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.
Welcome back.
So we've been diving into treasures in heaven.
And this last time we spent time thinking about generosity and the ways in which we can
be generous.
We opened up ways we can be generous with our finances, with our time, with our judgments,
and realized that there's many other ways.
And encouraged us to think about that deeply as we're moving forward in our lives of what
are the ways that we can have generosity in all of our actions and hearts.
We started talking about light and darkness and thinking about the distinction that Jesus
makes between light and darkness.
And I think we got in the middle of that, but there's much more to say.
And so, Matt, do you mind reading the scripture and then we can jump back into that?
All right, Matthew 6, 19 through 24.
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 your 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.
Appreciate it, Matt.
Last time we were talking about the contrast of light and darkness and how would the people
hearing this originally, what would be going through their heads when they heard the, if
your eyes are unhealthy, your body will be full of darkness, or conversely, if your eyes
are healthy, your body will be full of light.
How that would have landed on them, and then we're going to get into how that would land
with us in a little bit.
Well it's hard not to go back to the very beginning, right?
And you know, you've got that moment before when the Spirit of God is still hovering over
things and the work of creation hasn't really gotten underway yet.
And at verse two in Genesis where it says that their earth was without form and void
and darkness was over the face of the deep.
And the very first thing that God did was said, let there be light to dispel the darkness.
And I'm not a Hebrew scholar.
I'm not an expert in any way.
But I've read other translations that the words that are translated in many of the translations
that we have today that say the world was without form and void.
Those words are not very emotional to me, but when you look up the original meaning,
it's not like nothingness.
It's like, I've heard a translation that it says the world was welter and waste.
It's sort of a turbulent kind of roiling nothingness.
Like something that's really disturbing, something that is, and it says, and God is
hovering over the face of that.
And it makes me wonder if the Jews didn't think of darkness as the state of things when
God is absent.
And that's something that helps me in my own spiritual life is when I feel that way, when
there is a there is in my gut sometimes this feeling of welter and waste, this feeling
of things are just not, things are just not right.
They're not right within me.
Well, that might be because I'm not that he's absent from me, but that I'm absent from
God.
God is absent.
And so I think of darkness as the state of things without God.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's kind of what I was thinking in a lot of cases in the Old Testament, light is a
bit of a stand-in for the presence of God and darkness can be a stand-in for the absence
of God.
And if we look at when the Israelites were escaping Egypt, through them into darkness
to keep them, to keep the Israelites safe, he was a pillar of light at one point.
It seems the feel through the Old Testament is that light equals presence of God and darkness
equals absence of God.
And when we talk about the good eyes and the generosity, if our eyes are healthy or good,
our whole body will be full of light.
I mean, what is that actually saying now?
I'm trying to find the scripture.
But when Jesus is talking to the Pharisees, he, I think it's in the one time in Luke,
and he's like ripping into them.
He says like, he's telling them to give alms, to give to the poor.
He says, everything else will be clean for you, and I'll try to find it.
But there's that.
Jesus is making this explicit connection between the generosity that they exhibit and the generosity
and what's going on in their hearts, right?
And how close they actually are to God, because they appear to be close to God, but he's calling
them hypocrites and they're just actors.
So I think that that's a key thing that he's bringing out here too, that there's, when
we are generous, we're actually making space for God to be present in our lives.
I feel challenged by this personally, because Jesus makes very few either or statements,
and he rarely seems to definitively declare something as one or the other.
But it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of in between here when I read the text.
And in a Jewish world, they had a lot of in-betweens.
They had a lot of nuance.
They didn't view things quite as black and white as we do, or as we tend to.
But he says, if your eyes are good, if you are generous, your whole body will have the
presence of God.
And if you are not, your whole body will not have the presence of God.
It will be the absence, the conspicuous absence of God.
So with that in mind, what are the consequences when we don't see the world generously?
How do we act?
How do we treat people?
If we don't see the world generously, I think the big thing here we risk as a community
is not really reflecting God's glory into the world.
We'd fail to be a light to the nations.
If we're stingy, if we recoil from suffering to protect ourselves, if we hold onto this
myth of the self-made man or woman, not realizing that everything we have is a gift, we're just
not going to display our Heavenly Father, who is the most generous being.
We can't sing praise God from whom all blessings flow and then turn around and stiff arm that
person with a need walking up to us.
Yeah.
I think that it says in John chapter one that in Jesus the word became flesh.
And I read an interesting quote, I believe from N.T.
Wright where he said that the word still needs to become flesh and that flesh is the church.
And what I think is a consequence of not seeing the world generously is that you can't have
a church.
If your perspective is dark, then you can't be generous enough to be able to live in harmonious
community with anybody.
We all know from being members of the church that the church is far less than perfect,
that there's a lot of difficulty, there's a lot of challenge, there's whenever you bring,
Jesus said whenever two or three people come together in my name, there I am also, but
also whenever two or three people come together, there's also the potential for conflict and
mistrust and deceit and all the things that come with our human flesh.
And so if we can't see each other generously, the consequence then is darkness.
And if it's all dark, then you can't have church and then the whole thing falls apart.
If our desire is not to think of the world and to live in the world and to project generosity
into the world.
So I really love both of your responses because you talked about community.
And one of the points I had slightly after that was that a good Jew doesn't view anything
through individualistic eyes.
Jews were not individualistic people, again, painting with a broad brush, but it generally
fits.
They always thought about it in community.
And as Van was talking, I thought about how I would view my judgments of people before
I became a Christian, I viewed people very suspiciously.
You hear a lot of people say, everyone's out to get you.
Everyone's against me.
It's me against the, or it's us against the world or it's me against the world.
And that sort of thinking produces a lack of generosity.
It's hard to view someone, it's hard to judge someone generously when I think every single
person who's walking on the street is out to get me.
You're sort of forced into this corner of thinking that everyone's against you and it
doesn't go super well.
And it's hard to be in community working this out when you're doing that.
And I would also highlight what you guys said about being generous within the community.
Sometimes we can be generous with those outside the community while we are as un-generous
as possible with those inside the community.
How that looks for you, I'm going to let you wrestle with that.
That's a phrase I've used a lot here.
Now, we'll keep using it.
How would we change if we started viewing people generously?
And how would our church change if we started being more generous?
Do you want to take this?
Well, yeah, I think I could kind of link this with the question that just happened before.
We talk a lot in our circle of churches about acts in the picture of the early church.
And one of the incredible pictures there is that there were no needy persons among them,
because people were selling possessions to make sure that they would meet the needs.
There were still problems.
We saw there was issues with the distribution of that generosity.
But there was a lot of generosity that was there, that there was a strong foundation,
which you could work out those additional problems.
You had stuff to give away, and now you have to figure out how to give it away.
But one of the things I was thinking about when we were talking about the generous eye,
I was trying to see, okay, where is that used in the Old Testament?
And one of the places is when it's talking about jubilee and forgiving the debts.
So every seven years, you would forgive a debt that any other Jew had towards you.
And there's an obvious thing that you would do that you would be tempted to do, which
is to not leotain someone something like a year before jubilee.
And that's explicitly talked about in Jeremiah 15, and it says, don't have an evil eye, don't
do that.
And the point is that you actually might suffer a loss on this transaction, which is why you'd
be tempted to not do it.
And yet God is calling His people to still extend the loan, extend the gift to the poor
person in order, and He promises a blessing.
And that is really profound because it forces me to trust in God.
And so if I start viewing other people with a generous mindset, I might be tempted to
not want to do that because it comes at a risk that I could lose something from this.
But what it also will do is that I'll lose the part of myself that is tied to material
things, tied to my wealth, and I will gain the part of myself that is richly trusting
that God is going to provide for me, even if in this particular transaction, this particular
encounter, maybe I lose something of this world.
Yeah, that is beautiful.
I think when I heard this question and really the previous one, it reminded me of James
II.
And I'd love to quote the whole thing for sake of time.
I won't do that, but it's pretty on the mark.
I mean, the whole thrust of it is about not showing favoritism and honoring the poor whom
God has chosen to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom He has promised to those
who love Him.
He then asked them, aren't the rich the ones who are exploiting you?
And we're called to actually keep the scripture, love your neighbors yourself.
So if we show favoritism and judge others, we're missing the whole point of the mercy
we've been shown.
And James warns, speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives
freedom because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who's not been merciful.
Then he goes in the classic argument about faith and deeds.
And he uses two examples that are later used in Matthew 6 about someone without clothing
or daily food and he don't do anything to help them.
Coincidence?
I don't think so.
But anyway, this is the type of church I saw when I first came to church, by the way.
I saw people from all different walks of life, socioeconomic, age, race, rich, poor, everything,
old, young.
They knew each other.
They loved each other.
And they quoted the scripture regularly.
I saw that as like, I got to be part of this.
I think that's what family is supposed to be like.
Yeah.
No, I think I really appreciate you saying that because it does bring it back to, we
tend to, and I think you hit on it, even if you didn't say it explicitly, that we tend
to be generous to those that are close to us.
And those that are similar to us, we tend to be generous with.
With Matt and Van, and to a slightly lesser extent, Tim, I've known these guys a long
time.
So I tend to be very charitable in my view of them.
I always presume the best.
I always presume good intentions.
I always presume that.
But with other people, I tend to be very like, a little bit cynical.
Everyone is giving me that, not you.
You're never cynical.
Look.
But I really appreciate what you guys are saying because if we were this generous, if
we were a church that was, that defaulted to being generous, I think we would trust
people a lot more.
That's a good point.
I think we would give people space.
You know, and I think every church struggles with this.
It's not unique to us, but I think we would be more comfortable giving people space to
wrestle through some difficult things.
It can be scary to give people space.
As a parent, it can be scary.
Matt and Vance kids are much older than mine.
It can be very scary to give people space because we act out a fear of what happens
when we give them space, which leads into my next question.
What keeps us both individually and as a collective from being generous?
Well, I, you know, two words came to mind here and in some ways they're the same thing.
To me, it's fear and hatred.
And I think hatred sort of is an outgrowth of fear.
And there's always the thought of what if I was, I was reading a quote by some rich
celebrity.
I don't even remember who it was, somebody that I didn't think that highly of.
But one of the things that he said, he's somebody who started off as poor and became fabulously
wealthy.
And he was talking about how much easier his life was when he was poor.
And the one thing that he said is that I live in constant fear of losing it all.
It's in a, it's an, and he said, it's an irrational fear.
It's very unlikely that I'll ever lose all of what I have, but I live in almost constant
fear of that.
And it makes me, and it makes me standoffish.
It makes me not want to get involved with people.
It makes me, and I think that's what we risk by not being generous.
I think just as you were saying, Jim, if you look at the world generously, what you receive,
what you see is you, you kind of, and I think it was Matt who said, you know, you kind of
become what you behold.
If you, if you look at the world generously, then what you feel is generosity.
You feel it coming from the people around you, but you certainly feel it coming from
God.
You feel it all the time.
And if you, if you cut yourself off from that, what begins to in, hinge itself on you is
fear.
What if I lose it?
What if I trust this person and he's not trustworthy?
What if I put myself out there to be this person's friend and she betrays me?
What if, what if, and you start to live in this realm of what ifs and you become paralyzed
and you can't do anything.
And when you're paralyzed and you can't do anything, fear fills you.
And what's fear filled you?
Hatred can't be far behind it.
Right.
Yeah.
It far focuses not Jesus who's the solid rock, everything else is shifting sand.
That's where the, I think the next section comes in with anxiety too.
I think this is, this, when I'm not generous, it's usually, I've taken my eyes off Jesus
and I've focused on stuff in the world and I'm getting my security from there, which
is not a good idea.
And when I was thinking about this with light and darkness, it reminded me of, of something
which is, I can't believe this is now 40 years ago, but I saw, I remember seeing Return
of the Jedi in the theater when I was living in California.
And anytime you go, you're like in a theater and you go from the dark into the light, you're
like, oh, that's, that's really light.
And that's drawing.
And no, I like the, I like the dark.
Don't, don't show me the light.
No.
And, you know, maybe relating to the movie Han coming out of the carbonite, he's like
all stumbling around, needs, you know, needs help to shoot Bob.
Anyway, I'm really getting on tangent here, but the point of all this, I think if we are
focused on the light in the world, like we said before, there's nothing wrong about the
stuff that's in the world, in and of itself, there's nothing inherently wrong.
But if we make it our focus, it's like the light of the moon or something.
It's, it's creation is just, it's reflecting God's glory.
The heavens declare his praises, but it's not the source of real light.
Yeah.
Then I, I love Tim before I do the wrap up, Tim, do you have any, any thoughts?
Go for it.
All right.
So I love what Van said about fear.
And I am not generous when I'm afraid of what the consequence of my generosity will be.
Whether that's financial generosity, I'm afraid I won't have enough money for a need or a
need, whether that's someone just simply taking advantage of my kindness, whether that's I
develop a blind spot to something bad because I'm generous and I can play the mental gymnastics
game.
Well, what if I'm generous with the wrong person in my judgment and I harm someone and
somebody gets harmed and we've discussed a little bit how mental gymnastics usually
doesn't, doesn't end too well.
It usually ends with us pulling something.
It's not good.
But as we, as we close out this pod, I just want to ask you what keeps you from being generous
and what keeps us as a collective from being generous and how, and I, and I want you to
think and pray and reflect on how our lives, both individually and together would be different
if we, if our default position was generosity instead of fear and cynicism.
Really appreciate you guys listening to the pod.
It's been a lot of fun talking about this.
We have a few more questions we're going to get through, so I'm not promising how many
more we have on this based on, based on how it's gone so far.
But thank you guys.
We'll talk to you all soon.