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 last time on the pod, we talked about not storing up treasures in heaven and how the
different Jewish worldviews would have heard that and some of the challenges within those
different worldviews and how difficult it is to change our hearts to not store up treasures
on earth but to store up treasures in heaven and how we work for what we value and how
God is calling us to change what we value.
And so we're going to keep talking a little bit about that in this episode.
If we get to the next section in this episode, fantastic.
If we don't, that's all good.
We got time.
But my good friend Van Owens is going to read the passage we're talking about again and
then we'll get into some of the other questions we have.
All right, Matthew chapter six, starting in verse 19, it says, do not store up for yourselves
treasures on earth where moths and vermin destroy and where thieves break in and steal.
But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moths and vermin do not destroy 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.
If the eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light.
But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.
If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness?
No one can serve two masters.
Either you will hate the one and love the other or you will be devoted to the one and
despise the other.
You cannot serve both God and money.
Good stuff.
Thank you, Van.
I think I said we talked about how the different Jewish worldviews would have heard that.
Now we're going to talk about some ways what we do with that.
And I just want to open with the question, how do we store up treasures on earth?
Not how do we as a society, but how do we as individuals store up treasures on earth?
Yeah, a lot of ways actually.
I mean, again, I'm going to take this as treasuring earthly treasures.
And I think rephrasing it that way for me unlocks a whole host of treasures that I
store up.
And basically anything I put before God.
It reminds me of the people in Romans 1, and I want to read scripture from there, Romans
125.
They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served created things rather
than the Creator.
And there are so many created things that fight for my attention over God, the Creator, television,
entertainment, news, social media, what I read, getting security from my work, my home,
my clothing, my possessions, my, my, my, my, my, my bank account, certain relationships.
None of these things are bad in and of themselves.
But when I turn my focus to them instead of or over God, when I try to get my main pleasure
or security from created things or myself, that's when things go south pretty quick.
Yeah.
I think it is the, the, when I thought of this, I thought of what I invest the best parts
of myself in.
And that can be, that can be my job.
That can be my family.
That can be any of my, any of the things that I've possessed.
You know, I started to think of when I was a young man, when I became a Christian, when
I was 19 years old, and this passage was a breeze to me because I had nothing.
And I come from pretty humble background.
So I've always up to that point, I've always had, I'd always had nothing.
And so saying, don't treasure earthly treasure.
I didn't, I didn't know what that was.
I didn't have any of that.
And so it was very easy for me to embrace that.
But as I got older and I started to acquire things, when I found a girlfriend who eventually
became my wife, then it was easy for me to treasure her in a way that wasn't right.
Of course, and we've talked about even in the Sermon of the Mount, how you should, how
your relationship with your wife and how much you should love your wife.
But you cannot treasure her above God.
Or it, it infiltrates that relationship.
And I think that there is something addictive in my character to having anything.
As soon as I have something, I want more of it.
I would say it'd be good if I had a better car, but as soon as I have a better car, there's
a better car than that.
There's a better version of that same car.
As soon as you drive it off the lot.
Right.
As soon as you drive it off, you're like, oh, look at that one.
That one's nice.
And so I think that there is a very subtle way that, that it happens to me.
And it, like you were saying, Matt, a lot of times it's, it's things that intrinsically
are not bad.
And in some cases are very good.
It's good to do well in your career.
It's good to do well in your job, but there's a thin line between doing well and then treasure
it and then basing and then pouring the best of myself into it so that I look better or
feel better or am more comfortable in some way.
And it never satisfies you either, right?
You never get there.
You get insecure.
You're always chasing.
You're always wanting to build a bigger barn.
Yeah.
No matter what realm your barn is coming in.
I think this is so challenging because there's no, there's no set answer.
Like there's not a, when do you know?
Well, you kind of know when you know.
Like when are you putting too much of yourself into your work?
It's hard.
I mean, just to be very upfront, my wife and I made a decision when we got married that
she said, I don't really want you to work overtime even if it's extra money.
We can manage that.
But now I'm going to grad school because the equation has changed of what's going to
work for our family longterm.
And I don't think grad school's wrong.
My company will pay for it.
So it's no financial commitment.
But I have to be very careful that I'm not giving the best of myself to this career development
in pursuit of a little bit more financial cushion.
And which financial cushion is good?
If anybody lives paycheck to paycheck or is in horrendous debt, it's incredibly stressful
and that's not, that's a hard thing.
So it's, I find it very difficult to balance all of those things out and to sort of get
where I should be while also understanding that I need to engage some of this, that I
can't just like that the position I'm in right now at my job is not financially viable long
term.
It's not where I want to be longterm.
So how do I manage all of that?
Yeah.
So I'm the youngest in this group and there's, I'm kind of coming on the cusp a lot of these,
the tension that you guys were talking about.
I mean, it's been in the past few years that I went from making negative money to making
money, which is a pretty big jump.
And we just got a house.
My wife and I, so that's another significant thing.
And I will say, I think that treasuring treasurer's way of translating this like gets at a lot
of the heart of, you know, Jesus is where your treasure is, there your heart will be
at, but the store up, I think there's a lot of, it's important to keep that in mind.
And I'm not a Greek scholar, so I won't comment on that, but I will say that Jesus has a
whole parable about a man who's storing up treasure.
So there's a lot of support for that, that being part of what's in this.
And so, you know, when I'm thinking about this question myself, I'm really thinking
about material possessions.
And I am in this stage right now where I feel like there's two sides of me.
There's one side of me that really just wants to chase like the American dream, right?
And just get all of the status symbols of what it means to be successful.
For me, you know, the house was a big thing there where it's like very tempting to wed,
you know, that with, I've made it.
And then I just moved to a place where it's really easy to have two cars, really trying
to fight hard against that one and learn how to be a one car family, at least for now and
just see.
But yeah, but getting the extra car, getting, you know, all of the, there are some things
we are improvements we make to the house because it makes sense.
There's other ones that feel like they're just cosmetic.
So it's like, there's all these things and everything I can justify on some level.
But when I think about the equation for my family, the, the way principle way that I
can store up treasures on earth is like, when I look at what is my standard of living,
right, because I can make however much money.
If I'm giving away X number of dollars or X percent of that money, I could say, okay,
I'm not storing up treasures, but if my standard of living is really significant, and that's
where we have interpretation, that would be like one of the ways I'd be storing up treasures.
And so that's what I'm wrestling with right actively right now, right?
Because I'm making decisions.
I have made decisions and I am making decisions at the moment to decide what will my standard
of living be, how much flex will there be in my schedule, in my budget to allow for generosity.
And I think that's, that's a, that's a key thing that I'm wrestling with on this particular
issue.
That's really good to bring up.
A lot.
We will talk about generosity a little bit.
We are getting there.
Yeah.
Can I bring something else up though?
I know I'm going on a tangent again, but that's just what I do.
Jim's nodding his head.
The scripture I referenced a little ago in Romans one, it says they exchanged the truth
about God for a lie.
There's a writer, Richard C.H. Lenski, who, 90 years ago, Lutheran, translated, had his
own translation and commentary on the Gospels, and in this section, he talks about that aspect
that there's a lie happening here.
And in chapter six, the beginning part of it is how we would deceive others about how
righteous we are.
Look at all the good stuff that I do.
And then, but here it starts to shift to self deception, the stuff that we would do to deceive
ourselves.
And I think that is something that is happening in here, our propensity for self deception.
And Jesus is warning us not to treasure earthly treasures, which are a lie.
They're not real treasure.
And I think it gets a little bit at the classic short term versus long term.
There's so much in here.
It reminds me of that experiment where you give kids the marshmallow, what is it, the
marshmallow one?
Where you give them, here's a marshmallow.
You eat it and I'll be back in X number of minutes and I'll give you 10 marshmallows.
And you, you know, the kid, a lot of them just eat the marshmallow right in front of
them.
They can't wait.
I don't know when they're coming back.
Who knows?
Which is really the best case scenario for the parents to not have their kids eat 10 marshmallows.
They don't mention that in the experiment.
No, they don't.
But it begs the question, I think for us, how do we visualize what is essentially unseen
but better by far?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's, it's hard.
And I hope you weren't listening to the pod to have all the tension resolved because we
can't resolve all the tension.
We are all living in the tension.
Right.
Exactly.
And I'm sure at some level you are.
And I think one of the things I want to just bring up before we move on to the next question
is it's okay to live in tension on this.
We don't have to have all the answers right now.
Because there's an idea in Christianity specifically in the United States that we have to have
a concrete answer to everything.
And our faith tradition really doesn't come from concrete answers.
It comes from wrestling with questions.
And so I want, if you're listening to this and going, gee, I really look like I'm storing
up a lot of treasure on earth.
Well, that's a thing to wrestle with and getting community in to think about.
The next thing I want to ask on this topic, and we might finish this question, we'll see,
is just to reiterate, how much time do we spend maintaining our stuff, the things we
own?
We all have insurance.
We all have, we all spend, we're all homeowners here.
So we all spend some degree of time maintaining our property.
I own a rental property, so I have to spend some amount of time and effort maintaining
that.
It's a thing we all have to do.
And how much of our time do we spend in maintaining that?
And how is Jesus inviting us to look differently at that here?
Well, I think what you shared, Tim, is really helpful for me on this because you started
by saying, hey, I'm young, I'm just on the cusp of starting to wrestle with these things.
And I think the key is that you have to continue to wrestle with these things.
And what you were saying as well, Jim, is that this is a wrestling match that is continuing
and that it's not going to stop.
And when it stops, that's when you start to get in trouble.
When you start, when someone says, Van, are you greedy?
And I instantly say, no, that's a little problematic because that means I've stopped
wrestling somehow or I'm just plain flat out lying, but usually it just means I've stopped
wrestling somehow.
The proper answer for that to me is to take a step back and say, well, let me think about
it for a second.
How am I doing in that wrestling match?
How much time am I spending?
How much money am I spending on things that I can't quote unquote take with me?
And how much am I giving to others?
How much am I using my money to prolong my soul or to prolong somebody else's soul?
And because you can get caught, you can get trapped.
As soon as you stop thinking about it, you can start investing too much time, too much
money, too much of yourself into things that ultimately won't matter.
That's true.
The thing I was thinking about, yeah, I was just cleaning my house actually not too long
ago, the power washer and how did Moss grow on this?
This is ridiculous.
Why am I spraying this off and a bunch of other gross stuff and then spraying off some
of the paint?
Ah, Cred, now I'm going to have to go back and get that.
Anyway, the first thing I thought of though with these examples that Jesus gives is just
how much he paints a picture of how temporary all the treasures that we could want here
are.
I think we all live in New England here, so I think all of us can relate to our cars
rusting because of all the salt that's on the road and how annoying that is.
And then I came from the West Coast where they didn't salt where I was living and I
came out here and I own a car and I'm like, why did that fall off the bottom?
That's not supposed to happen.
And I look under there, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is disgusting.
And then I'm like wanting to go to the car wash every time there's a storm now, but it
doesn't matter.
It's going to rust still.
And the other thing I thought, so my mom retired and she downsized, she bought a condo in Portland,
Oregon.
And she, so like about a year after she moved in there, this is the one that I didn't relate
to until she told me this story.
She found moths.
And by the time she found it, it was like too late, they had already destroyed a ton
of stuff.
It was really, really discouraging.
And then after that, she went crazy trying to get rid of the moths, which was hard because
she's in this, who knows where they came in.
Like they could have come from outside or another tenant below her and then they went
up a ventilation shaft.
Who knows?
She was like trying to find them.
She paid to like bomb everything in the building and not bomb, I shouldn't say that, fumigate,
whatever the right term is there.
And even after doing all of that, I think they came back one more time and it was like,
how the heck did they get in there?
And then I think they're gone now, finally.
But she lives with the constant like, are they going to come back?
I had to replace all this stuff that I didn't want to have to replace.
And I think that's just the contrast though between that kind of earthly treasure and
what we have.
Peter describes this heavenly treasure as an inheritance that can never perish, spoil
or fade.
This inheritance is kept for us in heaven.
That's the most secure treasure we could ever have.
And yeah, so the question that you asked, Jim, I think was how much time and effort
do we spend maintaining our stuff?
That's what we're all about.
I'm just going back to that on my brain and I guess keeping my part short.
I've been thinking a lot about simplicity.
That's not a dig at you, Matt.
It's okay if it was.
We're going to say it was.
I was turning to Jim because we were both laughing.
It feels right.
Dig away.
That was a good one.
But the more you get four of us, that's a real doozy.
Yeah, but I've been thinking about simplicity for this reason, like the idea that everything
I own has some cost of my energy.
And so when I downsize my material possessions, I free myself up.
And there is this, you know, there's a scripture in Timothy six that says, those who want to
get rich fall into temptation and a trap and many foolish and harmful desires that plunge
people into ruin destruction.
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.
Some people eager for money have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with
many griefs.
And I just, I see the like the weight of the love of money with that and that it's dragging
it's dragging us down.
And a lot of that is just like these, the more we have, the more we're desiring, the
more it's, it's exerting, you know, this pull on our mind and our hearts.
But it doesn't align with like reality because, and this is like, we're going to die and it's
all going to go away.
Like we can't, we, right before that, it says, we've in first Timothy six, we brought nothing
into the world and we can take nothing out of it.
Right.
And so that's where Matt, you were talking about the fact that we're self-deceived when
we fall into this because we think we can hold on to these things.
We convince ourselves we can hold on to these things.
We spend a lot of energy doing that.
But the only thing we can hold on to is like our godliness, like our walk with God.
So that's what came to mind for me on that.
Tim, I really appreciate what you said there and that the idea that we can't hold on to
it and everything has a cost to it.
Like everything we own, everything we buy.
And I think that's one of the things I want to just mention in passing as we close this
part of the pod.
Everything we own, all our modern conveniences that we like, it all comes at a cost and it
all comes at a cost that we don't necessarily see.
And our abundance and we all own homes and live in New England and even the simple, those
of us that live the simplest still have abundance and we're lying to ourselves if we don't think
that's the case.
And our abundance does come at a cost.
It comes at a cost to our sanity, but it also sometimes comes at a real cost to people.
And as we're wrestling with how we view this, I don't want us to lose sight of the cost
of our abundance.
If we're, whether it's the materials that in our cell phone that somebody has to go
into a mind that's not even remotely safe in a country that has no regulations to just
get the stuff to get this thing we throw away every two years.
I mean, we don't think about that because it's, we're so far a weight removed from it,
but somebody's legitimately risking their lives for our cell phone that we are almost
forced into having.
And so I want us to, and I want you to wrestle with that.
But again, I don't have an answer for that.
Do you not have a cell phone?
I'm not saying that.
I'm just saying we should wrestle with the question.
And so I really appreciate what you said about that and about how our cost is.
And I will throw one counterpoint to that is I grew up as a grandchild of somebody who
was a farmer in the depression.
The idea of throwing something away to them was unconscionable because my grandpa might
have needed it at some point.
And it wasn't a guarantee that I could just buy it.
Now we can deceive ourselves into thinking today that, oh, well, I might need this someday.
And for most of us, it would be, no, you don't actually have the skills to make that into
something useful.
So it's better to give it away.
But I think there is a good idea in that that even though I might be done with it, it still
has value in somewhere and it's still useful and it's not just disposable.
So that's all things that I'm going to let you guys wrestle with.
We tackled some really good stuff in how we store up treasures on earth, the amount of
time that we spend, the amount of mental energy we spend.
And we didn't come up with a great answer and I think that's good because now you get
to go and wrestle with how do you do this?
How do you engage with the things on earth that you have and how you view them and how
you spend, how much time you spend maintaining them?
I think you have a lot of great things to wrestle with.
And then next pod, we're actually going to start talking about the eye being the lamp
of the body, which is a passage that took me a long time to ever really understand.
And I still don't think I really understand it, but it took me a long time to start understanding
it.
Thank you guys for listening.
See you all soon.