Quiet Righteousness

Great to be back with our church family today. Becca and I got to go up to Lexington last week to see some of our friends, and we worshiped at the Old Spot. And it was really nice to be missed by them, really nice to hug the necks of some folks that we love and have had three-year relationships with. But, man, I tell you, there’s nothing like being back home. And just thank you so much. Our family in particular feels really loved on by you guys yesterday with the baby shower. You know, there’s no third child ever gets a baby shower, so for us getting that, you know, it’s a lot of fun. So thank you so much.

Like we’ve been doing, we’re going to open up this time of our service with some prayer. So I just ask you to grab a neighbor beside you. We want to pray for two things that our church is doing but that other churches are doing as well. So we have Vacation Bible School coming up, and that’s a huge outreach that we’re going to offer to our community. So for all of the volunteers that are going to serve with that, I just want to say thank you. As well, we’re going to send our students with Carter to Infuge. A lot of churches in our area are doing something for the kiddos and for the students. So we want to pray for our church but also for the other churches. So grab a neighbor. We’ll pray for a few moments asking the Lord to bless both what we’re going to do here but also what other local churches are going to do. And I’ll call us to attention here in a second. All right, you go ahead and pray.

Father, I just want to thank You so much for all the hard work that’s been put into Vacation Bible School already. Lord, all the planning, decisions that have been made. Father, the recruitment of volunteers, the training. God, I just want to thank You for it. Lord, not just here at Sauldam but other churches too, like Harbor City over on 17, for Calvary here in town. Father, I just, I beg God. I am begging that this would be a summer that the spiritual trajectory of the entire low country would change because children are hearing the gospel and hearing Your word. Lord, we know from Your word that when the Bible goes out, Father, it always accomplishes the fruit and the produce and the product that You have for it. So, Father, I pray this summer as Your word is sown into the hearts of kids and students in our community, Father, that it would produce a return on that spiritual investment that would go into eternity. Please.

Lord, I pray for Carter and for Al and for Becca that You would prepare them to take our students up to Infuge. Father, I pray that You would prepare them to be able to capitalize on the conversations that will happen in the car, that will happen after the worship at nights, that will happen on job sites. Father, I pray that You would please prepare the hearts and the minds of our middle and high schoolers that are going to go with them. Lord, that they would be fertile soil, God, for Your word, truth. Lord, pray for the churches of our area that are doing something similar, God, sending their middle and high schoolers off to a trip this summer. Lord, that You would give them a return on that investment. Father, that when the fall comes back around and our students are interacting with their students at school, Lord, that there be an evangelistic edge to their conversation. Lord, that seventh graders and twelfth graders, God, would be reorienting their conversations and their priorities in school. Father, please, so that they would see their fellow classmates and even their teachers, God, as a mission field, not just a person to tolerate.

Lord, I pray for myself right now as we open Your word. God, that You would protect my words, that I would only speak what You have for me. God, that the truth of this would sink deep down into our souls and change us a little bit. Father, whatever is not of You, like chaff, it would just blow away, please. Lord, we love You. We give our lives to You. We’re here for You. And we are asking for You to speak with us now. Amen.

Well, thank you so much. If this is a first time with you, I just want to say welcome. We do some variation of this every Sunday morning. And we are really grateful.

that you would spend some of your time with us, especially on Father’s Day. So I want to take you guys back about 15 years to another father. Some of y’all know the story of Tony Dungy. Tony Dungy, he was a bit of an undersized athlete coming out of college. He was a football player, Division I. Played for about six years with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Did all right. I think he made a Pro Bowl or two, but not a very illustrious or very long football career as a player. Immediately goes into coaching and ends up becoming the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. At that point, they were an expansion team just a couple years into playing. And they were essentially the laughingstock of the league.

Tony Dungy held to a couple of really simple principles as a football coach. And he would not move off those things whatsoever. He said, these are our convictions. This is what we’re going to play by. We’re not going to try to match anybody else’s approach to the game. We’re just going to do what we do. And he took that mindset into everything he did. He was a really faithful dad. And most notably, he was a faithful Christian. He was a servant of the Lord. And he would say that football was his job, but following Jesus was His life. And he was just going to use whatever job he had to follow Jesus well publicly.

He’s with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. They make it into the playoffs a couple times, but they never make it to the Super Bowl. And he gets fired. He’s getting his stuff together at midnight, one Tuesday, a rainy night in Tampa Bay. He’s wondering, Lord, are You taking me out of coaching? Are You taking me out of this game that I love so I can invest in these ministries You’ve got me in? And he gets a phone call from the Indianapolis Colts, and they hire him to be their head coach. And he has this first meeting with his players and his staff, and he says, we do what we do. We’re just going to do it better than anybody else. We’re going to prioritize the normal things. We’re going to be quiet about it. We’re going to be secret about it. We’re just going to be really good at being normal, and we’re going to trust that that’s going to take us all the way.

Eventually, it does. Eventually, he does get all the way to the Super Bowl. And by God’s grace, He wins the thing. And people are asking him, how did you recover from being fired at Tampa? How did you tweak your approach? How did you change your system? He said, no, no, no, no. We do what we do. See, Tony Dungy, the greatest thing about him as a coach, as a dad, and as a believer is that he just held to some quiet principles. He said, you’re not going to shake me. This is who I am, and we’re going to go forward like this.

Jesus Christ has a very similar message for us this morning. If you have your Bibles, you go ahead and open up to Matthew chapter 6. I’ll be there in a second to join you. You see, right now we are in a series called The Life You’ve Always Wanted. I’m convinced everybody in this room wants a life that is filled with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and all the rest. There’s not a single person that you’ll ever interact with downtown or on your farm or at school or at work that would say, I would actually like to be less patient. Or I would prefer to have a little less grace for folks, actually. You’re, man, I am just too self-controlled. No one will ever tell you that. In fact, we are yearning for more. We’re reading self-help books. We’re making New Year’s resolutions that are broken by February. Anybody else have a treadmill you’re not using that you bought back in December? I’ve got two honest people and a room full of liars. Okay. We all would like to grow in these things. But the path forward to that type of life is not to look here. Jesus tells us where to look, and that’s what we’re going to examine this morning.

Last week, Al covered joy. He covered celebration. He covered, hey, look to Jesus. That is the source and the fountain of your joy. If you are looking to Him, you will become a joyful person. This morning, I’m going to talk about the practice of secrecy. The practice of secrecy. I believe for you to Have the life that you want, for you to have a life of joy, peace, patience, and all the rest, you’ve got to embrace this truth. If you’re a note taker, this is where you’re writing. Rewards the quietly righteous. For us to move forward, we got to believe, we got to embrace, we got to submit ourselves on this. God rewards quietly righteous. You see, this is Jesus’s message in the Sermon on the Mount. Hopefully you’re already there. I’m going to be reading out of chapter six of Matthew. Matthew chapter six is where I’m at.

The Sermon on the Mount is a sort of summation of Jesus’s teaching. A lot of commentators and scholars believe that this is a sermon or a message that He would have taught pretty much everywhere He would go. This might be His greatest hits and He would lay this out. And if people were sensitive to it, then you’d get the deep cuts from Jesus. You got to start off with these greatest hits though, to see what Jesus is doing.

You see, in the spring of this year, we did a sermon series called The King and His Kingdom. Jesus came to establish something different than the world had ever seen. And the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, 6, and 7, is the core of what Jesus was starting. And this morning, we’re going to turn to the very middle of that core. Matthew chapter six, read verse one. It says this, “Be careful, be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. Otherwise, you will have no reward with your Father in heaven.”

Immediately, Jesus takes this posture of warning. A posture of warning because He knows that we need to be warned. And He says, don’t practice your righteousness to be seen. Now, I got to explain something. That word righteousness is incredibly rich. And we can’t move forward today until you have a better grasp of that word is. It’s based off this Greek word, dikaiosim. That’s an easy one to say. Just say it with me. Dikaiosim. Okay. Dikaiosim is righteousness, both as a position and as a function.

It’s kind of like whenever in that video, the dad tossed the son the keys to the car. He said, “Hey, get behind the driver’s seat.” That’s a position. But actually cranking the thing up and pressing the gas and going down the street, that’s a function. In Christ, we have received a position of righteousness. And out of that position, we function. Here’s what I mean. In Romans chapter three, Paul says this, “But now, apart from the Old Testament law, the dikaiosim of God has been revealed, attested to by the law. The dikaiosim of God is through faith in Jesus to all who believe. There’s no distinction for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And they are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that’s in Christ Jesus.”

Dikaiosim, it’s a position that we receive by faith. It’s a thing that’s given to you. And you respond with dikaiosim too. Like in 2 Timothy chapter three, 16 and 17, “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in dikaiosim. So that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” Righteousness, it’s something God gives you and it’s something you give back to God.

Think about it this way. Because of God, I am made dikaiosim. And because of God, I can act with dikaiosim. All right, we tracking? Okay. So Jesus says, be careful not to practice your dikaiosim in front of others to be seen by them. Otherwise, you got no reward. No, you got no reward. See, God makes us righteous through the gospel. And then we respond with righteous living as an offering back to Him.

Our relationship with God is meant to be like a tide in and out, in and out. God ebbs toward us. We flow back toward Him. He dikaiosim toward us. We dikaiosim back to Him. The gospel is God’s power to save, but it’s also God’s fuel for your good works. Do not dikaiosim to be seen by people. It’s from God anyways. You see, for Jesus, trying to be seen being right, wrong.

Think with me here. How many tithes and offerings and financial gifts are offered in churches across America by people that just want to be seen giving money? How many prayers are prayed for saints and sinners alike for others to be able to say, “Man, that guy, he’s got a real eloquent prayers.” Or even in this passage, we’re going to read about fasting.

Man, how many fasted meals are done for the sake of people knowing that I’m fasting? Jesus says, don’t dikaiosim to be seen. You’re already dikaiosim by God. You don’t need that from people. Beware. Don’t practice your righteousness to be seen by people.

Then Jesus jumps into three ways that people act righteously. You see, Jesus, He’s drawing on His Old Testament heritage here. There’s three acts of functional righteousness in Matthew chapter 6. And these were attested to pretty heavily by Jewish culture and by the Old Testament. I’m going to read a passage out of some Jewish scripture. For us as Christians, we do not hold this as scripture what I’m about to read. But this will inform what we’re about to read. This is out of the book of Tobit. It says this, prayer with fasting is good, but better than both is almsgiving with righteousness. A little with righteousness is better than wealth with wrongdoing. It’s better to give alms them to lay up gold. For almsgiving saves from death and purges away every sin. For those who give alms will enjoy a full life. But those who commit sin and do wrong are their own worst enemies.

So in Matthew chapter 6, Jesus talks about those three things, prayer, almsgiving, and fasting. At least in this order, He starts off with almsgiving or what we could call generosity. That’s the first act of dikaiosine functional righteousness that Jesus addresses. And for the little ones in the room, generosity is not a new word. I have had the distinct pleasure of serving with Sauldam Kids on Wednesday nights the past couple weeks. And man, I miss the adults in Bible study. Don’t get me wrong. I’m having a lot of fun with the kids though. It’s a great time. Wednesday nights, the kids are prioritizing learning spiritual disciplines. So at this point, they’ve had weeks of learning what’s a spiritual discipline. And we’ve just been talking about generosity. So for the kids, they understand generosity, benevolence, almsgiving, it’s giving to others to meet their needs. The kids in the church, the ones back there in the hallway, they already got that. They’ve got a master’s degree in that. So we’re just going to kind of come up to their level this morning.

Read with me. This is Matthew 6, 2 through 4. This is what Jesus has to say about generosity. Whenever you give to the poor, don’t sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets to be applauded by people. Nah, truly, I tell you, they have their reward. But when you give to the poor, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing so that your giving may be secret. And your Father who sees in secret, He will reward you.

Some more cultural context for us here. Ancient Israel did not have a formal governmental system for welfare, which means if you’re down on your luck, you got a major injury come your way. You’re not settling a lawsuit in order to get recuperated. There’s no system of taxing the wealthy to provide for the poor and the down and out. No, if you were injured or if you were needy in ancient Israel, your livelihood and your eating, it came from the generosity of people passing by, giving you cash or giving you some food. And we’ve all known what it’s like to be in help, right? We’ve all known what it’s like to need some help from somebody else.

I could think back to Mother’s Day of 2011. Mother’s Day of 2011. I have just wrapped up a good time with my mom up in Columbia. I’m driving back down. This is 2015. Mother’s Day 2015. Wrapped up a good time with my mom up in Columbia. I’m racing down I-26. I need to get back to Tanger Outlets to work a shift at Bonefish Grill. Mother’s Day, if you do not know, is the biggest holiday for the restaurant industry because every son is trying to take out his mama for dinner. And Bonefish Grill, man, we are raking it in. We’re just creating new tables like on the floor so that we could fit all the people. And they were happy to sit there. It doesn’t matter. We didn’t put people on the floor. But anyways, I am between the I-95 exit and my, and probably Goose Creek. I’m, I guess, about 185, something like that. And man, my car just dies. Yeah, it just dies. I had a Honda Civic that was older than I was at that point, which, as you could tell, is not that old. And it just died for whatever reason.

It just kaput on the side of the interstate. I’m calling my boss. I’m calling Becca. And then I call my older brother and say, “Hey, man, I’m not necessarily trying to make it to work, but I actually have to get to my apartment.” And my boss calls back and says, “You are trying to get to work, by the way.” So my brother drops me off at Bonefish Grill. He helps me get my car towed.

I was in desperate need of help. If there wasn’t somebody that was going to give me a handout, there wasn’t somebody that was going to give me a little bit of cash to take care of my car, what am I going to do? We have all been in situations like that.

So when Jesus says, “Whenever you give to the poor, man, don’t toot your horn. Don’t sound the trumpet. Don’t make people applaud you for it. Don’t give so that people can give you credit for it.” See, hypocritical generosity, per Jesus, is generosity done for the sake of gaining attention. Jesus would want us to have wisdom in how we give to the poor. But the indictment here is on the heart of the giver, not the actions of the receiver. Jesus does not talk about what somebody might do once they receive your help. He just says, “Whenever you help, this is how you do it.”

Jesus addresses that generosity and He says, “Be quietly righteous.” And then He shifts in verse five and He says, “Be quietly righteous.” Read with me verse five through eight. “Whenever you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites because they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by people. Truly, I tell you, they got their reward. But when you pray, go into your private room, shut your door, man, pray to Your Father who’s in secret, and Your Father who sees in secret, He will reward you. When you pray, don’t babble like the Gentiles since they imagine they’ll be heard for their many words. No, don’t be like them because Your Father knows the things you need before you ask Him.”

Jesus talks about prayer. He lumps it with generosity. He says, “You need to be quietly righteous.” When He says that word babble, it takes you back to that story in the Old Testament where all the people were gathered together. They’re talking about how great they were. And they said, “How can we display our own greatness and glory and strength and ingenuity? Oh, we got it. We’ll make a tower that goes all the way up to heaven. We will make this monument to our greatness.” And the text is hilarious. They finished the tower, which supposedly reaches up to heaven. And it describes God as having to stoop down from heaven to even be able to see the thing. It’s like looking at an ant from on top of the third story of your house. And God takes that monument to their greatness and He smashes it by confusing their language. That place is called Babel because all people could understand was Babel, Babel, Babel, Babel. The languages had been confused.

And Jesus says, “We do the same thing when we try to make ourselves look great and mighty and holy by just babbling on in prayer.” We do the same thing. We try to make ourselves look so good and so big and so powerful. And God’s like listening. He’s like, “What are they even saying?” Nevertheless, whenever you do it on the street corner, you do it at church. The issue for Jesus is not the method. No, I think it’s the motive. The motive to be heard by people for how good we can pray. Or the motive of distrusting God to not know what we need when we pray. That’s Jesus’ address here.

I don’t think Jesus is trying to rule out public prayer, repeated prayer, or long prayer. No, Jesus is outlawing public, repeated, and long prayers for the sake of being heard, for our spirituality. That’s what He’s talking about. I mean, think about it. We are a church sitting here on a main thoroughfare. Our community expects us to be praying. It is not wrong for us to pray here. In fact, it’s incredibly encouraging when we begin this portion of our service and I get to listen to y’all praying with one another. It’s incredibly encouraging at 9:30 on Sunday mornings when a couple folks and I gather in the office and we’re just praying for Sunday school and the services and other stuff going on at church. It’s incredibly encouraging and sharpening when I get to sit with one of y’all at a lunch table and we just get to pray for the food and I get to hear how you relate to the Lord. Jesus is not saying never be heard praying. What Jesus is saying is don’t try to be heard praying. Don’t babble on while you’re praying. He even gives us a model prayer. I’m not going to read this in its entirety because this will be the passage for another sermon later in our series. But Jesus does say in verse 9 of Matthew 6, look at it again in your hands. Therefore, pray like this. Our Father in heaven, your name be honored as holy. That type of prayer goes against the type of prayer that wants to be heard for the sake of our own spirituality. If we can honestly begin our prayers by saying, Lord, may you be in first place. Lord, your name is holy. Lord, you are the greatest. That’s the type of prayer that God wants to hear from us.

So Jesus addresses generosity. He addresses prayer. He also addresses fasting. Verse 16. Read with me. Whenever you fast, don’t be gloomy like the hypocrites. Nah, they disfigure their faces so that their fasting is obvious to people. Truly, I tell you, they have their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head, wash your face so that your fasting isn’t obvious to others, but to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. He will. If generosity is gaining praise by providing for others, and fasting then will be gaining praise by denying ourselves. And Jesus is saying, when you fast, don’t be gloomy and unattractive. Fasting is already hard, and our flesh naturally wants credit for it. There is no more difficult spiritual discipline for me, a ravenous eater, than going without food. I will just tell you, that is the hardest thing in the world for me to do. And when I fast, I want you to know it. Because I want you to give me credit for it. I want you to be able to give me a sly wink, you know, because you’re recognizing, oh, Jeremy, you must be a little hangry. Oh, I mean, spiritual, okay. But trying to convince others of the difficulty of our own spirituality only points to our own glory, which is fleeting and wrong. It’s not the decaio scene that God wants. God wants cheerful fasters, not folks that are pointing at ourselves.

He says, be quietly righteous. Be generous and pray and fast in a way that it meets people’s needs and it touches heaven, and it brings no credit to you whatsoever. John Ortberg, he’s a pastor and author. He’s the one that wrote the book, The Life You’ve Always Wanted. And he mentioned some signs that we can see in our lives when we are not quietly righteous. He says, first, you will have approval bondage. You will want others to like you, to respect you, and to defer to you. You will want to be approved of because of your spirituality, because you’re praying and fasting and being generous. You want to be liked. Next, from approval bondage, you go to comparison. Naturally, you would begin to judge others. Are they fasting like me? Are they generous like me? Are they praying like me? Are they spiritual like me? You go from comparison down to self-deception. Because then you start to say, man, look at all that I’m doing for the Lord. I am big stuff. We naturally deceive ourselves if we’re going to compare ourselves to others according to these things. Finally, you get down to resentment because you’re going to be angry with others for not agreeing with your own self-appraisal. It starts at wanting to be seen, being right, and it ends at judging others for not agreeing with you. And if you don’t believe me, then start doing some of these things and don’t tell anybody about it. And watch how your flesh wants to respond. When I say flesh, what I’m talking about there is the natural desires of your heart that hasn’t been captivated by the Holy Spirit yet. And I stand in front of you as somebody that is deeply at war with his own flesh. John Owen, he’s a pastor during the Puritan period. He said, you must be killing sin or it will be killing you. And I could tell in every season of my life where I’ve tried to make a consistent and concerted effort into intimacy with the Lord, what happens here naturally gets real ugly. It’s in the moments that I take a back seat and I get real casual in my relationship with Jesus. That’s when life starts to seem a little easy until it gets all out of whack and I’ve hit the ditch. Jesus is saying you guard against that by being quietly righteous.

So as I’m starting to wrap up, I’ve got four big takeaways and applications for you. If you’re a note taker, this is the first one. There is a right and a wrong way to do the right things. You see, Jesus uses the word “whenever” seven times in this passage. Seven times: whenever you give, whenever you give, whenever you pray, whenever you pray, whenever you fast, whenever you fast, whenever you fast. Jesus assumes we will be generous. He assumes we will pray and He assumes that we will fast. That’s normal for Jesus. The difference is in how we do those things. It’s not if you might do those things as a follower of Jesus. He’s saying, no, if you’re my follower, you’re going to be doing these things. It’s how. Secrecy is the right way to do the right thing. It’s like I said at the very beginning. God rewards the quietly righteous.

So if you want to grow in your quiet righteousness this week, I’ve got three invitations for you. I want you to give 1% of your budget this week to meet somebody else’s needs and don’t tell them you did it. Find the quietest, most secretive way you could do it. Give 1% of what you make this week to help take care of the financial or the social burden of somebody else. You might be a little strapped on cash, but you got some time. Man, call a mom in this church or in your neighborhood and say, “Hey, can I just watch your kids for two hours so that you can go take a walk or go on a date with your spouse?” Or call a neighbor and say, “Hey, I’ve noticed the grass getting a little tall, a little harder for you to move around. Can I just come and mow that for you?” Give 1% of something to meet somebody else’s needs. That’s my first invitation toward quiet righteousness.

My second one is prayer. Give each morning this week to pray for somebody that’s not in your family and don’t tell them you did it. Choose somebody in your neighborhood or somebody here at church and just spend a moment while your coffee is brewing and just say a quick prayer. “Lord, would You bless so-and-so? Lord, would You take care of so-and-so? Lord, thank You for so-and-so.” Spend every morning this week praying for that person and don’t tell them you ever did it.

My third invitation, maybe the hardest for you, certainly the hardest for me. Give up one lunch this week. Give up one lunch. And instead of eating, spend that time reading your Bible, praying, and listen to some worship music. And then don’t tell anybody you did it. And try as hard as you can to act normal at 5, asking God to give you grace until dinner at 6 or whenever it is you eat. Just give, give, give. That is the quiet righteousness God wants us to have.

So there’s a right way and there’s a wrong way to do the right things.

The second overarching takeaway is this. God wants to bless you with rewards, not burden you with rules. God’s heart is after blessing you. Seven times, Jesus said “whenever.” He assumes we’re doing some stuff. Seven times, Jesus says the Father will reward you. Three times, Jesus says the Father who is in secret will reward you. God’s posture is not like a judge sitting on a throne waiting to dole out a conviction against us. No, Jesus Himself said, “I didn’t come to condemn the world. The world’s already condemned. I came to what, church?” Save it. Jesus came to seek and to save the lost. There’s a day coming. There is a day coming where Jesus will return and He will judge this world. Because He is the man that God has appointed to do that. Make no mistake. But in the here and the now, for anybody that calls on the name of Christ, God’s posture is like a daddy just looking to bless his kids with rewards. That’s God’s posture. He’s not sitting back waiting for you to do enough for Him to like you. No, God is sitting on the edge of His seat just yearning to give you something like a good dad on a birthday or on a Christmas morning. That is God’s posture with you. That’s what He wants to do. Or Jesus is a liar. God’s posture is wanting to bless you. And these ways, these functions of giving and praying and fasting, these are tools for you to enjoy Jesus. He did not say you must be generous in order to get into heaven. He did not say you must fast in order to please me. He did not say you’ve got to pray five times a day in order to work up enough dikaiosine to merit yourself into eternal life. No, He said, if you are my follower, do these things and God will bless you for it.

The question is, do you want a blessed life? Be honest. Do you want rewards? You play to win the game, right? That’s what you do. You want rewards. If you don’t want rewards, then how do you relate to a good dad that’s just looking to bless you with them?

John Ortberg, in that book, he says this, Jesus said, there is a reward that we forfeit when we neglect the practice of secrecy. Oh, quoting Jesus, beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them. For then you’ve got no reward from your Father in heaven. Of course, exactly what Jesus had in mind with that reward, we can only guess. Surely part of it consists of one day hearing that heavenly, well done, good and faithful servant, greater, sorry, that the best praise on earth only dimly foreshadows. But I believe there also is a present aspect of God’s reward now, which is lost when we do good deeds to impress others. Acts of servanthood, prayer, generosity, fasting, done to impress others, lose their intrinsic power to help us enter the life of the kingdom.

God wants to bless you with rewards. So third then, the third main takeaway is that man’s rewards don’t compare with the Father’s rewards. No person can do for you what God can do for you because no person is God. As high as God is, we are low. God is higher than us. His ways are higher than us. His wisdom is higher than us. As far as the east is from the west, God’s different than us. And because of that, the rewards that our heavenly Father can give us are so much greater than the fleeting pleasures of the seesaw existence. The strength of trying to please people. If you’re anything like me and you want people to like you, life is constantly like this. And you look like a monkey. Because you’re trying to please people and you’re riding high. And then you realize you disappointed somebody and you’re real low. And you just keep doing this all day. And this just looks real goofy.

God says, I hear, I am here to bless you. You got to trust in me. And you got to give me the greatest weight in your life. Motivation is the issue here. Will we be content with God’s rewards? Or do we need the little dopamine hit? People liking us until it’s gone. And then we try to drum up some energy to do something else. And we get it a little bit. And then it’s gone. And then we do it again. And we think, oh man, we’ve got it this time. The applause is sustained this time. And then it’s God’s rewards are greater than man’s rewards.

So then finally, and this is the biggest one. We act righteously because we are sons and daughters of God. Not to become sons and daughters of God. Jesus speaks of God as a Father. We are simply functioning as His children. You see, Jesus came to initiate something totally different. The Old Testament discusses God. I say different. Jesus came to initiate a completion, not something totally different. The Old Testament speaks of God as a judge of the nations, as a deliverer for Israel, as a master of His people, but never as a Father. Jesus came and said, the relationship that I have with the Father, I offer to you too, so that you can relate to God the way I do.

Even in the Lord’s prayer in the upper room in John 17, Jesus prays, Lord, may their unity be like the unity you and I have, that they would be one like you and I are one. Jesus, in the gospel, in the good news of His arrival and His payment of your sin, is inviting you into an intimacy with God that is new in the Bible, but is completed according to what was being promised. So you then don’t pray, you don’t be generous, and you don’t fast in order to become a son or daughter of God. You do those things because you’ve been given a position of it. This world will tell you, do, do, do, earn, earn, earn, work, work, work. Not that way with the gospel. The gospel is this incredible announcement of God’s eternal love for you. Love that is unchanging. Love that is unending. Love that is unconquerable. Love that would send the Son of God Himself into the grave on your behalf, so that you, though an enemy and a rebel against the holy judge, can now become a child of His sitting on His knee.

My children don’t have to do anything to be called a Simmons. They don’t have to earn their way into it. They don’t have to be like me. They don’t have to be like Becca. When our third child comes, it’s going to be born a Simmons. And I’m going to love that child no matter what they do. Just like you love your children no matter what they do to you. They don’t have to earn the right to become your son or daughter. How much more with our heavenly Father?

Jesus, throughout this text, is saying, your father, your father, your father. Some of us, let’s be frank, did not grow up with the best earthly dads. On Father’s Day, I think for most of us, it’s a really sweet day. Because we get to post on Facebook or Instagram about all the great things that our dad did for us. We get to sit around a grill later, talking about the funny moments, the advice that our dads gave us. So we get to think about the faithfulness of our dad’s love and showing up.

For some of us in the room, Father’s Day is really hard. We just didn’t have stellar dads. The offer of the gospel is that whether your dad on earth was good or bad, you can have a perfect father in heaven that loves you unconditionally now and forever.

Which means for the dads in the room, we will fail our families. Sometimes we’ll get it right. Sometimes we’ll be rock star dads. Most of the time, our track record’s a little like this, though. Any honest dads in the room with me? Anybody wish they could just kind of get this fatherhood thing right and be done struggling with our patience or our tempers or our patience? God never struggles with those things. And He loves the fool out of you. God’s wild about you.

I would not give any of my three children for your life. Be honest, I would not. They are too precious to me and I am too limited as a dad and as a man. The God of the universe gave His son willingly for you so that He could have you in His family. He adopted you. He calls you by name so that you get to call Him daddy. That is a wild dynamic that ought to transform everything about your life as a dad or your life as a woman. It doesn’t matter who you are in the room at this point. God is wild about you.

I want to close our service thinking about something. And I’ve got an invitation to all the men in the room. Some of us are blessed to be earthly dads. Some of us don’t have that opportunity yet or weren’t given that opportunity. We all have a role as men in society to be father to somebody. Whether that’s your biological child or that’s the young kid down the street or that’s a younger co-worker of yours, you have the opportunity to be like a dad to somebody.

And if you’re like me, you want to do a good job. You want to have your fatherhood be redeemed. You want to, at the end of your day, be able to put your head down and say, Lord, I trusted You with today. I may not have gotten a gold medal, but I showed up to the race.

Here’s the offer I have for you. Here’s my invitation. I don’t have a physical gift. I want to give you something else. I want to give you a blessing. If you’re a man in the room and you want your fatherhood, biological or otherwise, to be blessed by the Lord, I want you to come and just join me here at the front. Mary Lou’s going to play a little music. I’m going to pray for you. And I’m going to read a blessing out of God’s word over your life. If you want this, please come join me.