Alignment Issues | 3/22/26
-
When you think about your daily life, what are some areas where you feel like you might be slightly out of alignment?
If you take an honest look at your priorities, how much time and energy do you spend on things that won't actually last?
It is easy to put our security in our finances, so how can you shift your perspective to view money as a tool for generosity rather than a source of ultimate trust?
When you catch yourself worrying about things beyond your control, how can you pivot your focus to the small things you actually can do in that moment?
How might your mornings change if you took a few quiet moments to sit with the phrases of the Lord's Prayer
Is there something in your life right now—whether it's a habit, a device, or a certain distraction—that you assume you can't live without, but might actually need to fast from?
Transcript:
Well, today marks the final week in our Lenten series of messages on "The Way," lessons that we hear Jesus teaching in the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew. And our concluding segment today comes from the last part of the sixth chapter of Matthew, some of which you just got to hear in song, and you'll hear it again in just a moment as we read the Scripture. Follow along now, as I read for us, beginning with the 19th verse.
Stop collecting treasures for your own benefit on earth, where moth and rust eat them, and where thieves break in and steal them. Instead, collect treasures for yourselves in heaven, where moth and rust don't eat them, and where thieves don't break in and steal them. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. Therefore, 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 terrible that darkness will be.
No one can serve two masters: either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be loyal to the one and have contempt for the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. Therefore, I say to you, don't worry about your life, what you'll eat or what you'll drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Isn't life more than food and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds in the sky. They don't sow seed or harvest grain or gather crops into barns. Yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren't you worth much more than they are? Who among you, by worrying, can add a single moment to your life?
And why do you worry about clothes? Notice how the lilies in the field grow. They don't wear themselves out with work, and they don't spin cloth. But I say to you that even Solomon in all of his splendor wasn't dressed like one of these. If God dresses grass in the field so beautifully, even though it's alive today and tomorrow it's thrown into the furnace, won't God do much more for you? You people of weak faith.
Therefore, don't worry and say, "What are we going to eat?" or "What are we going to drink ?" or "What are we going to wear?" Gentiles long for all these things. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them. Instead, desire first and foremost God's kingdom and God's righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore, stop worrying about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
This is the Word of God for the people of God, and God's people say, "Thanks be to God ." Would you pray with me?
Come, Holy Spirit, and breathe life into the words that I speak. That they might carry a word from you into our hearts and lives this morning. Amen.
Have you ever been driving along and having what felt like a perfectly good day? The weather was beautiful, the sun was shining, and the temperature was just right for rolling down your windows and letting some of that fresh springtime air in. And then your favorite song comes on the radio, and you start singing along, and you are oblivious to the person who has now come up beside you in the next lane and is looking at you curiously and thinking, "Boy, they are really weird ." Or they're just having an exceptionally good day, and all is going swimmingly well until—kaboom!
You hit the pothole in the road that you did not see coming, and now you've been jolted out of your perfectly good day. Perhaps you've got a little whiplash. And to make matters worse, you realize as you continue driving down the road that your car is now out of alignment. Which means that now you're going to have to deal with the inconvenience and the costliness of getting it fixed and put back into alignment. And you'd really rather not. But you also know that if you don't, if you choose to ignore it, it will only make things worse and likely more costly.
In today's installment from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is talking about alignment. A nd our lives, like our cars, can get out of alignment. And when they do, it can be not only inconvenient, it can be costly—costly to us and to our relationships and our experience of the world around us. And if we choose to ignore our now misalignment, it will certainly only make things worse.
So the question that guides the instruction that Jesus has for us in this passage today is this: How do we best align our lives with God's purposes, both for ourselves and for the world around us? Well, as Jesus instructs us in this regard, he first, in the passage today, warns us about some potholes that we need to look out for. So let's take a look at those.
The first pothole that Jesus mentions is the one of misplaced priorities. Don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth. You know, sometimes we chase the wrong things. We get plenty of encouragement in this regard. We see others chasing things. We read, and we see ads for chasing things. And we get caught up in the matter. How often do we burn time and energy and money on things that will not last? Things that the moth or the rust or time will destroy? Rather than focusing on things that will last and have eternal value?
You all know the country song "Trailer Hitch”? Does anybody know that one? Wow. Y'all need to get out more. There's this great line in the chorus, and it's a refrain that comes back a few times just to make sure we get the message, and here's how that line goes: “You can't take it with you when you go. Never seen a hearse with a trailer hitch.” Truth, right? Truth. The first pothole Jesus warns us about is the one of misplaced priorities. Don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth.
The second one is the pothole of divided loyalties. You can't serve two masters. As I was thinking about this pothole this week, I started thinking about the money that we use here in America. The currency and the coins that are printed. And so I brought a couple of bills and some change with me today. And I just wanted to take a look. Yep, it's on that one. Yep, it's on that one too. Let's try the quarter. Yep, yep, it's there on the quarter as well. Nickel—yep, it's hard to see, but it's there. And the penny—a little bit out of style these days. Yep, it's even on that one.
You all know what I'm talking about, right? What does it say on all five of them? Has the irony of that ever gotten your attention? That, on the money that we spend to get the things that we want, to have our way, to sway somebody else's opinion, to get that thing that we just had to have at that particular moment. Has it ever struck you as ironic that on that currency it says, "In God We Trust"? Because we sure seem to put a lot of trust in our cash and what we have available to get the things that we want. And Jesus says, you cannot serve both God and wealth.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think that either one of these first two potholes is Jesus' way of saying that money in and of itself is a bad thing. In fact, that would not be consistent with other Scripture that we read in the Bible, where it talks about how money can be used as a resource for good. It can make a difference for others, and we can use it to help support not only ourselves but the larger community around us. But what Jesus clearly seems to be saying here is that perspective matters, and getting things in proper perspective matters.
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had a great way of framing this for us. Some of you can quote it with me: Earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can. Now notice each part of that. The first one is "earn all you can," which says to me, it's okay to earn money. It's okay to earn money. In fact, it's a good thing to earn money. Now, Wesley does go on to say, in his fuller expounding on this idea, it's okay to earn money by ethical means that do not violate morality or good ethics. It's good to earn money. Money can be a valuable tool and resource.
Then he says, "save all you can". Now, sometimes we misread this part because Wesley here is not talking about storing up. Wesley is talking about saving in the sense that we only spend what we really need to spend, to have the things that we truly need, and then we save to get to the final goal, which is to "give all you can"—to be generous people, to share what has been entrusted to us in ways that can make a difference. So when it comes to money, we are to hold on loosely, to be generous, and to use what has been entrusted to us well.
Jesus turns his attention to one more pothole toward the last part of this passage, and it is the pothole of pessimism. Don't worry. Really, Jesus? Are you serious? You must not know my life, some of you may be saying right now. Or, you clearly have no sense of what the state of the world is right now. Don't worry? Are you kidding me?
But as we dive into this Scripture a little further, which is the longest section of this passage, we realize that this is not a callous command from a disinterested or unsympathetic Savior. It's just that Jesus realizes and understands that worry is the thief of joy—not that fleeting happiness that we get from the instant gratification of getting that thing that we just had to have in the moment , but a soul-deep joy that is the kind we are meant to experience as followers of Christ.
And so the call not to worry is an invitation to deeper trust. And it also invites us to focus on what we can do, and not on what we can't do. Next time you start to worry about something, think about that for a moment. Sometimes we get lost down in the rabbit hole of things that we have no control over. And no matter how much we want to or how hard we work at it, we are not going to be able to change something. It's just something that we can't do. But what if we shift our focus to what we can do in that situation or in that moment? It can make a huge difference.
Now, I do want to offer one caveat about this instruction of Jesus to not worry. We should never treat that phrase flippantly, because sometimes we need help with this one. Anxiety and depression are real matters that can be debilitating, and in those moments, it would be inappropriate and callous of us to say to someone, "Just suck it up and move on ." We need to recognize that there sometimes is a need for us to find help beyond ourselves when it comes to the things that worry and concern us.
After addressing the potholes, Jesus is then able to focus us, as we come to the conclusion of this passage, on the key to alignment. He says, "Seek first the Kingdom of God and God's righteousness." Now, most of you have heard that verse before, and you probably love that verse. And you might find yourself saying, sometimes, "You know, I really want to do that. I really want to make that the thing that I seek first in my life. But how do I stay on track?"
Well, I want to suggest to you this morning that the cheat code might be found in the verses that are just before this passage in the earlier part of the sixth chapter of Matthew. The first part of that is the section that you all took a look at last week, when Marissa preached about prayer, and specifically the Lord's Prayer. Because as we read through that prayer, we begin to notice some things.
The person who is seeking first the kingdom is one who is able to be truly thankful for today's bread—not to get so caught up in worrying about tomorrow's bread, or next week's bread, or next year's bread, that we can't be thankful for the bread that is here for today. The person who is seeking first the kingdom is working to make amends where they have caused pain to others. As we seek the Kingdom of God, we humble ourselves to be able to say, "You know, I'm really sorry. I'm sorry that I caused you pain and hurt. And I want to make things right."
The person who is seeking first the kingdom is also learning to release the anger and disappointment and hurt that has been caused to them by others—to be willing to extend forgiveness. And the person who is seeking first the kingdom is praying. Always praying for God to lead not into temptation, but rather into faithfulness. So I wonder, how could praying the Lord's Prayer each morning and sitting with each one of those phrases for just a few moments be a way to help you, to help me, in our daily alignment of our lives? You might try that.
Second—and this is a section of verses that we didn't read here in worship, but I want to call to your attention this morning—right after that section on prayer, Jesus focuses his attention on fasting. And he's particularly concerned about offering instructions on how to fast so as not to draw attention to oneself. Fasting isn't meant to be a showy display of, "Look at me. Look at how I'm doing this thing." Rather, it's something we do quietly as an expression of faith. And what's interesting here is that it doesn't say "if" you fast, it says "when" you fast. The assumption is that people actually are fasting.
You know, that is largely a lost art or practice in contemporary culture today. But fasting has a way of opening our eyes to see more clearly. Stanley Hauerwas says this: "To be drawn into a life of fasting is to learn to live without what I assumed I could not live without ." Let me read that one again. I need to hear it. Maybe you do too. “To be drawn into a life of fasting is to learn to live without what I assumed I could not live without.”
You know, when we hear that description, we can pretty quickly see that fasting might apply to things other than just food. What is the thing that is getting in the way? What is the thing that is catching too much of your attention? Maybe even becoming an obsession? The thing that you're so focused on that it distracts you from what really should matter and is causing things to get out of priority for your life, to get out of alignment?
These potholes that Jesus identifies for us today, the ones that endanger our alignment, are most often the result of a life that has become too self-absorbed, too focused on what I think I need, I want, I deserve, I have earned somehow. They are the things that focus us away from what really matters.
But a kingdom mindset, on the other hand, is communal. It recognizes and values our connectedness as members of the family of God. Howard says this: "Those who would follow Jesus are taught that we have time to care for one another through small acts of mercy, because God's mercy is without limit."
So Jesus says, "Seek first the kingdom”, because in the kingdom there is not scarcity, there is abundance. In the kingdom, the focus is not on individual pursuit; it is on communal well-being. In the kingdom, the focus is not "grab what you can get now," but rather focus yourselves on what will matter in the end. The focus is on the fruit of the Spirit and on a life that displays the characteristics that the Gospels call our attention to, of compassion and kindness and forgiveness and love. The Kingdom mindset is the one that ultimately will keep us on the road to righteousness. And for that we say, thanks be to God. Amen.
