The Divine Conspiracy: Chapter Six

~ Chapter Six ~

Investing in the Heavens: Escaping the Deceptions 
of Reputation and Wealth

On the Sermon on the Mount

“From Jesus’ Discourse on the Hill we have learned thus far his answers to the two great questions forced on all of us by human life: Who is really well off? and Who is a genuinely good person? One is blessed, we now know, if one’s life is based upon acceptance and intimate interactions with what God is doing in human history. Such people are in the present kingdom of the heavens. And genuinely good people are those who, from the deepest levels of their understanding and motivation, are committed to promoting the good of everyone they deal with—including, of course, God and themselves. In this they have, with God’s assistance, gone beyond rightness understood as merely ‘not doing anything wrong’—beyond the goodness of scribes and Pharisees—and are acting from their inward union of mind and heart with ‘the heavens.’ It is their confidence in Jesus that has placed them into a living union with The Kingdom Among Us. Their union with Jesus allows them now to be a part of his conspiracy to undermine the structures of evil, which continue to dominate human history, with the forces of truth, freedom, and love. We can quietly and relentlessly align ourselves with these forces, wherever they are, because we know what is cosmically afoot. To ‘overcome evil with good,’ in the apostle Paul’s words, is not just something for an individual effort here and there[; it] is actually what will come to pass on this earth. The power of Jesus’ resurrection and his continuing life in human beings assures [this].” [207-208]

“Jesus now, in Matthew 6, alerts us to the two main things that will block or hinder a life constantly interactive with God and healthy growth in the kingdom. These are the desire to have the approval of others, especially for being devout, and the desire to secure ourselves by means of material wealth. If we allow them to, these two desires will pull us out of the sway of the kingdom—‘the range of God’s effective will’ [and] back into the barren ‘righteousness’ of the scribe and the Pharisee. But as we keep these two things in their proper place, through a constant, disciplined, and clear-eyed reliance on God, we will grow rapidly in kingdom substance. We will progressively incorporate all aspects of our life into the kingdom, including, of course, the social and financial.” [208]

The Desire for Approval

“The hunger for titles and public awards in human life—indeed, in religious life—is quite astonishing. The bragging and exhibitionism that goes on around the rear end of automobiles, the almost routine puffing of credentials and resumes, and much that passes for normal as part of our ‘self-esteem’ culture, are part of a life with no sense of our standing in the presence of God.” [209]

“[Jesus’ teaching in Matt. 6:1] is not that we should hide our good deeds. That might be appropriate in some cases, but it is not Jesus’ point. There is nothing inherently wrong with their being known. Just as in the case of ‘adultery in the heart,’ the issue here is one of intents and purposes. Not did we look at someone and sexually desire them, [but] did we look at someone in order to sexually desire them. And now: not are we seen doing a good deed, but are we doing a good deed in order to be seen. In any case where we use, on ourselves or others, promised recognition as a motive for doing what should be done for its own sake, we are preempting God’s role in our life.” [209-210]

“When we do good deeds to be seen by human beings, that is because what we are looking for is something that comes from human beings. God responds to our expectations accordingly. When we want human approval and esteem, and do what we do for the sake of it, God courteously stands aside because, by our wish, it does not concern him… On the other hand, if we live unto God alone, he responds to our expectations—which are of him alone. Os Guinness, the well-known Christian thinker and leader, has said of the Puritans in American history that they lived as if they stood before an audience of One. They carried on their lives as if the only one whose opinion mattered were God. Of course they understood that this is what Jesus Christ taught them to do. But the principle of ‘the audience of One’ extends to all that we do, and not just to deeds of devotion or charity. The apostle Paul charges us to do all our work, whatever our situation, ‘with enthusiasm, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that he is the one who rewards you and whom you serve.’ Indeed, we are to do all that we do ‘on behalf of the Lord Jesus, in that way giving thanks through him to God the Father’ (Col. 3:17-24).” [210]

On Prayer. “Kingdom praying and its efficacy is entirely a matter of the innermost heart’s being totally open and honest before God. It is a matter of what we are saying with our whole being, moving with resolute intent and clarity of mind into the flow of God’s action. In apprenticeship to Jesus, this is one of the most important things we learn how to do. He teaches us how to be in prayer what we are in life and how to be in life what we are in prayer.” [215]

On Fasting. “[Jesus] told us that he was to be ‘eaten’: ‘He who eats me shall live by me… and shall live forever’ (John 6:51). He, not the manna, is ‘the bread which comes down out of heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die’ (vv. 48-50). The practice of fasting goes together with this teaching about nourishing ourselves on the person of Jesus. It emphasizes the direct availability of God to nourish, sustain, and renew the soul. It is a testimony to the reality of another world from which Jesus and his Father perpetually intermingle their lives with ours (John 14:23). And the effects of our turning strongly to this true ‘food’ will be obvious. Here are some words from a pastor who had recently learned about kingdom fasting and began to put it into practice: ‘The discipline of fasting has taken on new importance and regularity for me… It is now my regular practice to fast every time I preach. I have a deeper sense of dependency and of the immense power of the spoken word. This has been demonstrated by the dear individual in my congregation who runs our tape ministry. She said that since January of this year, her order for sermon tapes has doubled. “I can’t explain it,” she said, “but whatever it is, keep it up!”’ He had learned to fast before the Father who is in secret, and the Father ‘repaid’ him by acting with his efforts in ministry. The effects in the visible world were far more than could be attributed to his own capabilities. Just as Jesus said.” [220]

The Discipline of Secrecy. “The discipline of secrecy will help us break the grip of human opinion over our souls and our actions. A discipline is an activity in our power that we do to enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort. Jesus is here leading us into the discipline of secrecy. We from time to time practice doing things approved of in our religious circles—giving, praying, fasting, attending services of the church, and so on—but in such a way that no one knows. Thus our motivation and reward for doing these things cannot come from human beings. We are liberated from slavery to eyes, and then it does not matter whether people know or not. We learn to live constantly in this way… The background practices presupposed in Matt. 6:1-18 are, obviously, doing good deeds, praying, and fasting to be seen. [Jesus] teaches us not to engage in these practices, and he does so by saying, ‘Let your alms [prayer, fasting] be in secret.’ But he does not mean, ‘Never, on pain of sin guilt, let anyone see you or know you to do a good deed [pray, fast].’ That is why there is no inconsistency with his earlier directive in the Discourse: ‘Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works and glorify your Father, the one in the heavens’ (6:16). His teaching leads to a discipline, not a law, and a discipline that prepares us, precisely, to act in a way that fulfills the law of whole-person love of God.” [221-222]

“Whatever our position in life, if our lives and works are to be of the kingdom of God, we must not have human approval as a primary or even major aim. We must lovingly allow people to think whatever they will. We may, if it seems right, occasionally try to help them understand us and appreciate what we are doing. But in any case we can only serve them by serving the Lord only.” [223]

The Bondage of Wealth

“Treasures are things we try to keep because of a value we place upon them. They may be of no value whatsoever in themselves; nevertheless, we take great pains to protect such things… [We] may also treasure things other than material goods: for example, our reputation, or our relationship to another person, another person, or the security or reputation of our school or our business or our country. The most important commandment of the Judeo-Christian tradition is to treasure God and his realm more than anything else. That is what it means to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. It means to treasure him, to hold him and his dear, and to protect and aid him in his purposes. Our only wisdom, safety, and fulfillment lies in so treasuring God. Then we will also treasure our neighbors rightly, as he treasures them.” [224]

“We reveal what our treasures are by what we try to protect, secure, keep. Often our treasures are totally worthless to other people. Sometimes, of course, they are not. And that is the case with money, wealth, material goods. So, to discuss our treasures is really to discuss our treasuring. We are not to pass it off as dealing merely with ‘external goods,’ which are ‘nonspiritual’ or just physical stuff. It is to deal with the fundamental structure of our soul. It has to do precisely with whether the life we live now in the physical realm is to be an eternal one or not, and the extend to which it will be so.” [225]

“[The] wisdom of Jesus is that we should ‘lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven’ (6:20), where forces of nature and human evil cannot harm what we treasure. That is to say, direct your actions toward making a difference in the realm of spiritual substance sustained and governed by God. Invest your life in what God is doing, which cannot be lost. Of course this means that we will invest in our relationship to Jesus himself, and through him to God. But beyond that, and in close union with it, we will devote ourselves to the good of other people—those around us within the range of our power to affect. These are among God’s treasures. ‘The Lord’s portion,’ we are told, is his people’ (Deut. 32:19). And that certainly includes ourselves, in a unique and fundamental way. We have the care of our own souls and lives in a way no one else does, and in a way we have the care of no one else. And we also care for this astonishingly rich and beautiful physical realm, the earth itself, of which both we and our neighbors are parts. ‘You have established the earth and it continues. All things stand this day according to your directions. For all things are your servants’ (Ps. 119:91). God himself loves the earth dearly and never takes his hands off it. And because he loves it and it is good, our care of it is also eternal work and a part of our eternal life.” [226]

The Centrality of the Heart & the Treasure of Heaven

“’Your heart will be where your treasure is,’ Jesus tells us (Matt. 6:21). Remember that our heart is our will, or our spirit: the center of our being from which our life flows. It is what gives orientation to everything we do. A heart rightly directed therefore brings health and wholeness to the entire personality.” [227]

“Jesus compares our ‘heartsight’ to our eyesight. We know how our eyesight affects our body in its environment. ‘The eye is the lamp of the body.’ If the eye works well, then the body easily moves about in its environment. As Jesus puts it, ‘Our whole body is well-directed,’ is ‘full of light’ (Matt. 6:23). The person who treasures what lies within the kingdom sees everything in its true worth and relationship. The person who treasures what is ‘on earth,’ by contrast, sees everything from a perspective that distorts it and systematically misleads in practice. The relative importance of things is, in particular, misperceived. The person who is addicted to a drug or to some activity is but an extreme case. All else is seen only in its relation to the object of the addiction and enjoyment of it—even one’s own body and soul. Thus, ‘if your eyes are bad, your body as a whole is in the dark.’ But if the eye of your soul, ‘the light within you,’ is not functioning, then you are in the dark about everything (6:23). You are, simply, lost. You don’t know where you are or where you are going. This is what it means to be a ‘lost soul,’ a dead soul.” [227-228]

“There is, I think, a tendency to regard this treasure in heaven as something that is only for the ‘by-and-by.’ It is thought to be like life insurance, so called, whose benefits only come after death. And indeed it is crucial to understand that, because we are friends with Jesus Christ, we do have ‘an inheritance that is imperishable, untarnished, unfading, reserved in the heavens for those of us who by faith are guarded by the power of God unto a salvation set to be revealed in due time’ (1 Pet. 1:4-5). This is important. As the Egyptians discovered long ago, we are going to be ‘dead’ a lot longer than we are alive on this earth. But the treasure we have in heaven is also something very much available to us now. We can and should draw upon it as needed, for it is nothing less than God himself and the wonderful society of his kingdom even now interwoven in my life. Even now we ‘have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to countless angels, and to the assembled church of those born earlier and now claimed in the heavens; and to God who discerns all, to the completed spirits of righteous people, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new agreement’ (Heb. 12:22-24). This is not by-and-by, but now.” [229]

“What is most valuable for any human being, without regard to an afterlife, is to be a part of this marvelous reality, God’s kingdom now. Eternity is now ongoing. I am now leading a life that will last forever. Upon my treasure in the heavens I now draw for present needs. If, with a view to my needs in this life, I had to choose between having good credit with a bank and having good credit with God, I would not hesitate a moment. By all means, let the bank go! What my life really is even now is ‘hid with Christ in God’ (Col. 3:3). What I ‘treasure’ in heaven is not just the little that I have caused to be there. It is what I love there and what I place my security and happiness in there. It is God who ‘is our refuge and strength, a very present help in time of trouble’ (Ps. 46:1). And as the apostle Paul has taught us from his own experience, ‘My God shall supply every need you have in terms of his riches in glory in Christ Jesus’ (Phil. 4:19). This is the constant witness of the biblical record to The Kingdom Among Us.” [229-230]

“’We have no reason to be anxious.’ ‘This present world is a perfectly safe place for us to be.’ That certainly is what Jesus, and the Bible as a whole, has to say to us. ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever’ (Ps 23). I recognize how strange, even strained, it sounds. But that is only because the entire posture of our embodied self and its surroundings is habitually inclined toward physical or ‘earthly’ reality as the only reality there is. Hence, to treasure anything else must be wrong. It is to rest on illusions. We must be prepared to be treated as more or less crazy unless we value what is ‘on earth’ as supreme for human existence… [If] we do value ‘mammon’ as normal people seem to think we should, our fate is fixed. Our fate is anxiety. It is worry. It is frustration. The words anxious and worry have reference to strangling or being choked. Certainly that is how we feel when we are anxious. Things and events have us by the throat and seem to be cutting off our life. We are being harmed, or we fear what will come upon us, and all our efforts are insufficient to do anything about it.” [230]

“People who are ignorant of God—the ethne, or ‘nations,’ who also pray, we have seen, with mechanical meaninglessness—live to eat and drink and dress. ‘For such things the ‘gentiles’ seek’—and their lives are filled with corresponding anxiety and anger and depression about how they will look and how they will fare. By contrast, those who understand Jesus and his Father know that provision has been made for them. Their confidence has been confirmed by their experience. Though they work, they do not worry about things ‘on earth.’ Instead, they are always ‘seeking first the kingdom.’ That is, they ‘place top priority on identifying and involving themselves in what God is doing and in the kind of rightness [he] has. All else needed is provided’ (Matt. 6:33). They soon enough have a track record to prove it.” [234]

“Soberly, when our trust is in things that are absolutely beyond any risk or threat, and we have learned from good sources, including our own experience, that those things are there, anxiety is just groundless and pointless. It occurs only as a hangover of bad habits established when we were trusting things—like human approval and wealth—that were certain to let us down. Now our strategy should be one of resolute rejection of worry, while we concentrate on the future in hope and with prayer and on the past with thanksgiving. Paul, once again, got it: ‘Don’t be anxious about anything,’ he says, ‘but in every situation, with prayer and supplications, with thanksgiving, let God know what you want. And the peace which God himself has will, beyond anything we can intellectually grasp, stand guard over your hearts and minds, which are within the reality of Jesus the Anointed’ (Phil. 4:6-7).” [235]

A Parting Shot

“[The] one who takes on the character of the Prince of Life will not be exempted from the usual problems of life, and in addition will have the problems that come from ‘not fitting in’ and being incapable of conforming to the world order, new or old. This will not infrequently mean death or imprisonment or exclusion from the economy or education, and so on. All of these things have happened repeatedly in our history. Indeed, it is said that more Christians have died in the twentieth century than in all the period from the beginning to 1900. The ‘Western’ segment of the church today lives in a bubble of historical illusion about the meaning of discipleship and the gospel. We are dominated by the essentially Enlightenment values that rule American culture: pursuit of happiness, unrestricted freedom of choice, disdain of authority. The prosperity gospels, the gospels of liberation, and the comfortable sense of ‘what life is all about’ that fills the minds of most devout Christians in our circles are the result. How different is the gritty realization of James: ‘Friends of the world [are] enemies of God’ (James 4:4). And John: ‘If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him’ (2 John 2:15). Accordingly, when we speak of freedom from dependency on reputation and material wealth, we are not suggesting an easy triumphalism. Indeed, there will be times when we have no friends or wealth to be free from dependence upon. And that, of course, is precisely the point. In such a case we will not be disturbed. Life is hard in this world, and also for disciples of Jesus. In his ‘Commencement Address,’ as we should perhaps call John 14-16, Jesus tells his distressed friends plainly, ‘In the world [you] will have trouble.’ This is not denied but transcended when he adds, ‘Cheer up! I have overcome to the world’ (16:33). ‘Many are the afflictions of the righteous,’ the psalmist discovered long ago, ‘but the Lord delivers from them all’ (Ps. 34:19).” [236]