Generous People Shine Brighter |11.10.24| Money Shouldn’t Make You Miserable pt.2

Matthew 6:22-23 Pastor Drew Williams One thing that I have loved since moving here a few years ago is how dark it gets at night, especially earlier this time of year, and you can see all the stars. We live right outside of town, kind of out in the country, and just all the stars just fill the sky.(...) And even though it's so dark outside, once your eyes kind of adjust to the darkness, you start to realize that all those little pinpricks of light are actually illuminating the surroundings around you, and it's kind of incredible how much you can see, even on a night that doesn't have a moon. It makes me think of when I was younger, we had a storm come through and knock out power for our entire neighborhood, and there was not a light on anywhere. There's no lights on in the house, no lights outside the house, in the distance, no other houses or businesses. We didn't even have the little indicator light at the bottom corner of like a TV or on the oven. There's just no light anywhere. (...) But when my dad grabbed out a candle,(...) and he lit a match, (...) and then lit his candle, (...) even that little bit of light filled the entire living room with warm glow, and all of a sudden I could see the room, and I could see my parents, I could see my brother.(...) And as we walked through the house with the candle, the light from the candle would bring to life every single room as we entered it. (...) And as we'll see in today's passage, this theme of light and dark has something to do according to Jesus with our life, with generosity, and with how we view our stuff.(...) Last week we started a message series called Money Shouldn't Make You Miserable. And we looked at the part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus speaks directly about our relationship with our stuff, calling it our stored up things. And as it turns out, our relationship with our possessions(...) determines a lot about our lives. When we store up wealth and possessions, we end up devoting our time and attention to worrying about them, to protecting them, to trying to get them.(...) But ultimately, these things will let us down.(...) So Jesus says, don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth.(...) Instead, Jesus urges us to store up a different kind of treasure. We might call sky stuff, or more commonly, treasures in heaven. (...) Last week we talked about how this kind of treasure isn't a future bank account that we build up and then access later after we die.(...) Sky stuff, treasures in heaven, isn't something we accumulate at all.(...) It's something that we spend. (...) It's time that we spend with someone who's lonely. It's the generosity that we show to those in need. And it's in these moments that we bridge heaven and earth in our lives for ourselves and for others.(...) That's the kind of treasure worth storing up. And so Jesus is urging us to be people who chase after sky stuff, God stuff.(...) Because if we really believe that God is an infinitely abundant provider, (...) and it will transform your heart.(...) And so today we're gonna move into that next teaching about money in our longer passage. And it comes in a form of a riddle. Now on its own, it might sound weird, doesn't really make sense, but in the context of generosity, it starts to become clearer. Now here's how the riddle starts, right? It says, "Your eye is the lamp of your body."(...) Now remember, this is a riddle. And so to understand it, we actually need to look at the Greek word behind it that's usually translated as good eye or healthy eye. So I'm gonna teach you a little bit of Greek today. It's a word play that has two meanings and both of which are intended here. And this riddle takes us all the way back to the beginning of the Bible, to the very first image of God's infinite life and presence in Genesis chapter one, and that is light. (...) Now I'm really thankful to the teaching of Tim Mackey. He's a Bible scholar, he's a pastor. I've leaned on him a lot for my preparation