Beware Of Practicing You Righteousness Before Men #1

So today is the 13th anniversary of our first worship service. No one ever knows that. I keep track of it. But January 31st, 2010 was our very first worship service. And I was sitting here thinking about what that service was like and how many people were there and how big the room we met in was. And you could have probably put that room on this stage and had extra space. There might have been 12 people there. And so to give you perspective, you might think, well, Dave, your family's 12 people. And that's true. But it wasn't then. At that time, Vanessa was pregnant with Micah. And he's taller than some of you now. And so it was a long time ago. We were a small family and a young family who, truth be told, didn't have a clue what we were doing. It was so scary. I look back and think, who in the world came and listened to two 28-year-old men? The Georges did.

And praise God for the Georges and the help they've been and the support to us all these years. But I thought, man, it doesn't feel to me like it's been 13 years, that Vanessa and I have been married going on 17 years, and the vast majority of our time has been spent in Indianapolis in this church. And it doesn't feel like that long to me. I wasn't even thinking about this when I came to church this morning. I just happened to look at the bulletin and saw July 29th, and I'm like, that's an anniversary. The time goes quickly, and it won't be long, and it'll be another 13 years. And your family that's got little ones sitting on your knee will have kids that are getting ready to drive. Time goes by quick, and we ought to make the best of it, use of it, because the older you get, the faster it goes. And so we ought to make use of our time and produce a good harvest for the Lord as much as we're able. So our sermon this morning is continuing on in the Sermon on the Mount.

and we're going to be moving on to chapter 6, which is a fairly big shifter in what Jesus is talking about. We've spent the last nine sermons that I've preached going through the section where Jesus says, you've heard that it was said, but I say to you, or the ancients were told. He's saying this is what the law of God was, and this is how Christians ought to relate to the law of God. Now as we move into chapter 6, we get a whole different focus. It's no longer how should we relate to the law of God, but rather what does it mean to live like a Christian? What should we be doing and how should we be doing it? And so over the next number of weeks, we're going to be working our way through a couple of different topics. One is giving to the poor. That's next week. We're going to talk about giving to the poor. We're going to talk about fasting. We're going to talk about prayer. We're going to talk about the love of money. These are the things that Jesus is warning the disciples about.

In the Sermon on the Mountain, they're the things that we need to be aware of, and we should recognize that when Jesus is talking about how we live as Christians, the things he mentions as areas of focus, the first thing we ought to learn is those are the things that are the most significant things we do as Christians. James told us that pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this, that one keep himself unstained from the world, and that he look after, care for the orphan and the widow in their distress. And the first thing Jesus brings up to us, which we'll get to next week, is almsgiving or giving to the poor, caring for those who are less fortunate than us. And isn't that the orphan and the widow? But it's not only the orphan and the widow. And so that's what we're going to talk about next week. So what are we doing this week? This week we're going to be focusing on just one verse, just chapter 6, verse 1. This verse is sort of the foundation that everything else is built on. It is the thing we have to get fixed solidly in our hearts and in our minds, or all of the other stuff is going to, like,

not make a whole lot of sense or be very important to us. And so as we lay this foundation this morning, just here in verse 1, my hope is that God will help us as we read it and as we think on it. My hope is that God will work in our hearts to help us seek his approval instead of man's approval. Our text this morning is Matthew 6, 1. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them. Otherwise, you will have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Now, there are two things I want to point out about this text because these ideas are going to keep coming up. These themes are going to keep coming up. We see them here. The first is the concept of a reward. And we're going to come and talk about that more in our passage today later on.

Suffice it to say right now, Christians ought to be motivated by rewards and rewards that come to us from the hand of God. We should learn to think, if I do what God says, he's going to reward me for that. We should not think he's going to save me because of it, but we should think that he is going to reward me for it. The second thing is, and I think this is probably a very important theme that we'll be drawing out as we work our way through this, is the theme of God as Father. Time and time and time again in this passage, God is referred to as our father. And I'll tell you, I pay attention and I listen. Having grown up without a father myself and having had spiritual fathers, it's something that I pay attention to. In my own life and in your lives, do you see God as father? There are many other ways we could see him, but the question is, do you see him as a father to you? And what I find is that it's very difficult for us to understand the fatherhood of God to us.

if we've had no father or bad fathers. And that's true of many of us. None of us have had perfect fathers, though some of us might say we had good fathers or faithful fathers. And so it's a great difficulty to come to the word of God and to see our God spoken of as a father because it just puts a bad taste in our mouth. We think fathers are bad, fathers are unfaithful, fathers are angry, fathers are absent, fathers are unstable. And yet time and again, Jesus reminds us a father to us, that we are his children. And so much of our disposition toward our lives and why we would do the things we would do as a Christian, why we would give to the poor, why we would pray, why we would fast, why we would love God instead of money, why we would be concerned about him is because he's been a father to us. And his disposition is one of love toward his children, not because we're good, not because we've earned it, not because we're better than the rest, but because he's chosen us.

And he's decided to love us as his children. And there really is nothing that can separate us from the love of the Father. But it's a hard thing for us. It's one thing for us to get our head around the idea and say, yes, that's true. But how much harder is it for us to do things like pray to our Father and not Lord or Jesus or God? You should think on that just for a second. When you pray for your meals or you pray for your small group or you pray for your school or your marriage or whatever, who do you pray to? Who do you pray to? You should always pray to your father, and you should address him as such. We'll come to it in this section when we come to the Lord's Prayer, and he says you should pray like this, our father. So do you pray to God as father? Do you think of him as a father? If you don't, then we're going to find an area over the next couple of weeks or month where we can grow. This is where we're headed. But tune your ears to rewards.

and to the fatherhood of God as we work our way through this passage. Now, what do we have before us this morning? Jesus warns us. Verse 1 is a warning. Beware of practicing your righteousness before men. Now, the first thing I want to point out or observe to you is that righteousness is something that God's children ought to do. We ought to live righteous lives. There actually should be a difference, a discernible difference, between the way Christians live. and the way non-Christians live. And that difference is not a matter of preference. And that difference is not a matter of the food they eat, or even the clothes they wear, to some extent. Our righteousness ought to be something that's visible and seen. We run into this passage sort of cutting across the grain of something Jesus said just in the chapter before. You remember, here he says, or previously he said, let your light shine before men in such a way that they see your good works and they glorify your Father in heaven. So it seems that that passage tells us, go and live righteously and let people see what you're doing. Now, if you read this passage, what's it telling you to do? Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be observed by them. And you're like, okay, so which is it? Am I supposed to live like a Christian for people to see? Or am I supposed to hide that? Well...

The answer is you're supposed to live like a Christian for people to see. The warning here is not you shouldn't live like a Christian or it shouldn't be evident to the people around you. The warning here deals with our hearts as Christians. Beware of practicing your righteousness before men. And then he tells us what to be aware of, to be noticed by them, to be noticed by them. Now, is righteousness noticeable? Yes. It really is. It really is. So what sorts of things are noticeable in this congregation? Kids. Lots of them. Young and young marriages. Lots of them. That's noticeable. How many of you, as you entered into that season of life, thought, I'm a weirdo. I'm leaving all my friends behind. They're not doing the things I'm doing. It's noticeable. And some of them were like, that's great and wonderful. And other ones were like, what kind of idiot are you?

One of the worst things you can do is get married really young. That's terrible for your marriage, and you're going to end up divorced. This is the world's sentiment towards getting married, having children. And so it's noticeable. And so there's a great danger for us to having recognized that our righteousness or the things we do in service to God, presuming that if you got married young or you had children young, you did it because you're a Christian, and you didn't want to fall into sexual sin, and you wanted to honor God, and you fell in love. Those are all good things. Better to have those things culminate in marriage than in fornication. And so a Christian's priorities and the ways they order their lives really ought to be different than those of the world. And those differences are going to stand out. They're going to stand out. And we ought not to be ashamed of them. And yet we also ought not to do them. And this is what Jesus warns us about here. We ought not to do them so that other people will notice them. We shouldn't do it so that we know they'll see it. Okay?

As I was preparing and thinking, what is it like? How do I communicate to us what it means and how common it is that we do things for other people to see? Because that's the warning here. I think there's not a minute of our life that goes by that we aren't doing what we're doing for people to see and to affirm. And I thought, well, where are there examples in life where people don't care about whatever it is they're doing? They don't care about anybody seeing it. When do you have those sorts of circumstances? Well, I thought of a few. Have you ever been out in public and you've seen somebody get into a real nasty fight? Like the kind you're only supposed to have at home, but they're having it in public. What is going on that allows that to happen? They stopped caring that people were watching. You understand? I mean, they got mad about something, but in their anger...

their anger got to the level that they stopped caring that other people would hear what they said. Now, how often do you see that happen? Not very often. That means that people don't get in those kind of fights very often, right? And all of a sudden you realize we're always watching. We're always aware of who is around and what they think. And we do the things we do or don't do the things we don't do because they're watching. Where else do you see it happen? Well, I had that sort of thing happen when I was in high school as a wrestler. The school I went to, a big public school up in Chicagoland, we had a good wrestling team. And you'd have a couple hundred people coming to the wrestling match. And wrestling is a unique sport in that it's an individual competition and there's only one match going on at a time. If you're on varsity, everything stops and everyone in the gym watches you. That's a lot of pressure.

There's guys who don't wrestle because of that. But when you're on the mat and you're in that situation, what happens? You forget that there are hundreds of people watching and yelling at you and the guy you're wrestling. You forget. You become unaware of the fact that they're there because you are engaged in something that needs all of your attention. Where else? Perhaps you're in the military. There are times when you might go into combat or be in a tense, very difficult, dangerous situation, and all of a sudden, your concern is survival. Your concern is not what the guy next to you thinks. It's we need to live. And you don't care who's watching or what's going on or what they might think of you or maybe when you've given birth. And all of a sudden, all of the nakedness and all of the embarrassment and all of the fears and all that stuff that's very, very real has to go away because there's work that has to be done.

And all of a sudden, it doesn't matter who's around and whether you know their first name or whether they're smiling at you. And so we have things in our lives where we can say, yes, I see there are times when I don't care when people are watching, but they are so few and far between. Maybe when you've had a medical emergency, broken a limb. All of a sudden, you don't mind yelling and hollering in pain or crying. caused real harm to yourself, blood squirting out somewhere. All of a sudden, you don't care what other people think of how you respond to it, right? But you realize the rest of our lives, the whole rest of it, we're concerned with people watching us. Always, always. And we do things. We live our whole lives looking over our shoulders to see who's watching and what they're going to think of it. The way we dress, the way we speak.

The vehicles we drive, our haircuts, our jewelry, you name it. All of that is like, is it cool? Yes. Will people think I'm weird? Yes, and I won't do it. And we don't even think that's a strange way to live. But here Jesus is warning us, people are watching. Don't pay attention to it. Now, why do we care so much that people are watching us? There are different cultures. If we were to compare different cultures, are there cultures that are more or less sensitive to this? And I'd say, yeah. Generally, I grew up in a poorer neighborhood, and most of my friends growing up in the neighborhood I lived in was black. It was culturally black. It was ethnically black. So I grew up with a bunch of black friends in their culture. That still to this day is the culture I would be most immediately familiar with or comfortable in. I understand how it works, and I like it.

There are parts about it I really like. And one of the things I like about it is that they will say what they think directly and immediately. We white people, no, no, no, no, we can't do that. We couldn't possibly do that. And I admire it because they're like, I don't care what you think. I'm going to tell you what I think you need to be said, even if it's offensive. And I find that refreshing. In some small way, we ought to do the same. We might joke around as a... If you've been to seminary or talked with Christians about the 11th commandment, we have 10 commandments in the Bible. But Christians and pastors often will talk about the 11th commandment. What's the 11th commandment? Say it. Yeah. I mean, it is basically be nice. That's the rule. You just have to be nice. You have to always, always, always be aware of what people are going to say and feel and think about whatever you've got going on. And what's that teach us?

Be constantly aware. If you're going to be a Christian, if you're going to practice your righteousness, it's the exact opposite of what this text says. The 11th commandment says, be a slave to what other people will think of you. Because if you don't, then you're not a Christian, or you're not behaving Christianly. But here Jesus says, beware of that. Stop trying to impress people with your Christianity. Stop it. Your job as a Christian is not to have other people look at you and go, oh, he's a Christian. Oh, I'm so impressed by him. You are not to do the things you do as a Christian for them. Because the truth is, if you're doing it for them, it's because you want something from them. You want their affirmation. Which means that we're totally absorbed, not so much or only with what other people think of us for their sakes, but for our own. We want them to think highly of us, and so that's why we have to be nice. Because we wouldn't want them to think poorly of us.

Now, it is possible for people to look at you, live as a Christian, and to do the things that Christians do, and to be righteous, and to glorify your Father in heaven. When he says, let your light shine before men in such a way that they see your good works and give glory to your Father, the difference between that and this is, who's the point? What's the point? When you see someone run out in front of a speeding car to snatch away the kid that's going to get hit, What's the person thinking about? Kid. They're not thinking about themselves. They're not thinking about the danger that they're putting themselves in. They run into 9-11 and we have firefighters and there's this revival of manhood. All of a sudden, we've got men. And why did we admire them? Because they ran into their own deaths to save the lives of other people. They weren't worried about themselves. When they got up this morning, they didn't know that that's what they were going to have to do. But when it was put upon them, they said, my job is to give my life for others.

And so they did. And we look at them and we see something of value. And if some man had gone into that and had survived it and came out and received all of the glory for himself and talked about himself and how great he was, it would just be disgusting. So your righteousness will be seen. People will see how you live. And they will know without the words coming across, they will know. What's important to you? How angry do you get when somebody misunderstands you? This is just a simple day-to-day life example. You say something and someone misunderstands what you said. And then they go tell somebody, they said this and they did that. And boy, oh, howdy, do we get mad. Because they're telling lies about us. And we need to go set the record straight. Why? Seriously, why? The reason you care so much is because you only care about yourself and how you're perceived. But I tell myself, what I tell my wife, what I tell my kids, what I'm telling you is the truth will become evident in time. The truth will become evident in time. And you'll either be vindicated, as you think you deserve, or you'll be condemned by the truth. The truth will come out at some point. I could use examples of men and women in this church of how they're perceived at a distance.

You know, if people were to look at me and get their first impression of me, they would have an impression of what kind of person I am and what I'm like. And there's probably reason for that. I'm really big. I can be very loud and forceful. And all of you felt it at some point or another. And so some people could say, well, he's just a big, mean jerk. He's just going to be so hard. He's not going to have any compassion. He's just going to be all these things. He's going to be an oppressor, certainly a danger. So what do I say? Over time, I say, if you spend time with me, and you spend time with my wife and my kids and my family, they don't think that's what I am. At least not all the time. And enough of the time they know that's not what I am that they're still very affectionate with me. They come and they'll sit on my lap and they hug me and they kiss me and they feel safe around me. They don't go, oh, he's scary. They say, oh, he's daddy. That's the truth. But it's not the first impression necessarily.

So when you practice your righteousness, when you do the things that God calls you to do, you really have to forget that there are people watching that you think deserve, that you think owe you approval. It's really not about you. Your life and the things you do, it's not about you. It's about God. Now if we move beyond why we seek men's approval, if we move beyond the first and most significant answer, which is because we think we deserve it. And we ask, why else is this so important to us? Why else do we want other people to look on us and say, good job? I'll give you four reasons. There are more, I'm sure. The first is it's immediate. The reason we want man's approval is because the affirmation, the turnaround time on it is right now. You do something, you immediately get encouragement. You don't have to wait for it. You also don't have to persevere in the righteousness. You can just do it for a time, a very short time.

a very visible time when everyone can see. And then you can go back to your normal way of life. The world doesn't keep tabs on that type of stuff. The world is not omniscient. It doesn't see us every second of every day. And that really is a big thing to us. That really is what social media is. It's these little snippets of righteousness, of glory, of things worthy of adoration and praise. But it is not the whole story. Why else do we seek the recognition of the world of man? Because it's uncritical. The world doesn't care if you have to sin to receive its praise. The world doesn't look at you. I mean, there is a morality to the godless. But it's not the morality of Scripture. And so if you had to sin to do that, something that's praiseworthy, they don't mind. You've become wealthy. You've become powerful. You've become rich. They'll never ask at what cost. They'll never care about your marriage or your relationship with your children or whether you have children. They won't care. Ask those questions.

They're not critical. They don't say, what did you have to give up to get what you got? And was that a good trade? Why else do we seek the world's recognition, man's recognition? Because it's self-serving. If you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. We call it networking, but really it amounts to building our own influence and our own kingdom. If I say something nice to you, you'll say something nice to me. You'll owe me one. And which one of us wouldn't want to have people around us indebted to us? The fourth one I've written down is that it's attainable. The bar is low when it comes to man's praise because we're asking sinful men to look on us with admiration. The truth is, we're very easy to lie to. And we're actually very willing to be lied to. Social media is a great example. It's just an economy of lies. And why are we on it? Because we want to be lied to. We want to be told what life's really supposed to be like.

You really can receive the praise of other people because the bar is so low. And that suits our pride. To always be told. To always be being told. Good job. Thumbs up. Smiley face. Love it. Why can't we on social media, if we wanted to bring some honesty to it, how come there can't be an I hate that? Thumbs down. Boo! Can't do that because that's not nice. So we're just not allowed to do it because that would hurt the other person's feelings. And that would reveal that we might have something else motivating us other than offering and receiving of praise. Now, the Lord's approval, on the other hand, you may be thinking, well, if we're not supposed to do all of this for the sake of the people around us and their approval, whose approval are we supposed to do? Does approval matter? And I say, yes, the Lord's approval. But his approval is the opposite of those four things I just mentioned. His approval comes later.

We have to wait. We have to wait until he chooses to reward us. Whether that reward is in some small way given in this life or whether we have to wait to receive our reward in the life to come, we have to wait. His rewards also are based on a lifetime of righteousness, not a particular act. You know that fireman that I described earlier that goes rushing into the building? We can look at that one act and say, glory. But if we stepped out and looked at that man's whole life and we looked at his marriage and his drinking habits and his sexual desires and his faithfulness to all of those things, we might actually get a different story of the man, right? At any given moment, we might look at a police officer and say, they saved my life. That man is something special. But you do also know that police officers have one of the highest rates in terms of professions of adultery, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide.

They're not actually, it turns out that that profession and the pressures that it creates produces a lot of bad fruit in their lives, even though in any one given moment they might do really well. They might save your life. God's rewards and his approval is based on a lifetime of righteousness, a lifetime of behavior, not a particular moment. It takes into account our faults as well as our successes. And even our greatest triumphs, the things we've done well, even that man who ran into that building, if he was faithful and had some awareness of himself and made it out, what he would say is, I wish I could have done more. There was so much left undone. There were people who I didn't get to. The same is true of us. All of the good that we do, even the life of righteousness, still is not perfect and far from it. There's so much more we could do, so much more we should have done, until the Lord's approval comes later and it takes into account our whole lives.

The Lord's approval requires humility, that you're willing for your actions to be used or poured out at his discretion. Sometimes you might think, you know, if you're married, whether you're a husband or a wife, I'm sure all of us have had the thought, my spouse is fill in the blank and it's not a good thing. They're angry, they're lazy, they're selfish, they're impatient. And when I'm respectful or when I'm loving or when I do these things for them, it doesn't produce anything. And so I'm not going to do it. Parents will say the same thing about disciplining their kids. They'll say, well, I don't discipline my kids because it just doesn't work. I go, it doesn't? What does work mean? Where in the scripture does it tell you that if a wife is respectful to her husband, that he will in turn respond to that and do all the things she desires of him? You say, well, certainly it should, shouldn't it? And I say, well, oftentimes in God's mercy, it does. But if that's your motivation, you're practicing your righteousness to be observed by your spouse.

And you realize how short that time span is before you give up. Because they didn't notice and do the things they were supposed to do. They didn't give you your reward. If you're supposed to lay down your life for your wife, husbands, then do it. Well, she doesn't appreciate it. Neither does the church. For all of the things Jesus did for us, the church doesn't respond anywhere near the way it should. Not yet anyway. And yet he still gave his life. So give your life. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Wives. I'm respectful and it doesn't soften his heart. I'm sorry. I actually am sorry. Your husband really is a sinner. I really am a sinner. You should still do it. And you shouldn't do it with this unspoken expectation that if I do this, I will get the reward that I'm seeking. If you're going to do it, do it for the Lord's approval and wait for him to give it. Now, it's easy to see why we seek man's approval instead of the Lord's approval.

Man's approval is immediate, it's uncritical, it's self-serving, and it's attainable, whereas the Lord's approval requires humility, time, perseverance, and faith. And so we throw our hands up in the air so often, saying it doesn't work. It may not work in the way that you want it. And oftentimes I think that it's God's kindness. When it doesn't work the way you want it to work, it's the Lord's kindness to you. Because if it worked the way you worked, you would always take your reward now. And the thing is, if you take your reward now, you won't have a reward later. And I don't think we realize that. Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them. What do you want from those people watching you? You want a reward. He says, beware of doing that because otherwise you will have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. That's a scary thought. You and I, we're motivated by rewards. We want good things. We want all the good things, and we want them now.

And when we can't have the things we want right now, we settle for what we can get right now. But when we do, we sacrifice the things that we should get later. You're all familiar with the concept of spoiling your supper? 4 o'clock, it's 4.30, you're home hungry. Yeah, a lot of people are hungry at 4.30 actually. But if you eat a bunch right then, you're going to spoil your supper. You've got to learn to wait. You have to learn to be patient. And then when the food is on the table, and it smells good, and you're just looking forward to it, you still have to have manners. You just have to wait, and you have to wait, and you have to wait. And how hard is that? It's hard at my house. It's hard for me to wait until the time. Christians ought to be those who wait until the time. If we take our rewards now, we'll have our treasure in full. You remember the rich man and Lazarus.

He comes to him and the rich man says, I want these things. And Abraham says, you've had your good things. You've had your good things. Lazarus, he didn't have his good things. So now he has rest and now he has comfort and now he has peace and satisfaction. But you, you had your good things. And so we really ought to think and realize, are we willing to sacrifice an eternity of good things for pleasure right now? You're making that decision every day, whether you realize it or not. My goal is just to show you, you're doing it. We're all doing it. And we ought to do it more wisely than we have. Some of us might think it's not worth it. The current cost is too high. I cannot pay it. I'm too weak. I need some encouragement. I need a win. I need a success. I need some building up. I need some praise.

Over and against those desires, what the scripture says is that in our weakness, God's power is perfected. You are weak. You do screw up. You are desperate for encouragement. The question is, what are you willing to trade to get what you want in the moment? Esau, he traded away his birthright. Will you? Will you continue? God's power is made perfect in weakness. So it shouldn't be our habit to excuse our sin and our settling. for instant gratification because of our weakness. It's no excuse. Living righteously is very difficult for everyone, not just for you. Everyone in this room thinks, you know, we think I have it hard and everyone else has it easier. And we all think it and we all sing the chorus to ourselves. My life's harder than everyone else's. I have burdens that no one else does. Here's the truth. You have burdens just like everyone else. Your burdens may differ.

But your burdens are enough to make you want to quit, and so are theirs. Whether they're young or whether they're old, their burdens make them feel their weakness, just as they do yours. Your body fails, their body fails. Your mind fails, their mind fails. Your faith fails, their faith fails. We are weak, and will we trust God to help us in our weakness and wait for him to help us in our weakness, or will we fill our hands and our lives with the praise of men now because we couldn't wait? That's the question before us. If our lives are a self-serving series of actions that are aimed at extracting what we want from those around us, we will have no reward when we die. And we won't be satisfied then either, I'll tell you. You might think, well, at least if I do that, I'll be happy for the time being, and that'll just be good enough. Actually, it won't. Even if you make that deal and that commitment in your head, you still won't be happy.

All the things that you want and you think, oh, if I just have this, then I'll be happy. It'll fall through your hands like sand. And you won't have what you want. You certainly won't have what you need. So the Christian life is a life that we live because God is watching and because he's promised to meet with us and to care for us and to bear with us in our weakness and to welcome us into his presence and to reward us for all the things we've done by faith in this life. Through all of the trials and hardships and failures as well. Do you want that reward or not? That's the question. And the answer to that question is what will inform how you live your life and what you'll do this afternoon and tomorrow and every day that follows. And so beware. Beware of practicing your righteousness before men, expecting them to give you what you need to receive from God. If it's to be meaningful, if it's to be satisfactory, if it's to last.

Your life as a Christian will be seen, both the good and the bad. It'll also be known whether what you're doing is done for the glory of God or whether it's done for the praise of man. Those close to you will know. Your children will know. Your spouse will know. Your church body will know. Your elders and pastors will know. And you'll say, no, nobody knows. And I'll say, no, I think you don't know. Your behavior will be noticed. You are being watched. We are all being watched by men. and by God. The world will look at your life as a Christian, and they are incapable of drawing the right conclusions about why you do the things you do. It would not make any sense to them. And that's as it should be. Spiritual things are not appraised by worldly minds. They can't conceive of it. It doesn't make sense. Why would you do this? Why would you do that? Why would you say no to this? Why would you say yes to that? It doesn't make any sense, and that's okay. And you have to live in that tension.

of being misunderstood, probably being maligned or made fun of or mocked or what have you, beware of seeking their approval. Another thing I'll tell you is that God is not miserly. And though we feel our weaknesses and we feel the hardships of this life and we know our needs, he does give us little pieces. You know, when you're cooking dinner and the kid comes up and says, ooh, and you hand him the spoon. God does the same thing to us. He gives us spoons to lick in our lives that are sweet to us. He'll give you people that will encourage you along the way, that will help you, that will do some seemingly insignificant thing that really will be. It won't have fixed the problem. It won't even have come close to fixing the problem. But their desire to love you and care for you and pray for you or give you a hug or cry with you or buy you a cup of coffee and talk with you or whatever it is, really will help. And that is the kindness of God.

that he gives those things to his people. But we worry. There are sermons about worry coming in the Sermon on the Mount, so I won't say it all now, but we worry far too much about how the Lord will provide for our needs now and in the future. And we make many foolish decisions because of a lack of faith. God gives kindness. He's kind with us and gives good gifts to us as his children. And we should be able to testify to those things in our own lives. His promises of fatherly tenderness and affection and provision are not just for those people out there. If you're a Christian, they're for you. So beware of trading away all of that for something that won't satisfy you. Maybe a way of saying it, and I'll come to an end here, is to say God is no man's debtor, meaning in the end he will never owe you. But he may owe you up until the end, and that's as it should be. Because he's promised that he will give to you in the end.

All that you've earned, all that you've required, all that you've earned is the right word, even though we're not supposed to talk about earning God's favor. I'm not saying you're earning God's favor. I'm saying fathers love to give their faithful sons good gifts. They delight in it. There's nothing that gives them more joy. And we should anticipate God giving his good things to us, even if we have to wait till this life is over. The closer we get to it, the more excited we should get. This is the life of a Christian. Live it. in the full knowledge that God's watching you and that he loves you. If you're his child, he loves you. He is obligated because of his love to give you all of the good things that are yours to have in the proper time. And so wait for it and seek after it and try to build it up. Let's pray.