Matt 6:1-18 KEEPING SECRETS 2/24/13 Introduction: A. Illus.: There s an old Yiddish story about a beloved rabbi who disappeared every Friday.

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1 Matt 6:1-18 KEEPING SECRETS 2/24/13 Introduction: A. Illus.: There s an old Yiddish story about a beloved rabbi who disappeared every Friday. Unable to find him anywhere, the devoted villagers boasted that their rabbi must ascend to heaven every Friday so he could talk with God. One day, however, a newcomer to their small village heard the stories and scoffed. People don t ascend to heaven, he mocked. I ll tell you where your rabbi really goes on Friday mornings. So the next Friday morning the newcomer crept into the woods by the rabbi s house. He quietly watched the rabbi rise, say his prayers and, much to the onlooker s surprise, dress in the clothes of a common peasant. The rabbi walked into the woods, chopped down a small tree and cut it into firewood. Then the rabbi carried a bundle of wood to a shack in the poorest section of the village. An old woman and her sick son gladly received the bundle of wood for the coming week. They thanked the anonymous woodsman, unaware that it was the rabbi in disguise. The skeptical newcomer, deeply moved by the rabbi s secret goodness, became the rabbi s disciple. Now whenever the villagers say, On Friday mornings our rabbi ascends to heaven, he would quietly add, If not higher. [Matt Woodley, The Gospel of Matthew (IVP), p.76, endnote p.281] B. Open your Bibles to Matt 5. In Matt 5:20, in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. Then, as we saw last week, he showed us just what an incredibly high standard of righteousness stands behind God s law. We re guilty of murder for just being furious with our brother; guilty of adultery if we look at someone else lustfully. God s standard of righteousness is impossibly high, yet it is the standard we must reach. So we come to him, poor in 1

2 spirit, mourning and meek, hungering for righteousness and Jesus our Savior gives us new birth makes us new creations. Our sins past, present, and future are forgiven, and his Holy Spirit comes to live within us so that we can become truly righteous. Such loving, faithful, truthful, and merciful acts are intended to be obvious in our relationships with others. These are ways in which we become salt and light in our world. In fact, Jesus said in 5:16, Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. C. So it seems strange that in the next breath, in Matt 6:1, Jesus says, Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. In the verses before Jesus talks about the morality of our relationships. Here, as John Stott puts it, he talks about our piety the spiritual exercises of the Godward heart. Jesus talks about three deeds in particular giving to the poor, praying, and fasting. We typically speak of these as spiritual disciplines. There are others: Bible reading and meditation, solitude, and personal worship, for example. But why does Jesus command us to let our good deeds shine to others in one case, and to do them in secret in another. The old Bible teacher A. B. Bruce summed it up when he wrote that we are to show when tempted to hide and hide when tempted to show. [Stott, p.127] I. RIGHTEOUSNESS REQUIRES DISCIPLINES OF DEVOTION TO GOD A. Illus.: Even listened to a beginners orchestra concert? Know what s wrong? Pitch. Those young musicians don t have an ear for pitch. They don t know that they re a halfstep flat or that the girl next to them is a half-step sharp. No matter how fast you can play, you can never be a musician until you have a fine sense of pitch. Every 2

3 musician must know how to tune up, and stay in tune as they sing or play. Spiritual disciplines these private, inward acts we do tune our hearts. They accomplish other things, too, of course. The poor are helped and prayers are answered. But even before they accomplish anything else, they tune our hearts to God s heart. 1. V.2 begins, So when you give to the needy The Greek word behind this means a deed of mercy. Jesus is obviously thinking specifically about giving to the poor, but his focus here isn t actually the poor, and the danger here applies whether we give to a ministry or a person. Jesus is saying that we need what merciful giving does for us. And what we need is forfeited when we give in order to be seen, when we want people to notice our generosity. Giving, when we get nothing back no notice, no thanks, nothing is a test of our hearts. I see how grasping I m inclined to be, how unloving, how merciless and judgmental. But on the other hand, when I do give out of mercy, my heart is changed in the giving to become more like my Father s. Blessed are the merciful for they will receive mercy. 2. V.5 begins, And when you pray If you asked someone, Why pray? they probably would say something like, To get God s help. So then what difference does it make whether we do it secretly or publicly? Well, in some ways it doesn t. The Bible tells of many powerfully potent public prayers. But ask anyone who prays seriously and they ll tell you that even apart from God s answers, prayer is good for our own hearts, because prayer reorients our lives to God, and teaches our fearful, stubborn, take-charge hearts to submit to and trust God for the things we need most. And I dare say, no one prays well or safely among others who doesn t pray well alone. 3

4 3. V.16 begins, When you fast We are so little acquainted with fasting we may not be sure just why people even do it. In the Bible people fast to express penitence or special earnestness in prayer. Jesus is speaking here of a regular discipline, and fasting as a regular practice has an obvious purpose the discipline of self-denial. Putting our bodies under control. Because anyone who has fasted, even for one meal, knows that it turns our bodies into whining, sleeve-tugging, cry-babies. The practice of fasting disciplines our spoiled bodies and teaches our hearts what it feels like to hunger and thirst for righteousness. Whatever else we accomplish through our fasting, the self-denial tunes our hungry hearts to our Father. B. In this passage, God is always referred to as our Father. Nine times. Your Father in heaven your Father who sees your Father who is unseen your Father knows what you need before you ask him Our Father in heaven These practices of the heart are between us and our Father. They draw us to his heart, and make us like him. The verse just before this passage, 5:48, says, Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Jesus draws us to that seemingly impossible perfect standard by enabling us to be both moral and pious, to practice righteousness outwardly and inwardly. Spiritual disciplines like these are not just exercises like spiritual jogging they are God-given ways to tune our hearts to our Father. As we read what Jesus says about each of these, his overriding emphasis is that we keep them to ourselves instead of making a show of our piety showing off our inner righteousness. The Pharisees practiced spiritual disciplines more rigorously than anyone, but because they did them to be seen by people, their hearts came home empty-handed and rock-hard. 4

5 II. RIGHTEOUSNESS REQUIRES A CERTAIN SECRECY LEST WE FORFEIT GOD S REWARD A. The warning here is not to be like the hypocrites. Originally this word referred to actors who wore masks (like the phantom of the opera). Hypocrites are people who wear masks to disguise their real character. Doing these private spiritual acts for an audience other than God changes their meaning completely and actually distances them from the God they pretend to approach. B. As Jesus describes the hypocrisy of the Pharisees you can almost see his audience go wide-eyed. Can he say that?? He s going to get in so much trouble! But I suspect there were also smiles playing at the corners of their mouths because such hypocrisy is laughable. Jesus showed them just what theater their leaders performed. 1. V.2 No one knows for sure if there were actual trumpets or not, but everyone knew what Jesus meant because the sanctimonious Pharisees always did their almsgiving with a flourish and fanfare. There is no mercy in the theater of charity. The poor might eat, or a good organization might continue, but there is no mercy in it at all. In fact, quite the opposite: a proud person is paying to be recognized as an actor, and it is actually laughable comedic. Ta-ta-ta-da! Unwitting spiritual buffoons, the laughingstock of heaven. Vv.3-4 [Walk to someone near the front. With left hand, point suddenly off to the left. Hey, look at that! while giving a dollar to the person with my right hand. Then my left hand speaks to my right: What did you just do? Nothing. You did something. No, I didn t. I was trying to see what you pointed at. Did you give that guy a dollar? What?? Are you kidding? No! ] Let your giving your acts of mercy be so private that you yourself hardly know what you ve done! 5

6 2. V.5 Godly people pray in public from time to time. We pray aloud in our groups and meetings. But here were people who made public praying theater. Everything about it was to get attention. Standing in the synagogue. You note his every elegantly spoken word. [ Mr Simon Medema] A street corner like a vender stopping traffic. Voices loud, words tap-dancing and orating and sobbing, as if it were vaudeville. V.7 These professional Jewish pray-ers undoubtedly used Scripture-heavy phrases, but it their hearts were silent so it was nothing more than blah-blah-blah to God. Instead, Jesus says in v.6 and in v.8 The word Jesus used for room is a storeroom somewhere where you won t be bothered. Prayer that mourns over sin and that curls into meekness, that hungers and thirst for righteousness, that lays hold of mercy and purity and peace, is private and personal. Just saying prayers even good words over and over does nothing to tune our hearts nor to move God s hand unless those words are between us and our Father. (We re going to pass over the prayer Jesus teaches here and focus on it next week.) 3. V.16 If you re going to spend a day really hungry, you might as well get some props for it! And the Pharisees fasted every Monday and Thursday. So folks could set their calendars by the faces of the Pharisees. They d see wincing eyes, hollow cheeks, the corners of their mouths drooping in hunger and think, Must be Thursday. What spiritual giants they are! Cha-ching, fasters! You just got paid. Might as well go eat, because that s all you re getting for your trouble. Disciplines of self-denial are to be private in the same way that we discipline our kids privately, or that Overeaters Anonymous is anonymous. We deny ourselves because we are shamefully undisciplined! 6

7 V Again and again, Jesus promises us God s reward for keeping our spiritual disciplines between ourselves and God. There is something about rewards that makes us uncomfortable. I shouldn t need a reward. In fact, doing it for a reward sort of cheapens the virtue, doesn t it? No. In fact, III. RIGHTEOUSNESS WELCOMES GOD S REWARD A. C. S. Lewis said in his sermon, The Weight of Glory, There are different kinds of reward. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it, and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it. So Lewis concludes, The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation. [Stott, p ] God s rewards are the desires of our new hearts. B. The reward to those who give mercy gifts quietly and humbly is that we receive mercy, not only now in our sin and weakness, but forever! We become citizens of a kingdom shaped by mercy, populated by mercy, forever singing praise to the Lamb who mercifully died for our sins. The reward to those who pray from bowed and hungry hearts is that we see the hallowed God! We see God s will being done, as we prayed, and we inherit new earth he will re-create. Our reward is becoming agents of God s grace and warriors standing against Satan s evils. The reward to those who fast and do all else to bring their appetites under control for Christ s sake is hearts that move in the presence of God unfettered. Our bodies don t control our hearts, and soon we will have new bodies, resurrected and recreated holy and healthy and deathless. 7

8 These are the rewards God holds for those who do not practice their righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. Merciful people, prayerful people, people who deny their flesh in order to pursue God delight our Father. Like the rabbi in the story such people, even here and now, ascend to heaven if not higher. 8