More than Enough. Mt. 5-7. Part Six of Seven.

Welcome back to week six of the seven week series studying Jesus' Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matthew 5-7. We pick up new students all the time, so just head on over to week one and start there. All of the other weeks are linked on the right sidebar. You can do them at your own pace.

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This study should take less than 60 minutes. When you are ready to begin, proceed onto lesson six:

week six. section one. treasure.

Make sure to do these seven studies in chronological order. The work you have done up to this point should actually make these last two sections of the Sermon easier to understand and apply to daily life. So, in light of all we have learned about Jesus' message of the availability of the Kingdom of Heaven, let's read the next section from the text and return to the study:

Matthew 6:19-34

Life is all about what we treasure:



We often know that the things we are treasuring are not fulfilling. We all treasure something. Jesus is telling us what Kingdom people living within the new community naturally treasure above all else: the stuff of Heaven - God the Father, his right way of life, our brothers and sisters in the new community and, ultimately, love.

Jesus taught about treasuring when he was asked about the most important thing in all of life:

Matthew 22:34-40

This is what we treasure above all: God our Father and his people. Since Heaven is already here partially, we can in this very moment begin to store up treasures in these real and present relationships. As we learned last week in the Prayer, our new family with God as Father is first.

The stuff of earth will all eventually run its course. It will fade, rust and be eaten by moths. But in the Kingdom-birthed new community, Heaven's eternity begins now in the relationships we have with Father and his other children, our brothers and sisters. Those relationships will last into the new heaven and new earth when the Kingdom is someday fulfilled.

Jesus then tells us that what we treasure (love) the most determines where our hearts reside. Our hearts are our true centers. Our hearts make us what we will ultimately become. Loving Father and each other is what changes us - forms us into the new community.

Verses 22 and 23 are admittedly a little confusing in the way they are normally translated. The common interpretations revolve around the following three ideas...and Jesus could somehow be implying all of them at the same time:

1. We ought to keep our eyes on God, meaning we should focus our light (vision) on Him. This is praying "Our Father."
2. We ought to be careful about what we spend our time looking at. The applications may be different for each of us, but we all have things that when we gaze upon them, we are more tempted to treasure them than our Father.
3. We ought to "light up" our priorities to guide our way. Taking the time to actively prioritize our treasures is important so that we don't drift into treasuring anything more than God and his people.

This little section concludes with the famous statement, "You can't serve both God and Money." The word money is actually the idea of "Mammon" which is best understood as the lure and power of wealth, property and material possessions. Jesus is clear here to those who believe they can somehow treasure material wealth while also treasuring God. He says, "you can't treasure both equally." Either you will treasure God and He will inform you how to relate to money, or you will treasure Mammon and He will inform you how to relate to God. To take an extreme position from this that Jesus is anti-money can be dangerous. Jesus is speaking of priorities here: what we treasure and what we love, not what we happen to hold in our hands at a given moment. You can have money and not treasure it more than God. You can also not have money and treasure it more than God. That said, Jesus made it abundantly clear that having material wealth is a liability to receiving the Kingdom of Heaven. Having money makes receiving Jesus harder. Most of us can depend on our bank accounts to meet all of our physical needs for the next several weeks. That creates less desperation for our Father's provision of daily bread. That causes us to seek the Kingdom less actively than those who need Father's help in the here and now. Being desperate seems to be central to receiving the Kingdom.

Here's the big reality in all of this: The Kingdom of God is a place of abundance, not scarcity. We have more than we need and plenty to go around because God gives us more and more all the time. This idea naturally flows into Jesus' next area of teaching: worry.

week six. section two. worry.

Read the next section and return:

Matthew 6:25-34

Several weeks ago we watched a message from John Ortberg. Let's return to him again for teaching on this section. Click on the following link and watch John's message entitled "Life Beyond Worry." It's about 20 minutes long. Return to the study when you have finished.

Life Beyond Worry Video

week six. section three. assignments.

Lesson six was a little shorter than the others. Maybe you find yourself with some time left to spend with God. Turn off your computer and take a walk or write a letter to God. Tell him what you worry about. Go for it! He'll meet you. He wants to take care of you and give you all that you need. Just ask Him to help.

Extra?

You asked for it.