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Living for the Line, Not the Dot: Treasuring
November 11, 2007 Rev. William “Buck” Day
Lord we do come before you. We fall down before your throne and we cry out “holy, holy, holy.” We acknowledge that you are Lord of the universe and we love you. Oh Lord we come before you now and ask that you would guide our thoughts, guide my words, Lord, that they may be used by your Spirit to change us. Lord that is what we ask this day and it is in the powerful name of Jesus that we do ask that. Amen.
Our scripture today comes from Matthew, chapter 6 and I invite you to follow along as I read it for us. The word of God for us this day:
Matthew 6: 19-21 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consume, and where thieves do not break in or steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
God’s word for us today.
Well, how many of you like Captain Jack? Captain Jack it seems is always on the hunt for treasure, isn’t he? That is the great adventure of the movies, or the Pirates of the Caribbean, is that someone is always out to get him; and there are many great adventures that he goes on as a result of that. Don’t you sometimes wish you could have a little treasure hunt, as well? What if I were to tell you that you could hunt treasure right here in the Twin Cities and you could hunt it without the fear of having a group of people trying to chase you down? Well you can do that be doing something that is called geocaching. It is catching on more and more each and every day. Geocaching simply is a modern day treasure hunt. What you do is you find a treasure using a GPS unit, a global positioning satellite unit. It kind of goes like this: A person will put together a little treasure, or what is called a cache, and they will hide it somewhere. Then what they will do is they will then put on the internet the longitude and latitude numbers and people get to look up those numbers and try to find the treasure. Now it is one thing to be able to find it on a map; but it is a whole lot more fun to actually go through the terrain, wherever it happens to be hidden, to try to find it. Once you found your cache, then what happens typically is there is a little treasure, a little memento, in there of finding it; maybe a log to sign in that you found it. You get to take one of those mementos and maybe sometimes, you can put one you brought in there to exchange it. Then you put the cache back for someone else to find. It can be very rewarding and it’s most enjoyable. So I invite you, if you’re interested in it, it is a catching on sport, to check it out at the website at geocaching.com.
That’s one way to do a little treasure hunting. When we think of treasure, however, this is what probably comes to our mind most of the time, isn’t it? It is this idea of pirates, of buried treasure, of gold doubloons and money. So when we think about our text today, it kind of invokes this notion of money and treasure and wealth and all those kinds of things. I think it is appropriate then for us to be thinking about treasure, or what I am going to call treasuring, in our stewardship sermon series. We’re in the midst of that and Chris will finish that up next week for us. I want us to think about treasuring because we have this notion of treasuring; but I think what it does it kind of bleeds into a kind of negative feel, that somehow treasuring is a negative. Some people might say, “Well you know if you treasure, that’s not very spiritual. You are not really spiritual if you treasure things.” So what I want to do today is look at this idea of treasuring. Look at this idea of treasuring and put it in a broader context, maybe a little more positive light. What I want to do is to give us some statements around treasuring that I think either relate to our text or are inferred by our text as well. So I want to start with one of those; and, that is, that treasuring is a good thing. Treasuring is a good thing. If you notice in our text, Jesus never said don’t treasure. He doesn’t say don’t treasure. He says be careful what you treasure. The inference there is you know what? We all treasure things. We all treasure things. I think that is true. I think it is fundamental to who we are as human beings. When we treasure something, we kind of cherish it in our heart, don’t we? We hold on to it, we protect it, we guard what we treasure. When we treasure something, it will usually bring us joy as well. I want to show you one of the things that I have treasured. This is my blue teddy bear from when I grew up. Actually this is blue teddy bear number two. I will give you a little close up there. Blue teddy bear one got thrown out by my mother after I chewed its face off. I chewed its face off and my mom goes, “OK, well, we’ll get another one.” Oh no, no, no, no! I needed another blue teddy bear. They were fairly few and far between. So my mom and my sisters went on a hunt to find what you see before you now. Once they finally procured it, and it was a rather involved process, there was peace that was restored in our house, come nap time. You see my mom discovered I didn’t need a nose or an eye or a face; just simply a new blue washcloth over the head would work well. My mom discovered and realized that this was something I treasured. So when I out grew it, she held onto it for me. Now it is one of my treasures and it has brought me much joy in my life. How about you? What do you treasure? What do you treasure? I think that is a good question to be asking ourselves. It is a good question to be asking ourselves because when we ask ourselves and think about it, it reveals a part of who we are. It begins to reveal what we value; what our priorities are; whether they are good or bad, and we can make that judgment; and I think it also helps when we know what we treasure it helps us kind of know a little more about ourselves. That’s always a good thing. The more we know about how God has put us together, the better off we are. Another part of this idea of valuing treasure, that it is OK, is around the area of love. When we love someone, we honor the things that they treasure. You know what? Part of love is revealing part of your treasure to the person that you love. It is an act of self disclosure, isn’t it? It is kind of opening up your heart and going, “This is me. This is what is important to me. This is a little bit more of who I am. I hope you love it.” It is an important part of doing that because it helps us give that treasure to a person and say “I trust you. I trust you with what I treasure.” That’s an important thing for us as well.
Let’s move beyond this notion that treasuring is a negative and look at it as something that is at the core of who we are as human beings; that we all treasure. One of the things then that we can add to that, I think, is that your heart will follow your treasure. I think this is what Jesus means in verse 21 and out of that comes this notion that our treasure shapes us. Whatever that treasure is, it will shape us. You probably heard the stories of the big lottery winners and what has happened to their lives once they received their winnings or their treasure; how it changes their lives; how it changes their hearts from that point going forward. The encouragement Jesus brings us in very clear statements in our text is to be careful, be careful what you treasure, because your treasure will shape your heart. This is something that I think is not new to Jesus but it is all throughout scripture. In Psalm 115 it says that we become like our idols. We treasure them. We treasure those things and they shape our hearts; and if they are idols, they shape our hearts away from God. In the Old Testament, idolatry was held up as treasuring gone wrong. In our day one of things that we can hold up as treasuring gone wrong is addictions. When you are addicted to something, what happens? It consumes you, doesn’t it? It consumes your time; it consumes your money; it consumes potentially your family, your job, your marriage. It eats you alive, doesn’t it? You are very much at the mercy of your addiction to the point that you will sacrifice many times anything, and sometimes everything, for your addiction, for your idol. We need to be careful. We need to be careful what we treasure, because it will affect our hearts. Our heart will follow it. So Jesus wants us to be thinking about treasuring in a different way, thinking about positive treasuring or healthy treasuring. What does that look like? One of the things we can say about healthy treasuring is that you “live for the line, and not the dot.” Those words come from a book called Treasuring by Randy Alcorn and the idea is this. That we live our lives from the moment we are born, through our days on earth, and when we are done on earth we continue to live on through eternity. To think of it in geometric terms, our life is a vector. It starts at one point in time and it continues on infinitely in one direction. I think for most of us, even those who are followers of Christ, we all too often think about life as a dot. We think of our lives as a moment in time because we think about the continuum of time and we go “Oh, I live here, I live here.” Or “Somebody else I know lived back here.” So we think about when life is over when our time is done on earth then we’re done. It’s all over. I think that kind of mentality has begun to take hold in many places in our society and so that the great theologian of our culture has put out the bumper sticker that says “He who has the most toys in the end, wins.” It’s that idea. That’s the notion of living for the dot. Get the toys. But Jesus says, when we are living for the dot, when we are living for the here and the now, we can’t store up treasures in heaven. We are actually storing up treasures on earth.
When we live for the line, we realize we have a different, a broader perspective that we look at life and say, we can’t take it with us anyway. This treasure that I have won’t last. It is only good for here and for now. So what Jesus is saying under our text today is that it is not a good strategy to store up earthly treasures. He would say, “Don’t do that. Don’t store up earthly treasures. Live for the line, not the dot.” How many selfish people have you seen that are really happy? I don’t think we see too many of them. I think that’s because they are living for the dot rather than the line. When we live for the line we are acknowledging that the earth is not our home, that this is not our home. We are agreeing with the Old Testament concept of being a sojourner. A sojourner is a traveler in a foreign land. We are travelers in a foreign land during our life on earth. This is not our home. We were made for heaven. So when we have that notion, then the stuff that we do receive here on earth, we can think about differently. We can say, one, well it is God’s anyway. God is the author of creation, God still owns all of creation, even the things that we have a title that say we own it – uh uh. God still owns that. We can also come at from saying you know what, it is not going to last anyway. I can’t take it with me. When we have that attitude then it leads us to the question of, OK what do I do with this stuff then? How do I use this stuff to store up treasures in heaven? Let me give you an example that might help. Let’s say that you are a wealthy southerner at the end of the Civil War. You know the war is about to end. You know the South is about to lose and all of your resources are in Confederate money. What do you do? You try to convert it into Yankee dollars, don’t you? Something that’s going to be worth something after the war is over. That’s what we are talking about here with our stuff. The stuff we have is like confederate dollars. Not going to be worth much for very long. So let’s convert it over into something that will have lasting value. One of the major ways we do that, the way we store up treasures in heaven, is to invest in things that have an eternal difference. Use what we have to live for the line, not the dot.
One of the ways I think we can do that is by giving. Because giving helps us live for the line not the dot, because when we give, our heart changes. Giving teaches us to treasure the right things, the things that matter most; those things that have eternal significance. I think way too many of us believe, incorrectly I might add, that when something captures our heart, whatever it might be, we will then give to that. But what Jesus is saying in our text is just the very opposite of that. He is saying to use your treasure to shape your heart, the way you want to shape your heart. Your heart follows your treasure. So you will follow where you put your money. Where you put your money, it will get your attention, right? How many of you have maybe invested in a new product or a new company or have been a part of an initial stock offering? After you invested that money, what do you do? You are watching it. You are watching it everyday to see how it is doing, aren’t you? It gets your attention. So when you know that you want your treasure to be in heaven, if that’s your heart’s desire; then put your money where you want your heart to be. Put your money in things that will produce treasure in heaven.
One of the things that we as the staff have been talking about is this concept of how do we begin to store up treasures in heaven? How can we do it as a congregation? What would that mean if we were all to do something together that would kind of shape our hearts to make a difference for God’s kingdom? How could we do that? What could we do? We want to invest in something beyond ourselves that might make an impact for God. I want you to watch a video; and as you watch this video, I want you to ask yourself, is this something that could shape your heart?
Video Clip:
It begins with one.
In an average life your heart will beat more than two and a half billion times, Two and a half billion times, never resting, every hour, every day, always searching, for where your treasure is there your heart will be also.
You only have one, one heart, one life. I only have one life What will you do?
In America, like no other place in the world, you have choices, opportunities. When so much is given Much will be required.
Is it safe to drink water in your country? Many African women walk 6 miles every day for water. On average, Americans walk 6 miles every month.
Do Americans really eat three times a day? Every day Americans spend 1billion dollars eating out. Every night in Africa 799 people go to sleep hungry.
Are there schools in your country for every child? American teens spend an average of $101 a week. $101 will send 2 African children to school for a year.
The truth is alarming. Average life expectancy in America: 78 in Zambia: 40
Aids is destroying Africa. In some countries one out of every 4 people is infected and suffering from the disease. Aids is wiping out an entire generation leaving behind more than 10 million orphans. Who takes care of all the orphans in your country?
Are you tired of people saying there is nothing you can do? The problem is too big. One person can’t change the world.
Are you going sit back and watch?
I only have one life I only have one life
Or are you going to do something?
I will be strong I want to be an engineer I will be a teacher I want to be a nurse I can live a long time
You have one life. Do something.
Let us not love with words or tongue, but with actions and truth. 1 John 3:18
You have one life. Do something.
We, along with our mission team here, have been talking about ways that we can begin to make a difference in Africa. You’ve seen just a snippet of the Aids crisis that is not just in Africa but in many places around the world. We have been thinking about how can we make a difference, because, quite frankly folks, the church has been called out on the carpet; and I think rightly so, because there has been lots of humanitarian agencies that have beating us to help to begin to make inroads into the Aids crisis. So we as a church, and I was just told between services, are going to be joining another church, the Lutheran church just down the street, and I have forgotten the name off the top of my head, it’s down on Excelsior. We are going to start something and we are going to do a lot of stuff, I think, here. We are talking about ways we can begin to make an investment in Africa. Our missions team will be telling us more about that in the time to come; but right now we are going to start with something that is almost, if you will, sticking our toe in the water. It is just a start. We are going to be joining All Saints Lutheran, that’s the name of the Church, and we are going to be joining in an initiative that was started by World Vision. We are going to be purchasing and building what are called Aids caregiver kits. Aids caregiver kits are put together and then taken to where the problem of Aids is rampant. They are usually given to a native caregiver; and that person will walk among probably a dozen villages or so and will just continue to circle around taking care of those suffering from Aids, to take care of them, to bathe them, to help them a little bit, to encourage them and to also support their families. Many times the families simply are just their children and their children will soon be orphans as you heard in there. We have the opportunity to build some of these kits. They cost $25. About two or three weeks ago our choir put together 150 of these kits using money from our Lenten offering last year. We put them together in about a half hour; it didn’t take very long at all. But I think that if we can do that with just the choir and with that offering, I think if all of us really say, yes we can really do this, we can get behind that. We can probably double, even triple that number just for us here at Faith and with the folks at All Saints Lutheran all the better. What we will do then is one Sunday, I think it will probably be in early February, after one of our worship services, we will gather and we will build these kits together. It will be a great time because we will know we are making a difference. That’s an important piece. That’s one of the ways we can invest in something beyond ourselves; when we do that, our heart changes, and that’s what it’s all about. God calls us to be His witnesses to the world. That’s what the Church is supposed to be and we can witness to the world; and, in doing that, we are investing in things for the future and we are storing up treasures in heaven.
Let me pray for us. Lord thank you, thank you very much that you have called us to live beyond ourselves. You have called us to be world Christians. World Christians means locally but it also means globally as well. Lord I pray that we would store up treasures in heaven that that would be our hearts desire, and that through that you would change our hearts as we give to those things. Lord let that be the case. We ask it in your name. Amen.
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