How Dark The Dark? How Light The Light? - Matthew 6:22-23 - March 18, 2012
Series: Kingdom Life – A World Turned Upside Down #22
How many of you have seen the movie, “Forrest Gump.” If you have, you’ll remember that the main character is played by actor Tom Hanks and there’s one line he speaks in that movie that has become very well known, and it’s that line that I want your help with this morning. This is what I’m going to do: I going to begin that quote and what I want you to do, is to shout out the answer and finish that quote off for me. So here we go … “Life is a like a box of __________________?” “Chocolates,” that’s right. Tom’s character says to people, “My momma always told me that life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.” It’s a great quote – life is full of surprises and you never know what’s around the next corner.
This morning though I want you to think of your life, not as a box of chocolates, but as an ice cube tray. Now, I know that’s not as exciting as a box of chocolates, not nearly as sexy, but trust me it will make for a far more useful illustration for us today. So picture your life as an ice cube tray just like the one I’ve got here. [Hold up tray for all to see.] This tray is divided into a number of compartments, isn’t it? That’s how many of us tend to live our lives - compartmentalized. In the first one we might have our finances. Anything to do with money goes into this section. Next to it we might have one labelled, ‘entertainment,’ and another labelled, ‘work,’ – others are going to be called things like, ‘friends,’ ‘marriage,’ ‘family,’ ‘recreation,’ ‘health,’ and so on. There will be others there too – ones that we might decide to call ‘faith,’ or ‘religion,’ or even our ‘God box.’ That’s where we group and put all the things that have to do with our spirituality. And we could go on and fill up all these different compartments but for now I think you get the idea.
Now picture this same tray filled with ice cubes. When those compartments are filled with ice there’s no movement from one compartment to the next. That is also how many of us live our lives. We tend to keep things separate one from another. On one side of the tray we have those boxes made up of the material, the physical things of life. On the other are those that make up the spiritual side of our lives and there’s little to no mixing between the material and the spiritual. That’s a division that many people are comfortable with. Life is neater that way. It’s easier. That way you don’t need to bring your financial stewardship into the church and you don’t need to let your faith inform your entertainment. Sunday is for church and God, and Monday through Saturday is for everything else. Life is convenient when we live it that way. But that is never how God intended our lives to be.
Take another look at this ice cube tray. Between each compartment there is a little notch, a ‘v’ if you will. The tray has been designed that way so when one compartment is full, the water flows into the next one, and so on down the line. That way, whatever you’re pouring into the first section, will eventually make it’s way throughout all the others. Jesus is all about there being unity or wholeness in our lives. Integrity if you will. Our faith, our relationship with Him, is never meant to be one category among many. It’s meant to be the category by which all the others are filled to fullness. Matthew 6:33 says, “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matthew 6:33, NIV)
Jesus is meant to be the first compartment in your ice cube tray. That’s the one that is meant to be filled first, and continuously, so that it overflows into all those other aspects of our lives. They all flow from that first reality – who we are in Jesus Christ. Too often we put that God box at the end of the tray. When there’s some life left over, we give it to God. Jesus says, “put God first.” Make Him the main box and let everything else flow from there. So if you’re a farmer, you’re not a farmer who just happens to be a Christian. If that’s how you’re thinking then you’ve got it all backwards! The truth is this: You are a Christian who just happens to be a farmer. You are first and foremost a child of God, chosen, called, forgiven, redeemed, saved, a new creation, an ambassador of Christ, who happens to have a mission field in the farming community. It’s a different way of looking at life and of living the moments of each day. If you get the boxes in the wrong order, your faith becomes something that you add to life when it’s convenient, when you have the time, when you have something left over. If you get them in the right order, your faith will give shape to every other aspect of your life, providing new meaning, purpose and focus in each of those areas so that there is a wholeness, a unity, an integrity in your life, that is pleasing to God.
Many of us struggle to do that though because we don’t intentionally think along those lines. But we need to. The apostle Paul writes these words, “But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him …. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. All of us, then, who are mature should take such a view of things.” (Philippians 3:7–15, NIV)
What’s he saying? Well, there was a time when Paul was living his life backwards. The wrong boxes were important to him. But when he put the ‘Jesus box’ in the right position, it totally transformed his life and gave him a new perspective. The rich young ruler, whose story we read about in the Gospels, illustrates the danger of having those boxes, those priorities, in the wrong order. You know his story, don’t you? He comes to Jesus and he wants to know what he needs to do to receive eternal life but He doesn’t like the answer Jesus gives. Turns out that God doesn’t want just one box in this man’s life – He wants all of them. Here is a rich man and it turns out his money is more important to him than his soul. He probably wouldn’t have thought of it in those terms but when push came to shove, money won out hands down. He cherished money more than God (it became an idol to him) and so he went away rich in the things of this world – as so many do - but poor in the things of God.
Take a moment and look at the sermon notes insert in your bulletin this week. Under number __________ there is a blank spot that I want you to take just a few moments to jot down some answers in. What you’re going to put in that spot is a list of all the different compartments that your life is made up of. So you’ll have things like ‘work,’ and ‘family,’ and ‘recreation,’ and so on. We don’t have a lot of time so we have to do this quickly but it’s important that we do this. So go ahead and start filling that out. You might have some labels called, ‘sports,’ ‘or hunting,’ or ‘television,’ or ‘children,’ or ‘relationships.’ These are things that are important to you and take up significant portions of your life – time, money, energy - either in the pursuing of them or the participating in them. And if you don’t have a pen to write with then start considering what some of your boxes could be named. … Folks, what you’ve just done, is to create a list of potential idols in your life. Things that you, like the rich young ruler, may be tempted to place ahead of God.
Now please understand, there is nothing wrong with any of those things I’ve mentioned this morning if they’re an avenue where you are living out your faith. But if they are having the opposite effect on you, instead of being places where you are growing in, and living out, your faith, and if they are instead tearing you down, and pulling you further from God and the life He’s calling you to live, then there is an idol in your life that you need to take care of. You need to get rid of it or get it put back in it’s proper place in relation to God. Everything you are, everything you have, and everything you ever hope to be – it all belongs to God. That’s what Jesus began to give us a picture of last week in the verses we looked at in the Sermon on the Mount. Let’s take a look at that passage again this morning. Matthew 6, beginning in verse 19:
“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.” (Matthew 6:19–21, NIV)
Some of you may be familiar with the name of Eric Liddell. Eric was born January 16, 1902, the second son of a missionary couple who served in China. As he grew older, Liddell became an outstanding athlete and won many awards. He is perhaps best remembered today for his refusal to run in a number of events during the 1924 Paris Olympics, including his best event, the 100 metre race. His refusal arose from his conviction that it would not honor God to run on a Sunday. How easy it would have been for Eric to convince himself that it wouldn’t be that big a deal – after all, the Olympics only come around once every four years – and surely God would understand. It would have been easy for him to run for the glory, to reach for the physical prize, up there on the Olympic podium. But he had his boxes in order; his priorities straight. He wasn’t an athlete who happened to be a Christian, he was a Christian who happened to be an athlete! It made all the difference in his perspective, his priorities, and his practice. He sought to honor God and testify to God’s greatness and so he humbled himself, let go of his Olympic dream, but stored up for himself treasures in heaven. And incidentally God ended up honoring Eric before the same people Eric honored Him before. Later on in the Olympics Eric ended up competing in the 400 metre race. It was not his best event and even his best time in that event was only so-so at the international levels he was now competing in. But, to everyone’s surprise, perhaps even his own, Eric Liddell ended up winning the gold medal in the 400 metres and setting new Olympic and World Records in the process! And he didn’t have to compromise his faith while doing it.
But whether he won it, or not, his heart was that his life would be for God. He went on to missionary work in China and many years after those Paris Olympics were over, he was asked if he ever regretted his decision to leave behind all the glory of his running. His answer was this: “It’s natural for a chap to think over all that sometimes, but I’m glad I’m at the work I’m engaged in now. A fellow’s life counts for far more at this than the other.” (www.en.wikipedia.org)
That’s the heart of what Jesus is getting at when He tells us to lay up our treasures in heaven rather than here on earth. Because that type of life is going to count for more than any other we could possibly choose to live.
Materialism, on the other hand, enslaves the heart. And that’s Jesus’ warning to us in that passage: Don’t put your things ahead of God. When you do, you make an idol out of something that will lead you further from God at every turn. Missionary martyr Jim Elliot once said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” That’s a man who had those boxes in the right order. That’s the perspective of a man storing up treasures in heaven that are going to last rather than here on the earth where they are all going to crumble away one day.
Now, if we keep reading, we come to verses 22 and 23 where Jesus says this: “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!” (Matthew 6:22–23, NIV) And those verses are troubling because they are difficult to understand and they don’t seem to fit with what Jesus has been talking about. Verse 24 reads like this: “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.” (Matthew 6:24, NIV) We understand that verse and there would be no problem if Jesus had gone straight into that verse after He had finished talking about storing up our treasures in heaven. The whole passage would make sense. But instead we’ve got verses 22 and 23 in the middle and we need to try to understand what they’re all about.
There are a couple of words in verse 22 that translators have had difficulties with and that’s where we run into a problem. The translation I’m using uses the words “healthy” and “unhealthy.” The King James uses the words “single” and “evil” in their place, the NIV, “good” and “bad,” and the NASB “clear” and “bad.” The old King James is perhaps the most literal translation. The word really does mean “single” and so the verse reads something like this: “If your eye be single then your whole body will be full of light.” What does it mean for an eye to be ‘single’? Until we can understand that, these verses don’t make any sense. That’s why I appreciate some of these other translations - they help us make sense of what is being said.
An unhealthy eye is one that cannot see clearly. Elymas the sorcerer, in the passage we heard earlier, had blindness, or darkness, descend upon him because of his unbelief. Because of the darkness he could no longer see the physical world around him. There was a sense in which his eye was unhealthy. The eyes could not see that which they were meant to see – they were no longer acting as the lamp of the body. They could not do that which they were meant to do and because of that his whole world was cast into darkness.
In Matthew 6, Jesus is saying, that type of darkness – when the eye cannot see what the eye is meant to see – that is bad enough, but how much worse if it is the light that is within you – your heart, your will, your mind – if that light is really full of darkness – how much worse is that?! If the darkness is not just physical, but spiritual in nature, how much worse off could we possibly be? The darkness that is in us apart from Christ is complete. There is no light. In the book of Ephesians we read these words, “So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.” (Ephesians 4:17–19, NIV) This is the heart of darkness that is in us apart from Christ, and that darkness is complete, not even longing for the light of Christ, unless the Holy Spirit be doing a work within us to draw our hearts towards God Himself.
And that darkness plays itself out in the way we live our lives and the things we value and give priority to. Materialism is the quest to find meaning, purpose, identity and contentment in the things of this world and it is a product of that darkness, and it not only enslaves the heart, as we saw last week, but it enslaves the mind as well. What Jesus is trying to tell us is this: A person’s whole life will be determined by the kind of light that the eye lets in. The word the old KJV uses to describe the eye as being ‘single’ is used to describe something as being undivided and whole. It denotes a singleness of purpose.
So for those of you who are married you would not want to accept as your spouse, someone whose heart was divided between you and another. You would not want to be with someone who longed always to be with someone else. You would not accept one with a heart divided in that way whose mind always led them to be thinking of another person. In a similar way Jesus is saying that we need to have that same singleness of focus if we’re going to be following after Him. Scripture calls the church the Bride of Christ and if our hearts are divided between Jesus and something else, then we are committing spiritual adultery and descending into darkness.
In the context of the larger passage these verses then begin to make sense. We are to store up our treasures in heaven, rather than here on earth, because a heart, a mind, divided between heaven and the material blessings of earth, is walking in darkness. The one who walks in that way is not desiring the things of God. They are divided and there is no integrity between what they claim to believe and how it is that they live their lives on a day to day basis. We’re told that Elymas opposed the works of God and perverted “the right ways of the Lord.” (Acts 13:4-12) That’s what we do as well when we live a life divided between the things of God and the things of this world – we pervert the right ways of the Lord. No one can serve two masters – and we’ll hear more about that next week when we look at verse 24. When Elymas did this we’re told that darkness came over him and for a time he would not even be able to see the light of the sun (s-u-n).
But when we, as Christians try to live divided between this world and God’s kingdom, we lose sight of the Son (s-o-n). We lose sight of God’s power, blessing, wonder and majesty. God begins to feel distant from us. Our prayers seem to go unheard. The power of God does not seem to be evident in our lives. We lose our hunger for the things of God and begin to run after the things of this world more and more. Sin gets a hold of us and we descend further into the darkness.
The single eye, the healthy eye, becomes a metaphor of a life that is totally devoted to God – a life that hungers after God’s Kingdom, God’s Will, God’s righteousness, just as how we saw Jesus taught us to pray in the Lord’s Prayer we looked at a few weeks ago. And Paul’s words to the Ephesians are good words for us to end with this morning. Let them serve as a reminder of the undivided life we are called to in Jesus Christ for he writes …
“For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. This is why it is said: “Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Ephesians 5:8–20, NIV)
Brothers and sisters, let us get the ice cube trays of our lives in order! Let your light shine! Let your eye be single – wholly devoted to God – that everything in this world fades into insignificance compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord. For when we do that the things of this world with which we so fill our lives, will lose their hold on our hearts and minds, and we will live undivided before the Lord – everything we have, and are, and ever hope to be, given over completely to Him. Then we will one day rejoice to hear those words, “Well done my good and faithful servant! Come and enter into the rest that has been prepared for you.” May our lives be filled with the light!
Let’s pray …
