Trusting God When There Isn't Enough

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said it is possible to live a financially and materially non-anxious life. In order to live this life, Jesus tells us to do two things:

1) Go to school in the classroom of creation

2) Remember whose you are

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The sermon text reading for today is Matthew six twenty-five to thirty-four. You can find this passage in the Sanctuary Bible on page fourteen seventy-six. Please listen as I read God's word. Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life. What you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air. They do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you, by worrying, add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon, in all his splendor, was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you? You of little faith? So do not worry, saying, What shall we eat? Or what shall we drink? Or what shall we wear? For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow. For tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. Here ends the reading.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Good morning, everyone. Uh was anyone else completely unprepared to scrape ice and snow off their windshield this morning when they woke up? Uh I was, so uh that's a thing. Uh before we get in the message this morning, I want to share a couple brief things with you. Uh the first one is this, as Benjamin mentioned uh just a few moments ago, uh Dave Hammond is at the District Blitz Student Ministry Youth Conference up in Duluth with a uh gaggle of our students. You can see them here. Uh last I heard, they are all in good spirits and alive. So we can continue to uh pray for God's uh provision for them and a safety uh for them as they travel home this afternoon. Uh but we're really grateful uh to be able to send a group of our students uh up to something like District Blitz. Uh the second thing is uh if you are newer to Elmwood, uh whether this is the first time that you're here today, uh or whether you have been here for, you know, however long you've been here, if you're newer to Elmwood, uh we want to invite you to something next Sunday called the Welcome Party. And this is an opportunity for you as someone who's newer to Elmwood to get to meet other people who are new to Elmwood, and also to uh get to meet some of our ministry staff and leaders and also uh learn about some next steps and ways that you can get connected uh into the life of Elmwood Church and what God is doing here. Uh so if you are newer to Elmwood, uh whether you've been here for, you know, about 45 minutes already this morning, or whether you've been here for a couple months and just haven't been to one of these, uh I want to invite you to join us next Sunday. It's gonna be right back there in the fireside room. It's gonna be like 20 minutes long, so we keep it short. There's cupcakes. Uh so please, if you're newer to Elmwood, join us for the welcome party next Sunday. Uh with that, let me invite you to join me in a word of prayer as we come to these verses today. The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes. The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever. The decrees of the Lord are firm, and all of them are righteous. They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold. They are sweeter than honey, than honey from the honeycomb. God, this morning, as we look into your good instruction, we ask that you would give us the same mindset that we see reflected in Psalm 19. God, we believe that your word given to us is for our good and for our flourishing. And so we ask that you would enable us to in this time this morning, uh, grow in our trust of you and your good provision for us. Lord, we ask that you would provide for each one of us here today what we need. You know who's in this room and you know what they carry in here with them today. And so, God, we look to you, as always, to provide for us what we need. And so we ask you to provide these things in the name of Jesus. It's in his name that we pray. Amen. Uh, I'll go out on a limb here and guess that most of us who are sitting in this room or listening online know what it's like to worry about money. Uh the moment that you become financially responsible, either for yourself or for someone else, you quickly learn that there are a lot of reasons to worry about money and possessions. Uh when Dina and I were first married, uh we lived in a financial situation that where things were very tight. I was working part-time in ministry and working part-time at Starbucks, and uh both of us, when we were first married, had student loan debt. Both of us were working at least one job, if not two, or some other side hustles on the side of that. And I came into our marriage giving Dina the wonderful gift of all the credit card debt that I had accumulated in the years leading up to our marriage. So in those first few years, there was no margin for error in our finances or in our budget. And I remember for those first uh two, I think it was two years, we did not pay for internet. We just used our cell phones as hotspots because we literally couldn't afford to actually pay to pay for internet uh to be routed to our apartment. We could all, I think, go around this room and tell stories of a time in our life when we were sure that there was not going to be enough, or we worried about there not being enough. Maybe for some of you who are sitting here today, that season is right now. Maybe that season is today. Maybe you're a single parent and you're struggling to make ends meet. Maybe you are on a fixed income and you know what's not fixed? The price of gas and groceries. Maybe you've had unexpected medical expenses crop up at some point in your life. Maybe you've made poor choices in the past, and those poor choices have lived on with you until now. Maybe you're watching your student loan debt go up every single year, and you're realizing maybe what that's going to mean for you in your future once you graduate and get out into the real world and are responsible for all that student loan debt that you have accumulated. Maybe you're here today and you're one of the 65% of people in our country who live paycheck to paycheck. Money and possessions are a huge source of worry and stress and anxiety. We all know this. And because we feel this so acutely, what Jesus says here, when he says, don't worry. What Jesus says here can feel like he has no idea what it means and looks like to live in the real world. Jesus sounds kind of like a hippie in these verses where he's like, just don't worry, man. Everything's gonna be fine. Just relax. And we hear Jesus' words here, and we're like, what do you mean, don't worry? And to us, it can look like Jesus is totally ignorant as to what life in the real world is actually like. But what Jesus tells us in these verses is that those of us who are consumed by worry and anxiety, we are the ignorant ones. We are the ones who don't actually know what it's like to live in God's world. We're the ones who don't know what things are like in God's world. We've been in a series of messages called Unstuck, and what we have been doing is we're looking at Jesus' teaching about money and possessions and the Sermon on the Mount. And the reason we're doing so is because we want to uh we want to explore what it looks like, how we can live a financially and materially non-anxious life. That's what Jesus says is available to us a financially and materially non-anxious life. And so he's been telling us what that looks like. How do we achieve that? We're gonna be looking at these same verses you heard read both uh today and next week. And the reason is because there's actually two kinds of worry as it relates to money and possessions. There's the worry of not having enough, and there's the worry of having much. And so we need to look at both sides of this. So today we're gonna be focusing on the worry of having little, the worry of feeling like there isn't going to be enough. So, how can we live a financially and materially non-anxious life? Well, Jesus tells us in these verses, we've got to do these two things. Number one, Jesus says, go to school in the classroom of creation. Go to school in the classroom of creation. So in the Sermon on the Mount, in this part of his teaching, Jesus has been reframing and reorienting our relationship to money and possessions from the ground level. And part of how he does that is he points us to God's created world. And he says, look at the birds of the air. So in verse 26, he says, Look at the birds of the air. They do not sow or reap or stow away in barns, yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you, by worrying, add a single hour to your life? Just about every morning, uh my wife Dina and our two girls go out for a walk around La Belle Pond, which is just behind our house. And one of the things that signals to us that spring is finally here is we start to see red-winged blackbirds in the trees and out in the in the you know foliage out there in the in the pond. And it's not long after that that we start seeing robins and we start seeing chickadees. And now this is the time of the year where we can look out our front window or our back window or into our neighbors' yards or anywhere else, and we can see birds fluttering all about and scampering all about, and they're finding worms and they're finding bugs, and they're just out there doing their thing. Maybe you've seen this in your yard or where you live, or maybe you've seen this as you've hiked in the woods and you've you've paid attention to the birds, and if you pay attention, you'll notice that it's not just the birds, it's also squirrels and it's chipmunks and other critters who are all scurrying about and scampering about in search of a meal. So Jesus points us to these birds of the air and tells us to learn from them. And as we look at the birds of the air, what we learn from them is that the father loves to provide for their needs. He says, the father loves to provide for the needs of the birds. It was true back then and it is true today. So he says, look at the birds of the air. And then secondly, he says, Look to the flowers of the field. Verse 28, why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow, they do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and gone tomorrow, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? One of the things that I vividly remember about a trip I took a few years ago hiking in the Alps with some pastor friends, uh, was seeing vast fields of wildflowers. All of these flowers individually were very small and very delicate. But when you put all of them together, it was incredible to see how they blanketed. They made this beautiful carpet on the side of the mountains. And I'm sure that you can remember a time where you have seen a field or have seen a place with lots of wildflowers, and it's beautiful. How many of you have ever been to Como Conservatory? Okay, uh, if you have not been there, or if you haven't been there in a while, you have to go. One of the things you'll see at the Como Conservatory is all kinds of different flowers that come in different shapes and sizes and patterns, and it's so beautiful. They're incredible. Jesus points us to the flowers of the field and he says, learn from them. Learn from them, look at them and learn that they are lavishly clothed by the Father. He makes a contrast. He compares them to King Solomon, who is the wealthiest king in Israel's history, and he makes the point that no amount of money can purchase you clothes that make you as beautiful as a simple flower of the field. No amount of wealth can buy you the kind of beauty that comes stock in the flowers of the field. So look to the flowers of the field and learn from them. They're lavishly clothed by the Father. His point with both the birds and the flowers is the same. He points us to them and he says, if if God does this for birds and for flowers and for grass, if he cares for them and lavishly and abundantly provides for them, won't he also do the same for you? In order to live a financially and materially non-anxious life, we have to go to school in the classroom of creation. And when we do so, what we see is the lavish care and we see the abundant provision that the Father showers on his creation. That's what we see. We live in a world where scarcity and anxiety and worry and stress, those things scream at us and press in at us from all sides. And it's so easy for us to live in our worlds and to be consumed by the mindset that says there isn't enough. But Jesus gives us a totally different way of looking at the world. Jesus says, contrary to what you may think or feel, there is enough in God's world. Learn from the flowers of the field, learn from the birds of the air. There is enough, Jesus says. Therefore, we don't have to worry or be filled with anxiety. So the first thing Jesus tells us to do is go to school in the classroom of creation. Look to the birds, look to the flowers, see how the Father cares for them. The second thing we have to do is we have to remember whose we are. That may not be good grammar, I don't actually know. But remember whose you are. Jesus points us to creation, and the reason why he points us to creation is because creation tells us something about who God is. It tells us about what kind of God, what kind of father he is. And one of the themes that we see woven throughout the Sermon on the Mount is that God is a loving and generous Father who delights to give us everything that we need. Jesus is insistent that those of us who read the Sermon on the Mount come away with this picture of God as not some distant God who doesn't really care what happens in our lives or a like an angry father who's waiting for us to screw up so he can punish us. No, Jesus is insistent that those of us who hear the Sermon on the Mount come away knowing he is a loving and generous Father who delights to give us every single good thing that we need. This is the kind of God He is. Jesus wants us to see the love and generosity of the Father and to remember that we belong to him. We belong to him. He wants us to remember whose we are. We are children of this loving and generous Father. And it he makes it so clear throughout this passage you heard read. He says, He provides for the birds. And don't you matter more to him than the birds? He provides for the flowers of the field and clothes them. Don't you matter more than they do? And he says, He knows what you need. Even before you ask. He knows what you need. And because we are children of this generous Father, we can trust him to provide when it seems like there isn't enough. To live a financially and materially non-anxious life, we have to go to school in the classroom of creation. And we have to see what it teaches us about who God is and how he operates in the world. We have to see the lavish care and the extravagant provision that God showers on his creation. And then we have to remember that he is not just their father, he is ours too. The same father who cares for the birds and the flowers cares about you. And therefore, you can trust him to provide when it seems like there isn't enough. So verse 25, Jesus says, Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear. I think it's really important that we notice that the specific provision that Jesus is talking about here is food and drink and clothing. What would you say ties all those things together? Those are essentials. Those are like basic life necessities without which you'll probably die. When Jesus says, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you, he is not saying that the Father has unconditionally promised that he will provide what we need to maintain our current standard of living. Let me just name a few things that fall outside of the scope of the provision that Jesus is talking about here. Things like money for our Amazon Prime or Disney Plus or a long list of other subscriptions. Things like money to spend on travel and leisure activities. Things like money for modern luxuries and conveniences. Those are good things. Those fall outside of the scope of what Jesus is talking about here when he says, when he talks about the Father providing for us. With that being said, God so often provides in abundance and in excess of what we actually need, doesn't he? Okay. We live in such a privileged time and place where we have access to resources and to conveniences and to all kinds of amazing things that people a generation or two ago would have never imagined us having access to. And so often God provides in excess of what we actually need and provides all of these good things for us. We should enjoy and we should. Savor those good things that God provides for us. And we should also remember that he owes us none of it. And has not promised that he will provide us enough to maintain our current standard of living. So how does God provide for our needs? Let me suggest that he provides in two different ways for our needs. Sometimes he provides in miraculous ways. Okay. Sometimes the ways God provides are only described, can only be described as miraculous. I've told this story uh a number of times, and I'll continue to tell it because some of you are new to Elmwood and haven't heard this. But also because this is a perfect example of God's miraculous provision for our church family here at Elmwood. A few years ago we made uh an insurance claim uh for a new roof and new windows that covered uh the north wing. And uh this insurance claim was uh to the tune of$350,000 worth of work that was going to be done. Uh, if you notice, we have a big roof on this building and a lot of windows. And so this insurance claim in and of itself was kind of a miraculous provision because we would have never been able to have afforded to just buy a new roof or all new windows on our own. So we made this insurance claim, and as they were doing the work on this, uh they discovered that uh the flashing was not watertight, which meant that water for who knows how long had been funneling underneath our shingles and rotting out a large portion of the sub-roof on our building. And as you can imagine, uh with how much square footage we have, this was not a cheap fix. And uh so that was really discouraging. And our our plan was to take out a loan for what we couldn't raise uh through our end-of-the-year stewardship drive we call Be Rich. And so that was our plan, and I had the uh very unpleasant task of standing up here on a Sunday and telling you all about this need. And it was unpleasant, let me tell you. Uh I did not enjoy that. But I stood up here and told you that uh, okay, we're gonna try and raise$30,000 as a church, which is a lot of money for a church our size. So I said, we're gonna raise$30,000, and that Sunday, the same same Sunday I shared about that need. There was uh a woman who was here who was a member of Elmwood in the 70s, and she had not been to Elmwood for over 40 years. So she had her own church up in wherever it was. She drove to her own church that morning, and as she opened her car door and put her foot on the ground, she heard the Spirit of God say, Go to Elmwood today. And she's like, Come again? What? Why do I need to go to Elmwood? So she's like, I didn't really have any idea what this is about, but I knew God told me to go to Elmwood, so I went to Elmwood. So she comes to Elmwood, and uh she told me after the fact that as she listened to me share about this enormous financial need, she said, I heard the Spirit of God speak again, and this time he said the whole thing. And she wrote us a check for$30,000. Okay, this is miraculous provision that God gave to our church family. The only way to describe this is miraculous. Okay, we have a father who is loving and generous and who delights to provide for our needs, and sometimes he does it in ways that can only be described as miraculous. He does that. And so we should trust him to provide for us in miraculous ways. We should live with anticipation, not with expectation or with a kind of uh what word am I looking for? Uh, not a kind of where we expect him to do it like in a you owe this to us kind of way, but we should live with anticipation, for God can and does provide for us in miraculous ways, and so that should be a part of the way that we operate in the world is trusting him to provide in those miraculous ways. So sometimes that's how God does it. Sometimes the way God provides is really ordinary. So ordinary and kind of maybe boring that we don't even recognize his provision in it. One of the ordinary ways God provides for his people is through his people. Listen to what Jesus says in verses 31 to 33. He says, Do not worry, saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or what shall we wear? For the pagans, that is, those who are not Jewish, they run after these things, and your heavenly father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. One of the things we have to remember is that the Sermon on the Mount is not just spiritual words given to individual people. The Sermon on the Mount is one of the sermons that Jesus repeated over and over again. The sermon is designed to shape the collective life of God's people. The values that we see represented in Jesus' teaching here are meant to be embodied by the community of God's people. And so when God's people embody the values of God's kingdom, and when our lives are formed into the image of our generous Heavenly Father, and when we embody that character and those values in the context of community, what's going to happen is that needs are going to be met. Most of the time, God's provision is the ordinary result of being the kind of community that God has designed us to be. I remember my grandma telling me stories of how God provided for them when my grandpa was sick and couldn't work. She told me about how they didn't know how they were going to make it, and occasionally they would open their front door and there would be groceries on the front step. Now, if they were to have, if they had a ring camera, like we have today, and they were to go back and review the footage, let me tell you what they would not see. They would not see bags of groceries appear out of thin air. Like they sort of dissolve in, you know, like a like a bad movie transition. That's not what they would see. If they could review that footage, what they would see is a person who knew them. A person who knew what was going on in their life, a person who loved them and who cared for them. How I imagine it is because this is how I would do it, is I imagine that they would see someone who snuck up and who dropped off these bags of groceries and snuck away as quietly as possible. And they did so with joy because they got to be the answer to the prayers of my grandparents. This is so often how God provides for us. Sometimes he does it in miraculous ways, and sometimes he does it in profoundly ordinary ways. This is how God provides, through the community of the church, loving and caring for one another. Through the church, embodying the generous heart of God in our relationships with one another. This is a huge part of how God provides for us. So sometimes the way he provides are miraculous, and sometimes the way he provides are very ordinary. But in either case, he is the kind of God who loves to provide not just what we need, he loves to provide in excess of our physical needs. And he often does so. And our lives are a testimony to this. And even when he provides in excess of our physical needs, that's not even the best part. Because what the message of the Bible tells us is that in Jesus, God has already provided for our greatest need. In the person of Jesus, God has already provided for the one thing that we truly need. See, the worst thing we could experience is not being cut off from food or water, even though that would lead to our physical death. The worst thing we could experience is not having Jesus, who is the bread of life in the living water, the one whose presence is more essential to our life and flourishing than food and water is to our physical bodies. The worst thing we could experience is not a lack of clothing, as uncomfortable and maybe undignifying as that may be. The worst thing we could experience is to stand before our Father and judge without being clothed in the righteousness of Jesus. Our Father loves to generously provide for our needs, and in Jesus he has done just that. The announcement that we find in the Bible is that God sent his son who was executed on a cross, who experienced the banishment and the forsakenness that we deserve, so that we could be given the status of sons and daughters. John was one of Jesus' closest disciples, and he wrote this in a letter that we call 1 John. He said, See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are. This is at the heart of the good news of the gospel that we find in the Bible. Through a relationship with Jesus, we can become sons and daughters of God. Through faith in Jesus, we can know that the generous heart of God is for us. We see that as we come to the communion table. As we look to the cross, we see the generous heart of God has already been displayed for us in Jesus. And because we know his heart, we know his heart is generous, we know his heart is for our good, and he's proven that. Because we know that we can trust him. We can trust him when it looks like there isn't enough. And let me tell you, even if there isn't enough, even if everything else is stripped away, we still have him. It gains us nothing to have all the nice things in the world and to miss Jesus in the process. In Jesus, God has already given us, he's already provided for us the one thing that we truly need. This is what we remember and celebrate as we come to the communion table here today, as we do each week. In Jesus, God has provided for our greatest need. He's made a way for our hearts who that have turned from Him. Our hearts that are dead in sin can be made alive through Jesus. He has provided that spiritual life for us. He's provided a way for our fractured relationship with our Creator to be restored. And he's done so by sending us his son, who is the ultimate example of the generous heart of God for us. And so no matter what we face today or tomorrow in the future, we can do so trusting him because we know his heart for us is always good. As we come to the communion table, let me invite you to take a few moments of silence for confession and reflection, and then we'll come receive Christ together.