culture, and particularly this is very hard because in our culture, we have become heart anarchists.

We think, well, you love what you love and you want what you want and who can control what they desire and how can you ever have any self-control in like your impulses? And we have become a culture that has accepted the idea that our desires and our loves and our urges and our impulses are just simply, they are what they are. They can't be cultivated or controlled in any way whatsoever. In our culture, we say, just set your heart free. And that's what it means to be a true human being.

And yet Jesus says, watch what you're loving. Watch what you're treasuring. Watch what you're serving. Jesus does not accept this, you know, kind of... Live and let live attitude about the condition of the heart. Jesus understands full well that we can do something about what we love and what we serve and what we treasure. And not only that, he understands that we need urgently to pay attention to what we love and what we are functionally treasuring in the way that we live our lives.

And in verse 22 and 23, he gives like a really, really strange illustration, but one that I think underlines the urgency, right? He says this, he says, the eye is the lamp of the body. And if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So if the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness? I wanted to comment on this verse because it's actually a really strange verse.

If you think about how eyes and lamps work, which is the metaphor here, if you think too hard about this, you're like, I have no idea what he's saying. Because that's not how either lamps or eyes work, Jesus, right? And so just as a way of explanation, like commentators talk about this. And the truth is that in the ancient Hebrew mindset, they didn't have our understanding of how eyes work and how light works and photons and all that stuff.

They had a different theory of vision than we do. And so a lot of this is tied up in their theory of vision. And I'm not going to go into that because it's not really that important. But there was also in the Hebrew tradition, kind of if you go through the Old Testament, There's a pretty consistent use of the eye describing a good eye and a bad eye as either a generous eye or a greedy eye. A bad eye looks on things and desires them and covets them.

And a good eye looks on things and just is generous about them. So what Jesus is saying, right, again, and there's a lot of idioms going on here. It's a difficult passage to get the sense of. But the point that Jesus seems to be making is that a bad eye or an unhealthy eye is a greedy one and a good eye, a healthy eye, is a generous one.

And that we ought to take that seriously. And notice Jesus is not saying, well, greed, the selfish use of our money, you know, serving money, it's just, it's not good.

Not recommended, right? What Jesus is saying is that greed and selfishness and treasuring things of this earth and piling up for yourself and expressing your anxiety about money through hoarding and keeping, he actually says it's a deep spiritual sickness. He says, if the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness?

Greed and love of money is a profound sickness one that is serious one that is going to hurt your soul over the long term loving money will keep you from loving god jesus he just says it so clearly storing up treasures on earth will keep your keep your eyes and hope away from the things that really matter eternally and justifying greed will darken your soul that's clarity not the clarity of law, but clarity about the heart and its significance. How are we doing on time? We're doing okay. Okay.

So the question is, what's your relationship with money? You know, like, where's your treasure? Are you serving God with what you have? Now, here's one thing I just want to, this is a little aside, because I think we have a little time. Maybe you're just sitting here and you think, no, I'm good. I'm good. I'm totally sure that I'm fine. I just want to introduce a little doubt in your mind. Just honestly, I want to help you. I want to help you.

Just because I want to just say this, this is this one warning. If you think you're good, like if you're good and you've prayed about it and you're like been with the Lord and you're like, no, I'm good. Like I have clarity. Good. Like Jesus wants you to get to clarity. Actually, that's the point. Not to introduce uncertainty. But I do want to say this. If you're here, you're thinking, no, I'm good. Can I just encourage you to think about it one more time? I mean, can I also just tell you this?

Idols have been a long-standing issue in every culture, right? And I mean, if we read the Old Testament, the problem with Israel is that they were always worshiping idols, which isn't just about them just like worshiping little statues, which was part of it. It's that they were ascribing to things which are not God, power that those things don't have. And then they were pursuing that power through worship.

And here's the reality is that, You know, we don't really have that context where we actually worship real idols anymore, but every culture has idols. Our culture has idols. And I would say our culture's idol and in every culture, especially that has a high cost of living, the idol has to be money. It is money. Like money is extremely important in a culture like ours.

Because honestly, if your source of income, unless you have like a huge amount of money in the bank, if your source of income suddenly dried up, you would actually have to move.

You get that? Like you couldn't stay here or you'd be homeless because the cost is so expensive. So of course, money becomes such an issue. And you might be saying, the way that also, so we say, number one, in Western Washington, the whole West Coast, New York, like all these places where it's extremely expensive to live, money is like an idol. And here's the other thing about idols. The way that idols are able to become so powerful is because culture makes you blind to them.

So the funny thing is that we don't, I think actually funny, relative to New York, where I used to live, outside New York, You guys don't think about money that much because you just got so much of it. It's just flowing. It's just flowing. It flows from Amazon, from Jeff. Jeff Bezos, he just makes it rain down here. And it is a feature of culture, all cultures everywhere, that they are blind to their idols. So you can say, and again, if you have this confidence from the Lord, great.

But you can easily just say, no, I'm good with money because relative to everybody else, like I'm fine. I'm just like everybody else. But like cultures blind you to their idolatry. Idolatry is always hidden in plain sight in culture. If you went to the American South before the 1850s, you say, do you guys have any idols? They'd be like, no, we're just good family people. Sure, we enslave all these people, but it's fine. They would have been blind to that.

Like, because everything around them would have been reinforcing this idea that this thing that is very wrong was fine. It was normal in our culture, right? It's a feature of idolatry that we become blinded to it culturally. In every culture and all times for every type of idol. I'm not saying, oh, we're so bad or so uniquely bad. I'm just saying that we need to understand that there is so much working against you to see what you really love in terms of money because it's an idol in our culture.

And so unless the Lord reveals it to you, I think you're going to have difficulty seeing that in your own life. Okay so what can you do right because this is just like i don't want you to just stress and think out like what what can you what can you possibly do and you know what what what what's what's the what's the takeaway what can you do. If you don't want to worship money, but maybe you do. If you don't want to store up treasures in heaven, but maybe you are.

You don't know what the rule is. Well, Jesus actually, he tells us, he goes on. He tells us what we can do.

So picking up in verse 25, he says, Therefore, I tell you, don't worry about your life, what you eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Isn't life more than food and the body more than clothing? Consider the birds of the sky. They don't sow or reap or gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren't you worth more than they? Can any of you add one moment to his lifespan by worrying? And why do you worry about clothes?

Observe how the wildflowers of the fields grow. They don't labor or spin thread. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all of his splendor was adorned like one of these. If that's how God closed the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, won't he do much more for you, you of little faith?

So don't worry saying what will we eat or what will we drink, what will we wear, for the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you. Therefore, don't worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. So Jesus gives some practical instructions. He doesn't say, just keep gazing at your navel.

Just keep thinking, what's the rule? Am I okay with God? He actually says, in light of the great risk of worshiping money over God, in light of the spiritual condition that is common in cultures, in their culture and in our culture, of treasuring things on earth over eternal things, in light of that.

Therefore, right, the therefore, the instructions that Jesus gives for those who may or may not be serving money, whatever your real condition is, it's don't worry about what you're going to eat or what you're going to drink or what you're going to wear. No matter the true condition of your heart, everybody could benefit by doing these things. Don't worry about those. The surest way to be free from the idol of money is to simply be non-anxious about it.

And to do so in light of the God who provides for you. And that's it. It's not like, I can't just choose to be anxious. That's really terrible advice. You ever tell anyone, don't worry? Well, I'm probably going to anyway. Thanks very much, right? That's not helpful. It's only helpful if there is some truth that I could trust more than I could trust my anxiety and my feelings, right?

Like at some point, in order to stop worrying about something that could happen, I have to become more certain of my security. And that's what Jesus is telling them. He's saying, don't worry, which is futile, unless it's true that God is who he says he is. And so he asked them to consider how God is so persistent in caring for the world all around him, to consider the way that God has just created all things and he sustains and watches over everything.

Like he says, just look at the example of the world around you. Isn't it a reflection of God's character and his care for you? And shouldn't that be so impressive to us that it might actually develop within us a non-anxious trust in him? He points very specifically to the wildflowers. He says in verse 28, observe how the wildflowers of the field grow.

They don't labor or spin thread. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon, the richest man in the world, in all of his splendor was adorned like one of these. If that's how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, won't he do much more for you, you of little faith? He says, consider who God is, what he's like. And then he uses that little phrase, you of little faith. And it's actually a really funny phrase.

It appears a couple of times in the gospels. It's just a single word. And it's sort of, it's a diminutive phrase, right? It's kind of like Jesus saying, oh, sport. Aren't you a silly guy? You of little faith. Jesus uses it throughout the gospel as a light-hearted way to remind the disciples of their immaturity and to sort of coax them to move on into maturity, which is through faith. Think of it. Yeah, Jesus is just, yeah, sorry. I already said that part. The notes.

See, Jesus, in all of his fondness and his love for his disciples, knows that the only real problems in their life stem from their lack of little faith, their lack of faith, their heart issues, their persistent trust in the wrong things. He says, all of that's just, it's just little faith. So it's not like Jesus isn't saying, oh, you have too much money. You don't have enough money. He says, what you really lack is faith.

What you really lack is faith. And Jesus' advice to those who have little faith in God and too much faith in wealth is, as he says here, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided to you. See, what Jesus invites people into is through faith working itself out in love to reorder the things that we love in our hearts. Our hearts are not a mystery to Jesus.

And the fact that salvation and God's work within us is through faith is a sign of God's wisdom about what the heart consists of. Like, I mean, salvation is great. Forgiveness of sin is great. It is so beautiful that I don't have to bear the weight and condemnation of the things that I've done that because I trust in Christ Jesus, that he's taken the penalty for my sin and he's taken those things away. But the really beautiful part of the Christian life actually comes on what we do after that.

We're invited into, in light of forgiveness, relationship with God, where by faith, he is sowing love within us and that love is creating more faith and more trust. It's like we talked about last week with the life cycle of faith. This thing just keeps happening and the love that we have for God, which comes from his love for us, demonstrated on the cross, it grows. And as we step out in and trust that his love for us even more, then he pours love into our hearts, like it says in Romans 5, 5.

And there's this virtuous cycle of faith and love, faith and love, faith and love, bringing us to maturity and transformation to the point where we could say, I no longer treasure things of this earth and I no longer sit in anxiety about what I'm going to eat or what my kids are going to do or how I'm going to pay for college or pay off the house or all these things because I have this growing confidence in the character of God.

His love demonstrated for me. And when I respond to that in faith, I find that that love grows more and he proves himself moment by moment, day by day, more faithful. And so I'm not thinking in my mind, what's the rule about how to be generous? Because I'm so caught up in this process of responding to the love in Jesus Christ, responding in faith, and then experiencing him grow love for him within me even more.

I'm not worried about the money anymore because I'm growing so confident in who God is. Jesus says, don't solve your problem of worshiping money by just like giving a certain amount away. He says, solve the problem through faith, greater faith, greater love, greater hope. This virtuous cycle, step into it. Seek first the kingdom of God. The money stuff will follow, the care will follow. That's who God is.

And so I think the invitation that Jesus gives to people who have checkbooks and have mortgages and have things that we need to be responsible for, right? Is to, yeah, have those responsibilities, but have them in light of the character of God, have them in light of a relationship based on faith and love. And Jesus's urgent plea to the disciples, I think throughout this book, is understand that God is here right now.

He cares for you. I mean, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount is these blessed ares, blessed are. And they're things that we normally think of as not being characteristic of blessing, the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the gentle, the meek, who are not particularly in that culture getting ahead by any means. Jesus begins his sermon by saying, this is what reality looks like. God cares for those who the world doesn't care for.

That's reality as Jesus understands it. And the more we come to trust in that reality, the more we can seek the kingdom first. We can seek that reality first. And so I think the advice, if I'm gonna give you anything practical, it's this, it's participate in the kingdom now. Jesus was coming, opening up the kingdom. He's saying this reality where God is present with people, there's relationship available to people, where there's this faith and love pouring out.

He says, you want to grow in faith enough to not be anxious about money? Well, then start to, right now, seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness. Be a part of, be growing in this relationship with him. Dallas Willard says this. He says, the treasure we have in heaven is also something very much available to us now. Now, we can and should draw upon it as needed. for it is nothing less than God himself and the wonderful society of his kingdom, even now interwoven in my life.

What is most valuable for any human being without regard to an afterlife is to be a part of this marvelous reality, God's kingdom now. Eternity is now ongoing. I am now leading a life that will last forever. Upon my treasures in the heavens, I now draw for my present needs. If with a view to my needs in this life, I had to choose between having good credit with the bank or having good credit with God, I would not hesitate a moment. By all means, let the bank go.

What my life really is now is hid with Christ and God. Colossians 3.3 What I treasure in heaven is not just the little that I have caused to be there. It is what I love there and what I place my security and happiness in there. It is God who is our refuge and strength and very present help in a time of trouble. And as the apostle Paul has taught us from his own experience, my glory, my God shall supply every need you have in terms of his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.

This is the constant witness of the biblical record of the kingdom among us. Worship team is going to come up here.

What Jesus is inviting us into, right? It's not just steps. Oh, well, you have a money problem, just don't be anxious. Go ahead and do that. Don't be anxious in the light of your growing and deepening experience of the care and presence of God in your life right now. See, we think this treasures in heaven is just sort of, oh, it's going to be when I die.

And so need to suffer through my life right now. The point of the kingdom, the point of what Jesus was talking about as he's going around Galilee in here and preaching on the kingdom and what it means for us is that the king is there present right now and he's inviting us to trust in him and put our faith in him right now. And the best way that we can serve the Lord and not treasure things that are of this earth is to start to draw from the bank of eternity, our life in Christ Jesus.

We can start to live by faith in everything. In everything, you can live by faith. I think I've got a slide for that. Yeah. If you want to trust God with your money, then trust him with everything. It's like, maybe you don't know if you're trusting God with your money right now, and that's okay. Like there's like, again, don't just continue to think about it harder. And then one day you'll figure it out. Just ask God this question. What am I trusting him with?

Maybe I don't know if I'm treasuring things on earth. Maybe I don't know if I'm serving money. That's that's OK. Just leave that question for now. Ask yourself this. What are you trusting him with right now? And if the answer is nothing, then take some steps. Because again, it's not, there's a rule. This is how much you're allowed to have. It's seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. Throw yourself into this relationship of trust and faith in Jesus Christ.

Maybe the step that you need to take the trust him with is to be a witness to your friends and neighbors and coworkers about the goodness of Jesus. Maybe that's an uncomfortable step he's asking you to take. Maybe, I don't know. Maybe there's an uncomfortable, maybe it is. Maybe it is financially. Maybe you are very anxious about money and maybe you need to take some risk to see how faithful God will be to you in the midst of that.

Maybe there's something going on in your marriage. Maybe there's some unforgiveness in your life. Maybe there's some thing that you just can't let go of. Start trusting God with these things. Whatever it is, as you pray, when you ask God, Lord, what am I trusting you with? and what am I not trusting you with? Whatever the thing that God brings to your mind, start to bring that to God. Start to, by faith, surrender these things to him.

Because the minute you start to develop greater trust for the character of God, the money stuff will follow. That's the point. Seek first the kingdom and all that stuff's gonna follow. You won't be anxious about money and God will provide for you, but grow in faith. Start to trust him with your whole life. Start to live as if Jesus really is on the throne, not distant, but present. That he's overcome the world, which is what he says.

Start to live in such a way where you can trust him with your reputation, with your finances, with whatever the thing is that you're anxious for and not trusting him in.

All right, we're gonna take some time. We're gonna worship the Lord. And we'll pray a little bit between songs here, okay? So let's just invite the Lord. Holy Spirit, we want to worship you. We want to seek you. We want to love you. We want to listen to you, Lord. And we don't know our hearts. You know our hearts, Lord. Would you show us the things that we need to entrust to you? God, if it's financial, great. If there's something first, something first on our hearts, Holy Spirit,

would you do what you say you do? convict us of sin, righteousness, judgment? Would you convict us of sin in our life? Or would you convict us of what it means to trust you, this righteousness you invite us into? Lord, would you right now, as we're gathered in your presence, in your name, seeking your face, Lord, would you speak to us and grow us in faith? Lord, we know you're so faithful to meet us as we turn to you. Would you say, as we turn to you, you turn to us? And so we,

God, we come in in that spirit. We ask Thank you, Lord, speak to us right now. All right, let's just stand. We'll worship the Lord together.