MK040 Sermons
Only One Master (Audio)
I'm not exactly sure where it is I'm from when I was with you guys last February. I was provost the school and as far as I knew I would continue to be that for a while. And then the president decided that it was God was leading in his life for him to go back into the pastorate, Jim Jeffrey back in the pastorate. And along the way they decided that they wanted me to be the president. That was not on the list. I was the president of a college before. It was Baptist Bible College of Kwazoomu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. We had like eight students. It's like going from running a lemonade stand to going to run Wal-Mart or something like that. There's no correspondence there. But we're pretty excited about what God is doing with this and Diane and I've got some specific things we want to accomplish over these next few years as we're retooling the school. And one of the things that we're doing is the banner we have back there this is BBC major in making a difference has a limited life value to it. As John said on April the 20th we're going to become Summit University and I don't want to steal my entire preaching time to talk to you about that. But I want to give you a glimpse of why we're doing that because it ties into the whole series that you're doing right now here in church. We believe that God directs save people to make a difference in the lives of people who don't know the Lord yet. And we don't know how he does that. I would be surprised if a number of you hadn't had several different jobs or careers along the way. None of which you were targeting from like age 18, you know, it just sort of happened that way. You're doing a Proverbs 3, 5 and 6, trust the Lord of all your heart, lean not on your own understanding in all your ways, acknowledge or show you know him and he will make your way straight. If you're doing one of those then life is just an ongoing step-by-step adventure with what God would have us do. And when you get outside America the word college doesn't mean what college means in America. We lived in South Africa around the corner from our house was Crawford College. It was grades K through 12, the high school. There was another college of three miles north of us that was a girls' elementary school. If you say you went to college it doesn't mean you did anything after high school in many places outside America. So we qualify for a number of years of the university here in Pennsylvania and because the law has changed we just stepped through that, changed our last name. And then we decided to change our first name also. We're not changing our mission, we're not changing our doctrine, we're not changing our curriculum. We're changing our first name and no longer Baptist Bible but Summit, Summit University. We are in Clark Summit. We're known as the Summit. I think the Summit is a great place to look at God's harvest field from. And we're hoping that this new name is going to help our graduates to take what they're gaining from us, which is a good major in Bible, combined with majors and whatever else. We're a unique double majoring school, blending all of that together in a way that creates a unique graduate who really can't think biblically, who's well equipped to serve spiritually. And so that's where we're heading with it. So we're pretty excited about it, we really are. One thing that has not changed, of course, is the Life Conference. Yes, thank you, Diane. By making this announcement, I'm ensuring a calmer ride home, Diane is the Life Conference Director. You guys know that. And I am for, you know, for six days out of the year, no longer a BBC administrator, but her special assistant. We got the display back there. The online registration has already kicked into gear. I think the brochures with the printer, they'll be coming out here before too long. If the Crown fits, that's the theme this year. If the Crown fits, well, you can finish it off, can't you? And we have coming in for as Liz Curtis Higgs be the main Bible teacher there. Bob Smiley is going to do one of his stand-up acts, should be fun. And a good friend of ours, Kazia Curry, is going to be in to provide some extraordinary music. So we'd like you to consider coming up for that, the two different dates, which would be May 28th and June 4th, the three days around that. And all the questions you might have are ones that Diane could answer, one service is finished. I miss anything? Okay, just checking. Just checking. Okay, that was, there we go, did I miss a slide? Let's go back to that, that's the one I wanted, yeah. Okay. I'm in the middle of your Sermon series from the Gospel of Matthew, and the spot that I've been assigned is one that, it's a challenging one, because what I don't want to have happened this morning is to wind up producing a lot of guilt without producing some good answers. This is, you saw there in your program, you've got the scripture passage written out for you there, you know, don't lay up for yourselves, treasures on earth, Jesus says to people who live in the wealthiest economy and country the world has ever had. And he says, store for yourselves treasures in heaven. He says, for where your treasure is, we'll read this again, I'm just picking parts up, for where your treasure is, that's where your heart will be. And I don't know what you, when John asked me to do this, and this was a passage, I took our church in Africa through this, and my theme down there, just so you know, was this. The Sermon on the Mount is the greatest sermon ever preached. I really believe that. This is the sermon Jesus preached over and over again, as he went from place to place. He couldn't put it in an MP4 file, okay, you couldn't download it. He preached this sermon. This is the core message of our Lord to people who really, really, really believe that God's kingdom was coming. They needed a how to live as they were waiting for God's kingdom to come, and he told them that. This passage we have right here, it is penetrating. No one can serve two masters. Either he will love the one or hate the one, love the other, or be devoted to one and despise it. You can't serve God and money. You kind of, you guys shift a little bit nervously in your wallet right now, don't you? You know, you can't serve God and money. You're thinking to yourself, so what's he going to say? We're going to take an offering here this morning, or several maybe. Don't give until it hurts. Give until it feels good. How's this going to work? Am I going to be able to walk out of here this morning with a heart full of, yeah, I can do this. Well, that's what the goal is. I don't know why it is that we keep score with money. I don't know why it is we keep score with money, but we do, don't we? We keep score with money and prestige and fun stuff, travel, possessions, power. You know, why wouldn't someone head down to the mall and max both of these out just because we could, but why do we do stuff like that? Let's work on a completion activity. I'll start. Money can buy a bed but not sleep. Those of us who spend a lot of nights in hotels know that. What's this one? Money can buy books. Okay, I'm hearing, okay. Money can buy books but not brains. How about money can buy food but not health, not a appetite? Money can buy finery but money can't buy beauty. And there's others and there's not just one answer to these. How about money can buy a house but it can't buy a home. It can't make that house into a home. Money can buy medicine but it can't buy health. Money can buy pleasure but it can't buy happiness. Satisfaction, yes. That's what I'm thinking that's on too. Money can buy luxuries but not culture. You think in Kardashian or Jenner? Yeah, I was too. Money can buy amusement but not happiness or joy, okay? Money can buy a cross but not a savior, salvation. Money can buy a church building but it can't buy heaven. There's nothing wrong with money. That verse in Proverbs where it talks says, "Go to the ant. You slothful slob. You go to the ant because it lays up in store now for its needs later on." I mean, the Bible doesn't say money is wrong. There's no ban on private property in Scripture. There's no push for socialism that, you know, without regard for what the circumstances are that we ought to all pool our funds here. Those of us who have more will have less with less more. Now, there's times in the Bible that happened when there was a specific crisis involved. Even the point where people gave themselves to where they were hungry so somebody else could eat. That kind of stuff is there but not just the idea that, "Hey, I don't know, the hundred and some of us here, let's just dump all our money to one pot and it'll be fine." Times of need we might do that but as a life, no, there's no indication that we do that. Matter of fact, in 1 Timothy, Paul says that if you don't provide for your own family, you're worse than an unbeliever. So whatever it is this passage does mean, it doesn't mean, "Thou shalt not have money." It's a stewardship. On Friday, part of my job during these first few months is to, "I need to make a connection with a number of people who've been very, very good to our students. They have stewarded some of the funds that God has given them toward BBC and made it possible for us to give scholarships, do things like that and part of what we're doing and passing the baton from Jim Jeffery to me is I'm getting to meet those people. On Friday, I was down in Florida, it's what I do for the Lord, it's okay. On Friday, I was down in Florida and I met there with a foundation that over the years has provided a number of things that helped us get a couple of programs off the ground and stuff like that. You pull their 990 and you can check them out and they've got like 75 million dollars under investment and certain amount of money they give every year and you put proposals into foundations. Here's what we'd like to do and they weigh that and perhaps they will help to fund that if they think God's in it. Well, you know what happens? Everyone thinks that I was talking to the fellows who own the foundations, it's their money. And I said, you know, we were missionaries in a country that was very, very poor and even on a missionary salary, we were fabulously wealthy compared to many of the people that were around us. And we know what it feels like for someone to look at us and see us as the solution to their problems. Because how can someone who has so much, not just give it over? Saw a cartoon once about a guy shaking the pastor's hand after the service and he says the pastor was a little concerned this morning, he started talking about the financial needs our church was having and you said you didn't know where it was going to come from. I was afraid you're going to ask for it from us. So what do you do? I have no clue what you make and I don't think I need to. What I do need to do is talk about this first paragraph where Jesus says, don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust, moth and vermin destroy where thieves break in and steal. And store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy moth and vermin do not destroy where thieves do not break in and steal for where your heart is backwards, where your treasure is though your heart will be also. Here's the first thought I'd like you to leave here with this morning. I want you to choose your treasure vault not just carefully but strategically. Jesus said where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Choose your treasure vault carefully. Now we are driving a salt covered, but very serviceable 2006 Honda court has 124,000 miles on it. We have spent $330 on fixing broken Hondas since we bought that in January 2007. You divide that by all those months, that's pretty cheap. Now oil change tires, of course, all that stuff. Man, that car, that's a great car, it really is. I just like a different one, newer, better, faster, stronger. I can't explain that to you. I can't explain it to my wife, I'm sure I can't explain it to you. Because the fact is, this is where everything ends up. It is not hard at all to spend more on a car than on a year of retail price of college. That's not hard at all. The car is going to be gone. Give it eight years, give it ten years, the car is going to be gone. The car is going to look something like this, this old pickup truck here. Because here on this world, moth and vermin destroy, where we used to live, they'd break through the wall and steal. You can do that. Number of enterprising South Africans, I read a number of years ago, left South Africa and went over to New Zealand, they immigrated to New Zealand. In South Africa, all the houses are built out of stock with their brick. In New Zealand, they were built out of wood. The South Africans said, this is easy, they went out and bought chainsaws and they cut doors in the side of houses and people were home. They went inside and stored the stuff, right through the wall. It just takes a couple of minutes. Anything, anywhere, anything we have, it's vulnerable. Either from the processes of life, corruption. Or from people around us who think that the fact that we own it is not a barrier to them owning it next, it's a creative reallocation of resources, we used to call it. So, what do you do? Well Jesus says here, store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moths and vermin do not destroy it and where thieves do not break in and steal. Anything in this world is vulnerable, but anything that's sent ahead is secure, it's eternal. It's safe from moths. It's safe from vermin. And our attempts of security are limited by our own capacity. By the money we have. Back when I was going through school, I had a job at a private home there in Clark Summit that had 27 rooms in it, a couple of professionals owned it, it was just a fabulous home. Beautiful home. A gentleman, his wife, their daughter, his mother lived there for them, and when you walked in there you thought wow, wow, it's nice. And he knew people would think that way. And so he had a very large dog, big teeth, it bit me more than once, you know, trying to keep the place safe. We moved to Africa, I found out how you take care of that, poison meat, that's what happened in South Africa. When the thieves come they go down the store, they buy some fresh meat, they put poison on it, toss the meat over the wall, the dog comes and eats the meat, the dog's gone. Problem solved. Security. Security is an illusion. You know, I could take the rest of your morning talking to you about robbery stories from the time where we lived down there. 40% unemployment. Yeah, 40% unemployment, you are going to have crime just the way it goes. Well, we don't know that kind of stuff here, right? We're afraid to think that they don't even exist here in America. Keeps the talk shows going. But security really is an illusion, unless you send something where moths and vermin and thieves can't get it. See what Jesus has in verse 21, the four, the because it starts that, because where your treasure is, there your heart will be. See, anything that holds my heart holds my treasure. What's really valuable to me? What could be taken from you that would set you a flame with anger? What could be taken from you that you would say, "Well, I can't come back from that?" When I ask you the first question, a lot of stuff. When I ask you the second question, "Oh, wait, where my treasure is, that's where my heart will be." That's why in our culture, sometimes guys especially, they will identify themselves with their job. Number of years ago I read that the highest incident of heart attacks in guys comes the year, the first year, after they retire. I said, "I don't know who they are anymore." Stress doesn't mean where your treasure is. You guys have seen that on my deathbed, I will not say, "I wish I spent more time at the office." That just doesn't happen. Where your treasure is, that's where your heart will be. Stories told of a guy who decided he wanted to make a deal with God to bring two suitcases of his most precious possessions to heaven with him when he died. The Lord granted that, the death angel granted that, when he got to St. Peter and he showed St. Peter his most precious possessions. Just see it there. And Peter said, "Why don't you bring along two suitcases of paving stones?" Relative value. Stories told is true when the Titanic was going down of a wealthy woman, one of the ones who made the ship, made the life ships, lifeboats, quickly left the lifeboat, went back to her room, and there as the ship was listing all her stuffs there in the room. We're talking about somebody who's got the jewelry and got the clothes and all sort of stuff. She went back to her room and she grabbed three oranges and left all that other stuff behind because all of a sudden, those weren't treasures anymore. And three oranges, the value of them, not even worth a tiny little scrap of one of those pieces of jewelry she left behind, but she brought that in because suddenly she realized that her treasure vault needed to be changed. One of the ways that you might be able to judge realistically, where your vault is, is to make a real budget for your household. I mean, to think it through and step back and say, "Well, what does God say is important and how are we spending our money? How's the money coming in? How's the money going out?" It's hard to do, but it's a great communication exercise and a great purpose exercise. See, God has before us, God has placed before us the opportunity to value. A few minutes ago, I talked about buying a car and I said, "You can't hardly buy a car anymore that doesn't cost more than a year of college." And it gets rusted, it goes. But I've had conversations with families where the value system, college education, 18 years old, 50 years of value, car, 18 years old, gone or traded by 22. What do you spend your money on? What do the parents push for? Real value. You follow me on this. It's a hard topic to deal with. Okay, I'm not quite done creating guilt yet because I need to do a little more before we make this worse. We said that we want to choose our treasure vault strategically. And now I say to you that I want you to clear your vision completely. The "I" is the lamp of the body, verse 22. If your eyes are healthy, the whole body is full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness? Now listen, I'm either going to walk in the light or stumble in the dark, right? I'm going to walk in the light or stumble in the dark. And last night we were over having a wonderful dinner with some friends of ours who I believe PV is preaching next week, right? And we had a wonderful dinner there, Indian food, yes, tastes like home, dark place. I had to go out to the car and get my computer so I could show some things to PV that we're working on. And I went out and I didn't have my flashlight with me because I'd left it in the car. It took me longer to get to the car than it did to get back in. I couldn't see anything out there. And I knew there was ice because I'd found it coming in when it was a little bit lighter. And I'm walking like I'm a 150-year-old man going out there trying to find a way to get out of the car. Once I got inside the car and got this and turned the light on, oh yes, now reality sets in. Now I can see what's going on. Jesus says this to us as if we had the power, the capacity to do it. He says to us, you know, that we need to be looking at our choices, at our vision, at our values, a dark eye, a blind eye, produces darkness and that's difficult. If you can't see, it changes everything else you do. In 1 John chapter 2, the Apostle John said that the cravings of sinful man, the lust, the strong desire of his eyes, the boasting of what he has and does, doesn't come from the Father, but from the system that surrounds us, the world. The world in this desire is passed away, but he who does the will of God lives forever. I'm either going to walk in darkness or I'm going to stumble in the light. God can clear my vision about this. If I'm willing by faith to say, if you've decided this is important, then I am going to live as if what you said was true. You say, wait a minute, Jim, as if what God said was true, we know that what God said is true. I know we know that what God says is true, but we don't live that way. We live often as if some of what God said, especially the part that pertains to you, is true, but I've got to pass on some other things. I don't know. That's not the way it works. Got a missionary friend who's not with the Lord. My first overseas experience, a guy named Bill Branda, Bill and Thess Branda in Natal, Brazil, and I went down there for first time overseas and at that time Bill had been 30 years down there in Brazil and he was Brazilian for all practical purposes and he took me around. We talked about what life was like down there and all that and he took me by the very first building that he had built with his first church and it was quite a nice building. I said, "Wow, that's pretty impressive." He said, "Yeah," he says, it's kind of an interesting story. That's the first building I built with the church, but actually the second building the church had. He pointed over there to where a highway was, a road, no buildings. What's the story? It works something like this, Donna Brazil, which is more a cash economy down there. You go in and you buy a piece of land and you go over to have the land valued. No one comes out to check the land, no one can survey the land, no one sees what's around the land and so if you're going to be paying taxes on the land, if the land's not worth very much, you don't pay very much taxes and so Bill told me it was not uncommon at all for churches down there in Brazil to take this, let's say, a million dollar piece of property and say it was worth $10,000, it gave them more money to use for the Lord. Well, you're always dealing with cultural pains when you're trying to grow in Christ and so as Bill's leading these folks to the Lord, they're gathering together, they're forming their own church, they say we'd like a church house, we'll build one, they found a beautiful spot, cost a certain amount of money and one of the guys said to Bill, well not what are we going to value this at and Bill said, what do you mean? And they told them, well, you know, the way things are done down here is this. And Bill said, I don't think we're going to do that. I don't know. Pastress, the way things are done down here. Well, that may be but that's not right. We don't need that and so foolishly in the eyes of many, foolishly Bill went in and gave the value of the property. They paid taxes on it for about four years. Then the city decided they're going to put a road in. And they gave the church the real value of the property to build a new church. There were other churches on that roadway that didn't turn out so well because they got the value they declared. See, where our treasure is, that's where our heart is. We clear our vision. So we see simply, what does the word say? And we follow through on it. The New Testament promises of God's provisions when we give generously are either true or false. The promises in the Word of God that say where God says to us, if you value what I value, I will take care of you. They're either true or false. Of course, we'd say, merely, well, they're the true, the problem is not the problem. The problem is they're wrenching because they drive into the way other people look at us, the way they keep score about us. And that's what makes this hard. Paul said that godliness with contentment is great gain. And sometimes we don't quite get it that way. We think that godliness with great gain is contentment. That's not going to work. The fact is that giving leads to blessing, more blessed to give and receive. The fact is, if you sow sparingly, you reap sparingly. Any farmer can tell you that, any gardener can tell you that. Where does withholding lead us? Where does generosity take us? We don't know what God's plans are. We don't control what God does. All we control is our heart and our vision. Two quarters, watch, and if I have a wrong perspective on something like this, it genuinely can come between me and you. It can come between me and god, between me and my church. A little bit wrong place obscures the views of Jesus says, what are you going to do? Serve God exclusively. Now a servant, and because we lived in a country that was so poor, we did pay people to come and work for us. I mean, there was time in our life when we, in fact, had servants that didn't dress in tuxedos like in Downton Abbey, but we had servants. And we viewed, well, there's two perspectives on that that we had. Number one, in a country so poor, who were we not to give people away to buy food, if we could, in return for some work? We had a lot of people begging. Guys will show up at five minutes of five and say, could I work for you? That's a bit late. But others were willing to do a day's work for a day's pay, and when we compared what the scale was, they're even paying 200% of the daily wage, compared with what it cost to have us in the country. We're better off to bring someone in and free up Diane for Bible studies. Better off to bring someone in and free me up for sermon prep and counseling, because it fed them and opened our time up. No one can serve two masters. A servant isn't someone who's humiliated. Oh, I am so low, I'm just a servant, I'll clean the floor with my tongue, I'm a servant. That's not a servant. A servant is someone who is owned by someone else and therefore does what that someone else tells him or her to do. A servant does what his master says. And this is the gauge in the passage, no one can serve two masters. And as Jesus pointed out for us here, when you try to do that, you'll hate the one who loved the other or be devoted one to spies the other and then he drills it. You can't serve God and money. I mean, the alternatives here, the alternatives we have of loving and hating, those are pretty stark, devoted and despising again, that's real clear. You can't serve God and money. Working for two bosses, some of you guys already know, is not a happy thing. You are the servant of the one whom you obey. You are the servant of the one who you obey. How can you tell this morning, how can I tell this morning, whether I am serving God or money? Well, right now, if as I speak, the Holy Spirit is bringing up into your mind a scripture passage, a truth, something you've heard that right now, you know you are not obeying because you are obeying something else. You are not serving God. A servant does what his or her master says. And when money gets in the way of what the word teaches me, I am serving money not God. Now, doesn't that take a little bit out of the realm of emotion? Because we have the sliding scale thing and I know how much money is the right amount to make. That's what I make. You make less, you are lazy. If you make more, you are gathering riches for yourself. See, I will self-focus, I will sinful that is. But instead, if we look on money as a stewardship, then what I have got to say is, am I serving God with my money or not? Am I doing what the word of God would demand of me or is my money getting in the way of that? Tough choices. My dad was fired from a job because of me. He worked a little family-owned company, and then as men do, he wanted to take a step up, found another company that would pay up substantially more money for doing the same job. Dad was an engineer and a salesman, and he would go into situations and tailor products for a company. And he worked for this new company for three years, and they had him on the road five days a week. Background, my dad's dad had died when dad was seven in the middle of the Great Depression. And dad was home on the weekend, he was a good dad, but he wanted something more than that. So he went to the company and said, "Listen, I'm never home. I'm never with my son. Can we work on this?" And I said, "Sure, you're fired." Well, that was pretty earthy. I had no idea until later. I had no idea until later that he'd made that risk. See, when you look at a life, you try and say, "What's really running me?" My oldest daughter and I took a trip to Ecuador, and this is not us. We've lost the picture we have. But if you go to Ecuador, that's the country's South America where the equator goes through, and if you go to Ecuador, you can actually stand with one foot in the southern hemisphere and one foot in the northern hemisphere, and we used them a picture of Beth and me doing exactly that. But that serves right there. That guy's one foot south, one foot north. That's about the only place you can do that. Other places in the north or south. Where your treasure is, that's where your heart is. If your eyes looking at things that are creating blindness inside, how great is that darkness? You can't serve God and money. It's my purpose this morning to ask you, "Who was your Lord?" Gospel of Luke, Jesus said, "Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do the things that I say?" That's pretty clear. I want to ask you this morning as you build your life perspective. As Jesus says to you, "I saved you to make a difference in the lives of others, and I'm adjusting your mind, your thinking, everything you're focused on in the step by step as the Word of God soaks into your brain." What's that next step for you? Because it's not like a light switch all on or all off, it's a process thing. If we can't serve God or money, God and money, both, we can't stand in the northern and southern hemisphere at the same time. Do you find any evidence in your life that knowing what the Word of God says for the sake of another master, you're saying, "Maybe later." Because then you know who you're serving, don't you? And as I'm going to pray in a minute and then we're going to close, and as you've come in here this morning and we sing our last song, if there's some business that you need to bring before the Lord, for you will say to him, "I want to serve you. I want to serve you only." And part of serving you, I recognize, involves my financial choices. Here are the adjustments, Lord, that I would be willing to make. You're going to have to teach me if it's enough. You're going to have to show me the way. You may have to ask, "Someone who's been here a bit longer than you have for some help with that." Because we both know that we can't serve God and money. And we both know how hard it is to serve God and how easy it is to serve money. Maybe as a group, we can get beyond this thing. Maybe as a group, we can encourage each other and build into our lives in a way that will allow us when we come to the end of it all, which we are going to, and stand before the Lord, that we would have not two suitcases of paving stones to give to Him. But treasures are already there. People whose lives have been changed forever because we took the time. When we could have been making money, we took the time to make a difference in their lives. Because we invested, as you do through your missionary family here, we invested in getting others to someplace else so they could invest in lives. Be up there. There's going to be folks that people in our supporting churches are going to meet up in heaven. They're going to say, "Hey, listen, I am here because you gave some money to Jim and Diane. Thank you." This is stuff that God's calling us to do. If we can't serve God in money, let's serve God, let's pray together. Well thank you for the opportunity you've given us to be here this morning. This is a challenging passage for us. We pray that you would grace us, help us to do a good job of building into each other's lives and encouraging each other so we would be able to serve you and serve you alone. We would like to be different for the right reasons and the right way. Teach us, Lord, we ask in Jesus' name, amen. Thank you, Jim. As the band comes forward to Lisa in the last song, I just want to invite you to just bow your heads with me and I just want to give you a minute or two, just to quietly think about some of those questions Jim was asking you. Who's your master today? Who are you serving? If you asked your family, what would they say? If you asked your spouse, if you're married, what would they say? Close friends. Some of you, the answer is crystal clear, and as Jim was speaking, you felt the conviction of God's Spirit kind of saying you've drifted and it's more about the dollars and cents and your security and your retirement and your kid's college education and it's not about people. It's not about things that are going to last. Some of you kind of know it is, but you're not really sure what to do and you may need to ask someone in your small group or one of the pastors and say, "I just need some input in my life. I know I'm not serving God." How do I move towards that? Some of you just need to be honest and confess with to God where you've been. Some may need to pray for direction. Amen. in the future. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.