Hey, I'm Matt Brownell.
And I'm Van Owens.
And I'm Tim Adams.
Welcome to Climbing the Mountain, where we dive into the scriptures and discuss themes,
connections, and real life application.
We're kicking off a series here where we're going to examine the Sermon on the Mount and
discuss implications for this teaching for Christians today.
So we're back for part two on our, this is our second episode on Matthew 6.
And we've been honing in on verses one through 18, really talking about why are we doing
righteous deeds?
Why are we doing religious activities?
And there's a lot here, but a lot of it is encapsulated in this first verse.
It says, be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them.
If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.
So last time we were trying to unpack, you know, what are some of the practical modern
day examples of doing public prayer or public giving or fasting?
And what are some of the ways we can, you know, signal to each other, oh, yes, I'm really
righteous.
And we talked about the purpose of these activities and how they're really more about being driven
out of desire to be close to God in an ideal context.
And that's really what Jesus is trying to get at.
But we also were saying that there can be, there's this tension between what Jesus is
saying Matthew 6 versus in Matthew 5, where it talks about letting your light shine before
others.
And that there's a question of who gets the glory in what we do.
Is it us?
Are we doing something so that we can get glory or are we doing something so that God
can get glory?
Which is really what Matthew 5 is emphasizing.
So yeah, I'll turn it back over to you, Matt, to keep us going.
Yeah.
Well, so I want to start off with an embarrassing question.
When, where none of us received any reward from our father in heaven for whatever, have
you ever had a time where you had to do something religious in front of other people and totally
fail because your heart wasn't right?
Yes.
And then, and as you're thinking about, how can we, how can we avoid this type of failure
in the future?
So I, this was quite a while ago.
I was, I was leading a Bible discussion and the campus minister was coming to our Bible
discussion and I did it.
And the first Bible discussion he came to that I led, he took me aside to the other room
and he said, that's one of the best Bible discussions I have ever heard.
And instead of saying, really, how so and trying to get something real out of it, my
head got three times bigger than it is now and it's pretty big now.
And so the next week he was coming again.
And so I decided to do this really elaborate, deep, I wanted to be deeper.
I wanted to be more meaningful.
I wanted to be more funny where I wanted to be funny.
I wanted to be more serious where I was going to be serious.
I picked this really difficult thing to talk about and we did it and it, I could tell right
from the beginning it was failing.
I would ask a question and nobody would answer it and it was, it was just horrible.
And he took me aside after that and he said, so that was one of the worst Bible discussions
I've ever heard in my life.
And I don't, I don't understand what happened.
And I think what happened was my, I got performative.
I wanted to, I wanted to live up to this new image that I had of myself, of this great
Bible scholar and the, what I could have done to avoid that was just did what I did
the first time, stick with something that I, that I felt that I knew very well, that
I was working with in my own life.
Just brevity and clarity and to make sure that I remember that I'm not the hero of this
story.
Yeah.
That, and, and I think that we live in a society now where everybody's trying to be the hero
of their own story all the time.
And that's where we trip up.
I'm not the hero of this story.
I'm a Christian, the hero of my story is Jesus.
And so he's the one whose story I'm telling, and if I can keep that in mind, it, it helps
me to avoid situations like that.
That's great.
I love that.
Tim, you want to embarrass yourself?
Well, so I have, I have a bad habit of forgetting times that I did things poorly.
So yeah.
Well, so my, my first reply to this question was, I for sure have done that a million times,
but I might have not even noticed it, right?
Like it might have totally failed, but I was just blind to it.
And that's probably more of where I think the Pharisees were at when Jesus was like
reaming into them saying, you're like whitewashed tombs, right?
And you're doing things, you look good on the outside.
But then I asked, I asked Adrian, my wife, and she had some good examples.
Why did you get good for that?
It was funny.
I asked her and she gave an example.
She was like, Oh, were you trying to have me tell you the way that you messed up?
But there have been times where I, yeah, I've been leading like a small group discussion.
And I've just felt like, you know, during that time, I just felt like in a terrible
place, right?
I just felt super like distant from God.
And I just felt like I had to kind of perform and put on a face as a leader.
And you know, there's like one time where the whole point of the discussion was to kind
of identify where you are in your stage of discipleship or being in a relationship with
God.
And there was one of the kind of identified sections is like, there's kind of be times
where you're just like in a wall, right?
And you feel distant, but you're like, you're working through it and you're fighting and
that can be a really transformative time.
And you know, I just totally pretended like I wasn't there, right?
I just pretended like I was, you know, in a really great space where I actually probably
was more in like that wall.
And so, you know, I think for me, the, I do think there were many, there have been many,
many other times where my, my witness was definitely greatly reduced or even I was a
bad witness for God because I was doing things for my own and someone else could notice that
and I didn't even notice it.
I know that's happened.
But yeah, the antidote for me feels like just like brutal honesty, right?
And there's different ways of doing that at different times, but the key is that I'm not
presenting one thing while thinking another or being another.
And that's, that's great advice.
So if you're a leader who is feeling kind of funky, it might be good just to get real
about it.
Like, you know, no one's perfect.
It's not like you're going to shock people that, oh, you're having a bad day.
Like we all have them.
For me, I, so I have to preface this with that my background is in acting actually.
I'm an actor and, which incidentally is the word hypocrite in Greek.
That's where we get that word from.
So my background, that's nice, right?
My background and training as a young man is in hypocrisy.
I, I, I was a lot of hypocrisy productions when I was in junior high, high school, even
college.
And I, I got to sing and dance and act in front of like in some cases, thousands of
people, which kind of is weird to think about now.
But so that's my background.
And I remember when I became a Christian, someone asked me to, to share my testimony.
And this was in a small church setting and I was, got up and shared it.
And I was very, at the time, very moved by just what Jesus did at the cross and was so
grateful.
And afterward, same kind of thing that you, you know, what, how you describe, man, people
are coming up to you.
Oh, that's so great.
I was really moved by what you shared.
And I was like, Oh, cool, that's good.
And then fast forward a couple of weeks.
It wasn't that long.
We had this big church group meeting, like regions coming together, lots of people.
And I was asked, Oh, we'd like you to share your testimony in front of that group.
Oh, now we're talking about a big group, right?
And I took upon myself to, you know, really act that, like really lean into that performance.
Right?
And I'm going to like really feel this now and, and, you know, have the, the tears well
up and all that, you know, and I remember after I got down from that, I thought, Oh,
no, I really did a good job acting and I almost right away, I was like, I feel gross.
What did I just do?
And you know, I think there was something, my motivation was wrong.
I cared about what others were thinking of me.
I liked the attention and I just, I got, it was, it was like glory for myself instead
of glory for God.
And I think what you were saying, Van is the antidote for me too, that I am not the hero
of the story.
I love how you said that.
I think the examining myself, if you're ever in this kind of position, examine your heart,
look at your motivations, be very, very wary and concerned if you find yourself in the
equation.
Yeah.
Okay.
So embarrassing moments aside now in some ways, social media has democratized the podium.
Everyone has their own soapbox now.
Public prayer wasn't and isn't wrong.
You know, as an example, but what should be our focus when we post something that has
any religious or moral bent?
I, you know, this goes back to me, to the, to the story that I was telling before.
There's a passage in, in John chapter three that I'd like to read a little bit of that
always helps me with this.
So it's in John chapter three and the, John the Baptist has just been told by a group
of his followers that this guy Jesus that you baptized a while ago.
Now people are following him.
People are going out to see him.
He's baptizing more people than you.
And they, they say this to him as a matter of some urgency.
Like this isn't right.
You're the guy.
You're John the Baptist.
You're the one that people are coming out into the wilderness to see.
And now all of a sudden this guy is competing with you.
John says to them in chapter three of the gospel of John in verse 27, he says, a person
can receive only what is given them from heaven.
You yourselves can testify that I said I'm not the Messiah, but I'm sent ahead of him.
The bride belongs to the bridegroom.
The friend who attends to the bridegroom waits and listens for him and is full of joy when
he hears the bridegroom's voice.
That joy is mine and it is now complete.
He must become greater.
I must become less.
And I think whenever I, let me go back and say and be honest, whenever I'm in my right
mind and I'm going to present something in front of a group of people, I'm going to contribute
in some way to a worship service or I'm going to even just share something in a devotional
setting or something.
If I'm in my right mind, I'll think he must become greater, I must become less.
And sometimes that's just almost all the time it's just an attitude in my heart that I have
to make sure that I'm trying to highlight.
Sometimes especially when I have a prepared thing to do, sometimes it's a very practical
thing.
Like I'll have a long, funny story in something that I wrote and I'll think, why am I telling
this funny story?
Because I like to make people laugh.
It makes me feel good about me.
But if that's the only reason this long, funny story is in here, then maybe I shouldn't
tell it.
Maybe I shouldn't do it.
Oh, but it's so funny.
It's so awesome.
It's such a great story and people are going to feel involved and they're going to feel
no and it gets crossed out because he must become greater and I must become less.
I love that.
That's such a great verse to quote.
Yeah, it reminds me.
I think it's very in keeping with what we were saying last episode too about how questioning
your motivation, why am I posting this content?
Is it for likes, am I doing it for my brand or so I get recognition or rather is it pointing
to God?
Yeah.
I mean, so it's funny because this group talks a lot about social media, but I don't
know how much three of us actually use it.
We're on it right now.
Yeah, kind of.
But yeah, I mean, the way I think about this is there's, when I'm posting something or
when I'm seeing someone else post something and I think, wow, that was really cool, the
benefit of having a podium like that is that you can reveal parts of your life to people
in a way that helps them to see something that they wouldn't have seen before.
And you can express, this is something I believe, this is something that's important to me.
This is a critical part of my life or my worldview.
And if that is something that is godly, that can be incredibly productive because it gives
a chance to shine light onto something that is very good.
And so I think that's the opportunity of the internet, of this kind of incredible reach
that we have of doing something or talking about something in tens or hundreds or thousands
or millions of people see it.
And I think the flip side is if I'm not doing that thing in secret, if this isn't actually
very important to me in the way I actually live my life, then it's hollow.
And that hollowness might not be shown immediately, but it will be shown eventually.
And so that's the challenge of being in the spotlight, right?
That there's a much closer scrutiny that gets put on us.
But it's honestly not, I think Jesus says multiple times.
God sees everything, right?
He sees our heart.
He sees every action.
He sees what we whisper in secret.
And so the social media platform is not in some ways unlike that because everything's
right there on you and it might take a little bit longer for things to be exposed, but it
will happen.
So the way I think about this, what should my focus be when I post something, you know,
is this something, am I revealing something that's really a part of my life that is important
that I can just bring into the light?
Or am I putting something on for the public view because I think that will bring me some
advantage.
When I only answer that question, it's pretty easy to know, you know, should I post or should
I not?
Nice.
Jesus says something really cool here.
Jesus says, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.
What do you think he means by this phrase in this context?
Well, you know, it made me think immediately of the passage where he said, if your right
hand causes you to send, cut it off and throw it away.
It's clearly, it's very hyperbolic.
I mean, you can't, you can't not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.
That's not how a human body functions, right?
But I think what he's saying is, I think maybe a couple of things.
I think maybe he's saying that when you, when you do your acts of charity, that you should
really guard your heart about doing it for any other reason, doing it for any kind of
performative reason, that you should really be aware of that.
That you should be so urgent about being aware that you're not doing it for just mere performance
to look good in front of people, that you should not let your left hand know what your
right hand is doing.
And I also think that he might be talking about, it should be something that comes from inside
of you and it's, it's a part of you.
And so that, so that it is reflexive, so that it happens almost automatically.
Like your, like your heart beating.
Yeah.
You know, you're not, you don't say to yourself, I'm going to, I'm going to make my heart
beat because you don't have to.
Yeah.
Does it by itself?
And I think that that might be what he's getting at with that as well.
That's, that's, I like that.
Tim, what do you think?
I mean, you know, he says right after that, so that you're giving maybe in secret.
And so that's the, the simple way of thinking about it.
But you know, then we've got many examples in the New Testament where give, someone gives
not in secret.
And so it's, I don't think it's a universal reward.
Right.
I don't think it's like a universal prohibition about telling someone about, you know, what
you're doing, that the image I see is, you know, the right hand goes and gives something
and then runs over to the left hand, right?
And says, oh, did you, did you see that?
Did you notice that?
What did you do?
And that's, you know, if, if I'm, if I'm giving so that I can run over, I'm in great
danger.
You know, I'll get my reward.
And the left hand will be, oh, wow.
It's incredible.
But yeah, the, so, so yeah, I think it's, I think it's really, it's as simple as that.
You know, it's, it's not so that there's this immediate feedback loop of I'm going to get
my praise right now, you know, the point of me to give, the point of me giving without
making a big deal of it is so that God can be glorified and, you know, who knows, who
knows every time you give, right?
It's the person who receives it knows there was a gift given and God knows.
And that there's quite enough opportunity there for, for glory, for God's glory to happen.
So not, I think that's kind of where he's getting at.
I think there's something about this where, because he's mentioning two parts of a single
body where it's more like, you don't, you don't take yourself so seriously.
Like don't think about it yourself.
I liked what you were saying, Van, about the involuntary kind of the heart's just beating.
You're not thinking beat heart, beat, beat, or breathe like, oh, I forgot to breathe.
You do it and or blink, right?
I think there's, there's something about that with this where it checks the pride that could
be in your own heart that would rob you of glorifying God.
It's like, forget about yourself.
Don't focus on you.
Incidentally, I gotta say, that's the best advice I could give anyone who has to speak
publicly inside or outside of church.
Don't think about yourself.
How people will view you.
Focus on the job you have to do.
It's important to get your message across.
The information you're communicating is important somehow, right?
I think the difference, I guess, between giving a presentation at your company or to a client
versus speaking at church is just in one sense a matter of importance, right?
I mean, there's no one more important than God.
If you can keep your eyes focused on God instead of what you are doing, like it's not, not
what you're doing up there, if you keep pointing to God, right, where you're, if you can keep
your focus on God, I guess is what I'm saying.
He's going to get the glory and, and he can just use you as, as he's designed you.
You're not tripping over yourself.
Yeah.
Well, the world loves controversy and hot takes and drama and Jesus is telling us to
take all of that stuff.
It makes us popular, draws a crown and turn it toward God where no one else can even see
it.
Why should we do that?
And is this just a tact to deflate hypocrisy or something more?
There's a quote from Origin that I find pretty helpful here.
And it basically says, just as water and fire can never exist simultaneously in the same
place, in the same way, egotism and virtue are opposed to each other and can never easily
coexist in the same soul.
And so that you were just talking about, you know, not focused, not thinking about yourself,
thinking about, you know, the job you're trying to do or the purpose behind what you're, you
know, what you're saying or communicating.
And I think that many of the times when we're feeling the pull to do something so that other
people can see us, right, it's just, yeah, just our ego, right?
It's just our pride wanting to get puffed up.
And when that happens, when we're being prideful in that way, it's very hard to have the heart
of compassion and self-sacrifice and love or all other things we might think of as virtue.
Um, in, in our hearts.
So I do think it's, it is deflating hypocrisy, right?
Um, by creating room for, for virtue to grow.
I like that.
Yeah.
I think what it also does is it also fosters an intimacy in your relationship with God.
And there are things that you do that only he and you know.
And um, you know, I think about in, in my relationships with my family, my, my wife and
my son and my daughter, there are things in each of those relationships that are between
us, ways that I try that I give to them that are only meaningful to them.
And that I only, that only happened between us and nobody else really knows about it.
And it makes, it makes those things and they're generally kind of small things.
But when I do them, there's a, there's a look that I get with each of them.
And I say, and for them to know, you know, I got you on this, I love you.
And it's just that little, and it's, it's just, it's gratifying.
It lasts a millisecond and, um, but I live for it in those relationships.
I think of the, the, there's a very, uh, fascinating passage for me, fascinating for
me anyway, in revelation too, where, uh, you know, revelation, he's, he's giving all these
messages to the churches there in the beginning of revelation.
And at the end of them, he, he has a little exhortation or a warning.
And in one of them, he says, um, to the one who is victorious, I will give some of the
hidden manna.
I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it known only to
the one who receives it.
I just, I, I read that and it feels like one of those things.
It feels like I want there to be things between me and God that only he knows.
Yeah.
I want to, I just want to do something for somebody that even that person doesn't even
know that it was done for them because I want, I want God to know that.
I want it to be like that little white stone.
I want it to be that little intimate thing that only he knows.
And in those seconds, there's a closeness to God that I feel that just, it defies description.
That's nice.
You know, in the last example here, the fasting one, Jesus uses a word for disfigure.
Uh, where they disfigure their faces.
It also means disappear.
It's just a wonderful turn of phrase.
Jesus uses.
It's fascinating.
When they fast, they disappear their face to appear holy.
What does living like this do to you?
And what do you think it means for our holiness?
Yeah.
I'm curious, Matt, what your thoughts are on this?
Cause I struggled with this question a bit, but it does feel this kind of like, um, you
know, this sort of contortion, right?
Like disfiguring or disappearing to appear.
It's like you're kind of doing something out of order in the way it's supposed to be.
Um, and I just kept on thinking about Matthew 23 and Jesus's indictment of the hypocrisy
of the Pharisees, um, him calling them whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside
by the insider fold, the bones of the dead and everything unclean.
And there's something in that too of this kind of like contortion or distortion of what
should be.
All right.
It's beautiful in one place, but it's totally disgusting in the other.
Um, and, and I think that that's the kind of the root issue.
Um, when, when we're disfiguring or disappearing in order to, to seem one way to, to those
whose opinion ultimately doesn't matter at all, right?
There's this something that should be beautiful.
That's not.
Um, and so that's, that's kind of what it, it did for me.
I was thinking about this.
Yeah.
I think it, it, it becomes purely performative when you do that.
It's only a performance.
Oddly, I thought of, um, this, this character that John Lovitz used to play on Saturday
night live for some reason, it, he was an actor and he would, he would do these, he
would do these dramatic things and then people would respond to, they would say, Oh no, your
mother died for instance.
And he would say, no, it was acting.
And the joke was he thought he was such a great actor that everything he did was only
a performance and it made all the performances just stupid and contrived.
And he wasn't really, he wasn't really doing what he thought he was doing.
And I think that when we, when we do things like these, like these Jesus is accusing these
religious people of doing, of disfiguring themselves, of trying to look like they're
fasting, you deprive it of all of its relevance of all of the good that it could do for you
or for the people maybe that you're fasting for, you deprive it of everything because
you make it nothing but a performance.
That's all it is.
Yeah.
When you can get to a point where that's all it becomes and then you're the one who's
self-deceived.
You're like that John Lovett's character where you think I'm this great person and
everybody else is thinking, look at this guy.
What's wrong with him?
Right.
Yeah.
I think it's pretty clear from this passage that when we try to disappear ourselves to
appear holy, our real holiness also disappears.
For me, it kind of reminded me of, I don't know if you know the, but I can't even say
it, Potemkin village.
Have you ever heard that term?
I think it originated from Russia.
Catherine was going around and they had these facades that looked really good for this area
she was touring, but there was nothing behind them.
It was just facades and they get people to dress up and as peasants and have fires in
front of them and they're like, oh, it doesn't look good as you walk by.
It kind of reminded me of that kind of thing that there's something that looks good on
the outside, but our holiness has no substance behind it.
It's all for show.
So when we live for the approvals of others, I think something that we mentioned before,
like it's hollow, it feels that way.
It's insecure, you're grasping, it's a lie.
It's not real life.
No one's perfect, but to try to keep up that appearance, which is this lie, I think is
exhausting.
That's the other thing I think.
And if we fall in this trap and we start comparing ourselves to others around us, I think that's
also something that's like that a little bit.
At least I'm not like so-and-so, right?
I say these prayers and I do all these great things.
On the flip side, when we're real with who we are and how much we need God in his mercy,
when we say like the sinner, oh, I'm a sinner, God, we give glory to God.
And also, this is another thing I was thinking, if we're really to call ourselves Christians,
we should live this way all the time because this is how Jesus lived.
He was God in the flesh.
His majesty was hidden, so much so that they crucified him on a cross.
The cross was his glorification, actually, because he was pointing back to God.
And that's where we see God's love in the face of unjust punishment and suffering.
Anyway, that's the high calling we have.
So I guess just to wrap this up, we've got one more question.
Jesus talks about doing things in secret to be seen only by God and that God will reward
you.
What do you think this reward is?
Well, the first thought that I had was, well, it's heaven, right?
We get to be with God for all eternity.
But then I thought also, and maybe primarily, it's the increasing likeness to Christ that
comes from that when we can pull this off and when we can do it for the right reasons
and have the right motivation, what results from that is I'm more like Jesus after that.
And if I can continue to do that, I become more like Jesus and that I become the opposite
of the person who's acting all the time until their acting isn't even good anymore.
What happens is the person who's motivated and properly motivated by the love of God
and by gratitude towards God, you become more and more like God.
I think that that's the reward.
Yeah.
I think it's both and.
But anyone who has spent any part of their life focused on getting other people to think
of them a certain way is familiar with that sense of things caving in.
There's like, I'm always fighting against this insatiable desire that other people have
for me to look a certain way or for my own perception to keep up that appearance.
And when I do things out of motivation to please God and to be more like God, I'm inviting
the spirit to come in and to remove that prison.
And so, you know, everyone who sins is a slave to sin or in 2 Corinthians, the Lord is the
spirit.
When the spirit of the Lord is, there's freedom.
And so I think there is a very real gift and a reward of becoming free from having to keep
up the appearance.
And that's pretty profound for, you know, at least talking as a person who's naturally
a people pleaser naturally feels that pressure to realize that I don't need to forever live
that way.
Yeah.
And so I think that's a great reward to take the burden off your shoulders of I have to
measure up, I have to look good, I have to, you know, compare myself to everyone around
me.
And that is exhausting.
I think what you were saying to Van about God, you know, being with him forever and
eternity, I think that is part of this too.
Like when I look at the flow of Matthew six, I can see like, and then the very next verses,
it starts talking about don't treasure earthly treasure, heavenly treasure.
And you know, reminds me of 1 Peter 1 where he says he describes an inheritance that can
never perish, spoil or fade.
It's kept in heaven.
And so there's something better that's waiting for us.
I don't know exactly what this is.
Paul talks about a crown, an imperishable crown.
You read about it, a crown of glory even and I think 1 Peter as well.
And but I don't know.
Just for me, all of that, who knows what that exactly means, but there's something better,
way better than anything here.
And so that kind of like key, that's our hope, you know, tied in like an anchor in heaven,
but the biggest reward, whatever all that other stuff is that can't perish or, you know,
the biggest one, I think is God.
And this is, I think what we're seeing that the motivation, all of this is relationship
with God.
That's where it comes from.
And it reminds me of Genesis 15 where God turns to Abraham and says, I am your shield,
your very great reward.
I think what we're seeing here in part with what Jesus is preaching here is, is we should
have a focus on God and value him above everything else.
Amen to that.
Well, I think that winds us down here for this session.
This has been fun.
Yes.
Yeah.
That was a great session guys.