Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 196th episode. In this episode we’re going to continue our study of the book of Matthew. We are in chapter 6. The theme of this chapter is Jesus warning His disciples against the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. In the previous episodes we discussed giving to the needy, the Lord’s prayer, and the importance of forgiving others. Jesus warned his followers to resist the temptation of using charitable action to garner praise for themselves — a practice common among the religious leaders. He also gave them a template for prayer which mimicked the Ten Commandments in its priorities and taught them to honor God from a posture of humility. In the previous episode we explained how the Lord’s prayer is an excellent model for both public worship and private devotion.
In this episode we’re going to look at fasting. What is the proper way to fast? What are the dangers of fasting? We’re also going to unpack why you cannot serve both God and money. Let’s begin our study with verses 16-18:
Mat 6:16 “Whenever you fast, do not put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites do, for they neglect their appearance so that they will be noticed by men when they are fasting. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.
Mat 6:17 “But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face
Mat 6:18 so that your fasting will not be noticed by men, but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.
Fasting as a discipline was at least considered normal if not expected among the disciples of Christ. But it wasn’t the same kind of duty as giving to the poor or praying to God, rather it was more of a practice which helped facilitate those greater works. Fasting is a spiritual discipline which helps reorient your priorities and bring you into alignment with God. You should not neglect it, but fasting is not an end-goal in and of itself. When Christians fast today, they often identify some specific thing which tends to compete with God for their attention and they voluntarily give that thing up for a specific amount of time. A common time for a person to fast is while they are in mourning for some kind of loss.
The disciples of Christ were not given specific times or frequencies for fasting. Fasting was treated more like a free will offering and up to the discretion of the individual. The Pharisees fasted twice per week, and the frequency wasn’t the reason Jesus condemned them for it, the reason He condemned them was because they boasted about the frequency. Fasting was a source of pride for the Pharisees when it should have been a cause of humility. Fasting makes us humble because we willingly acknowledge that no matter how mature we are in the faith, we are not entitled to our daily bread and it is only God’s grace which provides it.
Fasting is meant to curb the desires of the flesh which is why overcoming any kind of addiction always involves decreasing or eliminating use of the object of your addiction. The apostle Paul fasted often because he understood the importance of keeping the lusts of his flesh subject to the desires of his spirit. Jesus told His disciples that if they fast after the manner of the hypocrites then they will lose their reward for it. This loss would be devastating, especially if the fast in question was exceptionally challenging. If you give up ice cream for 30 days and then boast about it, you’ve rendered the entire practice worthless and in the final analysis all you’ve accomplished is depriving yourself of ice cream for 30 days.
In point of fact, Jesus instructs His followers to take active measures to ensure that others don’t even suspect you’re fasting. During your fast you’re not to go around in a state of depression or sadness because of the fast. You’ve all met someone who is constantly gloomy in their efforts to draw attention to the challenges of their own life. That’s what Jesus is talking about here. He’s telling you to take extra care of yourself and make sure you look presentable so as not to reveal your fast to others. Taking these steps will help ensure your fast remains between you and God which is where it’s supposed to be. God desires a humble heart and so you always have to watch yourself to make sure you aren’t trying to put your own humility on display for others to marvel at.
It’s true the Pharisees and the religious elite had some mastery over their own lust and pleasures. That’s why they were able to do things like fasting to begin with. But this mastery didn’t matter because they allowed it to foster pride in their spirits. If lust is a sensual wickedness, pride is a spiritual wickedness. Proclaiming their fast in the streets was yet another way the Pharisees sought for others to view them as devout men who endured self-flagellation for the faith. The praise and the applause of others is the final cash value of their reward because God disregards their offering since it is made on false pretenses.
Many Christians understand that pride is bad and humility is good. But sin tends to be much sneakier than these basic one-to-one understandings. If you’re not careful you can actually become proud of your own humiliation. If you put your own humiliation on display so that others might praise you for it — then what you’re actually doing is exercising pride. This is why Christ emphasizes privacy as a quality of humility. He knows it’s human nature to act differently in public than we do in private. He knows we desire the approval of others so much we are tempted to forego the approval of God to get it. These pressures, temptations, and bad motivations are nullified when our spiritual disciplines are made private.
Jesus is not specific on how often a person should fast and this means He leaves it up to the wisdom of the Spirit of God in your individual circumstance. The Holy Spirit will convict you when the time is right for a fast. Jesus also doesn’t hedge against the reality of the fast and the suffering of it. A fast is not pleasant. Intentionally denying yourself pleasure to further discipline your spirit can be very difficult. Rather than ameliorate the difficulty of it, Christ simply tells us to conceal the difficulty and resist letting other people see it.
Psalm 35 teaches that fasting is the humbling of the soul. It takes a great measure of faith to privately conduct a fast while maintaining that God both sees in secret and will reward in the open. One of the specific visions of Heaven given in scripture is the Marriage Supper of the Lamb which is a great feast and celebration of the consummation of Christ’s union with the Church. We fast in this life because we are looking forward to the everlasting providence of the life to come when we experience eternal joy in the presence of Jesus. Let’s read verses 19-24:
Mat 6:19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.
Mat 6:20 “But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal;
Mat 6:21 for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Mat 6:22 “The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light.
Mat 6:23 “But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
Mat 6:24 “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
Coveting the praise of men is a feature of worldly-mindedness, but so is coveting the wealth of this world. One of the perspectives which drives worldly-mindedness is the sin of choosing this temporal world as your reward. If you’re willing to displease God in order to gain an advantage in this life, then you’re exchanging eternity for the present moment and you’ve adopted a worldly mind. Human beings are designed to treasure things. If you’re a person then you have someone or something which you treasure above all else. This is not by accident. Jesus does not seek to deprive you of your faculty for treasure, rather He seeks to guide you into treasuring the correct things.
Part of the reason you’re designed with a hierarchy of values is so that you can worship. Whatever occupies the top spot in your hierarchy of values is the object of your worship. In this passage Jesus warns us against investing our happiness into things which are temporary. This doesn’t mean we can’t love and appreciate temporary things in this life, it just means our highest value should not be one of these temporary things. A good example is how Christ’s disciples left everything behind to follow Him. It’s not that they stopped loving the other parts of their lives, it’s just that they had a perspective-shift and they realized why eternity is much more important.
Part of properly understanding an object’s value is rank-ordering the usefulness of it. It sounds irreverent to call God useful, but He’s actually more useful to us than anything else we have. The providence of God is the predicate for all other useful things. Electricity is useful but we can only use electricity because God upholds the laws of nature. God is so fundamental and so important to everything else we experience that our entire existence stops making sense without Him. The absurdity of trying to build a life without God is highlighted by Christ when He says, “What profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
Another problem with worshipping the things of this world is that you’ll never have enough of them. A person who loves money more than anything else will never be satisfied with how much money he has. A person who puts all of their hope into their relationship will fall into despair when that relationship ends. Measuring this out can become tricky because you actually do need these objects in order to survive. It’s a bad idea to fall in love with food, but it’s a worse idea to starve. So we have to be able to experience and appreciate the beautiful things of this world without worshipping them. The best way to do that is to ensure that God Himself is the sole object of your worship. Remember we said values produce a hierarchy and a hierarchy implies a singular value at the top.
What exactly does it feel like to appreciate something properly? Part of this is to prevent the worldly thing from becoming your consolation. If you console yourself with an earthly substance then it’s only a matter of time before you try to ameliorate spiritual issues with earthly goods — and that is a form of idolatry. Emotional eating or dependence on marijuana are good examples of this. In the story of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man contents himself with worldly goods while ignoring the privation of Lazarus. When the rich man dies and discovers Lazarus is in the bosom of Abraham while he himself is not, the conclusion is that the rich man received his good things during his mortal life — while Lazarus is receiving them in eternity. If temporary wealth had not exercised such command over the rich man’s heart, perhaps he would have acknowledged the pain of Lazarus and helped him. You reap what you sow. As an eternal soul, it is deeply unwise for you to lay up your treasures in the present moment where everything disappears.
Treasures of this world are liable to loss and decay. This is true of both objects and consumable goods like food and drink. Sometimes you hear people muse about how we spend tens of thousands of dollars on new cars only for these cars to end up in a junkyard in due course. I can see their point, but really you’re paying for the experience of having the car while you have it, even knowing that it’s not going to last forever. I don’t think it’s wrong to want the experience, but trouble enters the picture when you begin exchanging the well-being of eternal things for temporary things. This would be the case if you neglected your spouse or your children, or cheated your coworkers in order to get that new car.
It’s true that you can make your stuff last longer with proper treatment and care, but proper treatment and care relies on you being the one who’s stewarding it. Many are the stories of individuals who took meticulous care of their treasures only to pass them down to heirs who squandered or neglected them. Naked you came into this world and naked you will leave it. It’s also worth pointing out that the hand of violence is often aimed at the house where treasures are laid up. If you’re wealthy enough you could hire security and make this less of a concern — but if you’re not wealthy and you merely hoard valuable goods then you make yourself more vulnerable to theft. Even king Hezekiah made the mistake of parading Judah’s treasures before the eyes of Babylonian diplomats — and this mistake was instrumental in causing the Babylonian invasion and the exile of God’s people.
These qualities like loss, decay, and corruption are absent from eternal treasures. Scripture says faith, hope, and love last forever. You might disagree if you’ve lost a loved one, but that’s only because there is dissonance between your heartbreak and the metaphysical reality of the situation. Your loved ones last forever. You last forever. That’s what the Bible teaches. In light of this fact it’s deeply unwise to become cynical about faith, hope, and love. People who are bitter and resentful tend to also be cynical about one or all of these three things. I sympathize with people who have endured great pain and as a result say things like, “I’m not going to love anyone because I’ll just lose them.” I understand the rationale for this desire to protect oneself. But if the Bible is true then this rationale is not only wrong — it’s the opposite of true. Your loved ones and the moral dimension of your experience are the only elements that are still standing in the final analysis.
Once you understand this reality the picture becomes clear that your greatest treasures in life can be categorized four ways: faith, hope, love, and sanctification. Sanctification is an eternal treasure because it’s the very capacity to sit in the direct presence of Jesus Christ. Sanctification is what happens when the word of God transforms your heart and mind making you more like Jesus. You should treasure the righteousness which the Holy Spirit works out in you. Of course you must maintain that it’s the work of the Holy Spirit and not your own righteousness, but you should treasure it nonetheless. You should treasure these things so much that earthly goods are deemed unworthy of comparison. If you focus on these things as your primary treasures then you can be certain God will protect them. God is an infinitely more powerful, more faithful protector of your treasures than any security will ever be. Treasure in heaven is not vulnerable to theft, it will never change or decay, and you will never lose it to the vicissitudes of chance.
Verse 21 of this passage is a staggering revelation of the human condition. This is one of those things Jesus says which is a tour de force of wisdom and piercing insight delivered in a single sentence: where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. This sentence supplies both the reason why we should be careful about what we treasure and the evidence of whether or not we’ve done so. He’s pointing out the truth that whatever holds the top spot in our hierarchy of values will color the way we see and experience life. If your highest value is in the world, then temporality will determine the way you move through life. If your highest value is in heaven, then eternality will determine the way you move through life. Either way your perception and your movements are so heavily influenced by your highest value that they are essentially determined. This is why idolatry is such a dangerous sin. Idolatry morphs and distorts every element of your experience underneath it until you’re no longer capable of seeing what’s true.
Your cares, your fears, your hope, your trust, your joy, your delights, and your very thoughts all follow directly after your treasure. Scripture says a rich man’s wealth is his strong city and like a high wall in his own imagination. This means he’s trusted his safety in something which cannot give it except in his own imagination. Everything we choose is so heavily influenced by external factors that I’m not convinced any of us have absolutely free will. But whatever thought is most free in you, whatever kernel of free will which is most upstream of all other determining factors — you must reserve this part of your heart for God and for your treasures in heaven.
Storing up treasures in heaven will also effect how you conduct yourself in religious practice. This goes back to the idea of the Pharisees giving alms and praying in public with the intent of making themselves look righteous before men. They valued the opinions of men more than they valued the opinion of God and so their treasure was laid up in this world. There’s a leadership dictum which says, “If you live for the applause then you’ll die when it stops.” The approval of men is fickle and you never know when standing on your convictions is going to cause you to lose it. Part of what makes people so vulnerable to cancel culture is their eminent desire for the approval of others. If your guiding ethic is the approval of others then you will be helplessly tossed to and fro by the culture. Your life will be lived in service to whatever principle or idea is the flavor of the month.
The rewards for good will or acts of service which are motivated by human approval are lost when your life is over. This is because God doesn’t value sacrifices which are made from a self-motivated heart posture. If instead you do these things in humble obedience to God with a desire to honor Him, then He will remember them forever. Scripture says a book of remembrance is written before the Lord for those who fear Him and who esteem His name. Building a good legacy on earth and pleasing God are not mutually exclusive, but it is certainly possible to have one without the other. The simplest way to ensure your heart is in the right place is to treasure and worship God, because Jesus said your heart follows your treasure.
When Jesus talks of our eye being bad causing our whole body to be full of darkness, I think He’s referring to both the power of attention and to the quality of what we broadcast into the world. First let’s consider the power of attention. Wherever you rest your attention is going to shape who you are as a person. That’s why scripture says, “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.” You become what you pay attention to and your attention also reveals what you value.
Scripture says, “Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” When the Spirit of God sanctifies you through the word of God, you become increasingly more like Jesus. When you become increasingly more like Jesus, you begin to shine light into the world through your conversations and actions. Jesus commands us to be salt to preserve that which is good and light to guide the world. That is a description of the impact a Christian has on his or her surroundings. They work to preserve good things and to be a light for those who are lost in the darkness.
But a person who has given himself over to evil has the opposite effect. A person whose heart is covetous, hard, envious, bitter, resentful, griping, and grudging is full of darkness. In the same place where the Spirit of God plants a light in the Christ-follower, an evil person plants darkness. That’s why Jesus says, “If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” This person’s conversations and actions are full of deceit, godlessness, and misery. A tragic property of the fallen world is that it’s easier to make an impact for evil than it is to make an impact for good. Those who are Christlike are often sailing against he prevailing winds of culture. They’re also fighting a war against the shadow side of their own hearts. This is one of the reasons why sin is considered tempting — it’s easier, it often feels good, and sometimes it allows you to fit in with the majority.
Despite the road to destruction being broad and easy, that road still ends in destruction. It might be easy to sin while God in His grace extends forbearance but eventually His forbearance is going to end. If you allow the thing which is supposed to be the light in you to become darkness, if you reject the thing which orders your affections after God’s own heart and steers you toward what is good, then in the day of the Lord you won’t see God as your loving Father. You’ll see Him as a Judge and you will hate Him for that. The real danger of sin is that it corrupts the soul and destroys the disposition of kindness. It changes you into the kind of person who does not want to be in the presence of God.
Another way of thinking about the eye in this passage is in reference to the moral sense-making of the conscience. The conscience is to the soul what the eye is to the body. It is used to guide and direct your movements and when it’s functioning properly it allows you to discern what is good. Sometimes you hear this referred to as your moral compass. Moral sense-making leads you on a path to a place full of light, grace, and comfort. Sin is like a toxic substance that makes you sick. The light and life of Jesus heals you and brings you comfort. Comfort is especially interesting here. Christians sometimes mistake their allergy to complacency for an allergy to comfort itself. I think this is a mistake. One of the titles of the Holy Spirit is Comforter, and while this is aimed at comfort in the midst of trials, it still reveals part of God’s proclivity to value comfort. The kingdom of heaven will be a place of great comfort. As a Christian you should not feel guilty about being comfortable, indeed you should work to lead the lost into a place of comfort as well.
A person whose guiding light is darkness is normally lost without even knowing they’re lost. They know something’s wrong and they know they’re miserable, but they don’t know why any of this is happening and too often they blame God, the world, or other people. A corrupt sense-making apparatus is what causes a person to call good evil and evil good. This breakdown in judgment is fatal because it blinds you to your need for repentance. Why do I need to repent if I’m a good person and if my words, thoughts, and deeds are all good? You can see why these people blame God and blame others — because they convince themselves it can’t possibly be anything they’re doing wrong. Avoiding this pit and helping others to avoid this pit is why I spend so much time and effort in the domain of ideas and worldview development. You might think abstract ideas and theories aren’t valuable, but that’s only because you have no idea how much influence these things have over you. Ideas grip you in a way so overbearingly strong they are said to possess you. People don’t have ideas, ideas have people.
You might also consider the eye as the thing which establishes your aim and your intentions. Aim is crucial to the Christian life and this goes back to the idea of being shaped by what you pay attention to. The goal of a sanctified life is to fix your aim entirely on the glory of God and to seek His honor and favor. The apostle Paul put words to this kind of aim when he said, “For to me, to live is Christ…” Part of establishing a proper aim is understanding that which is pleasing to God is comfortable for yourself. This doesn’t mean you’ll never need to make uncomfortable sacrifices, rather it means a sinner — even while in the midst of worldly comfort — will always be disquieted in his or her spirit. I suspect this spiritual disquietness is the true cause of much of western society’s mental illness.
If you’re not careful about your aim it can be easy to lose track and start looking sideways at things like the applause of men. Pretending to seek after God while inwardly contriving to honor yourself is the very definition of taking the Lord’s name in vain. It’s an attempt to mask your own motives with a veneer of piety. It’s dangerous to build your faith on such deceptive foundations because it causes massive dissonance in the structure you build on top of that foundation. This is one of the reasons why Jesus is called the cornerstone.
If your desire to honor God is not the cornerstone of your religious foundation then you won’t be able to hide the mistake later down the road. Such a mistake will impact every aspect about how you view yourself, how you view God, and how you view the world. This is called a recursive or compounding error. If one of your railroad tracks is a millimeter out of alignment, then some distance down the track it’s going to cross with the other one. Setting your aim on God first and foremost ensures a smooth and dependable construction of your faith later on in life. This is why Jesus says, “Seek first the kingdom of God and all else will be added to you.” He’s communicating the importance of focusing on God and not allowing the stress, worry, or temptations of this world draw your gaze.
We cannot serve two masters without painful and disruptive dissonance. At minimum you would have to become so duplicitous as to resemble two different persons depending which master you’re serving at the moment. In this respect neither of your so-called masters are actually in that role because you’re just lying to them. This is why Jesus says you cannot serve two masters.
There’s a story in the Old Testament of two mothers disputing with each other over who a certain baby belongs to. One of the women is the real mother of the baby and the other woman is pretending it’s her baby. When king Solomon suggests they split the baby in two pieces and each woman be given a half, the real mother (in fear for her child’s life) says no. The pretending mother agrees with the plan and that’s how Solomon discovers which woman is the real mother. This story is where we get the colloquial phrase, split the baby.
This idea of splitting the baby is relevant to the discussion of two masters because attempting to give yourself to God while also serving secular interests reveals that you aren’t being authentic about either. It’s better to live your life truly committed in one direction or the other. In the book of Revelation Jesus remarks to the Laodicean church: I would rather you be hot or cold, but because you are lukewarm I will spew you out of my mouth. The most tried and tested way to become a lukewarm Christian is to attempt serving two masters.
The men in scripture who supposed godliness to be a means for secular gain are described as being depraved of mind and deprived of truth. It’s a terrible mode of being because God rejects it and even secular people dislike it so you lose both domains where you’re trying to win. No one likes being lied to, and that’s why even if a person is outside of the faith they will likely respect you more if you actually believe in the things you say you believe in.
Christ’s observation about our inability to serve two masters becomes increasingly obvious when the two masters are pulling you down divergent paths. This is where clinging to the one will cause you to hate the other. This is why presuppositional divides are nearly impossible to reconcile. If you disagree with a person about core beliefs upon which your entire process of sense-making depend, then it will be very difficult for you to have a conversation with that person without one or both of you being unwilling to move on your beliefs.
When Jesus says you cannot serve both God and mammon, the term mammon is often equated to money. Money is a form of mammon. But really anything which is fundamentally self-oriented gain can be considered mammon. The mammon of the world is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life. This is the dark triad of the fallen self. To be self-dominated is to serve mammon. To be self-dominated is to be governed by sensual, secular, instinctive pursuit. You cannot serve the self and serve God at the same time because the self is bent in opposition to God. The self is pulling in the opposite direction of God.
It’s interesting to note how Jesus doesn’t say we should not or must not serve both God and mammon — He says we cannot. It’s simply impossible for us to love both opposing directions. And in the final analysis this is why true Christ-followers make an impact on the world for the better. To follow the tendencies of godless man is to follow the world and this path is often the way of least resistance. It’s easy to tear systems down and to make everything worse. You can destroy so many things effortlessly. But it’s exceedingly difficult to make them better. It requires faith, hope, and love as well as willingness to sacrifice yourself. This is a picture of Jesus. The narrow path to advancing the kingdom of God on earth runs through the cross. It will cost you everything and sometimes it will cost you your life. But we know because He went before us that it’s the right thing to do. We know if we cling to life we will lose it, but if we give it up for God’s purposes we will find it.
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