“Either We Trust God or We Don’t”

Matthew 6:24-34

I’ll begin this morning’s sermon with a short exercise. I’m going to say a line, and you’re going to repeat it:

I don’t know but I’ve been told…

The streets of heaven are paved with gold…

I don’t know but it’s been said…

You don’t need money when you are dead…

The following story will now hopefully make more sense. It seems that there was this guy wanted to take his money with him when he died. Just to be sure he converted all of his cash into gold bars. When he died, the bars were placed in his casket and buried with him. He appears at the Pearly Gates lugging a bag full of these gold bars. Saint Peter welcomes him to heaven, and then tells him that they had no need for more paving stones.

The truth is that we really don’t need money when we’re dead. Nor does the value of anything here on earth translate into value in heaven. There will be no need in the realized Kingdom of God for gold, silver, diamonds, money, or whatever.

In this morning’s text Jesus makes a clear contrast between earthly and heavenly riches. The possession of the former in no way guarantees the possession of the latter. There is to some degree, maybe a great degree, Scriptural evidence that the possession of the former can hinder one’s ability to possess the latter. There are hints in that direction in these few biblical texts I’m going to quote, texts that are but the tip of the iceberg in terms of the biblical attitude toward earthly riches.

· From First Timothy 6: For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.

· From Luke 4, where Jesus is Quoting Isaiah: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

· From Luke 6: Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God. Please note that Jesus says here “the poor” not just “the poor in spirit.”

· From Amos 5: Therefore because you trample on the poor… you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine.

· Matthew 19: Again I tell you[says Jesus], it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God.

Is money evil? No the love, or more correctly lust, of money is. Is wealth a sin? That depends on what we’re doing to accumulate it, how we go about using it, and our attitude toward it. Are possessions in themselves bad? Only if we allow them possess us. Is it wrong to be frugal? No, buts it’s a sin to be selfishly stingy. Is it wrong to plan for the future? Not as long as we realize that it is God who controls the future and that it is God who will ultimately take care of us when and if we get there.

Let’s be very clear; in today’s text Jesus is in no way upholding idleness or condemning prudence and forethought. What Jesus is condemning is a lifestyle spent accumulating “stuff” rather than serving God. What he is promoting is freedom from anxiety.

This freedom will, of course, never be absolute. As sinful people living in a sinful world letting go of anxiety is difficult. Says Sherman Johnson, “… we cannot divest ourselves from anxiety altogether, but, with the help of God’s grace, it is possible to make progress in that direction.” Even the best Christian can fall into the trap of a worried mind.

An example from my youth: I worked for a godly man. If ever there was a good Christian it was Mr. W. R. Shelton, but I’ll never forget what his brother-in-law told him one evening, “If you didn’t have anything to worry about you’d worry about not having anything to worry about.” The Christian life is a day by day exercise in trusting God more and worrying less. I’m almost sure that Mr. Shelton’s one regret upon entering heaven was that he worried so much.

What did Jesus say about the uselessness of worrying? “… can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” We know the answer to that one: no! William Barclay wrote that, “There may be greater sins than worry, but very certainty there is no more disabling sin.” Worry gives us nothing. It only takes away as it robs us of peace, lays waste to our happiness, eats up our time (as well as our stomach linings), consumes our energies, and more often than not contributes to diseases of the body and mind. Disabling, indeed!

Ultimately all our questions about wealth and our attitude toward it and the place of anxiety in the life of a Christian boil down to this: “Either we trust God or we don’t.” Either we place our absolute faith in God to take care of us or we place that faith in our own ability to earn, spend, and invest our money so as to guarantee a safe and secure future for ourselves and our loved ones. Again this is not about money being intrinsically evil or prudent preparation for the future a sin. It’s okay to have money. It’s okay to plan for our children’s education and our own retirement.

But only as we recognize that whatever financial resources we have come to us as a gift from God. It is our responsibility to be wise and faithful stewards of those resources. And the first steps in such stewardship are acknowledging that those resources are an undeserved blessing from God, giving him thanks for them, and reminding ourselves that no one can ever be a self-made or self-sufficient person.

Jesus makes it very clear in verse 24 of today’s text that we can’t have it both ways. We cannot ultimately trust God while crossing our fingers and putting our trust in things. We cannot faithfully serve God – we cannot faithfully walk with Jesus in the way of the cross – while allowing our possessions to possess us. As verse 24 is paraphrased in The Message: “You cannot worship two gods at once. Loving one god you’ll end up hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt of the other. You cannot worship God and Money both.” Or as William Barclay puts it, “God must be the undisputed master of our lives.”

The Greek word that Eugene Peterson translates as “to worship” is more faithfully rendered as “to be a slave of.” That’s where Barclay gets the idea of God being the undisputed master of our lives. We are either slaves of the Lord, whose yoke is light and easy, or we’re slaves of stuff – wealth, possessions, whatever. To be enslaved by the things of this world is to be owned and controlled by them. The yoke of this master is neither light nor easy. It is crushingly heavy and suffocating. Serving God and following Jesus set us free from anxiety. Serving mammon leads to constant worrying about the security of this stuff that we look to for security.

In his recent presentation to the National Presbyterian Stewardship Conference Karl Travis said that, “…the spiritual cancers of our age [are] materialism, consumerism, and acquisition.” He went on to say that in the United States the chief spiritual dilemma is materialism and that our society has taught and continues to teach us that the things of most value, the things in which we should place our primary trust, are things that can be measured, touched, tasted, smelled, bought, owned, sold, and acquired.

He further said that such materialism has given rise to what he calls an “alternative myth” about what human beings are for. This myth is that the value human beings is based on the resources they command, the clothes they wear, the car they drive, the house they inhabit, and the bank accounts they accumulate. In other words human value is measured by how much and what kind of stuff we have.

After calling this myth “complete poppycock” he went on to say, “[Faithful stewardship] is an exuberant conversation within which we step toe-to-toe with the idolatries [the mammon] of this age and declare with a loud and clear and resonant voice, ‘I am not your slave! I am a child of God, sealed by the Holy Spirit, marked as Christ’s forever, and nothing you can say or do can ever make that not true’.”

To serve the Lord is to serve the only One who can save us. To serve the Lord is to trust is a God who is absolutely trustworthiness. To serve the Lord is to serve the God who created us and called us good; it is to serve a God on whose gracious scale our status is but minimally lower than the angels, a God who blesses and values the poor even as the world kicks dirt in their faces.

Mammon cannot save us. To serve it is to risk damnation. Placing our trust in it can only provide us with a sense of false security. To be its slave is to ultimately come to believe that we are of no value without it, to allow it to define us and give us our identity.

To worship God, to seek first his Kingdom, is to be led to a life beyond this life. To worship mammon is to end an anxiety filled life’s journey at our grave. When it’s over it’s over, period, the end. It all comes down to choices, or as Joshua put it to the Israelites after crossing the River Jordan, “Chose this day whom you will serve.” Amen.