A sermon based on Matthew 6: 25-34
Preached by Charles J. Tomlin, DMin.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership,
January, 24th, 2021.
UCLA’s legendary basketball coach, John Wooden, established for his players a Pyramid of Success. It was made of the building blocks required for both individual and/or team success. They started with things like industriousness, loyalty, cooperation, friendship, enthusiasm, initiative and others .
At the BASE of his Pyramid, coach Wooden wanted to develop an eagerness and love of hard work; showing a respectful, loyal and cooperative spirit with others. The second layer of development called for self-control, self-awareness and a self-motivated drive that resulted in diligence, determination, fortitude and resolve. WOW! Who even uses words like this to describe people?
Of course, at the top of this Pyramid made of the most basic habits of good character and teamwork was success, which Wooden called Competitive Greatness. Simply put, he was challenging his players to be their BEST when their BEST needed. He wanted them to understand that their was no getting to the top if the foundation wasn’t laid down properly.
In Matthew, 6:33, part of our text for today, Jesus gave, and still gives his followers the most basic ’building block’ of Christian success, “ But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well”. Do you see what Jesus was saying? Put the things of God first! Go after them first, work toward mastering them first, put them to practice in your life first, and then everything else will fall into place.’
This the same kind thing Coach Wooden was saying to his basketball players. Put these qualities in your life first Follow this way first. Make this your priority first of all, and then rest will come together and fall in place. You will get there, but you must be this and you must do that first of all.
Now, hearing the kind of priority Jesus puts on the kingdom the question is, what is THIS that we are to put first, and why do we have to be told or challenged to do this? Why isn’t this ’automatic’ or ’natural’ for us after we become Christians? Why is Jesus having to explain this priority to his followers? When you think about it, all those basketball players Wooden was displaying his building blocks of excellence for, where already great players, but he was still challenging them tool. What this ’kingdom success’ Jesus wants us to achieve in this world when we put God’s kingdom first?
HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS
We can begin to understand what Jesus means by the Kingdom because he qualifies it by making it equal with ’his righteousness’. The kingdom that Jesus means isn’t a ’magical kingdom’ like Disney, not some ancient walled city like in medieval Europe or China, but the kingdom of Heaven, or Kingdom of Heaven is an ethic, a way of behaving, or living.
This is why Jesus’ call to ’strive’ or ’seek’ the kingdom comes on the heels of Jesus’ teachings in The Sermon on the Mount. ’You’ve heard it said, that you should do that, or behave like this, but ’I say to you, that you should, ’turn the other cheek’, ’go the second mile’, ’don’t even be angry with others’, ’don’t look with lust in your heart’, and learn how to ’love your enemies’. That’s what the kingdom is, it’s a way of living and behaving because you allow God righteousness to rule in your hearts.
The first time, in the Bible that any command about God’s righteousness, of course, was in the 10 commandments. ’I’m the Lord Your God’ it begins, and continues, this is how you should relate to me and how you should relate to each other.
The heart of the Law of Moses was about living righteously, which Moses declared as ’being holy as God is holy’. In other words, the way people should live is revealed in who God is. So, it all fits together. God has created us, We are made in his image. So, it follows that we only continue to thrive when we live as God intended, that is when we, in our God-given freedom, continue to ’seek’ or ’strive’ to live in his righteousness.
But what is God’s righteousness? Righteousness is a very broad term with different meanings, but has three most specific meanings in the Bible; such as justice, faithfulness, and mercy. Since God is just, faithful, and merciful, so should we be in our relationship with God and others.
Certainly in the last year, with the social outcry against racism in America, and in the world, many voices we’re heard, and many different interpretations of justice and mercy spoke out very loudly in our own country. But what I’m afraid we didn’t hear enough about was ’his righteousness’. We heard and saw a lot of people’s anger, hurt, and frustration which resulted in protest marches and taking down statues, monuments and flags, and a lot of ’cancel culture’, but what wasn’t really addressed was the kind of behavior we should have as people, the ’change culture’ everyone needs to hope for and become.
For it’s one thing to remove the symbols of our past, good or bad, but it’s quite another to keep new symbols of hate from popping up again, and to create an atmosphere of reconciliation and hope. Once all the past is erased, will people actually live any different? Is the problem really etched in stone, or is the problem still a matter that is deep within the human hear? As an old Chinese saying goes, ’The heart can be both hard and soft’. It is our wills that make the difference.
So, here is exactly why we need to seek or strive after God’s righteousness, not just our own version of what righteousness means to us. We all have our own versions, our own viewpoints, and our own opinions about what is right, just, and righteous. Somehow we have to all come together around a vision of righteousness that is both beyond us, and bigger than any of us, but is also fair and just for all. And this is exactly what the revelation and vision of God’s righteousness is about. It can be seen and clearly understood in that one great line from the Jesus’ sermon in Matthew 7:12, which said:’ In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.’
STRIVE
It is because we don’t always do very well at going after ’his righteousness’, but going after only what we want, that Jesus put his command the way he did. We are very good at going after what we want and need, only focusing on ourselves, but overlooking the fact that we are all created by God and related to each other. And do you know how we get off track?
Well, Jesus is talking about what we fail to realize right here, just before our text, and in our text too. We get lost or distracted in pursuing our own treasures and looking after our on concerns and worries. ’Don’t store up treasures on earth…but store them up in heaven…For where your treasure is your heart will be also ’(6:19-21).
Don’t misunderstand what Jesus is saying. He isn’t simply saying that we are to be righteous so we will get rewarded when we get to heaven, but he’s saying that we should seek God’s righteousness so that God’s will comes down to earth, now, as it is in heaven. Misplaced values, selfish pursuits, and unjust conditions brought about by poor human choices only delay God’s will and God’s purposes---the purposes of heaven from being realized on earth.
While human sinfulness won’t prevent God’s kingdom from coming into this world, it can prevent us from entering into that kingdom. As Jesus makes clear in the next chapter: ’Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven’ (7:21). This is why Jesus is so adamant about ’striving for’ the kingdom of living in God’s righteousness. If we miss this God’s kingdom, and if we fail to understand what it means for us, and to seek after it, we can miss the blessings of the kingdom, no matter who we say we are. It’s what we do and how we actually live that makes the real difference. And there is a difference---a very real difference.
I received a video from my German friend recently which was an interview with. German Jew named Sally Pearl. His story of surviving Hiltler’s Germany is incredible. Pearl was just a kid when the war came and his family was stolen from him.
Strangely enough, Pearl survived by posing as a Hitler supporter himself, a Hitlerjunge, a youth for Hitler. Hitler stood for everything he was against, but because the whole world around him was evil, he had to pretend to be part of that world to survive. And he did. He was never discovered, and by the end, was even working as an assistant to a high Nazi officer.
During the interview, Pearl remembered, quite ironically, that he survived by listening to the last words of his mother, not his father. His father was a Rabbi who told him obey God, no matter what happened. His mother, fearing for her son’s life, said ’Son, do whatever you need to do to survive!’ Sally Pearl said he survived by ’disobeying’ his Father and by becoming a Nazi, even disobeying God too.
While I hope we never have to make a choice like that, we too live in a world that sometimes ask us to make hard choices between doing right and what will make us rich, between what is best for us, and what God requires of us and what this unrighteous world sometimes expects for us. During the Coronavirus threat many people were refusing to wear masks, no matter who said they should be wearing one. Some people even saw mask wearing as a threat to their own political freedoms, just like some churches and pastors saw social distancing as a threat to their religious liberties.
Perhaps this is why Jesus said that to follow him meant doing something difficult, something that went against the grain, which was like ’denying yourself’ and ’taking up a cross’. Life does require us to make difficult and hard choices, sometimes. And the most difficult choice is seldom like Sally Pearl’s choice of having to choose between life or death, but the most obvious choices we make most everyday are between what we want to do and what we should do.
And we won’t ’strive’ or ’seek’ this needed difference and this way of being different, if we are completely distracted or caught up in only going after only what we treasure, or seeking only what we wish for ourselves. Sometime we have to see beyond ourselves in order to do what’s right for others too, not just for ourselves. Sally Pearl finally did this too. After the war was over Pearl moved to Israel, like many Jews did, and there he opened a Zipper factory, but he never ’unzipped’ his lips to tell what happened during the war. He didn’t want to jeopardize his relationships and his business. He knew his Jewish friends who lost loved ones during the Holocaust would turn against him. But then, after suffering a heart attack, he decided to tell his story, even crooked, deceptive and underhanded, as it made him look. He was just a kid, trying to survive in an upside down world. But now, he needed to come clean, to tell his story, and to talk with children of the next generation, in hope that this kind of choice would never have to happen again. Now, he was striving for ’righteousness’ and trying to make up for lost time.
ALL THESE THINGS...
What Sally Pearl did, isn’t at all what Jesus asks of us. While Mr. Pearl went after all these things, and waited until he had them, then started telling the truth and living the truth, Jesus asks us to live choose God’s righteousness, now, and then ’all these things’ will be ’added to us’. What prevented Pearl from sharing, and caused him to hold all those difficult memories inside was his ’worry’ about losing his friends, and perhaps his business too. But all that ’worry’ almost cost him his life too. Because he had held it all in and kept carrying all the guilt of how he survived by siding with evil, he nearly lost his life again.
Worry can do that to people. It still can. That’s why Jesus understood way back then, that you can pursue God’s kingdom if your heart is filled with worry and fear. Worry and fear is why so few have time to seek or go after God’s righteousness, he says. The only way God’s kingdom comes, or new priorities are pursued is when we give all these cares and worries to God. It may sound counter-intuitive to put our treasures in heaven and too stop our worry by seeking him, rather than all the stuff that makes us feel secure, but it’s not. Jesus makes it clear that a ’carefree’ life is based on caring for the right things, not getting lost in caring for the wrong things.
Recently, I was saddened to hear the difficult story about a week-respected pastor in California. Someone working with children in his large mega-church, came and admitted that he had an wayward attraction toward children. Because the young man hadn’t acted on his feelings, the pastor advised him to seek counseling, but didn't remove him. Later, another person on staff, wrote a letter informing the church leadership that this young man was, in fact a pedophile, suggesting the pastor was wrong to let this go. He wrote this because he had fear for the safety of the children. He wrote this very carefully but intentionally, because the young pedophile man was his brother, and the pastor was their Father.
This is a very sad story, because it happened in a church, and to a much beloved and popular Christian ministry. While nothing bad happened in that church, it could have. And God knows, we don’t need more bad press about churches not doing what they need to do to protect children. But still, even the difficult truth needs to be told because not only do children need to be protected, but churches made up of imperfect people still need to be constantly challenged with God’s higher, demanding righteousness too. That Pastor was faced with the choice between keeping ’his own family kingdom’ and God’s kingdom, and he, by not making a difficult choice, made a very bad choice, that could have hurt a lot of people, let along hurting the most vulnerable of all.
This is why we must make hard choices, both in the church and in the culture. Not to seek the kingdom of God’s higher righteousness can be disastrous for our world, as it can also be for us, in our own private lives. If we settle for less that God’s holy, righteous, and coming kingdom, we will end us living lesser, lower and healthier, and even destructive lives. That’s why we are not to ’settle’ for less, but to ’strive’ and ’seek’ what God intends as his moral, ethical, and and righteous way of life, that is for our benefit, and for our earthly redemption too.
So, let me conclude, where I began. I began this message talking about coach John Wooden. Wooden was a devout Christian. His Pyramid of Success clearly indicated his belief system was built on the rock, not just any rock or foundation. Wooden kicked All-American athletes out of practice for using curse words. He personally stood firm against the world with a belief system built upon the righteousness of God. He also built his life around the message of Jesus. At the top of his pyramid, over everything else, floated too words pointing straight back to Jesus: faith and patience. Wooden believed that loving God with everything you have, all that you are, and in everything you do, will lead you to living righteously, which Wooden called WWJD, Walking Worthy of Jesus’ Death.
What motivates you to strive to live differently and to be a difference maker in the world? In his sermon Jesus challenged us to be both Salt and Light. Striving after God’s righteousness is to become salt to the flavorless, and a light in the midst of darkness?
How can you possibly have the desire, the will, and the strength to live in ’his righteousness’ as Jesus presents it in the Sermon on the Mount—in a world that will still run over you if you try to learn or love this way? Well, the truth is you can’t live ’his righteousness, his justice, his faithfulness, or in his mercy on your own. You won’t be able to be faithful in your own strength. This is why Jesus will recommend in the very next chapter for us to ASK, SEEK and KNOCK!! “For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matt 7:8).
So, are you asking, seeking, and knocking on heaven’s door? Do remember that great Bob Dylan song. He wrote it for a Movie about Pat Garrett, the lawman, in pursuit of Billy the Kid. But the finally lines are prophetic to our human struggle to be more than we are. Garrett was looking at the lawless Billy as more than an enemy of the law, but as another human being. The feelings he had in the movie were being felt in the terrors of the Vietnam War, we’re men were tired of killing, longing for a better world and a higher righteousness, where even enemies could be forgiven and loved. That’s why the final verse goes,
Mama, put my guns in the ground, I can't shoot them anymore
That long black cloud is comin' down, I feel I'm knockin' on…
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door.
The point Jesus was making is still valid and needed now. Life’s too short to pursue the wrong kingdom or righteousness. It is only by seeking or striving after God’s kingdom, that we can have the life we are intended to have. Amen
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