Living Hope

Philip Miller: What we see, what we savor, what we admire and adore and yearn after and long for and gaze upon and worship shapes the character of our inner life far more than we realize.

Larry McCarthy: Welcome to Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I’m Pastor Larry McCarthy and we’re so glad you’ve joined us today for this series through the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus, our Lord, cares about us. He really cares about our inner life, giving us new hearts. So, Pastor Philip, how’s that connected to what we gaze upon and what we actually look at?

Philip Miller: Jesus has a really fascinating phrase here that doesn’t translate really clearly into our day, but he says the eye is the lamp of the body. It’s this idea that your eye, what it looks at, is actually revealing something about your heart.

And what we fixate on, what we gaze upon and behold and long after, is actually shaping our souls and forming us in a certain kind of people because our eye is a reflection of our appetites and what really we’re treasuring deep down. So Jesus is going to talk to us about our eyes today and how they actually are directing the formation of our souls. It’s very fascinating.

Larry McCarthy: Stay tuned after the message, beloved, because Pastor Philip is going to speak to our quest to stay young and strong and wealthy. But now, let’s go to the pulpit of the Moody Church for part two of the sermon, Treasures in Heaven. Grab your Bibles. We’re in Matthew chapter six, today we look at verses 19 through 24.

Philip Miller: Jesus says in Matthew 16:26, "For what will it profit a man or woman if they gain the whole world and forfeit their souls?" But if you invest instead—instead of earthly things—in heavenly treasures, heavenly treasures are different. They’re durable, incorruptible, secure, lasting, resilient, strong, and enduring. If your heart is tethered to heavenly treasures, you get an entirely different trajectory. Your life can be unwavering and resilient and steadfast and forever.

If the treasure of our life isn't earthly but heavenly, if that’s where we find our significance, that we matter because God himself knows our name, because we’re children of God with an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade, that is kept in heaven for us forever. If that’s where we find our security, that we’re safe, we’re forever held in the loving arms of our Father who will never leave us and never forsake us, who has sealed us by the Holy Spirit and keeps us for his Son Jesus Christ for all time and eternity.

If that’s where we find our satisfaction, then we’re fulfilled because we’ve tasted and seen that the Lord is good, that in his presence is fullness of joy, at his right hand are pleasures forevermore. And even now, Jesus is preparing a place where we will forever be with the Lord in the presence of his ever-expanding joy, always inviting us further up and further in for all eternity. Friends, a heart tethered to that kind of treasure can weather all kinds of storms in life. It’s like ballast in the bottom of the boat that keeps you steady in the chaos of the waters around you, resilient, steadfast, hope-filled, and enduring.

Jesus says, "Choose your life’s treasure wisely," because your treasure is your trajectory. Your treasure is your trajectory. Those are the two treasures. Next, let’s look at the two eyes. Verse 22: "The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness."

Now, this is an ancient idiomatic expression and it simply does not translate very well into our modern-day setting. At first glance, it's really a bit confusing, but let’s see if I can shed some light on it. In first-century Judaism, the eye was considered something of a two-way window between the inner person and the outer world. So the eyes did two things. The first thing is the eyes let the light of the world on the outside in. You see with your eyes. You’re taking in reality. You’re drinking in the world as it really is so that you can navigate it.

If you have a healthy eye, you can see the light comes in and you can be sure-footed in life. You can act in wise ways because you see the light. But if your eye is bad, if it’s clouded or blinded, then you spend your life unable to see and you’re prone to stumbling around. So that’s one way the eye works. The other way is that the eyes also let the light of the inner person out. The eye reveals what’s going on inside someone. If you want to know if someone’s lying, where do you look? You look at their eyes, don't you?

If you want to know if someone is pleased, if they’re angry, worried, confused, or disappointed, you look at their eyes. Have you ever seen someone smile with their mouth but not with their eyes? The eye doesn’t lie. The eye shows what’s going on on the inside. Salespeople know to watch the eyes of their customers. What are they drawn to? What are they attracted by? What are they gazing on? What are they longing for? What are they desirous of? A good salesperson can tell what your heart wants by watching your eyes.

And the eyes can stir up the inside of us. What they attend to, what they linger on, what they gaze after. A healthy eye looks on the world with generous love and is therefore full of light. But a bad eye looks on the world with greed and lust and discontentment and is therefore full of darkness. The ancient Semitic peoples called this the evil eye. That’s the phrase exactly that Jesus is using here. It is the greedy eye, the lustful eye, the ravishing, wanting, desirous, selfish eye. It’s the eye that’s always out for whatever it can get.

Jesus is saying there are two ways to live in the world, two ways to see in the world. You can walk through life with an eye to take whatever you can get for yourself—money, sex, power, fame, stuff. If that’s what you’re fixated on, if that’s what your eye lingers on, if that’s what you’re staring at, your eye is actually bad. It’s greedy and selfish. It’s not to be trusted. You’re actually stumbling around in the darkness, tripping all over the place, and you’re ruining your life. All that darkness is messing you up on the inside because the darkness has got inside you.

It distorts your soul, deadens your spirit, and darkens your sight. You go through life living like an orphan, fending for yourself, living on your own, taking whatever you can get to survive. Or, you can walk through life like a child of God with an eye for what you can give to the world. Instead of looking to your own interests only, you can also look to the interests of others and you see the world as full of good gifts from your Father who loves you and loves to give good gifts to his kids.

With your eyes wide open to the realities of heaven and earth, your eye is healthy. Your whole being is full of light and you’re healthy and whole, illuminated on the inside, and you can live in a sure-footed way in reality because our beholding is our becoming. Our beholding is our becoming. Friends, what we see, what we savor, what we admire and adore and yearn after and long for and gaze upon and worship shapes the character of our inner life far more than we realize.

Some of us will remember the 2005 commencement address that David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College. It kind of went viral before viral was an actual thing. This is what he said in that commencement address: "In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there’s actually no such thing as atheism. There’s no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of God to worship is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."

"If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough. You will never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. Worship power and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, and you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out."

Friends, do you hear what he’s saying? He’s saying we can’t help but worship. We can’t help but live for something bigger than ourselves. We can’t help but keep our eyes from adoring something. But we do get to choose where we gaze. We do get to choose what we worship. And Jesus says, "Choose your life’s focus wisely," because your beholding is your becoming. Your beholding is your becoming.

Larry McCarthy: This is Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I’m Pastor Larry McCarthy and, before we jump into our discussion, this program only happens because of listeners like you who believe in this mission. And I want you to know that we don’t take you or your partnership for granted. As a thank you for your gift of any size today, we want to send you a resource. Now, to receive yours, simply go to livinghopeoffer.com or call us at 1-800-215-5001.

We’re so glad you’ve joined us today as we explore becoming what we behold. Pastor Philip, I know my heart and your heart, we want to help someone today. So let’s see if we can help them with a diagnostic evaluation of how do we know if we’re overly focused on something?

Philip Miller: Well, the first thing I think we need to realize is that we’re all watching someone, something. Our vision, our adoration is fixed on something. If it’s not fixed on God and his kingdom and his glory, it’s fixed on something else. And all of us, probably, are conflicted here a little bit. So just think of what we’re daydreaming about, what we’re staring at, and what we’re looking at all day long.

We might be filling our minds with the people who have the C-suite offices. They’re the successful ones, the people on the stage giving the business talk lecture, and we might be looking at them in admiration and thinking, "Oh man, maybe one day I could do that." And what that’s doing is it’s training your soul, your affections toward something. All of a sudden, without even meaning to, it’s starting to shift your life toward a sense of that’s what’s good, that’s what I ought to be living for.

Or maybe we’re constantly looking at the award shows and the beautiful people with the beautiful surgeries and the beautiful gowns. They’re just so perfect. They’re not fat, they’re not wrinkly, they’re just curated. And we just think, "That’s beauty. That’s where it’s at. If I could have that kind of a life and that kind of wealth and that kind of people admiring me, that’s real beauty." And all of a sudden, it starts to shift you. It shifts your body image, it shifts the way you think about yourself and what you think beauty looks like, and it starts molding you.

Or we’re online and we’re just looking at properties of great houses that have great lawns and great curb appeal and fancy dining rooms and all the appointments and we just think, "Man, can you imagine living there?" But it’s shaping our souls. It’s drawing us out. Or we’re on social media feeds and we’re looking for people who have big followings and big influence. Whatever it is, there’s a long list of things that we could say they captivate our attention.

And what we’re attending to and what we’re admiring and what we’re worshipping, in a sense—we’re worshipping this outcome, this kind of life, this kind of objective—it’s starting to shape us. It’s starting to influence us. Our eye is the gate between the world and our souls and it’s actually as we attend to these things, our souls are actually being conformed toward those kinds of things.

And they’re idols. They’re idols that are promising, "This is what’ll give you significance. This is what’ll get you security. This is what’ll satisfy you in life." If you just have all these things, if you could have this life, then you’d be happy and then you’d be safe and then you’d know you’re worthwhile. But those are promises only the gospel can ultimately fulfill in our lives. We’re made for God. We’re made to be secure in his love, to be satisfied in his presence, to know we’re significant because he makes us so.

So they’re rivals for our affections, you see. And I think we’ve got to recognize that’s what’s going on with our eyes. What we’re attending to, looking at constantly, what we impulsively run after—fancy car on the road, somebody’s sexy body when they go by—where our eyes go is showing us way more about our souls and the direction of our formation than we often realize.

Larry McCarthy: So this isn’t benign. This is really a warning that we’re issuing is that this continuing to gaze at the wrong things for the wrong reasons, wrong time, it’s not benign. It actually has an impact on how we look and deal with everything else, yes?

Philip Miller: Yeah, and it can send us down a really destructive path. When I live for beauty and I think that’s what I’ve got to be—the reality is we’re going to age. So when we live for beauty, we actually are setting ourselves up to fight the entire aging process every step of the way, as if it’s not real and it’s not actually bringing us closer to God and ultimately the resurrection and the new life and the new heavens and new earth. Getting old and dying is not anything to worry about, actually, if you can be raised and walk to the newness of life in the resurrection.

It’s actually progress toward the greatest beauty you can ever imagine. But if you hold on to your earthly beauty and make that an idol of your life, you’ll feel ugly and uglier every day of your life until you finally die a thousand deaths before you actually are entombed. So it’s actually killing us when we do this. Or if you worship being really strong and having it all together, everything’s going to atrophy on your way to being resurrected and having glory and strength forever.

If you worship wealth, in the end, you get to take none of it with you. It all is useless. I love how older people love to accumulate gold. It’s like a safety security thing. You know in heaven they just pave the ground with gold. The most valuable thing we can think of is pavement in the kingdom of heaven. You just build everything else on top of that. It’s worthless. That’s the point.

And so the reality is, if we build our kingdom here and now around this life, we can gain the whole world and lose our souls and that is dangerous and that’s destroying us from the inside out. It doesn’t even work. It’s never enough. And so Jesus is saying your eye needs a better beauty to behold, something more glorious to fixate upon.

Larry McCarthy: You had a wonderful quote that I’ve heard you reference from Rockefeller about how much money is enough.

Philip Miller: Yeah, one dollar more.

Larry McCarthy: One more. So you taught us that we’re going to worship something. We’re created to worship, we’re made to worship something, someone bigger than ourselves. But we get to choose now where we gaze. So how do we train our gaze to look at God?

Philip Miller: So it’s a whole new affection at the bottom of our souls. We can’t do it on our own. This is where we’ve got the Holy Spirit in our life, and he is teaching us to have different desires. Paul says the desires of the flesh lead down this path, but the desires of the spirit are different. The desires of the spirit are for the eternal, they’re for the Father, for the Son, for the spirit, that the triune God might give us more and more of his life.

And so he’s training our hearts on the inside to value, to treasure, to have affections for different things. And that then shifts our eyes. The gaze of our souls is no longer on all the things of earth but is actually fixated on the things of heaven. So how do we do that? Real practically, we’ve got to have our eyes in the word of God. We’ve got to be drinking in his word, his voice, letting the vision that the scriptures are casting for us of what real abundant life looks like and the kingdom of God and all the goodness and beauty of our heavenly Father and the wonder in face of Jesus Christ.

That we might gaze our hearts and souls upon him and be drawn in affection and love and begin to cherish and delight in who he is. Because here’s the thing, when the whole world is stripped away, we’re going to get more of him and that will be enough. We’re never going to miss the things we leave behind because we will be so delighted in all that we are receiving. And we get to do that right here, right now.

We get to slowly untether the affections of our hearts from the things of earth for the things of heaven, for the presence and glory of God, which is where we’re going to one day spend all of our time in eternity. We might as well begin delighting in it now. And so the word of God right there, speaking back to him in prayer and worship, confessing the wonders of who he is, cherishing it, even telling God, "God, I don’t desire you nearly enough. My heart is entranced with all the wrong things. I’m confessing that. Teach me to love you more, to want you more. I want to want you. Help me want you. Cultivate the eternal appetites of all that you are for me. I want to see and delight in you."

That’s the prayer. And I think the more we can do that and train our eyes and fix our eyes on Jesus, the more his beauty will captivate our souls. And then we’re going to find ourselves starting to change ourselves to be conformed to his image as we align ourselves to the beauty of the kingdom of heaven.

Larry McCarthy: Spend time in your word, pray, and don’t forsake the assembling of yourselves together, beloved. Be around other like-minded people. When we fix our gaze on Christ, the attractions of this world, they simply lose their power over us. That’s how we truly become kingdom-minded in a culture that is constantly begging for our attention. To encourage you to keep your eyes fixed on Jesus, request Pastor Erwin Lutzer’s book, Christ Among Other Gods.

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You could also write to us at Moody Church Media, 1635 North LaSalle Drive, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. When our vision is clear, we can see exactly why Jesus deserves our full and total allegiance. And next time, we’ll talk about the importance of knowing where our true loyalties lie. Thanks for joining us for Living Hope, where you’ll always find gospel truth for the journey of a lifetime. Living Hope is a production of Moody Church Media and is sponsored by the Moody Church.