Seek First

I appreciate Clayton’s good work this morning and your wonderful singing. The last song just gave me chills. Not only does it fit perfectly with uh what we’re going to talk about this morning, looking at this text from Matthew 5 through7, but the proclamations within that song are powerful. I will trust you. I will build my life on you. That is precisely what we want to talk about this morning and what that looks like and what Jesus calls us to.

There’s so many other things in life that we could put our trust in. and it would be failing and it wouldn’t make sense. But we’re often tempted to do so. And what we’re proclaiming in a song like that is that our trust is going to be in the Lord. That’s where we’re going to put our faith and that is where our dependence is. If you’re visiting with us, we’re so glad that you have come our way. We love Jesus. We want to follow Jesus. That’s what we’re trying to do here.

We don’t proclaim to be perfect at it, to not make any mistakes. And in fact, an hour like this, uh, it exists because of that very reality that we aren’t perfect, that we are trying to grow. We’re talking about scripture and about the life of Jesus and what he calls us to because we all want to be improving and growing in our life. And I hope that you’re here with that same goal, that same motivation to be following Jesus Christ in your life and growing day by day.

At the end of Matthew chapter 4, we were given a little narrative note beginning in verse 23. It says, “And he went throughout Galilee teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom.” The gospel is just a fancy word that means good news. Jesus is going all through Galilee and he is proclaiming the good news of the kingdom. It’s an interesting statement, interesting idea. This is not just Jesus going around and saying, “Hey, here’s a bunch of new laws you have to follow, right?

I’m going to start something different and I’ve got a bunch of rules, a bunch of laws, and here they are. Do your best.” Now, this is a new way of life. It is a new way to perceive the good life, which is a lot of what we want to talk about this morning. And he’s trying to help people understand that the creator, the one who formed this world, who designed it, actually knows what’s best for us. And he’s going to guide us in the right way, in the best way if we will simply follow him.

And when we get to the midpart of the sermon on the mount, and this series that we’re beginning this morning will not only be in the sermon on the mount, but it’ll be kind of the anchor of it, particularly uh chapter 6 and verse 33. seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these other things will be added to you. And we’re going to go a lot of different places thinking through this idea and digging in more to the concept of seeking and what we’re seeking.

But I want us to think for just a moment about the idea of not just seeking first the kingdom, but also seeking first his righteousness. I I think although we can find justice in the world around us at times, we we probably wouldn’t think so much, you know, I’m going to seek first the United States of America and its justice. Now, it may be a lot more just than other nations that have existed in the world, maybe less just than others. The reality is we are built, we are a human um government.

We are a human system and it comes with its own failures. Things are not perfect. But what I want us to understand about what we’re talking about here, seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, is that Jesus is never wrong. And the word there that’s translated righteousness in your text in Greek, it can also be justice, which is why I’m using them interchangeably. He is just. He is right. I can depend on him even when things don’t seem that way, which the sermon on the mount deals with a little bit in the very beginning of it.

And we see this in various parts of scripture. When I look at the world and it seems like evil is winning and people who are doing the wrong things are prospering and having success, what I can know is that Jesus is just. He is righteous. And despite what I might see with my human eyes, I need to seek first his kingdom because that is the best way to live. It’s the way I need to build my life. We naturally build life around whatever we believe will make life good.

If I was to ask, what is the good life? I’d probably get a certain grouping of answers in a place like this. But let’s just imagine I went down to Main Street on Tombball and just walked around as people were going from shops or restaurants and said, “Tell me what the good life is.” What would the answers be? What kind of responses would we get? There’d probably be a lot of good things like spending time with family and going on vacations. Maybe we’d probably get some things like having a nice house or a really nice car, enjoying all the pleasures of life.

There would be perceptions about what the good life is that have to do with enjoying material possessions here. But I doubt anyone would include things like, you know, the good life would be being poor, mourning, being meek, being persecuted. These are not the kinds of things that we would typically think of as, oh, that’s the good life. Usually we imagine we’re laying on a beach somewhere in the sun and we’re enjoying the sand or enjoying the ocean or we’re up in the mountains and we’re enjoying God’s beauty.

And it doesn’t all have to be entirely selfishly motivated. Sometimes it is. We enjoy the nature of God and we think this is the good life. And certainly that can be part of the good life. And I’m not trying to tell you that is not good. God’s creation is good and he does want us to enjoy the good life that we have here. But what I want us to understand about seeking first the kingdom of God is that first of all Jesus wants to reframe in our mind what the good life is.

He wants to as we’re trying to order our life and build it the right way. He wants us to realize what the world perceives as the good life is not the good life. Look at all the directions it often goes when people think they’re following the good path and what’s going to bring them joy and fulfillment and satisfaction. And so often they end up empty wondering what happened. And so the beginning of this is that Jesus from the outset as he begins his ministry, as he’s beginning to talk to the masses and tell them who he is and what he’s after, he wants them to understand that his path and following him is like nothing they’ve ever seen before.

But it is the answer. It is the way to have the good life. He wants us to reorient what we value toward the things of the kingdom, toward a righteous kingdom and a just kingdom. Not all the empty promises that the kingdoms of men give us, but the promises of God that will align and bring harmony to our life and bring fulfillment and peace. Christ and his kingdom define goodness. They define, you might say, blessedness. That’s where he starts. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

He doesn’t say blessed are the rich because they enjoy all kinds of things in this life. Certainly there can be some blessings there. But he’s trying to get people to reframe their thinking and say what what really matters is us understanding who we are in relationship to God. And if we can do that, if we can live in humility, if we are poor in spirit, then we are truly rich in life and the kingdom is ours. Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.

They understand their position. They understand where they are and what truly matters. They’re they’re not filling their life with distractions and things that don’t actually matter. They they realize what is truly serious and important. And when we come at life from that angle, we will be comforted. Blessed are the meek. In ancient culture and to some extent ours too, it’s more like blessed are the prideful, the people who think a lot of themselves, who go after what they want, who get their own.

That’s the way the world perceives things. And it’s been that way for a long time. But Jesus is preaching meekness, not a characteristic or a virtue that would have been highly valued in his time. Blessed are the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers, the persecuted. This list is is not at all what an ancient person would have said either about what the good life is. But Jesus is saying you will be blessed. Things will be good for you if you live this way.

That’s a challenge. That that’s difficult to think. I I don’t need to go out and get my vengeance, you know, retribution. I just need to be a person who’s merciful. That’s going to really give me peace in life to not go and get my own and not seize the opportunity to take advantage someone who’s taken advantage of me in the past. Isn’t that the way it really should work from a human standpoint with worldly wisdom? These are the ways we are tempted to think. But Christ and his kingdom say, “No, goodness is different than that.

The good life is a function of character and not circumstances. The good life is being at peace with God and knowing I have a relationship with him. Not having all the great things of life and having achievement and status or whatever else it is that people imagine is good in this limited temporary time that we’re here. And the result of what Jesus and what his kingdom proclaims as the good life, what it brings is peace. enjoy. And so we see things like hungering for righteousness, having a life of purity that controls desires, one that is not caught up in conflict, but is trying to bring people together.

We’ve talked all about that in our last series talking about peacemaking and why that is not trying to be right, not trying to win, but trying to bring people together. This is what’s going to bring peace and life. It’s the good life. How beautiful and joyful it is to have fellowship. The psalmist says this is the idea that Jesus is presenting here in the sermon on the mount. And it’s about our character. Our goodness is aligned with Christ with Christ likeness and with God likeness, not the achievements and the successes that we find in this life.

A lot of what we’re going to talk about both this morning and in future sermons that relate to this is not some portrayal for example that like wealth is bad and evil. Um it is more about where we place it and the perspective we have about it. It’s not that all of these things in and of themselves are wrong or they can’t ever be a part of our life. But it is the position we put it in and how much we elevate some of these things as we live. How are we building our life? Are we building our life in the right way?

Is it structured properly? Are we ordering it in the way that Jesus would have us order it? And so, the goodness of life comes from the understanding of who Christ is and what his kingdom proclaims and being like him and being like God. And in fact, partway through Jesus’s statements, his sermon in verse 48 of chapter 5, as he’s talking to them about some ways how they would interact with others, he says, “You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.”

That’s the goal. The goal is to look to God and see who he is, see his character, and to be striving for that. to be realizing sometimes day by day that I’m not matching up with him here and I’m going to work there or I’ve been working on this and I’m starting to get myself into a place where I see some alignment with God. That is our motivation. That is our goal. Like I said earlier, it’s not just about keeping some rules and laws. It is about shaping our heart to be like God the Father and his son Jesus Christ.

And so godlikeness then realigns our moral compass. It changes the way we see things ethically in the world or maybe where our emphasis is from an ethical standpoint. And this is what Jesus is working through in this sermon, right? Even even good things or proper things. Sometimes the the compass is not aligned very well. Sometimes we look at standards that are rather easy standards, which is some of what Jesus is going to do here, as I’ll point out in just a moment, and we think, okay, I’ve I’ve done what I need to do.

And Jesus is asking us, if we’re kingdom citizens, if we’re going to build our life on him, to dig a little deeper to try to calibrate that compass a little bit more and make sure we are actually heading in the right direction. It’s not about I didn’t do this or I did do that. It’s also about the attitude that I have and the heart that I’m putting into something. And so he says things like in verse 21 of chapter 5, you have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not murder.

Not murdering is good. We don’t want to murder. I mean, this is simple stuff. But this becomes problematic when we can treat people horribly and we insult them and we do all manner of evil things against our brother, whether we mean brothers in Christ or more generally just the brother of man. And we can act in a way that is not befitting of someone who claims to be a Christian and say, “Well, I I didn’t murder anybody.” I think this is one of the easier ones to see here, what Jesus is doing. It’s like, you know, maybe we should up the standard just a little bit beyond don’t murder.

Yes, we shouldn’t murder. And we even struggle with that in our culture at times, but this should be pretty obvious. But let’s dig in a little bit deeper. What about being angry? What about insulting or calling your brother a fool? Right? And so Jesus kingdom and his justice and his righteousness and his redefining of goodness, it’s not just don’t murder. Don’t murder becomes don’t be angry. Don’t insult your brother. Jesus says, yes, don’t commit adultery, but let’s go a little bit deeper than that, right?

It’s not just don’t commit adultery. It’s don’t lust in your heart. Right? But he’s getting to the heart of the matter. It’s not just the outward actions. It’s not just the easy things to see. It’s also what’s going on in our mind and in our heart, in our will. He he points out some of the the failings of man. Some of these do come from the old law and he wants to refine them and help us understand them better. Sometimes these are are failings of human thinking that he’s pulling out.

We’ll see that in a couple of these examples he gives. But we’re not going to go into every single example in every part of the sermon. We don’t have time for that this morning. Uh and in fact, not too long ago, I preached a sermon where I went through the sermon on the mount. I think I read through the entire thing and just made short comments. Uh so you could go back and maybe look at that to get some more of the content, but we’re just kind of hitting the highlights this morning.

Here we go from what people did think, which is make sure divorce is lawful. You know, let’s go through this process the right way. Jesus says divorce is harmful. Look at the text. It was also said, “Whoever divorces his wife, let him give a certificate of divorce.” This is verse 32. But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife except on the ground of sexual immorality makes her commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

He says this is bad. It’s harmful. It’s not about just going through the steps the right way, you know, getting the right documentation. And Jesus himself said, “Moses gave you this because of the hardness of your hearts. This is not what God actually wanted. Stop doing that.” Malachi tells them the same thing. Be faithful to the wife of your youth. This is not the right way to go. Don’t live like this. It’s not just about keeping laws. It’s not just doing it the right procedure.

It is about having the right heart. And he says divorce is harmful. In our culture, we see that thoroughly the damage that is done to countless children because of the selfishness that is involved inevitably somewhere. Maybe not always on both parts, but it’s there somewhere that leads to a divorce that harms not only the two people, but others around them, friends and family. Jesus is just. He says, “This is not good. Let’s not do that.” Right? And we’re going to hit some things as we work through these sermons that you’re going to say, “Yeah, but there’s this exception.” Yes, I understand there’s exceptions to things.

And Jesus himself says that, but we’re working on a high level here this morning, talking about building our life on the Lord Jesus Christ and on his kingdom, living according to his path and in his ways. And what he’s saying is don’t murder, yes, but don’t be angry. And don’t commit adultery, yes, but don’t lust. These he’s trying to up the the the stakes a little bit. Let’s think a little deeper on this. And then this one, he said, you know, oaths. We need to have some oaths.

We need to have a contract. You know what Jesus says? Why don’t you just keep your word? If you say you’re going to do something, do it. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. instead of feeling like, you know, we’ve got to have contracts and we got to have these commitments and all of this and if I didn’t make a contract then I don’t have to do it. No, just be a person of your word. And and Jesus is not saying here we can’t ever have any contracts or can’t have any. But he’s working kind of from this idea of I’ve just got to keep the letter of the law, right?

I I’ve got to make sure I keep the code on divorce. Well, I said I was going to do this and it’s in writing, so I’m going to do it. Well, what if you just said you were going to do it and you just keep your word? Let your yes be yes and your no be no. That’s what Jesus wants as a just ruler in his kingdom. Rather than seeking retaliation, this is the eye for an eye and parts of this were in the old law and it is very prevalent in the ancient world.

Lexalionus, right? You you you take what what is given to you. If someone damages your your eye or damages a loved one’s eye, you take their eye. this kind of and and it’s meant ultimately to present a concept of justice. But what Jesus is saying, let’s go above this. Let’s let’s seek to be meek. Let’s seek to be loving to do what’s best for everyone. And sort of instead of seeking retaliation, let’s turn the other cheek, right? Someone smacks us. Let’s be the kind of people who say you can have the other side, too.

Do we see how Jesus is different than than the world around him? a world that is built on vengeance and getting their own and making sure that I am not on the short end of the stick. But I get mine. Jesus says that’s not our goal. That’s not what we’re aiming for here. It’s a kingdom that’s calling us to more. And then he says, don’t just defend your tribe. You know, anybody can love their friends and hate their enemies. This is the end of chapter 5.

Even the pagans do that. Even the tax collectors do that, right? Even criminals love their own and and hate others. Maybe let’s have a little bit higher calling here. A a calling of radical grace, a concern for all people, even those who hate you. He says in verse 44, “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Remember earlier, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake. Remember those people who are persecuting you? Pray for them.

And that’s a different way of life. But Jesus says, “This is the good life. This is what’s really going to bring us fulfillment and peace and harmony. You must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. When I live in these ways, it’s what makes me most like God.” That’s the idea. And so, get the vision of what the kingdom is here. and how different it is than what we typically see in the world. That this is a way that is meant to transform our heart. It’s meant to transform our desires.

He wants us to reorder the things that we pursue. Wants to reshape our will to get us thinking and thinking in different ways. And I what I want to do with this section is talk about mostly what it’s not. Sometimes it’s a little bit more effective to do it that way. Peter himself does that in some of his letters, uh, telling us what things shouldn’t look like to help us understand what they should look like. Right? So, that’s what we’re going to see here. It’s what Jesus does in this text beginning in Matthew chapter 6.

He he wants us to change what we’re pursuing and what we’re after so that we’re not after the approval of others. That is not the goal. And that applies in so many different ways, but particularly here, he’s looking at a spiritual focus, right? spiritual pretense, doing things in a way that people look at me and think, “Wow, that person, he’s so generous. He’s so spiritually minded. He knows his Bible so well.” Or whatever the thing is that’s causing me to get attention for what I’m doing.

Jesus says, “Don’t do it for that reason. Do the right things, but do the right things for the right reasons.” And so, he hits these three major categories: giving and praying and fasting. And the idea here is that we should be doing all of this and any of this to honor God, to elevate him in our life, not to elevate ourselves. And the reality is there’s a danger in all of these becoming a pursuit of my own recognition rather than the act of devotion of giving myself over to God.

And so in this series of of three here in Matthew chapter 6, he says when you give to the needy, this is where you know you have one hand not knowing what the other is doing. And he’s not saying there that you you can’t ever make known anything you’re doing. Right? These are kind of like proverbs. They’re general principles. Sometimes I’ll just take an aside here for just a moment. Sometimes we do things so secretly that our kids don’t see it. And I I would suggest that that isn’t always a good thing.

I when I was a lot younger and was living somewhere else, I had uh someone who was young and eager um saying, you know, we never help anybody. We never do anything. And I had actually that morning at church, someone had come up and given me an envelope with about $2,000 in it without a name to secretly give to someone who was in need. And so I told that person. I was like, “I can’t tell you who this is.” because they wanted to remain anonymous. But I just want you to know these are the kinds of things that happen and this is not a one-time situation. These types of things happen here.

And sometimes that is perfectly fine. I’m not saying we can’t ever do that. But it was ironic to me in that moment that this person was complaining that we don’t help people and we don’t look out for people’s needs. And yet in that very moment, someone had been doing that very thing. And so Jesus is is not saying everything always has to be secret, but what he’s talking about here is motivation. Why am I doing this? Am I doing this so that I get attention?

And he gives these phrases in each one. The first one he says that you may be praised by others. This is verse two of chapter 6. You’re given but you you sound the trumpet and you make a big scene and you want everybody to know what you’re doing so that you’re praised rather than God being praised. in the prayer scenario beginning in verse 5, they’re on the street corners and they’re at the synagogues, right? Making a scene and making sure everybody knows how holy they are. It says in verse 5, that they may be seen by others.

And it’s the same phrase found beginning in verse 16 with the scenario that has to do with fasting. He says, “You want to fast? That’s great.” We’ve had a sermon not too long ago on fasting and the benefits of fasting from a spiritual standpoint and it’s something that’s not really talked about much in our culture, but pretty much every other culture before ours did this for spiritual reasons of some sort. And so this is just Jesus recognizing this reality.

But what he’s saying is when you do that, if you’re going to fast, don’t have a long face and let everybody know how much you’re fasting and you’ve been this many days without food. Don’t make it all about yourself. Just do your thing. Get up in the morning, get ready just like you normally would. It’s about honoring God and it’s about growing in your relationship with God, growing spiritually, not being noticed. And this is the very thing he says here. Don’t be like these people who disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others.

This is all a spiritual pretense so that other people see how religious I am. Right? That’s what Jesus is warning against. Don’t be like that. Reshape your desires and your will so that you’re not looking for the attention or the approval of man but the approval of God. This is what he has to say about this in each case. He says those people they’ve already got the reward. When you sound the trumpet and everybody knows you gave or you pray the big prayer on the street corners and everybody sees you or you walk around and everybody knows you’re fasting, you already received your reward which was the attention of everybody around you.

But you’ll get no reward from God. That’s the point. If your motivation is approval and attention seeking, that’s what you’ll get and that’s all you’ll get. But the one with the right motivation, who will even go to the secret place to pray, who will fast when no one knows, who will give when no one realizes who’s giving, they’re the one who has the approval of God. That’s the kind of desire God wants to have in our hearts. He wants us to reorder our our pursuit or our desire so that we aren’t taking security in possessions.

This is when he gets later into the text and says this is not about having treasures on earth. Verse 19, don’t be so focused on laying up all this wealth on earth. All of that’s going to go away, but lay up treasures in heaven. This is about security and about protection. When we serve Christ, we need to let the material things serve us. This is another example in which these things are not bad and evil and wrong. They’re just part of life, but we can let them become our God if we aren’t careful.

It can be the pursuit of the treasures of the things of this life, the material possessions, getting the bigger house and the nicer car and and working our way up at our job to make more and more and more money and and mistaking what actually truly matters. Right? We’re talking about building a meaningful life by reordering our life through seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And that means getting everything aligned in the right way so that it builds properly.

And if my security is in my 401k and my investment portfolio, I’m not understanding things well. We cannot serve both God and Mammon. Jesus says we can’t allow both of those things to be our gods. it won’t work. We will serve one and we’ll hate the other. And if we we make possessions our God, that’s what we’re going to go after. And we may give God some kind of secondary place. We may show up and keep some rules and some laws that everybody sees.

But what he’s saying is the heart is not right. Where your treasure is, there’ll be also. And the pursuit that Jesus wants is for us not to be seeking to relieve anxieties and seeking after the ambitions of the material world. And so this is where where he talks about don’t be anxious and and don’t worry. Don’t think about what I’m going to eat and what I’m going to drink and and what I’m going to wear. These are the the basics of life. And we are amazingly blessed in our culture.

I every time I read this text, I think about what life must have been like on the days Jesus was saying these very things and and actually just the the amount of trust some of these people had. You know, Jesus feeds thousands of people multiple times. And why does he do that? People followed him out into the wilderness and they didn’t have McDonald’s nearby. But we probably wouldn’t even go to McDonald’s, a lot of us. But they didn’t even have that.

We kind of point our nose up at McDonald’s. Not good. Now, maybe some of you like it. I don’t know. But that’s where we are. We We can get so many things so fast and it’s so easy. But you think about these people and the amount of trust they had in Jesus to follow him out in deserted places. And he looks at the the disciples and says, “Hey, we’re going to feed these people.” And they’re like, “With what?” And he takes a little supplies and divides it up and feeds thousands of people who had no idea Jesus was going to do that.

But because they wanted to hear Jesus at that moment at least, their priorities were aligned and they wanted to be with him. And it didn’t matter what was going to happen with that. And they went out into the wilderness with no food because they hungered and thirsted for righteousness. That’s who Jesus is looking for. That’s what he wants me to be like. That’s what he wants you to be like. not to be seeking to relieve anxieties in the world through worldly methods, through having enough money and enough food and enough clothes.

It’s not about finding peace in provisions. It’s finding peace through our faith in God. And this is where he pulls out the phrase, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all of these other things, the basics, you know, the food and the clothing and all that. you’re going to have what you need, but it is the most important thing that we should be after. And so Jesus wants us to realign things so that we build upon the right things in life.

As people build their lives, they tend to ask questions like, “What’s going to make me happy?” Now, we don’t sit down in our living room and say, “What’s going to make me happy?” Like, I’m not saying that way. I just mean like in our minds, we’re wondering, “What is it in life? What do I want to pursue? What kind of job do I want to have? and how much money am I going to need to make and and all these kinds of questions. What do other people think of me if I do this career and I make this amount of money and I live in this place? What will my family think or what will others think? How do I protect myself? How will I save enough?

When what how old will I be when I’m able to retire? Will I have the food and the clothes and the housing that I need? Sometimes maybe we’re a little bit younger. We’re even more worried about those kinds of things. Some of you are beginning life. Maybe you’re newly married, beginning to have children, and you’re wondering how are we going to make all this work? And these are valid concerns. And so Jesus is not saying you can’t ever have any concern about those things. It is the priority we place on them that he’s after, the anxiety that gets built up over the wrong things.

And to some extent, we should care what people think. We should want people to think that we’re followers of Jesus Christ and that we want to walk in the light as he is in the light and that we want to shine our light. That we shouldn’t be seeking the approval of men and seeking status and be worried that people are going to look down at us if we’re living the good life by Jesus definition. Those are things we shouldn’t care about. But again, the questions themselves are not inherently bad or wrong.

It’s the emphasis we put on them. And what Jesus is helping us see just in this brief sermon is that while some of these questions are good and we do have some valid concerns like what are we going to eat today and what are we going to eat tomorrow? I mean that’s we’re made that way. We’re created that that we fuel our body with food and so we do at some point have to think about that and we have to think think about the clothing we’re going to wear and we got to think about how we’re going to survive. But all of these he says these are second third tier concerns.

And so essentially what he’s saying is if we’re going to build our life, if we’re going to seek first the kingdom, all of these questions and concerns we have, we need to start somewhere else first. The place to begin is, am I seeking first the kingdom? Is that my foundation that I’m building on? And from there, everything else is added. He He’s not saying if I seek the things of God, if I just sit and pray all day and read my Bible 23 hours a day, that magically food’s going to appear in my room.

This is not the message. It’s about priority. It’s about getting things aligned the right way and building properly on a good foundation so the things are added the right way. And I want us to think about what’s going to matter in the end for just a moment as we close. You’ve walked through a cemetery, I’m sure, if you’re of any age. And isn’t it interesting to look at the the headstones, the tombs, and see the things that are said, and this is another example of some of the things I’m going to say, you’re going to say, “I’ve seen an exception to this.”

Okay, I’ll grant you that. As I look at these pictures, and I I looked at a lot of different ones. Some of these are from spring or tombball. One of the things I notice here is just the amount of crosses in these pictures. Why is that? I mean, that one on the bottom right, I see at least four or five crosses as you scan the different tombstones. The one on the top left is actually someone from this area, but on the bottom there’s a Bible verse. Do we ever see tombstones that say an amazing financial advisor or graduated with a 4.0, I know was really good at baseball.

Climbed the corporate ladder for 40 years. Loved video games. Always had a really clean house. Cooked the healthiest meals. Had a huge retirement portfolio. Now, I will say I’ve seen some things that maybe are not not those exact words, but are a little bit like that, and it seems a little inongruous, honestly. It’s kind of weird or out of line. That’s what inongruous means, out of line. I actually was part of a funeral one time. It was It was very awkward. Um, I love golf.

Most of you know I love golf. Uh, but this was a very interesting funeral there. Like the centerpiece of the funeral was the person’s golf bag. I mean, like we were here doing the things we were doing and then there was a golf bag right here and then the casket. And the entire time I was just like this just seems odd, you know? And and there’s times where, you know, if you look at enough tombstones, you’ll see like a baseball player etched in there or a golfer etched and it’s, you know, things that people liked and we do sometimes put those things on there.

But typically what we’re seeing on something like a headstone is the summation of someone’s life. And and the whole time I was there, I was thinking, is this it? You know, his tailor made driver. Like I I I don’t Is that what this life is about? And I I love golf and I love golf clubs. My wife can attest. And I can spend a lot of time researching and talking and playing. And some of you guys know that we talk about golf. But man, that is the sum total of life.

We just know. We know that doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or where you go to college or what your job is. All of those things, they’re not going to be on your tombstone one day. And ultimately, nobody’s going to care. The things that matter are what end up there. was a great brother, a beloved husband, a father, a mother, a sister, right? Family things. I saw one that said anchored in Christ and it gave the date they were baptized.

These are the things that matter in life. And when it comes down to it, that’s what we want there. And so, the question I have to ask both myself and you is, what sums up my life right now? What should go on my headstone? What have I actually built my life on? If someone was honest about who I am and we’re going to put a summation on my life, bring it all together to a head and say this is who Brent is. What would it say? Jesus is telling us there is something so much better than the things of this life.

Even though there are temporary obstacles and difficulties we deal deal with sometimes the persecutions that we have to go through all of that is short-lived and it is part of what makes up at times the good life. Jesus gives us a vision of reframing the way that we see the world, a new understanding of what is good, a direction of things we should pursue and the foundation that we should live on. And that’s the whole image he’s he’s giving there that everybody hears these words. They’re hearing the words of Jesus and some people take this and they build this house like it’s being built on a rock, right?

They’re they’re hearing the words of Jesus and they’re doing them and they’re living them. And then there’s others who are hearing the word of Jesus and they’re not doing them. They’re not living. That’s like building on the sand. Then here’s the reality. They are both going to face the same storm. Whether you build your life on Jesus Christ or you choose not to, the storms of life are going to come. It’s not going to be different. The difference is whether your house is going to fold or not, whether the life that you’ve built is going to endure.

And so the rest of the series, we’re going to spend some time talking about priorities and what we put attention on and the way we spend our time and how we’ve shaped our desires and how we use our possessions and the way we’ve built relationships, whether or not we’re truly depending on God. And all of this is meant for all of us to reconsider and to rethink by way of reminder. So often as scripture says, am I really following the things of Jesus Christ?

I appreciate so much your attention this morning. The words of Jesus call us to take up our cross and follow him to give our life because he gave his life for us. And the way that’s represented in scripture, if if we want to be in Christ, if we want to get rid of the old man, as it talks about in places like Colossians 3 and Romans 6, then we are baptized into Jesus Christ. We give up who we are and we come up out of the water in newness of life. And that’s not the end of the story. Now, it is a story in which we live.

We follow Jesus Christ. We’re an instrument of righteousness, justice, living in his righteous and just kingdom. We can help you do that this morning. If you’re ready, why don’t you come now as we stand and we