Who Sees You?

We all long to be appreciated for the sacrifices we make, but Jesus teaches that the foundation of a solid life isn't built on recognition—it's built on giving with the right heart. Together, let's discover how our motives shape our worship, our generosity, and even our relationships, and why living for the Father's approval changes everything.

Transcript

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For those who don't know, my name is Reggie. I'm one of the pastors here. You may not often see me on Sundays. I oversee the youth middle school and high school. So I'm in the other building over there. And let me just tell you: if you have teenagers or have had teenagers, you understand that they are wonderful. They are a blessing, and they are complicated. Amen. They can be really complicated. And I want to, by the way, welcome everyone joining us, both here and in person and online. I hope you guys had a wonderful 4th of July weekend. And we are continuing our series called Solid Ground, which taking a look, which is taking a look at the Sermon on the Mount found in the book of Matthew, and Jesus sharing these deep truths. And we're looking how do we apply them not just to our lives, but to our families. How do we integrate the Jesus' teaching, not just in how we live our lives, but how we as a family live this life together? And today's topic is going to be about giving and giving generously. And a question you can keep in mind that throughout this message is when you're giving generously, who are you giving to? Who are you giving to? That's my little hook for the message. So you'll be thinking about the rest of the message. But before I dive into the giving portion, I want to do a little bit of info on who I am, a little bit of background. Again, I already said I'm a youth pastor. I have a wife. Her name is Pam. She is an introvert. So we are like the exact opposites. I am large. I am loud. I am gregarious. You will, if you don't see me, you will hear me. My wife is the exact opposite. She does not love attention. She may be right over there. She does not love whoops. She does not love attention. She is not loud. She is very quiet. And she is very just like gentle. It's why she's a nurse. So you're so thankful if you have her. She works overnight. If I was your nurse, she'd be like, bro, could you turn it down a little bit? Like, I my wife all the time. I just move. Even when I move, you hear me. My wife is the opposite, and we have two kids. And both of my kids have taken after me. They they are beautiful like her, but they have some pipes. Like they can be loud. And if you've ever seen Charlotte and Juliet, even if you haven't seen them, I guarantee at one point you have heard them. They are very, ah, like, especially my youngest, she's crazy. And they have these pipes. The reason I'm giving you this story is I want to walk you back to when my kids, right now, they're five and seven, back when they were infants, that beautiful season of having babies. They're cute, they're cuddly, but my goodness, our two are slightly defective. Their defects happen not in their cute and cuddliness, but in their sleeping abilities or lack thereof. See what they love to do is not sleep. And when they don't sleep, they love. My oldest daughter's nickname was the screaming eagle. They love to see how high the decimal meter could get when you were trying to sleep through the night. And my wife and I, who both work full-time in that season, we're just trying to hold life together, trying to keep it down. We're both serving each other, both trying to go to church, trying to keep normalcy happening. But we used to also play a game. It's a super healthy marital game. It's called In the House, someone already knows, in the middle of the night, when my daughter Charlotte or Juliet are screaming, we'd hear them and we'd walk pop up and say, Okay, let's play a game of who did more for the family yesterday. Because if you lose that game, you go get the kid. But if you win the game, you go back to sleep because you contributed more. This game was wonderful. So in the middle of the night, I would call him and wake up and say, Hey Pam, I worked all day yesterday. I did the dishes. Can you just go and wake up the kid? My wife would kindly say, I also worked and I redid the dishes that you thought you cleaned. So it's your turn. And then I'd say, loving wife, like I know that you re-clean my dishes, but who cares if there's crumbs? You did extra work, you didn't have to. Why don't you go get the kid? And she would say, Loving husband, that's not clean. Go get the kid. And we would go at it in the middle of the night. Some of you may judge us, some of you may be like, oh, he's sitting too close to home. And in the middle of the night, we would just keep debating with each other on who did more. And you know who the winner was? Neither of us. We would be furious, frustrated, like, oh, go get the kid. No, I'll go get the kid. Because we felt so unappreciated. As we are giving and trying to make things happen for each other, there was never enough. I call that stage the bankrupt stage. No matter how much you give, there is never enough because my kids just need it all. They just need it all. And maybe you haven't experienced this kind of battle, but I'm sure every single couple in here, or whether it's not a couple or at work or something else, you have given your best to somebody. And they have treated it at times like it wasn't enough. Because at times every single one of us runs into, as we're generously giving, and we think we should be seen and appreciated, we can find ourselves being unappreciated or unthanked. And that can take our heart from wanting to be generous to saying, fine, if you're gonna be that way, then so will I. And that is not a heart that builds a solid foundation when it comes to giving. Because we can all be generous when we are properly appreciated or acknowledged. But my gosh, watch what happens and how everything falls apart when we don't get that thank you, we don't get that acknowledgement, we don't get that appreciation. We will go from the extra mile at our job, showing up early, staying late, volunteering as we need, and suddenly that promotion time comes around and we get passed over. Or suddenly it's time for a pay raise and that doesn't happen. Now suddenly we went from I'm gonna be the best worker ever, to see, hey, you want to pay me minimum? I'll give you minimum. Like if you want to treat me that way, I'll treat you that way. Or in our marriage, hey, you're not gonna appreciate how I take out the trash? Let it sit there. Now let's see who's thankful. Like we'll start having these situations because in our hearts it can be really confusing when we feel like, hey, I'm being a good person, I'm being generous. Why aren't you seeing? Why aren't you acknowledging these things? And God has some clear truth about how we are called to give generously and who we are called to give to. But I need to give a disclaimer. This message was assigned to me. I did not choose it. When I teach this message in Matthew, I need to be so for real, I am unqualified to share this truth. In our family, I am a gold star person. What does that mean? I'm willing to make dinners, clean, hang out with the kids all day. I will serve my wife. The only thing I need is an itemized receipt of everything that I have done and an acknowledgement of how amazing I am. If you do those things, God bless my wife, by the way, but if you do those things, you are gonna get the best of me. But if you forget to acknowledge that I took out the trash three days in a row, well, I guess there won't be a fourth day. Like I am a gold star person, and that's not even hyperbole. I don't actually give in the way that God has called me to. So this message I'm gonna teach you guys is God's word that I myself am going to try to apply. Amen. So with that, we're gonna dive into the book of Matthew, chapter six. I'm gonna read the whole passage and then break down verse by verse after that. Matthew 6, 1. 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. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that you may be so that your giving may be in secret. Then your father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. That is the main passage we're gonna be going through today. And verse one, we'll take a closer look at it. 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. First, I want to be very clear that word righteous is diocine, it's a Greek word. What that righteous word means is justice, justness, just cause, equity, doing what is right. That word righteousness is not a trap word. Jesus is not saying, oh, be careful of fake righteousness. No, no, no. He's saying be careful of genuine righteousness. Be careful of genuine righteousness when it is done for the wrong reasons. What does that mean? It means you can be living in a right way. You can be reading the word of God, you can be going to church, you can be helping the poor, and you can be doing it in a sinful way, in a way that missed the marks. Sin is not just that, oh my gosh, an evil term. It means to miss the mark. It's an archery term. You shoot and you miss. Righteousness can be led astray, even right living, when we do not know who we are giving to and why we are giving. And this again, this word going on with this righteousness and what he's calling out is hey, when you're off showboating, you got your reward. When everyone sees you as a good person, father of the year, everything else, you got your reward. You have your human appraise, you have human approval. Cool. God's already like you've already been rewarded. But that's something that you have to be very careful of because it can be a poison. And I want to share a story that's actually a little less funny, but more honest about who I am and some of the shortcomings that I have. About eight or nine years ago, I was a youth pastor at a different church, and I'd taken over this youth group. It was so I hate to say this because I hate this word. It's so weird. I walked into this youth, there was like four or five kids. They had this like lighting that was literally red and black. And I literally thought, it's just like a vampire situation. Like I don't understand. And they love to play board games, and they just didn't have any way to attract new people. So I came in, I started investing in discipling, reaching out to kids through student venture, and saying that youth group went from five kids to 50. And now we are humming. I'm also at a church of like 100 people. So a 50-person youth group, we were humming. Like it was going great, salvations, baptisms. However, with all this incredible ministry, that was an incredible strain on my time. And at the time, I'm not even paid full time, so I am gone, probably working 60 hours a week, being paid for 20 of them. And the challenge of that is I have a spouse at home who's also working full-time and isn't seeing her spouse. And not only is she not seeing me, the dishes, all the trash, the different house responsibilities, the endless chore list. I doesn't have any list. My wife loves any list, like the mini lists that are popping up. I'm not getting any of them done. And then suddenly I'm coming home and my wife is just all over me. By the way, this does not end bad for my wife, by the way. Sounds like I'm ragging on her. But she is just always on my case. I never feel like she wants to hear the stories about what God is doing. I'm like, Pam, do you want to hear what happened at youth group tonight? She's like, no. Like, do you want to hear about like how God is moving? No. But could you please take out the trash that I actually do a week ago? I'm like, who cares? It's just trash. Like, I'm saving souls. And you want me to take out the trash? Like, so for me, I was getting so frustrated. Also, disclaimer, I'm kind of dumb. So this story is gonna end worse for me. And we keep going back and forth and clashing, and I get so fed up with her behavior at home. I'm like, you know what? And I wasn't at this church at the time, and I'm like, I'm gonna hit up Pastor Ryan and I'm gonna go and tell him how you're behaving. And she goes, fine, go ahead. So I sit down, I drive to Menaphy, me and Ryan meet up, and I just share about all the great things that God is doing through me, all the incredible ministry and all the credible things. And I go on and on and on, and I just say, Ryan, how do you just like lead your wife to care? Like, she's just not invested, like she just doesn't get it. Like, everyone like loves on me, and she's always my biggest critic. And Ryan says something that stuck with me all these years, I think like a decade later. Isn't it incredible that you have hundreds of strangers thinking that you can walk on water, but the one person who actually knows you knows you don't. I remember being like, oh, that was a you know reverse. Like, I did not expect that situation. Like, I thought my outrage was she doesn't appreciate me. I'm giving so much of myself, but I wasn't honoring her, I wasn't honoring our family. I was giving so much of myself to so many things. Maybe for you it's not ministry, maybe for you it's work. There's incredible things happening. You are making that money, you are making it rain green green, like it is just growing, and you are just working so hard. That's incredible. It's incredible to provide for your family, but again, even incredible provisions can be off the mark if that's where you're stopping. We have a call as a family of God to honor the unit that we have, to honor the marriage, to honor the kids. We have a call to live righteously, amen. And righteous living is not about the praise of others, it's about his praise. Does he see what you're doing? Verse one reminder be careful of righteousness that's in goal is more about being seen and recognized than being lived out to God. Be careful that your giving and your generosity isn't just look on me on Instagram, look at how generous I am, look how generous my organization is. Be careful if you're doing all of those things for human applause, because God is saying, fine, you have the human applause. You don't need mine, you just don't. Also, a takeaway from this verse is how do you evaluate the righteousness built? How do you evaluate your own righteousness? Is it built on your own self-interpretation? Or is your family, your friends, your close ones, are they allowed to speak truth to you? Where you're like, hey, I'm gonna go to another Bible study, and you're like, hey, I love Bible study, but I've literally asked for you to clean the kitchen. If you want to honor me before you go to another study, please clean up. Amen. Verse two. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. The word hypocrite used right there is Hippocratis. It's in the Greek, it simply means a hypocrite, a stage actor, a play actor, or a pretender. What he is saying is not that they are just not doing what they're saying. The people in the Old Testament and currently in Jesus' time, they were actually going into synagogues and saying, Hey, are you in need? I got you. Hey, are you in need? I got you. Look how great we are. We're coming in, we're helping the poor, we're tithing extra. Look at how great we are being. And the truth of it is their actions are there, but their heart is not. That's the hypocrite he is talking about. He is not saying they're not doing what they're saying they're doing. He says the reason they're doing these things is so misguided. It is not to honor me, it is not to care for them, it is to be seen by others as someone greater. And that is not the heart of what God has for us. And I can actually show you somebody who could be kind of the first play actor in the Bible. It's actually from the book of Genesis, chapter four. I'm gonna read verses one through seven. Now Adam made love to his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, With the help of the Lord, I have brought forth a man. Later she gave birth to his brother Abel. Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time, Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering, fat portions, from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering. But on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast. Then the Lord said to Cain, Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door. It's desires to have you, but you must rule over it. The reason I call Cain the first hypocrite is what do you see in the passage? Both Cain and Abel offered offerings to the Lord. You actually see that Cain offered it first. And it's wrong culture to say, like, well, people like surmise, well, Cain didn't give as good of a gift as Abel did. That's possible. But you actually see that God doesn't favor ranchers, i.e. the lambs, over farmers, i.e. the fruit. You don't actually see that in the Old Testament scripture. What you're seeing is that Cain literally is giving as unto the Lord. He's sitting there saying, Hey, I'm supposed to give this offering to you, God. Here you go. And Abel does the same thing. But what do you see with God when he looks at Cain? I don't want this. I don't think you actually want to give this. Your heart is far. You're just going through the motions, you're just giving these things, but you're not connected to it. And if Cain can do that with God, so can we. And if we can do that with God, can we not do that with our own families? We will take out the trash, we will clean things, we will serve because we want to make sure when they talk about us, there's nothing they have ammunition against us about. We have done all the things that we need to to check off the box of being a husband or being a good wife. But we are missing this. Or being a good parent. I can tell you, my kids can tell at times when I am having a long day and I'm on my phone and like daddy watched, and I'm like, sure. And they're gonna show me the same dance for the hundredth time. They love K-pop Demon Hunter and they love to sing that song Golden over and over and over and over again. And they want you to see their dance moves. And there are times where it's like, okay, I saw your dance. I just kind of want to do my thing. And sometimes I'll try to like trick them by having the phone low, and they'll be, and then suddenly my daughter Char will just start pouting and she'll be like, Dad, I know you're not really watching. And those are the things that I have to keep working on. Because the truth is, I'm not always engaged with what I'm doing. Sometimes my generous giving is I don't want to. I don't want to be generous, I don't want to give. And sometimes I'm just going through the emotions. And if you're someone who's in that same trap, it's okay. Like you're not alone. I want you to understand, like, I am very much there, but God has called us to do better. Amen? So, with that, I'm gonna keep walking us through where God has for us. And I also, before we actually move to verse three, I want to talk about the challenge of going through the motions, is it often will lead us to caring more about our reputation versus our heart's transformation. We should be working on Lord, I'm going to generously give because I want to give because you give to me. I want to do these things as unto you. I want you to be my mind's eye. When I give to the poor, when I give to the needy, when I give to my family, when I stay up late and clean up the house, we both had a long day, but I know my spouse is exhausted and I just want to bless them. When I give those things, rather than thinking, oh my gosh, when they wake up, they better thank me because I just sacrificed. What I need you to see is, God, I did these things because I wanted to honor you and say that, God, you constantly keep loving on me. And I just want to love on my spouse. I want to love on my kids, I want to love on my boss, I want to love on wherever in the same way that you love me. And yes, that will cause you to be a little bit messier when we're being over. Open and honest, and our generosity can't just be faked, but it has to be here. We're gonna constantly have to do a heart check to say, God, I need this to change. I don't have anything in me. During the bankrupt season of my wife and I, when we had two infants and we're trying to work full time and we're just trying to breathe, and we feel like we are underwater. That is not an easy time for me. Like, Pam, how can I serve you more? That is not at all what I am thinking. It's more of how can you serve me? How can I get another nap? Me, me, me. And that happens when we are drowning, because when you're underwater, what do you try to do? You try to get air. That's gonna be your number one focus is how do I get air? But when we keep that self-focus, it does not build a solid ground for our family. It actually keeps us separated. Us on the outward looking like, hey, I've done all these things. There's no reason for you to be upset with me. There's no reason for you to be angry with me. That is not what God is calling us to do. Verse three. We're gonna go three and four. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. This is obvious hyperbole by God. He is not saying when you give to the offering box, be like right hand, you can't see what's behind my back. Like, he is not using that. What he's trying to make is this hyperbolic example of even within yourself, your generosity should not be your self-focus. Your generosity should be focused on love. It should be focused on I'm doing what is right because it's right. As a youth pastor, I can tell you, if you've had teenagers, you know. If you were doing my job expecting teenagers to say thank you, you are crazy. If you think that they are gonna say, oh my gosh, like thank you for taking time to meet with me for coffee, you're so awesome. Like, no. And a teenager's love for you is as much as you say yes to them. As soon as you have to say no, or hey, I can't like support that, they're like, you're the worst, and I'm done. And if I suddenly turn around and say, Well, you're the worst, like, and suddenly, and if we suddenly get into this situation, we can get out of sorts. And if I use these teenagers, but even with our kids, that can happen. My wife and I put on this huge birthday party for my daughter Charlotte. It was last Sunday. My daughter Charlotte, and I know this is ironic for me, is an extrovert's extrovert. She had so many families show up to our house. My wife and I knew only like 25% of a party. Everybody else, we're just meeting these random families. And me and my wife are just like, I'm like gearing myself to be in the front yard, just so as they can see the same like walking up, being like, Who are they? I'm like, what up? I'm Reggie. Like, I'm just trying to meet everybody. And this is a party we've been preparing for for weeks. It is costing us a fortune. My daughter, at the end of the party, has a table full of presents. And at the very end of the party, we start cleaning up. Me and my daughter, the youngest daughter, Juliet, are cleaning up the entire backyard. My eldest daughter has decided to be very moody, has ever had that. She's just sitting on the couch staring off. And every time I ask her to clean, she's just like, I just can't right now. And you're just like, okay, whatever. It's your birthday party, whatever. So after I finally finished cleaning up, doing everything for her, she walks up to me and says, Hey, dad, what present did you get me? And I literally said, You mean besides the decorations, the setup, the food, the drinks, everything else? And then I also said, I said something like the axolotl doctor. She goes, Well, mom got me that. And I go, Okay, let's restart Shar. Let's pretend you're not spoiled right now. And let's pretend you're being a good daughter. She goes, Okay, dad-da. And she walks away. But the truth of it, in that moment, I was so frustrated. I have just spent the entire weekend dedicated to axolotls. They're little weird lizard creatures, if you don't know what they are. They're like a big raise, but they have like these little slits and they actually freak me out a little bit. But that's what I was doing all weekend is looking at axolotls. And we did everything for her. And then it was, well, what's next? And that can break us when we are working hard in our families, and our spouse, after we have put our heart and soul into something, says, not good enough. That can be so discouraging. When we invest in our kids or our nephews, our nieces, our in-laws, and we are putting our heart and soul into something. And then suddenly there's no thank you, there's no appreciation, or worse yet, I don't really like this. Can I get something else? Suddenly, we no longer want to give generously. And the trick around that is to remember that question I said earlier. Who do you give to? When we are called to biblically give, it is found in Matthew chapter 22, verses 37 through 40. Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law? Jesus replied, Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it love your neighbor as yourself. All the laws and the prophets hang on these two commandments. Are you giving in a way that is solidly rooted and that I love God and God has called me to love others, which means loving my family? Are we rooted in that appreciation and that applause? Because every one of us wants to be appreciated. Every one of us wants to be thanked. We want our spouses to notice what we have done. We want our kids to say thank you. We want someone to recognize the sacrifices we have made. Those desires are not sinful. If you're wanting a thank you, please don't hear me say, no one has to say thank you anymore. Like that's not what I'm saying. We are allowed to desire appreciation and thanks. But when our appreciation becomes the reason we give, our generosity becomes frail and fake. That is how the Pharisees went from giving to the poor to God being like, I'm disinterested. Yeah, you've done the right thing, but the reasons are so far. I want nothing of this. Jesus is calling us into something more real. Live before the Father's eyes. Give because he sees you. Love because he sees you. Serve because he sees you. Feel appreciated because he appreciates you. Then whether or not someone thanks you or not, you will be able to keep on giving. Because giving as unto the Lord will radically transform your families, your friends, and your places of work. Amen. So with this, it's the first Sunday of the month. We are also going to move into a time of communion. So I want to invite everybody to grab some of the elements right in front of you or in front of your chair. And I want you guys to know we do communion because Jesus has asked us to do communion. It is how we appreciate him as unto the Father. Because the sacrifice he made on the cross for us is something he asked us to remember by observing this. So with that, I'm going to offer opportunity for us to walk into communion. We're going to dive into the book of Matthew, chapter 26. We're going to read verses 26 through 28. While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to the disciples, saying, Take and eat. This is my body. So everyone, if you want to open up your little lid, there is a, I would call it bread, but more of a stale cracker. It is right here. And I want to encourage you guys an opportunity to now partake in the sacrifice of Jesus' life. And next, Jesus is calling. And next, scripture says in verse 27, then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. So now I'm going to encourage you guys to pull off that lid. This is juice, this is not blood or wine. And with that, please partake. With that, I'm going to tie in communion with the end of this message because they're one and the same. How you give generously is by looking to Jesus. If you are someone right now who is just dry in their faith because life is so busy, and when I keep saying you need to give as unto the Lord, and right now you're like, I'm not even talking to him. I want to encourage you to trust that God forgives and he loves. And no matter how long it's been, let him back in. Let him be the reason you do things. Let him be the thing that says you are worthy, you are worth it, you are appreciated. Because that is what he is about, and that is why he died for us. Amen. So with that, I'm gonna pray us out and be free to go. Dear Heavenly Father, you love us, and you have given to us so generously, giving your life for us. While we were sinners, you died for us. And Lord, so often I don't appreciate that sacrifice. So often I'm looking for validation from others when I need to stop and say, God, you are enough. You are my validation. Jesus, empower us this week to love our families because you love us. In Jesus' name, Amen.