Unobstructed Faith

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Well, as we prepare our hearts for our message, you can be turning in your Bibles to Matthew chapter six.
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And we're going to be looking today again at verses 19 to 24.
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Last week, we examined these verses in sort of a larger context.
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And today we're going to pinpoint in on some of their more specific truths.
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Last week, we discussed the heresy of the so-called prosperity gospel, the prosperity gospel.
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For those of you who were not here is the teaching that we are because of being and there's all kinds of language.
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But typically the language is because you're a child of the king, you should live as a child of the king and you should have health and wealth and prosperity.
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And that that is the goal of the gospel.
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When we give, we give to get for ourselves.
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And when we do, we do so that will be done unto us.
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And it's always about self enrichment and self fulfillment and your best life.
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Now, it is a devilish teaching.
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It is not the gospel.
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It promises everything that your temptations want, which should prove to us enough that it is not of God.
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First John, chapter two and verse 16 says, for all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes and the pride of life is not from the father, but is from the world.
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Beloved, is there not a better explanation of what is taught in the prosperity gospel than the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes and the pride of life? And the very Bible tells us that that's not from God, but it's from the world.
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It is a devilish teaching.
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John Piper said prosperity cannot be proof of God's favor since it is what the devil promises to those who follow him.
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What did the devil promise Jesus? Cast yourself down from this place.
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And you will be caught up on angels wings, bow down to me and I will give you all of the kingdoms of the world.
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Remember, that was the promise of Satan to Jesus.
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Prosperity is what Satan promises to those who bow the knee to him.
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The prosperity gospel is a devilish doctrine.
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So if you weren't here last week, you're all caught up now and now we'll move on to the text, because today we are going to be dealing with the subject which I have entitled the unobstructed faith, the unobstructed faith.
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And before we read the text, which we will do, I want to ask a question, sort of a diagnostic question before we even begin.
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And you don't have to answer verbally, but I want you to answer mentally answer in your in your heart, what would you say? And this was a question which was posed by Pastor Paul Tripp.
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The gospel coalition, he said, what would you say is the most dangerous threat facing Christians today? What would you say is the most dangerous threat facing Christians today? Now, put your answer in your mind and just hold it there in a little box.
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Don't answer verbally.
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I don't I don't want to hear your answer.
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I want you to hold your answer in a box, because I imagine that some of you have put in that box radical Islam.
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I imagine some of you have put in that box liberal theology or some other type of bad teaching.
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Maybe some of you have put in that box fascist or totalitarian government.
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That's the most dangerous threat facing Christianity today.
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Well, beloved, I don't mean to challenge you and say that I think that you're wrong, but I do, if those were your answers, because there is no more powerful and dangerous barrier erected between God and men than that of wealth.
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The most dangerous thing a Christian can be is not in the heart of Iraq and not in the face of persecution.
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But the most dangerous thing a Christian can be is rich.
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Rich, because Jesus said that it is difficult now and near impossible that a rich person would enter the kingdom of heaven.
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And why is that? Because we don't own things, things own us.
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Our wealth becomes our God, and it becomes an idol, and beloved, idolatry is a terrible and deadly sin.
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Proverbs chapter 30 says this in verses 8 and 9, it says, Remove from me falsehood and lying, give me neither poverty nor riches.
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Feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, who is the Lord, or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.
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So the writer of Proverbs is saying something very, very simple.
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He says, I don't want to be poor, because if I'm poor, then I'm going to be out having to beg or I'm going to have to steal just to survive.
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God, don't make me poor, but also don't make me rich.
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Because if I'm poor, I may steal, but if I'm rich, I may deny you, which is even worse.
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And here's the scary thing.
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On the world standard, we are all rich.
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I mean, not even a little bit, but a lot of it.
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I was thinking on the ride in this morning, this is going to be the least popular sermon ever.
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But that's OK.
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I I'm going to preach what the word says and allow God to be God and know this, that this is challenging.
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I, you know, I spend six days with the message and then I present it to you and you get it for 45 minutes.
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But this is something that I spend all week thinking about and all week having to having to search my own heart.
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And ask myself, is my wealth, what little it may be, is my wealth, my God, it's a serious question.
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So let's read the text.
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Let's stand together.
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This is our custom to give honor to reading of God's word.
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We're going to read Matthew chapter six, verses 19 to 24.
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It says in the text, do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves and thieves steal.
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But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust, where neither moth nor rust destroys 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.
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So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.
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But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.
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If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness? No one can serve two masters for either he will have hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
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You cannot serve God and money.
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Our father and our God, we come to you in Jesus name.
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I ask first and foremost, as I always do, that you would keep me from error.
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And I ask today, Lord, for an extra measure of your divine care as I preach on a subject which is bound to be unpopular, but which must be preached.
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And I pray, O Lord, that the words that come out of my mouth would be in keeping with your truth.
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And that your people will hear it and be edified and moved and confronted by it, and that we would all understand that where our treasure is, there also is our heart.
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In Jesus name we pray, Amen.
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This is a passage of great weight.
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It has a lot to say, but if we boiled it down to its most simplest form, it would simply be this.
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That Jesus is challenging us in our passage today to forsake our desire for worldly wealth.
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He's not saying we cannot earn a living.
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But what he is saying is that the accumulation to ourselves, the storing up for ourselves is not godliness, but is worldliness.
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And rather do rather than earning to store, we need to earn to share.
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And I've broken this down into three parts, but it all focuses around the same idea, the unobstructed faith.
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But I broke it down into three parts.
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And this is this is the three parts.
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God wants our heart.
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God wants our eyes.
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And God wants our hands.
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God wants our heart.
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God wants our eyes and God wants our hands.
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And I can show you in the text where we're going to extrapolate those three points.
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We're going to look first at the fact that God wants our heart.
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Verses 19 to 21, he says, don't lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven for where your treasure is.
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So also is your heart.
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The key word there, the key phrase in that entire section versus 1921 is the phrase for yourselves.
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Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth.
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By the way, the word treasure there comes from the root word.
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Thesaurus, Greek Thesaurus.
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What is a thesaurus? Do you know what that is? It's a book of words.
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Do you know why it's called a thesaurus? Because they wanted to confuse you when you're a kid.
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That's why.
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No, no.
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Why it's called a thesaurus is because the Greek word thesaurus means treasury or a storehouse.
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And what a thesaurus is, it's a storehouse of words.
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It's a treasury of words.
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It's synonyms and all of these things for words.
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And what's interesting is this Greek here says don't treasure treasures.
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It uses the word thesaurus twice.
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So when we read it in English, we read it as this.
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Do not lay up for yourself treasures on earth.
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But literally what it says in the Greek is don't treasure treasures.
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Don't store up things just for you.
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Ephesians 428 says this.
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Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor doing honest work with his own hands so that he may have something to share with someone in need.
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Notice that it doesn't say let the thief no longer steal so that he can fill his own barn.
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So it doesn't say let the thief no longer steal so that he might have himself a mansion or a car or a house of some vacation home or something like that.
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It says, no, let the thief not steal.
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Number one, because it's a breach of God's command to steal, but rather let him go to work.
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And when he works, he works to the point that he has an excess, but not an excess that he would store for himself, but an excess that he would share.
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Beloved, communism is not biblical because communism is theft.
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I want to say that communism is not biblical because communism is theft.
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Here, let me explain why.
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Communism is theft because the government demands all of what you have and then redistributes it as it wills.
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And that is theft.
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If I take everything you own and then give back to you what I think you deserve, that's theft.
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It's not biblical.
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So anyone who tells you that communism is biblical or the early church was communistic is wrong.
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It's false.
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It's not true.
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Communism is a breach of the commandment that thou shall not steal.
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Government stealing is still stealing.
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However, greedy self-indulgence is also unbiblical.
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And that's often what people say.
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I'm not a communist, but I'm greedy and self-indulgent.
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Well, that ain't biblical either.
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Don't let your hatred of communism, which is a righteous hatred, cause you to hate the biblical call to be generous.
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Don't let your hatred of communism make you hate generosity because they are not the same thing.
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Generosity is to give willingly, is to give openly, is to hold all things with an open hand.
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Heard a guy say babies are born with clenched fists and some of them never open them until they're old and die.
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And that's the truth.
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There can be such a tightness because we hold it to ourselves.
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If all we care about is growing our own estate, if all we care about is building our own wealth, if all we care about is personal prosperity.
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Beloved, we are not Christians, we are idolaters of the rank, the highest rank, because we have taken God from his throne and we have replaced his majesty with our comfort and prosperity in the ancient world.
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Wealth was judged by three things.
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MacArthur, who is great at making things have the same first letter, he's a great alliterator.
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I'm not sure if that's a word, but he's great at alliteration.
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And he made the point, he said, the way that people were rich in the old in the ancient world.
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So garments, grain and gold.
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If you had a lot of garments, I mean, that's how kings demonstrated their kingliness was by the fanciness, fanciness of their robe.
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If you remember in Isaiah six, when the Isaiah saw the the Lord seated upon his throne, what did it say? It said the train of his robe filled the temple.
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Why? Why did you the train of the robe? Because it was representative of God's majesty.
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Garments represent wealth and affluence and power in the ancient world.
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What does he say? He said, don't store up where moth will destroy.
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Why does he mention moth? Because moths eat garments.
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You don't walk around and go, oh, moth, we don't get moths when we're wearing them.
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We get moths when we store them.
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You pull a garment out that's been stored for five years and you hold it up to the window and the light shines through and it looks like a net because it's been eaten.
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Right.
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The moths destroy stored garments and this isn't a new problem.
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This is the ancient world had this problem.
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And so Jesus's point is simple.
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Why do you need to store that? Why? Why store something that could be used by someone else? You ever see the TV show Hoarders and people walk into their house and they have to make a maze around stuff because they've got stacks of stuff because they have to store and accumulate.
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And often it's weird stuff.
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It's not even valuable stuff, but it's stuff because they feel comfort and security and stuff.
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The second thing we see on the list, it was moths and rust.
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But let me tell you something about that word rust.
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I think.
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And again, I don't like to challenge the translators because there are teams of translators who translate our Bibles.
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But the word here is brosis in the Greek brosis is the root of the word to eat.
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And if you look at the bottom of the ESV translation, you'll notice the word rust has a little note.
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And at the bottom of the ESV, it says worms.
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The actual word in Greek is eaters.
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So I think that what it's saying here is moth is the garments and eaters the grain, because that's the second way in the ancient world they would have.
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Well, they not only would have garments, but they would have grain.
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And what happens when you store grain, worms and animals get in and they ruin it, they eat it, they make it dirty and nasty and unfit for human consumption.
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So Jesus is challenging the the way of the ancient world, the way that they measured wealth, he's challenging them with these things don't store where moths are going to eat your grain or eat your garments, where eaters, worms or whatever else are going to eat your garments or your grain.
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I can't get it right.
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And then the last one is gold.
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What do thieves break in and steal your gold in the ancient world? They were called mud diggers.
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You know why they were called mud diggers? Thieves were called mud diggers because they would come and dig out the houses that were made and put together.
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They would dig out the mud and pull the blocks out so they could sneak in and steal the gold that people were hiding was their treasure.
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Jesus is making a very simple point here, and I don't think I don't think it's hard to understand what he's saying.
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Temporal things, whether they be garments, whether they be grain, whether they be gold, whether they be your expense account, whether they be your stocks, whether they be your bonds, whether they be your savings, whether they be the money you have stuffed in a cookie jar or shoved between the mattresses of your bed.
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It all is temporary.
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You realize that the dollar bills that you have in your wallet aren't worth anything except what we ascribe to them.
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When you hold up a dollar bill, it says Federal Reserve note.
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Because that note is given value from the government to say this piece of paper represents a dollar, five dollars, ten dollars, a hundred dollars.
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It doesn't.
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But but if you are going hungry on a desert island, could you eat it? Could you? I could burn it for warmth, but it has no intrinsic value.
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It's only given the value that we put on it.
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And you know what? Tomorrow, if there was an economic collapse, you could have one hundred million dollars and it'd be worth nothing.
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And that's the point Jesus is making.
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We store up for ourselves, we store up for our own well-being and our own prosperity, only to realize that when life is over, none of that is going to matter except for making a really beautiful casket and a really fancy mausoleum.
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And you won't even know.
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So Jesus tells us our heart cannot be captured by our wealth.
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Now, I'm going to move on.
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But that's the that's the root of all of this, because in the second and third point, Jesus talks about the eyes and Jesus talks about.
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It's the same thing.
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Read the second part.
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God wants our eyes.
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Let me show you this text.
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It says the eye is the lamp of the body.
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Verse twenty two.
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So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.
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But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.
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If then the light in you is darkness.
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How great is the darkness? Now, some people think that Jesus has changed the subject.
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Oh, nay, nay.
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He has not changed the subject.
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He has not changed the subject at all.
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Because he's remaining on the subject of greed and covetousness, and I will demonstrate that from the Bible, the Bible interprets the Bible, right? Hold your place in Matthew six and turn with me to Proverbs twenty eight.
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I want to show you a Hebrew idiom.
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An idiom is a expression.
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And in Psalm, I'm sorry, Proverbs twenty eight and verse twenty two.
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I will say this, if you're if you're reading from something other than the ESV, hopefully this will make sense.
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And if it doesn't, I'll I'll show you later.
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But in the twenty eighth proverb versus verse twenty two, it says this.
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A stingy man hastens after wealth and does not know that poverty will come upon him.
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Now, you notice that it's got a little a little note there on the phrase a stingy man.
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Go down to the bottom with that little note says, because that's not what it says in Hebrew.
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What it says in Hebrew is a man whose eye is evil.
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Beloved, the phrase an evil eye is a Hebrew idiom for a stingy person.
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A person who looks with an evil eye and you've all heard that phrase give you the evil eye.
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Right.
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Well, that phrase is actually a statement of greed.
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It's a statement of stinginess.
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So when Jesus says the eye is the lamp of the body.
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So if your eye is healthy, meaning that you're not stingy, you're not greedy, but you don't look at things to covet after them.
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But you look at things to see wherein you can lend aid and support and comfort and help.
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You look a different way than the stingy evil eye.
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Your body will be full of light.
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Why is Jesus making this point? Well, he's making a very simple point.
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How we look at the world tells us how our heart really is.
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If we look at the world for what we can gather to ourselves.
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And boy, don't we have covetous eyes.
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And you know what? The television knows it because the television feeds our hungry eye.
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Stay up past eleven o'clock at night and watch the infomercials.
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Nineteen ninety five.
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But wait, there's more.
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You've got all this stuff to fill your eye, to make you want.
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And Jesus said, if your eye is dark, how great is the darkness? If we are stingy, if we are unwilling.
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To to to give and to share.
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How great does that demonstrate the darkness of our heart? Finally.
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God wants our hands.
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Verse twenty four.
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No one can serve to master the word, serve their due loss.
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It's important because a lot of people have read this text and they say, wait a minute now, I can have two jobs and I can have two bosses.
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But this is not the idea of being a boss.
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The idea of here is being an indentured servant.
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And guess what? A slave cannot be a slave to two masters.
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A slave is a slave to one master.
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He's indentured servant to one, not many.
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And the word due loss is very important.
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He says no one can be a slave, no one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
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You cannot serve God in some of your text.
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They and Mammon Mammon is the Arabic for money.
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It's just the same idea.
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A slave cannot be owned by two masters, neither can we be owned by both God and money.
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One will always take precedence.
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One will always be our God.
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And I say God wants your hands because that's what the idea there is service.
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God wants our heart.
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God wants our eyes.
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God wants our hands.
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He wants all of us.
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That's the point.
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God wants us all.
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Romans chapter 12 in verse one.
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Some of you know this verse by heart.
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I appeal to you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present yourselves a living sacrifice, holy and blameless unto God, for this is your proper service.
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You know, that's an oxymoron.
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You know, an oxymoron is right.
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Two words put next to each other mean different things.
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Dodge ram.
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It's not oxymoron.
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If you dodged it, you didn't ram it.
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It's, you know, two words that go together that mean opposites.
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Living sacrifice, a sacrifice is by nature dead.
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It's what it means to sacrifice.
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So the Apostle Paul lends to us an idea that seems on its face to be a contradiction in terms, but it's not because he himself said, I die daily in my pursuit of Christ.
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Jesus said, unless a man be willing to take up his cross daily.
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And what was the cross? It was a symbol of death.
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Every one of those people had seen someone hung on a cross, every one of those people knew what it was to be hung on a cross.
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And Jesus said, unless you're willing to take that cross up daily, you have no right to follow after me.
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Die to yourself, die to your things, die to your wants and live for me.
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As the Apostle Paul said, for me to live is Christ and to die is gain.
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This is the most difficult thing to preach in the American church, for we are at the center of the crosshairs of the world's affluence.
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The world wants us to buy their goods, so they build factories so as to ship us their goods because they know we can't get enough.
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The poorest among us live like kings.
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Compared to the world outside our walls, and many of us have never been outside the walls and we don't know what I'm talking about, but I've heard it said, and I believe it's true that the average dishwasher in the American household is a king.
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Each better than a large portion of the population of Africa, meaning that more food goes out your dishwasher being washed off the plates of our food that we got left over.
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Then goes into the bellies of these people, yet if you ask the average Christian, if you ask the average believer, do you think Christians are materialistic? They might say, well, yeah, maybe.
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Are you materialistic? No, not me.
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But the numbers don't lie.
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Study after study after study has been done and demonstrated a very consistent trend.
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And here's the trend in regard to giving.
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And this is just church giving.
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And this is just Christians, people who claim evangelical Christianity.
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Twenty three percent give nothing.
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Twenty four percent give a tithe to the church, twelve percent give a tithe or more tithe is ten percent of giving of earning, but the average person gives two and a half percent.
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Why don't we give as we ought because we love our wealth and we like to store up for ourselves? Martin Lloyd-Jones tells a story of a farmer who had a calf or had a cow, rather, that had two calves, twins.
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And he was so excited and he ran in to tell his wife, honey, the cow has had calves, two calves, they're twins.
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One of them we're going to donate to the Lord.
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Committed to God will raise them both together, but when the time comes to sell them at market, we will give it what we'll sell them both at market and we'll take the one calf and we'll donate the entire amount of money to God and to his work.
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And the wife said, that sounds great, honey.
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Which calf is the Lord's? He said, we'll determine that later, not a big deal now, but we'll just we'll just know that one of these calves are dedicated to the Lord.
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And so the months went by and finally one day the farmer walked in and he had a solemn look.
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And the wife said, honey, what's wrong? And he said, the Lord's calf died and that's the way it always is.
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I want to ask you a question.
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This is a diagnostic question for you to search your heart.
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And you all know I don't preach on giving every week.
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I don't preach on giving every year.
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I preach on giving when it comes up in the text because I preach through the text.
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But on this subject, I want you to consider this and I want you to really take this to heart.
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If you were tomorrow to receive a call from a lawyer who said, Mr.
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or Mrs., whatever, we need you to come to our office.
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We have good news for you.
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And you drove down to the lawyer's office and you walked into the lawyer's office and the lawyer sat you down and said you had a relative that you never met.
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And this person was affluent beyond your wildest dreams.
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You are his only heir.
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And you have received his inheritance.
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Of one hundred million dollars.
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Now, just think, don't don't please don't fiddle, move, just think how many of you would walk out of that place on a cloud? You would be so excited.
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You would call yourself blessed and you would be thinking about the house and whatever else.
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Every time you come in to this church.
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And you gather around that table, you are reminded that Jesus said, I go to prepare a place for you.
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And in my father's house, there are many rooms.
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How many of you leave this place with the same elation that you would have left that lawyer's office where our treasure is? There are heart is also father.
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Father, thank you for the power to preach the truth.
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And though today's words are not intended to be comforting, they're intended to be challenging to everyone, including myself, father.
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I pray that you would give us strength to search ourselves and ask the probing question, where is our treasure? Have we focused on our treasure in heaven? Or are we still groping for that which moth and rust destroy and that which thieves break in and steal? Let it be, oh, father, that we turn our hearts to you.
38:19
In Jesus name we pray.
38:24
Let's stand and sing.
38:25
And if you have a need for prayer, I encourage you to come.