The Lost Obsession Series

B. Appraised as valuable

When you want to sell you home you call for an appraiser to come and tell you what it’s worth. We don’t know how much it’s worth until we go through the appraisal process.

Similarly we do no fully appreciate the kingdom until we have appraised it--discovered it worth for our selves. Until we do so we can live indifferent to the value it represents in our lives. If the kingdom lacks value, it could be easy to feel pursuing it isn’t worth our time or effort.

Appl: Have bored because you have forgotten or perhaps never discovered how valuable the kingdom is?

II. WE BECOME BORED WHEN WE FORGET THAT THE TREASURE IS HIDDEN.

Matt 13:44

44 "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field.

A. Not necessarily evident

Ill: My son was helping a neighbor clear out his basement when he spied this cup and asked to bring it home," says Joan Nold of Lake Ariel, Pennsylvania. He liked that it was old and collapsible, and it said on the bottom that it was from a 1903 performance of the play The Wizard of Oz."

Value "The cups don’t display any obvious Oz-related decorations, But because they were given out at the 200th performance, they are rare." Worth $400.

When we look at the wealth, the pleasure, the distractions of this world it’s easy to miss the treasure of a kingdom that is not tangible.

B. Easily overlooked

Ill: Fever Pitch, is the romantic comedy about one man’s obsession with his favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, and how that obsession comes between his relationship with the woman he loves.

"Do you remember last winter? This is exactly what you liked about me. That I was capable of having a passionate commitment with something. A devotion."

"Yes, but you feel it for the Red Sox, and I was hoping that someday you might redirect that. All those things that you feel for that team, I feel them too--for you."

Ben has a perplexed look on his face. Lindsey turns around and walks toward her building.

It is very easy it be so busy pursuing other things that we over look a treasure that is hidden. All our other obsessions cloud the pursuit of something so other.

The church used to be accused of being so heavenly minded that it was no earthly use. Now were so earthly minded we’re bored with the church. Worse we see failing to get it all in this life a tragic. We are consumed with the here and now to our determent because we no longer fantasize about a kingdom no made with human hands being built for us by the forgiver himself.

Appl: Have you become so busy, so distracted that you over look the secret treasure of his kingdom?

Does the pursuit of this world over shadow your pursuit of the invisible kingdom?

Has it been a long time since you were passionate about the discoveries you were making concerning the kingdom.

III. WE BECOME BORED WHEN WE FAIL TO PURSUE THE HIDDEN TREASURE.

Ill: How many have seen the movie, National Treasure?

Nicolas Cage stars as Ben Franklin Gates, an archaeologist and adventurer looking for the legendary lost treasure of the Templar Knights, spurred on by the stories he was told as a young man by his grandfather, John Adams Gates, twenty years before. John tells Ben the secret hiding place for the treasure is encoded on the back of the Declaration of Independence, placed there by none other than the founders of the United States of America, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.