Dr. Conrad Vine. Thank you.
All right, good evening everybody. It’s a real joy to be with you here
today. I uh I drove down yesterday from Tennessee uh Michigan. I was planning on
driving down today and I took a closer look at the map and realized maybe I
should drive down on Thursday. Uh I want to make it here on time on Friday night. So, I’m grateful I did as it turned to
be a 12-hour journey yesterday or with traffic and road works and so forth. And I got lost one of your little Tennessee
side roads up there. I was outside of a phone contacts and my GPS stopped
working and I took a wrong road and I knew I was on the wrong road because even the raccoons weren’t going there
and it was a little dirt track going through the woods for a number of miles and I kept figuring, well, the sun’s over there. Well, as long as I’m heading
in the direction of the sun, I’m going in the right direction. I knew I was east of here. So, I kind of followed the
sun and follow the sun. Eventually, I came back to a road that the GPS recognized. But anyway, it’s a pleasure
to be with you. As um as was shared in our introduction. Um the restrooms are
rooms 4, 6, and 7. So, we ask that you only use one room at a time, and if you
need more than three, you probably need to go to the doctor. So, those are rooms four, six, and seven. I bring greetings
from my wife. She’s up in Berian Springs right now and uh
my son will be joining us tomorrow. He’s going to be filming for me. Uh but it’s a real privilege and an honor to come
and share with you and what a beautiful location. Yes. And uh you know I remember the the the
Barin facility just a few miles away. And uh when I was invited to come here,
my mind went back to the Bayerin facility. No, the um Echo Echo Valley
and I thought uh they said they’re going to have three or 4 hundred people. I thought I don’t see them getting three
or 400 people in upper room and Echo Valley and then they said no it’s going to be at barein and I just say praise
Lord for what has happened here. Uh it’s a beautiful facility and those who are managing it have done a wonderful job in
putting this place together and we say praise God for how everybody uses their gifts for God’s glory. So um our talk
tonight is entitled Heavenly Treasure. Um when when they asked me to give topics for this for this event, I was
writing a whole bunch of sermons for a bunch of events. And I and I put down um Sabbath morning, I’ll talk about the
Godhead. And uh that sermon never got finished. It actually turned into like a
five-part series. And I thought, well, I’m not going to get that done in a Sabbath morning. So I thought, I better
not do that in one session down in Tennessee. I will do it um somewhere else. So I want to talk tonight a sermon
entitled heavenly treasures which is really a meditation on this teaching of Jesus in Matthew chapter 6 as was read
for us in our scripture reading. And then tomorrow I’m going to talk about when you were called into ministry by
God. Uh Moses was called by God and Moses had five objections to why he
should go into ministry. And every time God said I want you to do something Moses says but. and he comes up with an
excuse. I want to go through those five excuses tomorrow morning because those are excuses that we often use ourselves
and we see how God overcomes Moses’ objections but also our objections. That’s our journey tomorrow. So, uh
tonight it’s entitled Heavenly Treasure. I’d invite you to bow your heads with me and invite the presence of God’s holy
spirit. Our dear heavenly father, we thank you for the blessings of the Sabbath day which are almost upon us.
Father, I thank you for the day of preparation when we can set things aside
so the Sabbath is the climax of the week. And now, Lord, as we gather with your saints in this beautiful house of
worship tonight, I ask that this teaching of Jesus will take deeper roots in our hearts. Lord, we live in a world
where men’s hearts are failing them for fear. Lord, we live in a world where the love of money is the root of all manner
of evil. And father, we know that we are use to use our talents for your kingdom. So
Lord, as we reflect on these teachings of Jesus here tonight, I ask that you will guide us and direct us that we will
be willing to walk in a new direction in life after we’ve heard these teachings. In Jesus’ name we humbly ask. Amen.
All right. So our sermon is entitled Heavenly Treasure. And there’s our journey tonight. We’re going to look at
why money. We’re going to look at the rise and the fall of money. We’re going to look at what heavenly treasure is in
the teachings of Christ in the sermon on the mount and the ma uh gospel of Matthew. And then we’re going to come to
our conclusions. That’s our tonight. And um I don’t know when was the first time
in your life that you realized that money was kind of important. Does anybody remember?
When you were born. Yes. Well, uh, when my, uh, I wanted to have twins. When my wife had kids, I was
praying for twins because I figured we get two for the price of one hospital visit. And unfortunately, the billing
system doesn’t work in that way. Um, but, uh, my first conscious memory of money is growing up in England, my
grandma, she would send us, my my twin brother and I would each get a five
pound note, a blue five note in the mail every Christmas. And everybody knew this money was
coming. This was back in those days, you know, when a pastor was earning, let’s say, um, 10 or 15 pounds a week, a five
pound note for a little boy was an awful lot of money. And we knew this was coming. And for months in advance, we
were planning in our minds how we were going to spend that money. We weren’t thinking of saving it. All right. It was
going to go on a mixture of of of little um little um um aircraft that you put together made of plastic. And if mom
wasn’t watching, it was going to go on some candies. Um, but we had spent that money many times over in our minds. The
joy of the expenditure was already entrenched in our brains. And then something happened every year around
October, November. I would have an argument with my brother and I would be deemed responsible for the argument
by my father. And I knew what was coming. He’d invite
me into his office and he’d talk to me about the seriousness of what I’d just done. And then he would say, “Well, when
your £5 comes from grandma this Christmas, that’s going to be your fine.”
And so you’d lived with joy. You’re just hoping to make it through to Christmas. And um uh when Christmas arrived, you’d
open up your envelope for your grandma and there’s this beautiful five pound note. and uh I’ I’d walk over to my dad
and hand it over and I’d look with my at my brother with something less than forgiveness in my eyes um because I’d
always blame him for it. The net result of this was we learned to spend our money the moment we got it because if we
did manage to make it through to Christmas and we weren’t fined the £5, we spent it as soon as we possibly could
to make sure that we weren’t find anything that was left behind. So if I managed to make it to Christmas and
still have my5 pounds, it was gone by, you know, two, three days after Christmas, it was blown. And we had no
in incentive to save because we had a domestic tax system known as the fines.
And so I learned very, very quickly that money can be a very painful topic and you have the joy of looking forward to
an income and you have the pain of seeing that income go all around you. And so I’m going to talk tonight about
why money. We’re going to talk about the rise and the fall of money and then the heavenly treasure that Jesus wants us to
invest our hearts in. So let’s talk first about why money. We’re going to start out by saying this. Without
exchange, civilizations would die tomorrow. Without the exchange of goods and
services, civilizations would die tomorrow. Everybody in this room has a
unique set of guil skills and abilities. Most people drove here in a in a in a
car. Nobody here drilled their own oil and refined their own gasoline and built
their own cars and then drove here. We all are here tonight because of something called exchange. Every acre in
the world has unique features such as land in Kansas is good for wheat. Land
in northern Minnesota is good for iron ore. And without exchange, we would be
completely self-sufficient. Most people would starve to death if we didn’t have
something known as exchange going on in society. It’s the lifeblood needed for
human society to survive. So, um, if I were to show you a pencil, a simple
pencil, there’s almost nobody alive on planet Earth today who with the own knowledge in their own head could
actually make a pencil from nothing. There’s almost nobody alive today who
could actually make a pencil just with their own head knowledge. And so we are completely dependent as a
society upon the concept of exchange. And an exchange takes place when this
person says that this person over here has something of value that they want and this person has something of value
that this person has and they want it. So they come to a negotiated exchange and so um in uh in we have direct barter
for instance um farmer A has got apples and uh farmer B has got lumber and I’m
hoping this stays up. So farmer A has apples and farmer B has lumber and
farmer A goes to the market and he wants to build a barn like this or a hall like
this and farmer B is has a lot of acreage of wood and he has piles of
lumber and farmer A um he has apples he wants to get lumber from farmer B and what happens if farmer B doesn’t want to
have 10,000 tons of apples in exchange for the wood nothing’s going to take place is it and so the chances are if
you just have a society of direct barter, you’re not going to have a sustainable economy. Everybody’s going
to be a subsistence farmer um eating or growing eating whatever you grow or
eating whatever you happen to to hunt. When I first came to Miss Tennessee, um
I was I was aware that woodchucks are a name for groundhogs in Michigan. And I was driving around Tennessee and I kept
seeing signs at the gas stations that said ground chuck, $5 a pound. I was
wondering myself, do they really eat woodchucks down here in Tennessee? And so, you know, uh this is part of,
you know, our heritage here in America. But, um because direct barter doesn’t work, so society’s evolved to where we
have indirect barter. So, farmer A has some apples and he wants lumber from
farmer B. But farmer B doesn’t want apples, but he needs butter.
So, what’s going to happen? Ah, it seems we are we are continually cutting out on our slide here. Sorry,
it’s back. So, farmer A figures he’s going to exchange apples for butter from
farmer C and then he takes that butter and he exchanges it with farmer B who
needs who needs the butter and he’ll exchange some lumber for it. So, indirect barter takes place when you
don’t have two people wanting to exchange exactly the same thing. Now the this is known by economists as uh the
double coincidence of wants. So farmer A wants lumber but farmer B doesn’t want
apples. So you don’t have a double coincidence of wants. Therefore butter appears in all these transactions.
Butter becomes the medium of exchange in this farmers market because everybody’s happy to buy and sell butter and trade
butter because it’s useful commodity to everybody. So in this simple example here, butter is effectively the money
for that local market. You get that? Because butter is divisible. You can have a pound
in the South Sea Islands in Papa Nigini when I was there we are in Papa New Guina. Um does anybody guess what was
the form of currency in northern Papa Guini for many many years? Does anybody have any idea? Yes, sister.
coconuts. No. Well, they do have coconuts there, but it wasn’t coconuts. Well, I’ll tell you what it was. It was
dog’s teeth. And you would see necklaces made of dogs teeth. Beautiful necklaces.
And you think they were made of ivory. No, they’re polished dogs. And they would be made into the these necklaces
and and as chest guards, uh, ceremonial chest vestments. And so dogs teeth were
used in Papa Nigini. In the South Pacific, cowry shells were used. In Scotland, in ancient times, nails were
used as a commodity because everybody needs nails. They’re small, they’re divisible, and they’re durable, and
they’re neutral. Everybody likes to have nails. And so, over the millennia, two
commodities have achieved have achieved um universal acceptance as money, as a
medium of exchange, and that’s gold and silver. And those two commodities are now
universally accepted throughout all of human civilization um as forms of money.
And so u money uh u these two commodities they’re durable over time. They don’t corrode. You can divide them
into smaller and smaller units. They are easily transportable and they are of limited quantity. Now due to u money
civilizations can flourish. If you don’t have money, everybody’s reduced to growing their own food on their own
plots of land. The only way a civilization can grow is if there is money in the system. And that money
could be anything. It could be dogs teeth. It could be cowery shells. It could be nails. It could be copper as in
ancient Egypt. Every society finds something that meets the definition of
money that can act as a medium of exchange. Now once you have money in the
system you can then figure out the price or the value of things. If you don’t
have money in the system you don’t know what the value of something is. Let me give an example. If one car is exchanged
in the market for 60 ounces of gold and one TV is exchanged for 3 ounces of
gold. That means the comparative price of a car to a TV a car is worth 20 TVs.
Now you can only calculate that if you have a medium of exchange that everybody
accepts for building for attaching a price to something and so you can say this is worth more than that for the
price because you know the relative value in your society of those two things. So money allows for comparative
exchange rates otherwise known as prices to be set across a society. And
entrepreneurs once once you have money you can calcul calculate the cost of something. They can calculate the price
of inputs and the price of outputs. That means they can focus only on profitable activities and thus the existence of
money supports the efficient use of scarce environmental resources. Money
also serves as a store of value. If you think about your bank account, or maybe not because it’s a painful topic, but if
you think about your savings account, your savings account is the net value of
your cumulative economic output thus far in your life.
And for some people, it’s a lot and for some people it’s not very much. Now, throughout history, currencies such as
the pound or the dollar or the peso or the durham were always used to the underlying medium of exchange. And for
the last 4,000 years, that’s been money. Tangible goods were always traded in
weight, tons or pounds, ounces, grains, or grams. And whether you use the
imperial system or the metric system is immaterial. You could sell a a coat for
one gold ounce in the US or for 28.35 grams of gold in France. What matters is
the the weight of the gold, not how you calculate the weight. Before 1933,
national currencies represents a fixed quantity of gold. So before 1933, one US
dollar was fixed at 120th of the of an ounce of gold. That was the price of of
a dollar. That was the value of a dollar. It was a 20th of an ounce of gold. In before 1933, a British pound
sterling was a quarter of an ounce of gold. And once you knew what the price was in gold, you could then figure out
the comparative price. The exchange rate was therefore four US dollars equal1 pound sterling before 1933 because you
always cross referencing it with the underlying quantity of gold that that currency could purchase for you. Now in
Britain money is called pound sterling. That’s GBP. That’s Great Britain pounds. That’s the acronym for the for the
pounds or in England we call them quid. Um but it’s called pound sterling. And it’s called pound sterling because uh
the kings used to mint their own coins before England was unified in Saxon times. And the kings on the east coast
of England, the Easterling kings, their silver coins were always of a higher purity than the other mints in England.
And so people wanted a pound sterling or Easterling because those mints had a purer quality of silver or gold in them.
And the the word dollar the word dollar has an interesting origin as well. The
word dollar comes from uh the 16th century. There was a Bohemian aristocrat called Count Yokim Schlick. And he
produced his own silver coins. And his 1 silver coin were called Yurkim’s talas.
And that word tala became the dollar in the US because $1 was worth a was a one
one ounce of silver. you had a silver ounce dollar and that was the where the word dollar comes from. It comes from
Bohemia in the 16th century. So the mo the names of most modern currencies that
we use today were originally tied to fixed weights of gold or silver. Now,
some people store gold in bullion in in in bars like um 100 100 gram ounce of
silver which is about this big and and some people have like kilograms of silver which is about it’s like a big
brick and um somebody showed me a kilogram of silver once. It’s actually a big block and it’s kind of heavy um but
it’s only a kilogram but it feels quite heavy. But um the these um these currencies um people wanted these
currencies in coins rather than in bullion bars. And so coins are more transportable and they’re more divisible
in bullion bars. So coinage became preferred medium of exchange store of value and the setter of prices for most
of humanity over the last 6,000 years. So these gold and silver coins on the
screen there, they provided a global medium of exchange that every person in human history, every family, every clan,
every tribe, every society, every civilization could store, exchange, and
move. And it was these little pieces of rare metal that enabled planet Earth to go from subsistence farming 6,000 years
ago to building flourishing societies and wider civilizations. So without
money, we’d still be living in caves hunting whatever we’re going to be hunting for the day.
And if you want to know, has silver lost any of its value over the years,
I did a rough calculation on this yesterday in Matthew 26:14.
How many pieces of silver was Jesus sold for? 30 pieces of silver was the price of a
slave back 2,000 years ago. The word for silver there is arg.
That’s458 of a troy ounce because it was a shekele. At today’s prices, that’s
worth about $550 US. And if you go to the slave markets of
Libya today, you can buy a slave. These young African men who march up from
subsaharan Africa to Mediterranean coast to try and cross the coast into Europe. Many of them get siphoned off by the
human traffickers and they’re sold in the slave markets of Libya. The going price is $400 to $1,000 a slave even
today. So you could buy a slave in the time of Christ for 30 coins of silver and today
you can buy for the same value of silver a slave today. So silver has kept its
purchasing power over 2,000 years. Our dollar hasn’t kept its purchasing
power, but silver has and so has gold. So let’s talk about the rise and fall of money. So historically within any
society the total supply of money in that country equal the total weight of
the underlying commodities of gold and silver in that country and the shape or size of the gold didn’t really matter.
It could be in coins, it could be bars, it could be in jewelry but gold is a commodity and uh when the supply
normally in a society when the supply of consumer goods rises there is a benefit
to society. Let me give an example. If you are in a country and you suddenly
discover new springs of water where there was previously desert, you you find a new supply of water that’s that
supply of water enables new civilization to take off. Would you agree with me? Yes. And if you’re in a society um and
the and it’s a it’s an impoverished society and suddenly a new factory starts up and they’re producing more
refrigerators so people can store their food and and poor folks don’t have to live on day-to-day existence because
they can supply store their food for longer. You find you have an higher standard of living for its community or
to put it another way you reduce human suffering when you increase the supply of commodities or consumer goods within
a society. But money is the only commodity where if you increase the
supply of it, it doesn’t increase the quality of living or standard of living for the people in that society. You can
increase all other commodities in a society, more iron, more steel, more coal, more wheat, more olive oil and the
society will be blessed. But there is one commodity where if you increase the supply, it will hurt that society and
it’s money itself. If the money supply increases
without a corresponding increase in the amount of goods to buy or sell, then the purchasing value of that money goes
down. So let me give you a simple example on the screen here. Imagine hypothetically that one loaf of bread
can be bought in the markets of southern Tennessee for 1 ounce 1/10enth of an ounce of gold. So that’s the market
price today. Then it suddenly imagine that um you start somebody discovers a gold mine in the area and the supply of
gold goes up 10fold. So now there is 1 ounce of gold in the country. But if the
amount of bread doesn’t go up then you that the seller of bread is now going to charge 1 ounce of gold for the bread
because that’s what’s available rather than a tenth of an ounce because there’s more money chasing fewer the same amount of goods. So if the supply of bread
increases to 10 loaves, then the loaf of bread will still cost a tenth of an ounce of gold. But if there is no
increase in the supply of bread, then one loaf of bread will now cost 1 ounce of gold instead of a tenth of an ounce.
What I’m talking about here is inflation. When you increase the supply of money, then the purchasing power of
your money goes down. So unlike all other items for exchange, unlike all other commodities in human history,
increasing the money supply may make may make people feel rich for a very short period of time, such as the stimulus
checks we got four years ago, but it dilutes the money supply and reduces its purchasing power, leading to inflation
and poverty. Every time they print out of thin air a trillion dollars,
the value of your dollars in your savings account drops accordingly because prices go up.
So the more government supplies extra more and more money to the system, the more those who’ve saved in their lives,
the more they’re going to be penalized because their savings are just going up in smoke. So let’s say that suppose
somebody opens a new f a warehouse for gold one of the original banks and you
go back to the middle ages for this in Europe the Knights Templars they were one of the first to open an intern an
international banking system uh you could deposit money with a Knights Templar abbey in Rome and they would
give you a letter of credits you could take it to London and get that same amount of gold or silver from a Knights
Templar’s abbey in London and so the Knights Templars even though they a military order of monks. They were also
some of the first international bankers in human history. But let’s say that um somebody opens up a warehouse for gold
in the Middle Ages and a rich farmer deposits 100 ounces of gold and he doesn’t just give the gold but they give
him a piece of paper in exchange a receipt for it called paper money.
And then that rich farmer he wants to sell or so he wants to buy some more land. And so he goes to another farmer
who has land and says, “I have a I have 100 ounces of gold in the bank and here’s a little piece of paper that
proves it.” He said, “Why don’t you sell me your piece of land for those 100 ounces?” And the other farmer agrees.
Well, what’s going to happen is the first farmer is going to give his piece of paper showing the ownership of those
100 ounces of gold to the second farmer. He’s not going to take his gold out of the bank and then give 100 ounces of
gold to his neighbor who’s going to put it back in the same bank and himself just going to get a piece of paper a
receipt for that 100 ounces of gold. So what happens the moment you start having a warehouse for gold i.e. a bank you
start having paper money which is basically a receipt for the money that you deposited within that bank.
And so the banking system starts throughout the middle ages. And these days we have warehouses for gold
literally in New York. You have the comics. Any of you know what the comx is? The commercial exchange, the
commodities exchange in New York. Um and that there was the intraday price from
earlier this week of pri of gold and it was going up and down. the ticker was going there and you can see the price of
commodities, gold, silver, copper, crude oil, Brent oil, natural gas, all the other commodities down here. And so you
have the commercial exchange in New York. These are where commodities are traded. And then in London, you have the
LBMA, the London Bullion Merchants Association. And that’s where the daily fixed price of gold is set at 9:00 every
morning. And everything in the world gold markets revolves around that. And in the last few years, the third global
glo gold market has just opened. and that’s the Shanghai Metal Exchange and that’s an attempt to draw gold away from
the west to Shanghai and they’re doing a very very good job of that. So over the
years, people have deposited um millions of ounces of gold and silver in the ComX
New York and the LBMA in London and increasing the Shanghai Metal Exchange. And what happened was over the last
couple of decades was traders were buying and selling in in paper promises for the money.
And nobody was actually what is called standing for delivery. That is if if I if I needed gold to use as collateral
for a building project somewhere else, I would buy I would borrow gold from the comx and uh and they would they would
give me a credit note for that gold and I would go and use that with another bank as deposit as credit and for
collateral for for money to build a building somewhere else. And over the years we have um actually trillions of
dollars in derivatives, paper caper money has built up on these pyramids where one ounce of gold has maybe 500
claimments on it in these bullion exchanges now. And at the moment the whole system is unwinding in front of our eyes quite literally. and um the
LBMA in London and the ComX in New York are being drained dry of their money,
their their co their gold and their silver because wealth managers, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds,
wealthy families and sovereign nations see that the dollars are dying and they’re getting their money out of the
system as fast as they can. And so the LBMA in London, the Comics in New York,
if you follow the news, um last week the LBMA had less than one day’s trading of
silver left in the vaults, which is the first time in their history that’s ever happened.
And so what we’re seeing today is that the the wealthy in the world are getting
out of fiat currencies and they’re turning it into gold and silver as fast as they can. Now coming back to that
bank customer, we’re going to fractional reserve banking. You heard of fractional reserve banking?
This is how your local bank works. So a bank customer, do you have warehouses for gold? Those evolved over the years
into what we call fractional reserve banking. So, a bank customer can hold their paper receipt called banknotes or
cash or they can wave their right to hold paper and you can hold your title to that asset as an open book account
known as a bank deposit in the bank. There is no real difference between a cash note and a bank deposit. Both are
claims to theoretical ownership of the theoretical gold that is held by the bank. But these days, banks have no gold
in their vaults after 1913. This stored gold is theoretically held as reserve
for whenever you want to come and claim ownership. And banks make profits on the service charges for the warehousing of
this gold. And this leads to fractional reserve banking. And so the banks realize that most c customers don’t
actually withdraw their gold deposits. So the bank issues new receipts to new customers for the original gold that the
original depositor still has got claim to. Most don’t realize this is happening, but the bank creates pseudo
gold credits, i.e. credit, which is theoretically backed up by gold, which doesn’t exist in the vaults of the bank
anyway. And so banks, uh, you know, when you get a mortgage from a bank, they don’t have,
let’s say you take a mortgage of $200,000, the bank doesn’t have $2,000 worth of gold sitting in its vault to back up
that loan to you. They literally create money out of thin air and they lend it to you. And if you’re
on a home extension loan, they literally create money out of thin air at the touch of a button because they know that
statistically that if they keep like one or two% of the deposits in the bank actually in the bank, um then they can
inflate up to another 98% on top of that. So that um because they just create credit out of thin air because
not everybody’s going to want their money at the same time. Of course, the whole system comes crashing down when you have a run on the bank when people
all want their money back and the bank simply doesn’t have the money. So, this is what we call fractional reserve banking. And so, the the the per the
giving of credit by banks inflates the money supply over and above the underlying commodity that is gold that
is backing it up. Should all the customers demand their gold, the bank would fail as they don’t have enough
physical gold to cover all your paper receipts. Every bank in the US is technically insolvent today as they’ve
created so much paper credits, paper receipts known as credits. But the risks are spread across society because our
banks have formed a cartel and they agree to pay each other’s receipts being few people asked for their cash anyway.
But this system became problematic. So we come to governments deciding to control money supply directly
themselves. So in a barter economy, governments will seize physical assets. In a monetary economy, monetary assets
are seized to pay for services provided by the government and the to pay for the subsidies to favored groups,
unemployment benefits, um various subsidies to X, Y, or Z groups within society. Now, this is known as taxation.
Now, taxation is not popular, is it? Nobody want nobody likes to pay their taxes. They we have to as Christians,
but nobody wants to pay taxes. But governments have figured out that they can print money. That means you increase
the money supply. You print money out of thin air because then the government gets the resources it wants today
without causing the public hostility if they were to tax the people for the same amount of money. Now throughout history,
governments have claimed a monopoly on the minting of coins on the issuance of new currency and and defining what is
legal tender within your government in your particular country. And in so doing, governments throughout history
have claimed control of the means of exchange. That is the core of a functioning society. And over the years,
governments have debased their currencies deliberately in order to squeeze as much purchasing power out of
the currency for the benefit of the government, not for the benefits of society. And so for instance, the French
Libra in 1200 AD was set at 98 grams of silver, but by 1600 AD, it had been
debased down to 11 grams of silver. I was just looking in my bag before I came across today. I was in England earlier
this year. I found a 50 p piece 50 pennies in my in my bag. It’s a silver
coin about this big. And uh when I was growing up, it was very substantial coin. It was a thick coin and it was
very heavy in your hands. But just in my lifetime, that 50 pence piece has been shrunk and thinned out and doesn’t have
half the weight that it used to have. And I see in front of my eyes the debasement of the currency when you compare the sizes of the coins. And the
Roman governments used to do this. They would literally snip the edges off the coins and and melt down the snippings
and reissue coins. And they’d say, “Well, if we’ve snipped half of the silver off this coin, it’s still a
dinarius even though half the silver is gone.” And then they would take the sn the cutings and create another coin with
that. And then over the years the Roman government kept debasing and debasing and debasing its own currency. So that
eventually the Roman money was literally worth less. There was nothing left. It was more tin than silver at all. So when
the government creates new cash, we call it quantitative easing. The money new money weight makes its way into the
system and it forces money prices up. Now, what’s interesting to note for our purposes here tonight is that when the
government prints money out of thin air, it gets the most purchasing power from that money more than the society does.
Why? Because the government, if the government prints a trillion dollars, it gets to print to spend those dollars at
today’s prices before prices have gone up. But as those trillion dollars extra
just create work their way through the economy, the prices everywhere go up through society. So by the time the the
the trillion dollars make their way out to rural Tennessee, prices of society have gone up long before you see the
benefit of those extra dollars. So whenever the government creates money out of thin air, it always has the
biggest benefit from it. The people who suffer the most are those who are furthest from the economic centers,
rural areas such as southern Tennessee, those on fixed incomes,
retirees, those who have annuities, life insurance beneficiaries, landlords or commercial
landlords with long-term leases, bond holders, those holding cash in their
home. As the savers lose, the borrowers gain because they’re now repaying back in a devalued currency.
And so when the government creates trillions of dollars out of thin air, and currently we’re producing about a
deficit of a trillion dollars about every three or four months just gets fed into the system. Everybody in this room
here tonight who’s done the right thing and had and saved throughout their life, you are losing every two or three
months. The purchasing power of your dollars is evaporating in front of our eyes.
It’s not I’m not sugar coating it. This is just reality. This is what happens when governments create money out of
thin air. The governments of the world realized that if everybody asked for
their money back, then the banks would collapse. So in America, beginning with the 1812 war,
war of 1812, which was between Britain and and the US, the US government said
that um the banks of New England did not have to repay their customers if they demanded their deposits back. They
called it the suspension of speci payments. And so banks across the United States issued their own credit notes
once they realized they didn’t have to pay silver or gold coin to the depositors if they demanded their money
back. They could just print more of their money notes. In the US, here in the south, this led to, you may remember
Jonian, the hard money movement before the Civil War. The hard money movement
was a reaction to people losing their life savings in the American banking system in 1819, 1837 and 1857 in the
banking crisis. And so because there were so many banking crises around the world, governments decided to set up
central banks. Now central banks um were another money-making scheme for the government and uh most governments
around the world, they they confiscated the gold in their countries. They brought all the gold back to their central banks and then they issued a new
national currency. Private banks such as here in America were banned from issuing their own notes and gold went from you
and I to your local bank and then from your local bank into the coffers of the national bank or the central government
bank. And the national bank in turn issued bank notes um from those gold
reserves. So since 1917 here in America, gold could no longer be part of a bank’s
legal reserves, but it has to be deposited with the Federal Reserve Bank. So the government took over the gold
from your savings and put them in the reserve, the Fed, the Fed. And though the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and the
creation of the FDIC in 1933, we were weaned off gold and silver
dollars and started using cash instead because the Federal Reserve controls most of the gold. This allows the
Federal Reserve on the screen there to print dollars to counterfeit, inflate,
devalue, debase whenever it’s politically or economically expedient because they’ve taken your gold. Now
over the last 200 years there’s been a systematic dellinking or decoupling of
the national currencies and the dollar in particular away from gold to what we
have now as an entirely fiat currency which is dying in front of us. I’ve charted the the the flow the major
events there in 1815 we were on a classical gold standard where you could you could deposit a dollar and get a
certain amount of gold in exchange from your bank. In 1914 with the on World War I, um governments in the west and in
Germany, they suspended gold redemption rights in World War I because they needed the gold to finance the national
war effort, not to um pay back savers. In 1926, after the end of World War I,
um the countries went back to a renewed gold standard, but now they had debased currencies. So now it took far more
dollars or far far more pound sterling to buy an ounce of gold than it did before World War I. In 1931, uh because
the governments couldn’t supply the gold when people wanted to redeem it, we went back to fluctuating fiat currencies. And
then World War II came along and by the end of World War II, we ended up with what we now have the Bretonwood system
that was put together in 1945. And uh that um tied the dollar to gold
and you could redeem gold for dollars. And if you gave your dollar to an American bank, they were obliged to give
you a certain amount of gold. So the dollar was backed by gold and America had about 8,000 tons of gold the end of
World War II. And so um America controlled the world economic system because of her control of of that large
pot of gold. But by 1968, Breton Woods was unraveling
because you cannot be the world’s reserve currency when everybody needs dollars. Um you can’t be um the world
reserve currency and everybody needs dollars and still keep your gold reserves because once dollars are floating all around the world um people
want to turn those dollars into gold. So America was losing its gold. So Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971.
He came up with the Smithsonian agreement in December 1971. He called it the greatest monetary agreement in the
history of the world and it was dead 12 months later. So then in 1974 the petro
dollar was established. The dollar had to be backed by something and so the US government made a deal with Saudi Arabia
in which they agreed to only sell oil for dollars and then they would funnel
their dollars into US treasuries in exchange for US military protection. That was the petro dollar deal. Most of
us grew up with the petro dollar. Now,
what has happened since then? Well, since we’ve come off the the petro dollar,
the dollar has lost most of its value. If you look at the Federal Reserve, they’ll tell you that we’re down about
97 to 98% of the purchasing power of the dollar has gone since we came off the uh
went into the petro dollar and Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971.
Since 1974, US incomes have stagnated. You used to be able to raise a family on
a single income. Have a family, a car, a house on one income.
But for most people, that’s an impossible dream. Nowadays, you need two incomes, a side gig and a credit card
just to raise a family. It’s the new economic reality. It’s because the
purchasing power of the dollars just keeps going down and down and down. Or to put it another way, you’re being
devalued as an individual in society. If you could raise a family through 40
hours of work for one person in the week and now you need a 100 hours of work a week to pay for a family that means that
you as individual are being devalued. It’s not just that purchasing power of money is going down is that you as
individual are worth less and less and less to society to eventually reach the point whereas many people already have
you check out of society because there’s no point doing 40 hours a week. You can’t survive on 40 hours a week.
So the great fiat experiment is coming to its end. Just recently
um we see the the fiat experiment is coming to an end as I said and and the world is coming full circle and so this
year just come into effect the Basel 3 banking agreements from the bank of international settlements and for the
first time in many years um this allows gold to be held as a tier one reserve by the banks of the world. We’re going back
to gold as a global economy. The banks are realizing that they don’t need dollars or pound sterling or yen or euro
dollars or dirham. They need gold. And so the Basel 3 international framework
for banks which is not something we talk about at our kitchen tables. I understand that. It means that now you
can consider gold a tier one asset in the reserves of your bank. Gold prices are surging as central banks are buying
gold in never seen before quantities. The banks of the world are buying gold.
They’re sucking up as much as they possibly can because they see what is happening to the dollar. Just a few
weeks ago, President Trump signed the Genius Act. You probably saw this,
the Genius Act. And the Genius Act is kind of a work of genius actually. Um,
some of you are familiar with stable coins. You know what stable coins are? So, a stable coin is a cryptocurrency
like Tether. Say USDT is Tether and it’s on the crypto exchanges and in order to
buy $1 worth of Tether, they have to buy one they have to have $1 worth of of US
reserves, whoever the supplier of that stable coin. So if you buy $1,000 worth of Tether, they have to buy $1,000 worth
of US treasuries to back it up. So stable coins are tied to the US dollar.
And uh President Trump realized that more and more com uh uh companies are
wanting to issue their own stable coins. Amazon wants to issue its own stable coin. So you you buy and sell in Amazon
with Amazon coin, not with dollars. And United wants to issue its own stable coin. And all the gaming industry
already has its own coins out there. You ask any teenager and they will buy and sell commodities online. They’ll put
dollars into the system. And then they’re buying and selling with these credits online which are uh t stable
coins issued by the gaming industry. And so stable coins are are uh what is
happening with them is that um just in a few years time we’re probably all going to be using stable coins whether we like
it or not. And what has this done for the US government? Um at the moment US buyers don’t want to touch US treasuries
with a barge pole. Nobody wants it. Nobody wants to buy 30-year treasuries from overseas because people don’t
believe the dollar is going to exist in 30 years. So, the era of the 30-year fixed rate mortgage is going to come to
an end because nobody’s buying the 30-year treasuries from the Treasury anymore. And so, President Trump issued
the genius which requires all stable coins to buy US treasuries.
So, as corporations issue their own currencies, which is what they will be doing, they’re going to have to back
them up with US treasuries. So this act here was a temporary like plaster sticking plaster bandage over the the
the loss of demand for US treasuries around the world. And President Trump is forcing stable coin issuers to purchase
US treasuries if they’re going to to back up those stable coins. So it’s kind of like an act of economic genius. But
what it does mean is that um because the government controls the stable coins, it means they can turn you off at any
moment in the future. So even though President Trump promised no central bank digital currency, once we all shift over
to stable coins and we will be doing more and more of it in the near future, there’s the mechanism for Revelation 13
looking you right there in the face. So as President Trump said recently on
Truth Social, the golden rule of negotiating and success, he who has the
gold makes the rules. So the architecture of global finance is
shifting in front of our very eyes. We are watching the death of one monetary system and the evolution of a new
monetary system. We’re living through um a savings and pensions crisis. We’re
looking through tariffs, trade wars, and economic cons coercion against the nations of the world as their own fiat
currencies fade. In the last three months, America has used economic coercion against dozens of countries
worldwide in the tariff wars to get what we want. It’s exactly what Revelation 13
talks about. The US using its economic might to gain its own political objectives. And President Trump has been
using the tariffs as a weapon to force compliance from governments worldwide to
what he wants for the American economy. So it’s only a matter of time before that economic pressure is used not on
economic grounds but for spiritual goals and spiritual objectives. So the new
economic system is going to be a mixture of commodities such as gold and silver, digital currencies and digital ideas.
I’m going to talk about this somewhere else, but the the United Nations has what they call sustainable development
goals. Have you heard of the United Nations sustainable development goals? These are all to be implemented by the
year 2030 which last I checked is just around the corner. And one of those sustainable development goals number
16.9 is that um there’s digital there’s legal ID for all people on planet earth. And
the the benchmark is that every child born on planet earth will have a legal digital ID.
Now you say well what does that matter? Well you read through the United Nations paperwork and it’s on their websites.
you just have to dig around for it. You realize that these digital IDs are required to have access to the global
economic system and that those who don’t have a digital ID will be frozen out of
not just economics but out of health care, out of education, out of transport and travel. And this is openly stated in
the UN websites in their sustainable development goals. And so in order to implement this this digital dungeon, the
sustainable development goal 16.9, which sounds innocuous enough that every child born on planet earth will have a legal
ID. The purpose behind it is to establish a global no-by noell regime.
So I’m talking about this tonight because we’ve seen the rise and the the rise and the fall of money as we know
it. And we’re entering a digital era where everybody will be using digital forms of money. Digital forms of money
that can be turned on or turned off based on what you think and what you say. In China, they have it. It’s called
a social credit score. In Canada, they shut off the truckers, the truckers
protests in the COVID pandemic. They closed their bank accounts. They closed their PayPal. They closed their Bitcoin.
They closed everything because they said you’re a national security threat. And so don’t think for a minute that
governments around the world will not use their economic leverage over the new and digital money to to force people
into compliance with what is coming upon this world. We’re already seeing it take place.
So having cheered everybody up so far tonight,
my wife says I have a gift of cheering people up. So she sends me away weekends so that she doesn’t have to be depressed
every weekend. So, um, having cheered us all up tonight,
what do we do? Well, the bad news is we can’t change what’s happening to the economy around
us. We have no control over that. And my son is 23 years old. He doesn’t
carry cash. Says, “Dad, if he wants some money, I go to my cash app and I press a button and
the money goes to him. It’s all it’s all digital. And if he wants to buy something, he
goes to Facebook Marketplace and he pays with his PayPal account. He never sees any money. Maybe my generation, we’re
used to having bills in our pocket and checks. But the millennials and the Gen Zers,
it’s a foreign world to them. They’re using digital money already. Some of them wouldn’t know what a $100 note
actually looks like. They just deal in digital numbers on a screen. So that the younger generations are already used to
working in a cashless environment. They’re already used to this. We can’t
change the stable coins. We can’t change Bitcoin. We can’t change the collapse of
the dollar. We can’t change the printing of trillions of dollars by the federal government. We have no control over any
of that. And so I want to talk for a few minutes then about what does Jesus say about money. And this is what was read
for us in our scripture reading. Jesus says this. He says, ‘do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where
moth and rust consume, where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourself treasures in heaven, where
neither moss nor rough consumes, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your
heart will be also. Now, if you look at the wider context of
Matthew chapter 6, Jesus is speaking from this passage, verse 19 all the way through to the end of of this chapter
about worry. He’s talking about people who worry. What are we going to eat? What are we
going to drink? What are we going to wear? Where are we going to live? How are we going to pay our bills? Jesus is
talking to our natural human tendency to worry about tomorrow.
Now most of us have some worry for about tomorrow because most of us have an emergency fund somewhere. We know we
live in an unpredictable world. Is that not right? And we also most people they they want to save for a rainy day. It’s
even an idiom in our English language because we know that today may be better than tomorrow. I’d better put something
aside for tomorrow. So most of us have got the idea that it’s a good thing to save for a rainy day. And really it is.
When you have grown teenage kids, you know, as a parent, you need to be saving all the time because accidents do happen
with teenage kids. You know, my my daughter came back from college the other day and she put a
receipt on my desk. It’s like $20 for gas. I said, “What’s this for?” She says, “Dad,” she said, “You need to pay
it.” I said, “Why do I need to pay that? It’s your car.” And she smiles sweetly. She says, “Daddy,” she says, “It’s my birthday today.” So I paid it for her by
let her know that this is a non-recurring donation to you. You have your own car, you run your own gasoline.
But Jesus speaks to the fact that the accumulation of worldly goods is
generally motivated by a desire for security and it reflects our fears over the
uncertainties of the future. We do save for those rainy days. Jesus teaches us
in this passage that possession of material wealth is often more a source of anxiety than a means of escape from
anxiety. Every material possession we buy is affected by decay, debasement or
depreciation. You all know what a new car smell smells like.
No, we go in Uber sometimes. So rent a car somewhere and you’ll smell a new car
and they don’t last for very long. That smell doesn’t last for very long. Everything depreciates with time. Jesus
is teaching the fact that those without God tend to be consumed by their love of money because money represents wealth
and represent that represents their ability to survive in times of crisis. Money equates with personal security.
Once people have their wealth, they’re then consumed and paralyzed by fear of losing that wealth. And they spend much
time managing their wealth to avoid loss. I’ve noticed over the years of my life
whenever I visit a wealthy person sometimes they will have the Dow Jones on a ticker on a screen in front of
their desk and you can chart their emotional state through the day with where the Dow Jones
has gone literally. The Dow Jones drops 500 points by 10:00
a.m. in the morning. And they’re like tearing their hair out. And the Dow Jones climbs 600 by the end
of the day. And so it’s a net 100 points increase. And you can ask them for a favor. But don’t ask them for a favor
when the Dows just drop 500 points because they’re in an emotional frenzy.
My dad used to say that he said, ‘Boy, he said, ‘If you’ve got any money in the bank or anything, he said, buy the
Financial Times on Christmas Eve and take a look at it once a year just so you know that fund is still there. He
says, but don’t worry about it through the rest of you can’t change what happens. If it’s there, it’s there. If it’s gone, it’s gone. There’s nothing
you can do about it. Don’t let it rule your emotions. But there are many people today who are consumed by fear of loss.
And so those who have nothing don’t worry about losing anything because they’ve got nothing to lose. Those who
have billions in the stock market manage their finances 247.
Many men have so many toys in their garage that you know come say at least in Michigan or Minnesota where I used to
pastor come September October the men were unavailable for any church activities because they were winterizing
their boat. They’re winterizing their their their theiruizing whatever they’re winterizing. They were
winterizing so many gadgets um that they were unavailable for two months of the year to do anything for the church. They
were worried about the deterioration to their physical assets. It took them out of circulation in the kingdom of God.
The Christian according to Jesus does not need to be anxious about the material necessities of this life
because we have confidence that God knows our needs and God is going to provide for them. Earlier in this
chapter, Jesus teaches us to pray in the Lord’s prayer. He said, “Give us this day our bread for today or our daily
bread.” So before Jesus talks about money, he’s teaching us that your daily bread, your daily survival is dependent
upon your walk with your heavenly father, not upon what is happening in the Dow Jones this week.
And so in this extended discussion in Matthew 6, Jesus is speaking to 21st century Americans, myself included, and
everybody, you know, Bill Clinton says, “It’s the economy, stupid.” No, it’s your trust in your heavenly father that matters.
And Jesus is inviting us to lift our eyes out of the values and the goals and the worries of this world and to ask our
heavenly father each morning for the bread sufficient for that day. And so he says, don’t store up for
yourself treasures on earth. Why? Because thieves are going to break in and destroy known as um politicians.
Moth and rust is going to consume. Yes, cars do rust away. those new washing machines, whatever else you buy that’s
brand new, within a few months is dirty and damaged and starting to fall apart.
So Jesus says, “Don’t do this. It doesn’t mean that we’re to be lazy. We are to work to provide for our needs.” 1
Thessalonians 4:es 10-12 says this. But we urge you, beloved, to do so more and
more, to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands as we directed you, so that you
may behave properly towards outsiders and be dependent on no one. And so we
are to work with our hands, preferably. According to the Apostle Paul, manual labor is honorable labor. It enables us
to provide for our own needs and to be a blessing to those in need around us. And so the Christian is not just to pray,
give us this day our daily bread, then sit at home waiting for money to drop, money, food to fall from heaven. We are
to ask God, then we’re to cooperate with him in the process in doing an honest day’s labor.
So we’re not to be anxious, but we are to store up for ourselves treasures in heaven. According to Jesus, the treasure
in heaven is permanent, unaffected by thieves. Politicians can’t get their
hands on it. Politicians cannot induce a currency debasement of your heavenly money. They cannot cause inflation to
your heavenly money. There can be no physical decay of your heavenly money and the ravages of time do not affect
your money. Heavenly investments are guarded by God for his faithful children for when Jesus comes again. But what
does Jesus mean when he says, “Do not store up for yourself treasures on earth, but store up for yourself
treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Well, the word treasure appears
three times in these two verses. The word in Greek is thesaurus. We get the word thesaurus. A thesaurus is a
treasure house of words. Okay, so that’s what it is. So Jesus says um do not store up for yourself treasures on
earth. But you want to have treasures in heaven for where your treasure is there your heart will be also. That is your
heart will go where your treasure is. Your treasure doesn’t follow where your heart is. Your heart follows where your treasure what really important to you h
really is. So what does Jesus mean in this gospel by treasures? What is he
talking about? Well, the first thing we’d say is that when the wise men came to Jesus earlier in this gospel in
Matthew chapter 2 11, it says then opening their treasure chests and the word is thesaurus there. They offered
him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrr. This is the first instance of this word treasures or treasure chests in the
gospels and it’s the worship and adoration of the babe Jesus in the manger of Bethlehem.
In ancient times, it was customary to bring a gift to a ruler as an act of homage and as an act of worship.
Joseph’s brothers brought him gifts when he was a prime minister of Egypt. The Queen of Sheba brought gifts to Solomon,
including gold and spices from modern day Yemen. And we bring our treasures as
an act of worship to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. In this story here,
gold, frankincense, and myrr. The gold is gift worthy of a king. The
frankincense is reminded that Jesus is our heavenly high priest. And the myrrh is reminded Joseph Arythea brought myrr
to bury to embalm the body of Christ with. So the when the when they brought frankincense, gold, and myrrh to the to
the babe Jesus, they’re reflecting on the fact that he is the king of kings. He was going to die a death and he is
our heavenly high priest. And so the wise men, they brought gifts to Jesus. They were acts of worship to
Jesus that reflected their understanding of who Jesus really was.
So how do we bring treasures or store up treasures in heaven above?
Romans 12:1 says this. I appeal to you therefore brothers and sisters by the mercies of
God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to God
which is your spiritual worship. Now this verse became very very applicable
during the pandemic the last four years. Um but we are to present our bodies as a
living sacrifice to our heavenly father. That is your body is the temple of the
holy spirit. When we care for our body we are preparing ourselves to receive
the holy spirit. There is a relationship between gut health and brain health.
We’re becoming more and more aware of this. And people who suffer from depression, they don’t have enough serotonin in their in their body. And
now we know that serotonin is produced in the brain, but far more is produced in your gut. And having a healthy biome
and a healthy gut actually affects how you think and how your mental mood is. And the bad news is is that burgers and
fries doesn’t help your serotonin production. The bad news is it’s cauliflower and salad that does it. I
mean, terrible news, I guess, but we just have to take that with a pinch of salt tonight. But, you know, it’s the salads. Having a healthy biome improves
your mental health. But we one way that we store up treasures in heaven is
present my body as a living sacrifice to God. That is taking care of my body with intentionality, not abusing it, not um
overeing, taking enough exercise, the new start principles. I preached a few weeks ago in Portland on lost zombies
and and I realized as I was doing that preparing those three sermons that when I was doing chip programs in churches,
the new start principles um they actually directly improve heart health. And then when I was doing depression
recovery programs, I realized that the new start principles affect your mental and emotional state. Then I was talking
about indoctrination and how you have critical thinking skills so you can avoid the fear that’s pumped into this
world to force us to think in certain ways as happened in the pandemic and the key things you can do to improve your
hippocampus health is the new start principles that God has given us this this incredible health message and when
we live the avenist health message it affects our our hearts it affects our emotional well-being and it affects our
ability to perceive heavenly truth so there are multiple hits, positive hits
from the Adventist health message. I want to encourage you tonight just to start living the new start principles.
It doesn’t cost you anything, but it can gain you an incredible
physical health, mental health, emotional health, and the ability to perceive heavenly truth as well. The
next thing that we are to do is to avoid fornication. 1 Corinthians 6:18-20 says they shun
fornication. Every sin that a person commits is outside the body. But the fornicator
sins against the body itself. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you which you
have from God and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price. Therefore glorify God in your body. Our
bodies are a gift from a heaven our heavenly father and we have responsibility of stewardship not just
on the world around us but on how we steward our own bodies. We are to avoid sexual immorality,
porn, fornication, adultery, self harm, and in so doing, we prepare our bodies
to be the temple of the Holy Spirit. And so, this is one way that we soar up treasures in heaven above. The Apostle
Paul goes on to say in 1 Thessalonians 2:19-20, he says, “For what is our hope or joy or
crown of boasting before our Lord Jesus at his coming? Is it not you? Yes, you
are our glory and our joy. And so the treasure above all treasures that we are
to store up in heaven above is winning treasures for Jesus Christ. Paul is
talking here about his crown, his joy, um his crown of boasting are the saints
who’ve been won to Christ in the Greek city of Thessalonica. And so when we are to store up treasures in heaven above,
we are to go seeking to save the lost. We sang in our hymn. Yes. 373, seeking
the lost. and and so forth. So when we engage in gospel work, when we lead
people to Jesus Christ, when a teenager in your church says, “Could somebody please study the Bible with me to
prepare me for baptism?” When there’s a chip program going on in your church, when there’s a revelation series going on down the road, get involved in that.
You are storing up heavenly treasure. Your treasure when you get to heaven will be to meet those precious souls who
have an eternally positive consequence. That is life with God in heaven above. because we stepped out in faith today.
And so we store up treasure in heaven above by consecrating and consecrating not just giving unwillingly, but by
consecrating with a willing heart our talents, our abilities, our time, and yes, our finances to further the gospel
in Tennessee and in the states and to the ends of the earth. I will encourage you tonight to to think about where your
money is going tonight. My dad said to me many years ago, he said, he said, Corin, he said, “Show me
a man’s budget for the month, and I’ll tell you whether he’s a Christian or not.”
You can tell someone’s spiritual priorities by how they spend their money.
Do they have a budget every month for Netflix and eating out, or do they have a budget every month for local worthy
student funds in local Adventist Elementary School? Do they have a budget every month for the local evangelism
fund in church? Or are they saving up for a new vehicle? Now, we may need a
new vehicle, but maybe a used vehicle could be just as good in the interim. And so, you can tell somebody’s
spiritual priorities by looking at how they spend their money. How I spend my money, how you spend your money is a
reflection of where our heart truly is. And if you want to know the state of your walk with God tonight, ask
yourself, how much of my time, how much of my talents, how much of my of my dollars and financial resources, how
much of those are consecrated to winning souls?
Look at yourself in the mirror. And if you don’t like what you see,
may you get on your knees tonight and ask God to show you how to consecrate your time, your talents, your treasure
for God’s kingdom purposes. The Apostle Paul goes on to say in
Colossians 2:3, he uses the word thesaurus there as well. He says,”I want their hearts to be encouraged and united
in love so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery.” That is
Christ himself in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
And so in Christ himself are hidden all the thesuride, the treasures of wisdom
and knowledge. And he wants us to have the riches of assured understanding of
the knowledge of God’s mystery. The mystery of God in the New Testament is the plan of salvation.
So Paul is talking about here that he wants that God wants us to have the assurance of salvation and we are to
know the treasure that is Christ himself for ourselves. Are we spending time getting to know
Christ for ourselves? Jesus put it this way. Matthew 13:52, the same word is
used there. He says, “And Jesus said to them, therefore, every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven
is like a master of a household who brings out of his treasure if the sorai what is new and what is old.”
And so the word of God is a treasure. And those who are wise treasure this in
their hearts and in their minds and they store it up because there are times when
you’re going to bring out those treasures because you need them in life. Something happens to you. You need to make a decision and the Holy Spirit
brings a voice to your memory and says this is the way walking in it. and and you’re having to uh having to make not
just make a decision but you’re I don’t know asking yourself is this attitude consistent with the kingdom of God. The
Holy Spirit will bring from that hidden treasure in your minds the words of God. These are the teachings of Jesus that
Jesus is referring to here. Those teachings of Jesus have been stored in your minds. So they actually guide you
on a daily basis in what you say, what you think, the decisions you make, the relationships that you enter into. So
when we are to store up for yourself treasures in heaven, there’s no like heavenly bank that we’re literally a
bank that we’re putting money into, but we are storing up the treasures of the teachings of Jesus in our mind. And when
when crises come, we’re not going to be guided by human wisdom, but we’re guided by godly wisdom. And God steers us away
from the pitfalls of life. and he helps us avoid the catastrophes and the disasters that may come upon us because
we’re being guided by his Holy Spirit who brings the words of Jesus to memory to guide us when those moments of
decision come upon us. And so to know Christ for ourselves, to have the assurance of salvation to store up in
our hearts and our minds the teachings of Jesus to guide us through life. Jesus says at the end of the sermon on the
mount in the next chapter, the foolish man built his house upon the what? The sand. But the wise man built his house
upon the the rock. And that rock is the teachings, the words of Jesus Christ. So
when we store up for ourselves in our minds the teachings of the word of God, it enables us to stand when the storms
of life hit the homes that we have built all around us in life. When you support a missionary in Africa,
you’re laying up treasure in heaven above. That is the joy of meeting the saved souls who were there when Jesus
comes again. When you give for an evangelistic series in southern Tennessee, you give of your time, your
talents, or your dollars, you’re storing up for yourself treasures in heaven above. That is the joy of meeting those
saved souls when Jesus comes again. When you start when you start to give to a
people group overseas that you’ve never met before, you start to pray for that group. You become concerned for their
well-being, both temporal and spiritual. You wrestle with God in prayer over the spiritual battles that are going on for
that unreached people group. As when God’s kingdom enters that unreached people group, Satan’s kingdom is being
pushed back in real visceral spiritual warfare. So put your treasure into gospel work and your heart will
naturally follow. Sister White put it this way. She’s quoting on this passage here. Where your treasure, your
thesaurus is, there your heart will be also. She says, “He who gives money or time for spreading the gospel enlists
his own interest and prayers for the work and for the souls to be reached through it. His affections go out to
others. He is stimulated to greater devotion to God that he may be enabled to do them the what? The greatest good.
So we are stimulated not just to do the bare minimum for God’s kingdom. We are stimulated to do the greatest good
possible because our heart has followed where our treasure is. The treasure we seek is the salvation of the lost.
And so therefore, we give of our treasure. You may be at a stage of life where you have time on your hands.
Invest your time in kingly purposes, godly purposes. You may be at a stage of life where you have money to give.
Invest that money in a way that makes a tangible difference for the kingdom of God. You may be at a time of life where
you have talents to give. Maybe a nominating committee and you’re good with finance and they say, “Would you be the church treasurer?” And you think,
“Oh, no, Lord. Just give me a break for the next two years, but you invest your talents in God’s
kingdom and you’re going to strengthen God’s kingdom for everybody else.
So, wherever you are tonight, you think about my engagement and your engagement
in God’s kingdom and where our treasure really is. If you want your heart to be where God
wants it to be, invest in where God already is, that is at work among the
lost, seeking the lost that they may all be saved for heaven above.
What do we say in conclusion tonight? We store up treasure in heaven by stir
storing the word of God in our hearts. Memory verses,
memorizing scripture. If you’re not very good at memorization,
you know, mark it up in your Bibles. I mark up things. I know where they are
on the pages. I have one Bible version that I use for the last 20 years. I have three reserves
sitting at home for when this day this one dies because I remember where stuff is on the page. Give me a different
Bible. I’m going, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where is that text again?” But I’ve invested in something so it
aids my memory. And this is the sword of the spirit, the word of God. And so I
want to be proficient in its use. So I’m going to invest to make sure that I am as proficient as I can be in. So store
the word of God in your hearts. Live the teachings of Jesus in your daily lives. That is like the scribe who brings out
the treasures of knowledge in meat season in the right moment in time. Store up the teachings of Jesus in your
hearts and live them out on a daily basis. Honor your bodies as the temple
of the Holy Spirit. Invest or live lives of moral purity
because we were bought with a price. And invest your time, your talents, and
your money in evangelism to the lost and sacrificial service to the hurting.
Currencies rise and currencies fall. Throughout history, the average fiat currency does not last
longer than about 250 years. The dollar is at the end of its lifespan right now.
Don’t pursue dollar wealth. Pursue treasures in heaven above.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God. As Jesus says at the end of this chapter,
don’t be like the pagans who worry about what we’re going to eat, what we’re going to wear, what we’re going to drink, what where we’re going to live, what kind of cars we’re going to drive.
Jesus says, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” And all these things, that is the things that
the Gentiles, the pagans, those who do not know God worry about. You don’t need to worry about those. Jesus says, “Seek
you first the kingdom of God and his righteousness as the righteousness of Christ in your life, and God will take
care of your temporal needs.” All these things shall be added unto you. Currencies rise and fall. Money is
inflated. It’s debased. It’s corrupted. It’s stolen. We have no control over these matters. But tonight, you can
choose where the treasure of your heart is going to reside. Seek first God’s kingdom and ask God to
take care of your material needs. Pray each morning. Give us this day our daily bread and trust that God will
provide. Store up for yourselves an imperishable inheritance where politicians and the
IRS can never reach. Share in the joys of the plan of salvation. Love others as
yourself and wait with eager anticipation for that glorious day when Jesus comes for his own with his own and
we will receive that eternal inheritance. Jesus is coming soon. It’s never too
late to start building up treasure in heaven above. Wherever you are or whoever you are tonight, I encourage you
to start laying up treasures in heaven above. And as you do that, where your treasure is, there your heart will be.
Also, God will start to give you the new heart experience where when you invest in God’s kingdom, your heart starts to
love God’s children the way that God does himself. May God bless us as we invest in heavenly treasures, not in
treasures down here. Amen.
Bless, right? Amen. Might as well stand for our closing
song. If you don’t have your hbook, if you have your cell phone or if you have your
your tablet, whatever you’re using to sing I’d rather have Jesus than silver
or gold. That’s number 327. I rather.