I want to get ahead of our sermon for Sunday and discuss a few things. The Scripture for Sunday is Matthew 6:22-23.  

“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (ESV). 

For unbelievers this Scripture is a wakeup call to consider the great darkness of life outside of Christ. It’s an invitation to consider whether the immense darkness in their life is because they are obsessed with laying up treasures on earth. It’s an invitation to consider the Messiah’s offer to make their whole life full of His healing light. 

For believers, here, God anticipates our nervousness and anxiety. The Lord knows we are anxious about leaving behind our obsession with earthly things. Like Israel in the wilderness, we are tempted to go back to the Egypt of materialism, workaholism, and selfishness. Our Heavenly Father reminds us of the darkness that He pulled us out of and the light He has shown into our hearts. 

This section falls within Jesus’ larger teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. We can summarize the whole sermon with Chapter 5 verse 6: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (ESV). The sermon lays out both what true righteousness is and the blessings for putting it into practice. Our Lord shows how vastly different is the righteousness of His kingdom when compared to the pretend righteousness of the world. The end goal of the sermon is that we might be “astonished at his teaching” and the authority of the Savior. To the eyes of faith, the practices and blessings of the Messiah’s kingdom are astonishing. 

All this serves the larger purpose of the Holy Spirit in the Gospel of Matthew. The Spirit’s purpose here is to convince the world that it is worth giving up everything in order to possess Christ’s Kingdom. Moreover, once a person possesses this glorious kingdom it will follow naturally to worship Christ and to go into all the world baptizing in His name, making disciples of Him, and teaching others to obey everything He commanded. After all, he has saved his people from their sins, risen from the dead, and will be with us always.