Last week we talked about the lost art of seeing heaven. Looking at Matthew 6:1 we focussed on why we find it easier to practice our righteousness ‘in front of others to be seen by them’, than it is to look for ‘reward from [our] father in heaven’.

This week we’re going to take a look at another passage in this same chapter of Matthew and talk further about heaven—but also about money.

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not 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 eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. 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!

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. (6:19-24)

We need to start by re-emphasizing a point that we made last week: heaven is not where we go when we die; heaven is God’s dimension of the world that we live in. We must avoid the temptation of thinking of earth as here and heaven as there in any kind of physical sense. If we don’t grasp this, we will fail to fully appreciate so much of what the New Testament teaches—not least this passage we’re looking at today.

Tom Wright, the New Testament scholar, offers a helpful explanation in his For Everyone commentary series on the book of Matthew:

As with other references to heaven and earth, we shouldn’t imagine [Jesus] means ‘don’t worry about this life - get ready for the next one’. ‘Heaven’ here is where God is right now, and where, if you learn to love and serve God right now, you will have treasure in the present, not just in the future. Of course Jesus (like almost all Jews of his day) believed that after death God would have a wonderful future in store for his faithful people; but they didn’t normally refer to that future as ‘heaven’. He wanted his followers to establish heavenly treasure right now, treasure which they could enjoy in the present as well as the future, treasure that wasn’t subject to the problems that face all earthly hoards. How can one do this? Learn to live in the presence of the loving father. Learn to do everything for him and him alone. Get your priorities right.

The next section in the passage we’re focussing on today helps to shed some light on what it means to get our priorities right. This is one of the trickier sections of Jesus’ teaching to understand. What on earth does Jesus mean by healthy and unhealthy eyes? The key to figuring out what Jesus meant is to actually do a bit of research into how the Jews in Jesus’ day would have heard this saying. And the Jews would have heard loud and clear what Jesus meant.

Let’s start by including the the translation David Stern offers in his ‘Complete Jewish Bible’:

So if you have a ‘good eye’ your whole body will be full of light; but if you have an ‘evil eye’ your whole body will be full of darkness.

Instead of healthy and unhealthy eyes as translated in the NIV, Sterne refers to a good and evil eye. And that matters. The phases ‘good eye’ and ‘evil eye’ had very clear and specific meanings to the Jews in Jesus’ day. To have a good eye meant that you were generous; to have an evil eye meant that you were stingy.

So, let’s re-read the whole section, but update the NIV version to include the meaning:

The eye is the lamp of the body. If you are generous, your whole body will be full of light. But if you are stingy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

Having a good, healthy eye is about seeing the needs of those around and being generous in our giving towards meeting those needs. Having an evil, unhealthy eye means that we are blind to the needs around us and are greedy and self-centred.

Lois Tverberg expands on this in her book ‘Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus’:

Why is a person’s “eye” toward others so critical to Jesus? Because our relationship with money reveals our relationship with God. To have a “bad eye” is to cling to the little that you have, resenting those with more and refusing to help those with less. Your attitude shows how convinced you are that God is stingy, that he is either unwilling or unable to care for you. And it reveals how disconnected you are from the struggles of others. No wonder Jesus says that life becomes dark indeed when you’ve cut yourself off from both God and those around you.

On the other hand, if you’re radically convinced of God’s caring presence in your life, you’re also confident that God will provide for your needs — not just materially, but emotionally and spiritually as well. You may not be wealthy by the world’s standard, but you have a rock-solid understanding that what you have is enough, that ultimately your own situation is secure. The fruit is a generous attitude, a “good eye” toward others. How can your life not brighten when you think this way?

Shedding this light on having a good and evil eye immediately makes this section fit perfectly with the prior and subsequent sections where Jesus talks about treasure in heaven, and then not being able to serve God and money. All three sections in this short passage are about our attitudes towards money, material possessions, God, and others.

In essence, Jesus is challenging all of us who would listen to live lives that are God and other-focussed, lives that look for the reward - the treasure - from heaven rather than than from earth. He is calling us to be generous and other-centred rather than stingy and self-centred. And he warns us that the choice we face is either/or, not both/and. We can’t be generous and stingy, we can’t be other-centred and self-centred, and we can’t serve God and money. We must choose.

Let’s choose to rediscover the art of storing up treasure in heaven.

I was reading through a few sections of Matthew’s Gospel this morning when this statement from Jesus jumped out to me:

Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. (6:1)

It stood out to me because not many people—myself included—obey this! The truth is nearly all of us want to receive immediate and tangible recognition for when we do good things.

This is natural. Anyone with kids knows that your child isn’t very old before they’re constantly saying, ‘look at me’, for every new thing they start to do.

We crave appreciation. We long to be seen and to be noticed. The thought of doing something amazing and it not being noticed affects us to the point that we might never even attempt some feats if it were not going to be seen.

But Jesus isn’t saying that it’s wrong to crave this attention per se; he’s saying that we need to change the audience we look for that recognition from. Instead of seeking the attention and applause of those around us, we are to seek the eyes and ears of our ’father in heaven’.

The problem we have with this is that most of us can’t see the father. Neither can we see heaven. If our friend says, ’well done’, it’s something we can feel immediately. Getting that reward from the father instead doesn’t seem real.

This betrays a major problem all too many of us struggle with: we have lost the ability—if we ever had it—to see the other, heavenly dimension—God’s dimension —to the world we live in. We see only what we can see with our physical eyes; we hear only what we can hear with our physical ears.

It is because we have lost the ability to see heaven that we seek the applause of those around us. 

Heaven you see is not somewhere we go when we die; heaven is another dimension to this world that we live in. There are so many distractions in our physical, material world that we all too many of us have become blinded to this other dimension. 

Heaven is real. It’s just as real as the physical realm we so easily sense. But our seeking of applause and recognition from those around us highlights the fact that we don’t ’see’ heaven. We might believe in it intellectually, but we don’t experience it in any true sense. Our behaviour betrays us.

The challenge for us all is to regain this lost art of seeing heaven; of seeing the other dimension that’s right there, just hiding behind a thin veil waiting to be discovered. We need eyes to see and ear to hear. 

All too many of us have an intellectual faith in God rather than an experiential one. We believe the doctrines of the Christian faith, but we don’t know God. We believe we’ll go to heaven when we die, but we can’t see heaven’s dimension hear and now. 

How do we change this? How can we learn to see both the physical and heavenly realities that both surround us? How can we develop a connection with the father so deep that it feels more natural to seek his applause than that of those around us? 

When we look at the life of Jesus—the one guy who better than anyone brought heaven and earth together in his everyday life—we see someone who was a real man of prayer. He didn’t just say prayers or prayerful sounding words. He talked with the father. Early in the morning, during the day, late at night. His whole life emerged out of a life of prayer. 

For Jesus, prayer wasn’t wasn’t about endlessly making requests for his needs to be met; it was about hearing from the father. We too need to seek a life of prayer that is communion with God rather than reading out a list of things we want God to do for us. 

Prayer should be about connecting to God, getting his perspective, hearing what he’s saying, seeing what he sees. It’s about slowing down and seeing God’s dimension to the world around us. It’s about seeing heaven. And it’s about asking that what we see in heaven would come to pass in or physical world.

So why don’t we take this opportunity today to seek the father afresh in prayer? Why don’t we ask that he would give us eyes to see and ears to hear the realities of heaven that are currently hidden from us? 

As Jesus himself said just a short while after the statement quoted earlier:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. (7:7)

After talking a little bit about Philippians 1:21-26 on Sunday, Sam wrote a more extended reflection on the passage on his KERUFF website. We’re including it below in full:

Paul, the apostle, writing in his letter to the Philippians:

For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, so that through my being with you again your boasting in Christ Jesus will abound on account of me. (1:21-26)

At Mosaic, the community of faith I help lead here in Sheffield, we are in the middle of a series of talks and conversations around the themes of passion and discipleship. We’re exploring what our unique passions, talents, strengths, and skills are and seeing how we can put them in service of our shared mission to ‘go and make disciples of all nations’, as instructed by Jesus of Nazareth.

This last Sunday I gave a short talk and led a discussion looking at what discipleship really is. In preparing for that time I found myself drawn to the passage I’ve quoted above. It struck me that, in those few short verses, we in many ways see the essence of discipleship. We see in Paul, a fully-fledged disciple of Jesus, someone who’s life now completely embodied the two sides of discipleship: being a disciple, and being a disciple maker.

Being a disciple

It is readily apparent that Paul’s relationship with Christ was so real and strong and intimate that he genuinely and truly desired to go and be with Jesus. He loved his master. He had devoted his life to knowing and serving the person of Jesus. And his relationship was so strong that, if he could, he would love to leave and be with Christ.

How many of us can say the same? Is our relationship with Jesus that real, that living? Do we want to go and be with Christ, or are we caught up in the things of this world and really not that bothered?

I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t enjoy the things of this world. Not at all. I’m simply saying that, in Paul, we see someone who was so captivated by the person of Jesus that he would truly have loved to go and be with him there and then.

So the question isn’t whether we should or shouldn’t enjoy the things of this world (I think we should); it is whether we are enjoying those things more than Christ and whether those things have distracted us from having a deep and meaningful connection with him.

Being a disciple-maker

Having said that Paul so clearly wanted to go and be with has master, we then see though that his desire to remain on earth was even greater. But not so that he could enjoy the things of the world (again, not that that’s wrong and doesn’t have its place). The reason Paul wanted to remain was because of his love and devotion to the people he felt called - by Jesus - to serve and disciple.

Paul’s commitment to the cause of Christ was so embedded into who he was that he’d rather stay and influence others with the hope of Christ than go and spend eternity with Christ (even though he’d, of course, eventually get to do that).

This really highlights the essence of discipleship. We should seek to be so intimately connected to Christ that we really would love to be with him and yet, at the same time, be so motivated by the cause of Christ that we see that as our primary reason for being on earth.

I should add that I am by no means at the same point that Paul is. I’d be lying if I said I could echo Paul’s ‘to live is Christ, to die is gain’, sentiment. But in reflecting afresh on discipleship, I’m motivated once more to pursue that place that Paul reached.

This last Sunday we continued our series on Passion and Discipleship. After talking about Passion last time, we started to explore what exactly it means to both be a disciple of Jesus and to be a maker of disciples.

We started out by looking at two Scriptures:

Philippians 1:21-26

For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, so that through my being with you again your boasting in Christ Jesus will abound on account of me.

Matthew 28:16-20

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 1Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

The first Scripture highlighted two equally strong truths about Paul (the write of Philippians). First, his relationship with Christ was so real and strong and intimate that he genuinely and truly desired to go and be with Jesus. And second, his commitment to the cause of Christ was so embedded in who he was that he’d rather stay and influence others with the hope of Christ.

This really highlights the goal of discipleship. We should seek to be so intimately connected to Christ that we really would love to be with him and yet at the same time be so motivated by the cause of Christ that we see that as our primary reason for being on earth.

We then saw in the second passage containing Jesus’ disciple-making command the real sense that this isn’t passive. Both ‘go’ and ‘make’ are active, intentional words. It’s not enough for people to simply watch our lives and hope that people may see Christ in us. That’s important. But the disciple-making mandate of Christ requires us to go, to act, to be intentional.

Insights on discipleship from a Japanese swordsmith

After this we then watched a short video about a Japanese swordsmith and how he discipled his apprentice. This is full on insights of disciple-making and what it involves.

Discipling Images

Once we had watched the video we then had a discussion around six different images of disciple-making, taken from Alex McManus’s ebook. These were:

• Student
• Apprentice
• Mentor
• Coach
• Activist
• Shaman

None of these images by themselves capture everything about discipleship but each in different ways opens up a different aspect of what it means.

Homework!

We finished off by setting some homework for everyone! Before we have the next session (27th May) we want everyone to read through the gospel of Matthew. Also, we want everyone to have a read through Alex’s very short ebook* (just 20 pages) on disciple-making. Both these activities will feed into the next session in the series.

*We’ll send round a separate email containing the ebook.

It’s a Mosaic at Starbucks Sunday this week so we’ll be meeting in the Division Street branch from 10.30am.

There’s nothing on the agenda this week, simply a chance to catch up, introduce friends, and spend time together.

See you Sunday!

It’s Fire Night tonight at the Offutt’s. Were going to be watching The Passion of the Christ. If you arrive for 7.30pm, the film will then start at 8pm and we’ll be done by 10pm. Hope to see you there!

It’s Good Friday this week and so we’re going to be having a Mosaic Brunch at the Offutt’s on Friday morning (10am - 12pm).

There’ll be two parts to the morning. The first half of the morning we’re going to have some prayers, Scriptures, and a couple of songs to help us focus on Jesus’ death and the significance of that. And at the end of that time they’ll be an opportunity for those that want to to take communion.

Following on from that it’ll be time to feast! Emily is co-ordinating who needs to bring what via the Facebook Event we’ve created, so please check what food or drink would be good for you to bring. It’d be helpful too if people RSVP.

If you need any more information, just let us know.

See you on Friday!

It’s a Mosaic at Starbucks Sunday this week so we’ll be hanging out at the Division Street branch from 10.30am. It’s a great opportunity to connect with our community if you’re interested in finding out more and also, for those who are regulars, a perfect space for introducing friends.

See you Sunday!

(For those of you who weren’t around last Sunday for the start of the series on passion and discipleship, you can catch up with the talk and discussion that was all about passion here.)

On Sunday we began our series on passion and discipleship. This first talk and discussion was on the subject of passion.

We talked about how, in today’s world, passion is understood mostly in connection with romance. A quick Google Image search for ‘passion’ highlights that reality very quickly. And, of course, it is also associated with sports fans.

But what does it really mean? In essense, the purist definition we can find for passion is suffering. The cause or issue (or indeed, person) that we are truly passionate about is the person we are will to suffer for in order to pursue. True passion will always cost us.

Passion fuels action

This reality highlights another important truth: passion fuels action. True passion is never passive; it always drives us to action. Almost all meaninful change in the world is fuelled by passion. Passion is so much more than a feeling; it’s a commitment to a cause. And, we only need to take a look through history to see that the world’s leading change agents - whether that be a Ghandi, a Martin Luther King Jn, or a Nelson Mandela - were people with passion; people who were prepared to suffer to see a better future emerge.

It’s all very well considering how other people have pursued their passions though, but what about us? How do we discover our passion and pursue that with all that we’ve got? More often than not, it is through our experiences. Whether the experience be a negative one or a positive one, when that experience includes pressure, uncertainty, and discomfort, it serves to bring the the surface our true self. Deep, stretching experiences that bring to the surface things inside of us that we never realised were there.

And when that passion is combined with our talents, abilities, skills, and knowledge we reach a place where we can truly function in our element. As Howard Thurman said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Faith fuels passion

If true passion always fuels action rather that passivity, what is it that fuels passion itself? We’ve seen how meaninful experiences can help us to discover an area of passion, but what role does our faith play in all of this? Before reading any further though, pick up a Bible and have a read through Hebrews chapter 11. Take a few minutes to read through that amazing chapter that catologues the role that faith played in so many of the heroes from the Old Testament.

Reading through that chapter it immediately becomes clear that faith was right at the heart of so much of the courage that we see in the people highlighted in the chapter. Their faith motivated them and kept them going, it informed everything that they did. And that has to be the goal for us.

Whilst we all have unique passions and interests and areas of ability and talent, we all as Christ-followers share the same faith and are called to the same mission. We need to allow the Scriptures and our times of prayer and meditation with God to inform and infuse our desires and passions. It is faith rather than passion itself that will truly sustain us.

Questions

• What are you passionate about?
• To what extent does your faith shape you passion?
• Are there steps you could take to more fully embed your faith as the source of your passion?
• How do people of faith and passion inspire you? And how can you do the same for others?

Hi guys,

I came across an interesting article on the BioLogos website that I found helpful and thought I’d share.

Feel free to add any thoughts, comments, or questions!

Sam.