I know everybody is happy to be here on Mother’s Day… Before we begin, I know there are no mothers in this room, but can we take a moment to pray for all our moms, grandmoms, aunts, and sisters who are moms. The reason we’re doing that is because there was a pastor by the name of Sam Crabtree who said, “Mother’s Day is not primarily about being a mother and receiving honor but rather thanking God for the mother he gave you and giving honor.” Let’s pray.
Now, let’s look at this: James 5, starting in verse 1. “Come now, you rich…” Let’s stop for a second because some of you went, “Okay, not the sermon for me and will have begun to turn off and day dream.” If you make $25,000 a year, you are in the wealthiest 2 percent of the world. If you make $25,000 a year, you’re in the wealthiest 2 percent of the world. In this context, you might be pulling in $10,000 and feeling broke, but by global standards, you’re wealthy. Someone somewhere would have their mind blown at how you live, even if you think you’re living humbly.
Now, if you’re jaded, let me start this way: we’re not taking an offering today, in fact we never take an offering here. We have a giving plate, but we don’t have offering as a part of our worship service. This isn’t money, extended offering day—there’s no special song or dance or video to inspire you to give here at this church. I don’t want your money; God doesn’t want your money. Keep your money. I don’t need a plane or a suit, my Honda isn’t broken I don’t need new gadgets or anything like that. This is a sermon for the good of your own soul that I titled, “Your Treasure.”
1Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. 2 Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten.3 Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. 4 Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5 You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you. (James 5:1-6)
So there are four things that you need to get out of this message. To understand these four things, we need to look at Matthew 6:19-24 which is part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Let’s read Matthew 6:19-24, it’s just five verses, and you’ll see immediately that the passage in Matthew parallels the passage we just read in James. The reason I’m telling you this is because when we read it, we understand that we weren’t saved for ourselves but saved for the glory of God. And we need to live our lives aiming to glorify God because that’s exactly what He wills for us; meaning that everything in our life, marriage, kids, degrees, careers, etc, are a waste of time if they are not for the glory of God. Only then are we not wasting our lives away.
19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, 23 but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
24 “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. You cannot serve God and money. (Matthew 6:19-24)
I know on Mother’s Day, I should be preaching about butterflies and lilies and stuff, but I want you that this is super important when you become mothers or when you look at your mothers hard work because you’ll understand why they shed blood, sweat, and tears for you. All in all, James is looking to solidify our thoughts and actions around what our treasure is in life, because when we know what our treasure is in life, we can effectively make decisions about our lives and the things in our lives.
So the first thing he points out to us is that money is dangerous. I’m not saying that it’s bad to have money. I like having money, it keeps the lights on in my house, it can cook food, as in somebody cooks it for me and I go eat it without having to do the dishes. Money is dangerous because money is capable of doing lots of good things for you, but it can also do a lot of dangerous things for you. Just watch any movie. Money is dangerous because our heart is deceptive. If, in our deceptive heart, we play around money and end up loving money, it’s deadly.
Do you see what James says in verse 2 and 3? Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire (ESV). Let me read that to you in a translation that isn’t as vague: Your greedy luxuries are a cancer in your gut, destroying your life from within. You thought you were piling up wealth. What you’ve piled up is judgment (MSG). There is a toxicity when we deceive ourselves by thinking that money is something other than what it is: a tool for us to glorify God with. If it becomes anything else in our hearts, we’re going to lie to ourselves and we’re going to be infected with a toxic waste in our hearts. We cannot allow money to define who we are and what we do and how we act, yet we often do so and that’s the problem.
So why in the world is all of that about money to James? It’s simple: If you want to know what goes into your heart, then look at your bank statement. James knows that what actually happens with our money, how we spend it and how we think about it determines what we believe about it. Our bank statements show us what we really value and what we really love. I’m just saying, just take it out and categorize it, you’ll see. Then ask yourself, “uh… how did I glorify God with that last purchase right there at the end?”
Here’s the best analogy I can give in current events to help you understand this: The Flint water crisis. It’s been going on since April 2014, yes it’s going on two years now, but basically the water supply for the city of Flint was contaminated with lead and bacteria known as Legionella that leads to Legionnaires’ disease and Pontiac fever. A little history, if you don’t know, Flint used to be an old GM town; meaning that when GM (the car company) started to outsource and close the auto plants in Flint, Michigan, about 30,000 people became jobless. 30,000 people is about a third of the city, effectively messing up a blue collar city. Short story, less people with jobs means less tax revenue for the municipality, meaning less money to upkeep infrastructure. Then, probably to save money, the City of Flint changed it’s water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. The Flint River had a lot of chloride in the water because years of road salt melting and going into the ground water and eventually the river. On top of that industrial pollution from the 1950s and 1960 inserted lots of carcinogens that probably wasn’t cleaned up as nicely or as well as we would like to believe. When the lead plus carcinogens entered the bodies of people in Flint, it led to toxic waste in us.
Just like the Flint Water Crisis, but when we have an inflow from a different supplier (that is the world and not from God) then what we’re drinking is toxic and it will eat us to death. This is what James is saying here in verses 2 and 3. I’m telling you this because when we really think about our lives, the only inflow of good living water (that is what Jesus called himself when he was speaking with the Samaritan woman) is one hour a week. But the other 167 hours of the week, we have a different water supply and the source is corrupt and when it comes into us, it rots away at our very nature (that is the way God created us).
But really, how much of our lives do we really give to God in trust? Is your hope really built for the future of eternity or do you find it easier to believe the lies of your heart and put your hope in the wrong place? I know what you’re saying, “that’s not fair.” The reason you say this is because you and I both live in an environment that is toxic, and people will tell us that our lives aren’t toxic. You know the officials at the EPA taking care of Flint are being prosecuted because they lied and they botched the fix. It’s sad but that is the reality of life. We’re being spoken to by James as a church filled with members who would settle for moth-eaten and eroded hearts because [We] have laid up treasure in the last days (v3). Understand that James doesn’t want us to miss out on our lives because of what we talked about last week: arrogant planning. James doesn’t want us to have treasures for ourselves on earth that perish. It would be a waste of time to aim so low—We need to aim for the glory of God in our lives. Everything else is toxic and we’ll end up paying big.
We are eternal, so the temporary can never satisfy, which is why we’re never ultimately satisfied. We always want more, and we always feel like if we just get a little bit more, we’ll finally be satisfied. But we won’t. Let’s look at verses 4-6 now. 4 Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5 You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you.
You don’t have anything that wasn’t given to you. You don’t have anything that wasn’t given to you. You own nothing that was not in some way related to God’s graciousness toward you. You might be a great businessman, and I can introduce you to other great businessmen who the ball hasn’t bounced their way. You might be a hard, hard worker, and I’ll introduce you to dozens of hard, hard workers who the ball hasn’t bounced their way like it has for you. You have been blessed, and all you have belongs to the Lord.
Let’s get our lives aimed for the right place. Let’s live to do the right thing. You know what we have to understand as Christ followers? When we read James 5 and read Matthew 6, we have to understand that life, our treasure cannot be in two different places, there can only be one master in our life. We can’t do both and we can’t have both. We can only have one. If God responds to us generously by sacrificing His one and only Son, Jesus Christ in the most horrific death imaginable, despite the fact that we love the creation more than we love the creator (see Romans 1), then we have to know that we are God’s treasure. Our lives are God’s treasure. He gave us an inheritance that is eternal, that could have only been given to us if we were children of God, then our treasure should be in God, who gives us love beyond imagination. Moreover, our treasure should lead us to live a life that is worthy of being kings and queens for the most high God. Our lives should be living sacrifices that change the world for the glory of God.
What we do with our money matters because through it, we can give more people the opportunity change the world as heirs of God through Christ, their savior. When we do this, our treasure is immutable and cannot be denied by anything. Let’s pray.
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