(2 Samuel 12:1-14; Matthew 7:1-6)

In the Authorized Popular Culture Version of the Scriptures, also known as the Buddy Jesus Bible, Matthew 7 begins, “You’re not allowed to tell me anything I do is wrong.  Jesus said so.  And if you do, you’re a hypocrite.”  That’s why a lot of folks who mostly wouldn’t give the Bible the time of day are nevertheless fond of this passage.  I trust it won’t surprise you when I tell you that’s not what Jesus is talking about here.  In truth, there’s a fair bit of judgment, in one form or another, in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount.  In this passage, verse 5 makes it clear that we aren’t just supposed to ignore the sin in a brother’s life; but how to fit all this together has troubled many people.

To understand this, it helps once again to see how this fits into the greater structure of the Sermon on the Mount.  Our text this morning stands parallel to a longer passage in the center of Matthew 5, in that both these passages deal with law and judgment, and both are concerned to correct misuses of God’s law.  Their purpose is to teach us how we ought to use his law, and his word more generally.

In Matthew 5, Jesus takes aim at an approach to the law that says, “How can we interpret the law so that it doesn’t stop us doing what we want to do?”  The Pharisees had effectively been doing that by focusing on superficial obedience, which they could then define and interpret to suit themselves and their purposes.  Jesus corrects that by driving down to the true meaning and purpose of the law; to make it vivid, he goes case by case, bringing home the real force and significance of the commandments against murder and adultery, and the laws about divorce and the taking of oaths.

Here, he’s taking on the tendency to treat the law as a tool to be used on others—to control their behavior, to manipulate their actions, to punish them, or simply to beat them up and demonstrate their moral inferiority to oneself.  It’s a much briefer section, since there’s no need to discuss this case by case, but it’s a complex argument for all that, and we do well to read it carefully.

First, a principle I’ve noted before, that God doesn’t give us his commandments for us to tell others what to do, but for us to know what we’re supposed to do.  We see this with special clarity in Paul’s words to husbands and wives.  He doesn’t say, “Husbands, expect this from your wives and make your wives do this,” or, “Wives, you should be getting this from your husbands”; he says, “Wives, you do this,” and “Husbands, you do this,” and each of you let God worry about the other one.  So it is here.

We read God’s word to ourselves, and for ourselves; to understand it, we stand under it, and we look at our own lives in its light.  We apply it to ourselves and let the Holy Spirit speak through it to convict us of our sin.  This is hard; it requires us to humble ourselves to admit and accept that we’re being convicted, rather than denying that conviction, working to make excuses for ourselves, or proudly defying it.  We have to admit, not just intellectually but down deep in our souls, that we need to be convicted and corrected.  But that humility isn’t just a byproduct—it’s part of the point.  The conviction of the Holy Spirit, humbly accepted, moves us to repentance; and when we’re humbly repentant and aware of our own need for grace, then we can correct one another as Christ calls us to—not as something we have the right to do, but as an expression of love.

You see, we don’t have the right to use the word of God as judges, pronouncing others guilty and handing down sentences.  We’ve talked about this before, that judgment comes down from above, from a position of moral superiority; that’s why in a courtroom, the judge sits well above the floor and looks down on everyone else.  It’s a symbol, and a powerful one.  We don’t stand above anyone—we’re sinners saved by grace, that’s all, and that’s everything.  There are certainly many people who’ve done worse than we have, but even so, our need for grace is no less than theirs.  We aren’t qualified to pass judgment on anyone, and we don’t have the right.  Only God is, and only he does.

That said, this doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to call sin sin; in fact, we’re supposed to.  We just need to remember that the judge isn’t the only person in the courtroom.  Often during any trial, the most important person there is the witness on the stand, telling the court what they have seen and heard; and that’s our role.  We witness to what God has done for us, and also to what he’s taught us about himself and ourselves and the world.  Part of that is declaring the holiness of God, and our own sinfulness; part of that is straightforwardly naming sin as sin, without beating around the bush or trying to redefine it for our own comfort.  But if we do so humbly and graciously, not because we want to cause hurt but because we want to bless others, that isn’t judging or being judgmental.  It is, rather, warning others of the standards by which God judges, and will judge.

That’s uncomfortable, if you’re not self-righteous about it—and it’s a service the self-righteous cannot perform, because their spirit negates the service.  In Jesus’ parable, the log in the eye draws our attention for the sheer ridiculousness of the image, and rightly so; but we shouldn’t miss the reality that a speck in the eye is a painful problem that can cause a fair bit of damage.  Helping to remove such a thing is a good work, if you can see clearly to do it.  If your vision is obscured or distorted—by the log of self-righteous­ness, for instance—then you’re only likely to do harm; that’s the reason for Jesus’ injunction.  Challenging a fellow believer about an area of sin in their life should be a work of healing, restoration, and reconciliation, and it is, if we do it humbly and graciously, in an attitude of service.  It’s only when our heart isn’t right that it’s a problem.

You’ll note that I said, “a fellow believer”; so did Jesus.  He could have said, “the speck in another’s eye,” but he didn’t—he specified “your brother.”  He expands this in verse 6, which is pretty harsh in its language; pigs were the very worst animals to a Jewish audience, and dogs were maybe a half-step above pigs, if that.  What is holy, and what are your pearls?  The word of God is holy, and the kingdom of God is the pearl of great price (though that parable doesn’t come until chapter 13).  To your brother or sister in Christ, you go and you help them remove the speck from their eye, because they know the value and the power of the word of God and the promise of his kingdom.  But outside the church?  Maybe so, maybe no.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean we never talk to anyone about their sin if they aren’t a Christian.  If we did that, a lot of folks would never hear the gospel because they would never see the need.  It does mean this, however:  we should try to do so only with people whom the Holy Spirit is preparing to be receptive.  That’s a matter of spiritual discernment, learning to follow God’s leading, which comes only by much prayer; even the wisest and most godly will sometimes get it wrong, but they’ll tell you it’s better to get it wrong sometimes than to never speak.  This isn’t a call to be hyper-cautious, but it is a command to be thoughtful, because there are a lot of people out there who are closed of ear, mind, and heart.  If we try to convict them of their sin, they aren’t going to listen:  they’re going to trample the message underfoot, and probably attack us for our trouble.

If that happens, one thing they’ll probably do is accuse us of being judgmental.  Our culture likes to do that, because it’s committed itself to the proposition that what I want to do is who I am, and so if you tell me it’s wrong to do what I want to do, you’re telling me it’s wrong for me to be who I am, and that’s judging me.  With that, we’ve come full circle on this sermon; and we’ve come as well to the paradoxical title I’ve given it.  We cannot truly judge another from our knees, for that’s the posture not of arrogant judgment, but of humble service.  We also cannot turn away from serving another because we fear to be accused of judging them, and we know that some people will do that.  It’s a risk.  It’s one we need to take, because as the last verse of James tells us, “Whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”

(Proverbs 6:6-11; Matthew 6:25-34)

A couple years ago, I read a post on a blog called Pursuing Titus 2 that I’ve never forgotten.  It’s a post called “Fear and Grace,” and after telling the story of a time when she almost died from pneumonia, the author says this:

When we are simply imagining chilling scenarios, we are facing the horrible emotions without any of God’s sustaining grace.  Every time we imagine something, we put ourselves through agony of a kind we will never have to go through in real life.  Because when awful things are actually happening, God walks with us through them and gives us His grace and strength.  The peace of God’s presence through a trial is something I can never conjure up in my imagination, and something that only comes with real trials, not the pretend ones I make up while driving. Now I know the difference.

This is why anxiety is spiritually lethal, and why Jesus commands against it:  it pitches us out of the present, and out of dependence on God in the present, into a future of our own imagining—which is to say, a future that does not actually exist.  God is present in every place and time that exists; if something does not exist, God is not there.  If we project ourselves into a fu­ture that does not exist, we go alone—and this is what we do when we worry, when we let anxiety rule in our hearts.  When we do that, we are refusing to trust God, we are refusing to live by faith in him; by our actions, we are denying that he can be trusted, asserting that we will only make it through the trials and troubles of the future if we’ve solved them ahead of time by our own wits, and prepared ourselves for them by our own strength, out of our own resources.

Like last week, Jesus is talking about money here, but not for its own sake.  In the previous passage, he’s talking about money as treasure, inviting us to treasure God rather than our earthly possessions; here, his concern is with money as security, teaching us to trust God rather than our earthly possessions.  This fits with the parallel passage at the end of chapter 5, where Jesus asks us to trust that if we give up our claim to punish our enemies ourselves, but instead show them grace and give them over to God, we will not end up victimized, but vindicated; here, he asks us to trust that if we give up our claim to use our wealth for ourselves, and instead live by faith and give it over to God, that we will not end up bereft, but blessed.

This is alien to our culture.  I think most of us were taught as kids that we needed to do well in school so that when we grew up, we could get a good enough job to “earn a living,” or to “make a living.”  Not everyone has that sense of responsibility, of course; what do we say about those who don’t?  “They think the world owes them a living.”  (The apostle Paul would say, “If they refuse to work, let them not eat,” but that’s another discussion.)  In discussions about the economy, we talk about the “standard of living.”  In all of this, what’s a “living”?  It’s whatever amount of money is enough to “provide for our needs,” however we choose to define them.  The essential assumption is that we keep ourselves alive and provide for ourselves by our own efforts; and it’s an assumption which most of us in the church share.  Sure, we would affirm that God assists us and his help is important, but at bottom, we still believe it’s basically up to us.

Jesus tells us something very different:  this is God’s work.  He gave you your job, your income, and all the things you possess, and he didn’t do it so that you can provide for yourself.  He didn’t give you the ability to have pension plans and savings so that you can store up to provide for yourself in the future.  God gave you all those things so that you could use them to his glory.  Full stop.  God provides for us because he loves us, and to show his faithfulness.  Yes, he does so mainly through our own work—but he is the one who gave us our abilities and our skills, he is the one who gave us our opportunities and our connections, and he is the one who put the circumstances together so that we could succeed.  Our hands, God’s provision.

Now, I’m not naïve; I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night.  I’ve been preaching regularly for over a decade now, I’ve preached in a lot of churches, and I know what some of you are thinking:  this is fine as far as it goes, but I can’t possibly mean—.  Yes, I do.  One of the great problems with the rich church in the First World is that most of us are nowhere near radical enough about this; we’re like Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5, we want to keep something back for ourselves.  So let’s up the ante here:  God didn’t give you money and possessions so that you could keep yourself alive.  Keeping you alive is his job, and he’s better at it than you are.  Our job is to lay down our lives for him, as Jesus says in Mark 8:  “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.  For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the sake of the gospel will save it.”

Just look at the parallel to this section, verses 38-48 of chapter 5.  As we saw some weeks ago, it isn’t about rolling over, being a doormat, or letting yourself be abused—far from it; it’s about trusting God in the face of human evil and fighting it his way.  But to do that, we have to reject our instinct to protect ourselves or defend ourselves and go out on a limb—we have to trust that if we take the radical step of leaving ourselves apparently unprotected and defenseless in the face of evil, that opens up a conduit for the power of God to attack evil through us.  We have to trust that by not protecting ourselves, we will be better protected, and by not defending ourselves, we will be better defended, because God will do what we cannot.  Jesus teaches us to leave our vindication and even our safety completely in God’s hands.

In the same way, this passage doesn’t justify irresponsibility, or never bothering to plan, or freeloading on other people and contributing nothing in return; it’s about trusting God in the face of evil circumstances and dealing with them his way.  Again, we have to reject our instinct to protect ourselves and go out on a limb:  we have to trust that if we take the radical step of putting God first with our money and our assets, using them to seek his kingdom and his righteous­ness, that he will in fact add all these things to us that we need.

I can illustrate this from the life of this congregation.  As I think most of you know, our budget is much larger than our congregational giving.  Our mission giving, our office wing, the founding of our preschool, and most of our staff have been made possible by large financial bequests to the church, most notably that of Harriet Gawthrop; interest from our investments and the sale of investment principal each cover something like a third of our spending.  The elders of this congregation have recognized this as God’s money which he has provided to us to advance the work of his kingdom, and so that’s how they and we have striven to use it.

From a worldly point of view, from a purely business point of view, this is foolish; from a spiritual point of view, it’s profoundly wise, and I commend them for it.  They have sought first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and God has continued to give us our bread that doesn’t run out.  Should God stop providing, it would, and so we’re compelled to acknow­ledge our dependence on him.  Because we’re human, sometimes we’re anxious, saying, “How long shall we have enough money?” and “How long shall we be able to keep going?”; and yet, God continues to show himself faithful, and by and large, we remember that today has enough troubles of its own.  We keep our focus on the challenges God has given us right now, and leave the troubles and challenges to come in his hands.

And why shouldn’t we?  And why shouldn’t you?  We don’t; we get anxious because we don’t fully understand what’s happening and we don’t know what’s going to happen, we worry because we think we have to figure out what to do and how to do it or else everything’s going to come apart, and when we get that way, we may talk like Christians but we walk like atheists.  Why do we do that?  Do we really believe that God values us so little that he’d just let us fall, that he’d let us go smash like a carton of eggs on the sidewalk?  Do you really believe he values you less than you value yourself?

You have all your self-doubts, all your fears, and all your regrets, and you have the Devil perched on your shoulder speaking through all of them to pour his poison into your soul.  God knows about all those things—indeed, he sees your darkness far better than you do—but he also sees the light he has made to shine in your heart.  He knows, not just who you are now, but who you will be by his love and his grace and his power, and he’s heaven-bent on healing and purifying and perfecting you; he made you and he loves you, no matter what you’ve done and no matter what you’re going to do.  And so, consider the corn of the field:  yes, there are tough years, when it’s hot and it’s dry and there isn’t much of a harvest, but the farmer doesn’t just pave it over and set up a fireworks shop; he keeps planting, and next time, it grows tall and green and golden.  So it is with God:  he who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it.  He cares for you, and he will provide for your needs, if you trust him to.

You may say this is impractical, that I’m being unrealistic, that I don’t know what I’m asking; from a worldly point of view, this is impractical.  But we are in Christ, we no longer live according to the flesh, we’ve been given a better point of view and a deeper understanding.

(Isaiah 51:7-8, Isaiah 58:1-9; Matthew 6:16-24)

As we read through our passage from Matthew this morning, it might have seemed like a jumble of unrelated stuff.  After all, Jesus is talking about fasting, and then he’s talking about money, and then you have whatever verses 22-23 are about, and then he’s back to money again; and what do all those things have to do with each other?  In fact, though, this whole passage is about one thing, which relates to each of these areas.

If we look at the Sermon on the Mount as I’ve laid it out, we can see that it’s carefully structured as one large ring composition—working in parallel sections from the outside in.  With such a structure, the climax comes in the middle, and so it is here with the Lord’s Prayer; that marks the turn, and then you begin working back through the same themes as the first half, only in reverse order.  This passage stands in parallel to the first six verses of this chapter—which also, on the surface, dealt with two different things:  giving to the needy, and prayer.  In both, however, if you look at what Jesus is saying, you find one central question and one primary concern:  do you want your reward from other people on this earth, or do you want it from your Father in heaven?

Jesus spends the greater part of these two passages asking that question about our religious activities.  Partly, that’s because of the Pharisees; not only were they his loudest opponents, they were past masters at spiritualizing everything, and com­pletely blind to the issue he’s raising with their religious behavior.  More than that, it’s because it’s so easy to spiritualize things, and assume that if what we’re doing looks religious or spiritual, we must be pleasing God—we don’t need to examine our hearts or question our motives.  Fact is, though, just because we look like a Christian doesn’t mean we are.

Jesus doesn’t stop there, however.  It’s interesting, if you compare these two passages, you can see some additional inverse parallelism going on.  The inner sections, 5-6 and 16-18, deal with fasting and prayer, which traditionally go together; in the outer sections, Jesus talks about money.  In verses 2-4, as noted, his concern is with giving money to the needy; in 19-21 and 24, his focus is broader.  The issue is the same—are you using your money to earn an earthly reward, or a reward in heaven?—but he appears to have more material rewards in mind; and more than that, Jesus expands on the warning he gives in verse 1.  It’s not just that if we get our reward in this world, we miss out in the long run; there’s a greater spiritual cost attached.

The rewards you seek become your treasures.  If you win them, they become your treasures in the present, the things to which you look for meaning and satisfaction in your life now; if you don’t win them, they become your treasures in the future, or perhaps in the past, leaving you dissatisfied with the present because of something that didn’t happen, and may never.  Either way, you set your heart on them, and so that’s where your heart is to be found.

Now, remember, in the Beatitudes, Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart”; and if you were here when we looked at that verse, remember two things we saw then.  First, when the Bible talks about the heart, it doesn’t mean our emotions, it means the core of our being—the center of our intellect, the wellspring of our emotions, the root of our will.  Where your treasure is, that’s the center of your life.  Everything else falls into place around that, and that’s what drives your decisions.  Second, a pure heart is a heart which is all good, because it’s completely devoted to God; it has no additives and is com­pletely unadulterated.  It is single, all one thing—there are no conflicting loyalties, no contradictory desires.  That’s why Psalm 86 says, “Teach me your way, O Lord . . . give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name.”

Why does this matter?  Well, verse 22 literally says, “If your eye is single, your whole body will be full of light.”  No one translates it that way because people would take it badly, but if we think of it in terms of focus—which is a metaphor we take from eyesight—it makes sense.  Light enters the body through the eye, and God is the source of all light.  If we have a single focus on God, our eyes are open to his light, and it fills us.  If we focus away from God, we turn our eyes into the darkness, and our lives go dark.  The heart focuses the eye on what it desires; through the eye, the heart is filled.  Where your heart is, your eye follows; and where you look, your heart follows.

If, then, you fix your attention on the things of this world, it is the things of this world that you treasure; if your heart is set on this world and the things of this world, then your focus will be on the things you have and the things you desire, and your concerns will be all for them—which means it will be this world that owns you, not God.  And ownership is precisely what’s in view in verse 24, for this is the language of slavery, not employment:  either the world owns you, or God does.  You can’t divide your loyalties between this world and God, because they pull in opposite directions, and both demand exclusive allegiance; to obey one is to defy and reject the other.

If your goal is to have treasures on earth—whatever they might be:  money, expensive things, success, a good reputation, marriage, family—then the desire to get and keep those treasures will run your life; they will be your idols, the gods you really worship.  You will obey the Lord and believe in him only as far as who he is and what he tells you to do fit with what your idols demand of you—which is to say, you won’t really believe in him or obey him at all.  You might say you love him, but you won’t love him as he truly is, only as you want to believe he is; in truth, you will despise him.

This is true even if your idols are religious.  If your treasure is having a big church with lots of programs, if it’s the church building or having lots of money in the church’s bank account, then you’re not actually loving or serving God—you’re trying to serve two masters.  The fact that you might be doing this in the name of God doesn’t change that any; it’s no better to make an idol of the church than to make one of anything else.

Does this mean it’s bad to have money and a good career, to be married with kids, or to have a big church with a beautiful building and lots of money in the bank?  Of course not.   The problem isn’t with having any of these things, it’s when they become our treasures.  It’s not what we own, it’s what owns us.  God gives us many good things, and he wants us to enjoy them and to use them well—but he wants us to hold them lightly.  He doesn’t want us to treasure them, he wants us to treasure him, alone.  The question for us isn’t, “What do you have?” or, “What do you want?”; it is, simply, “Where is your heart?”