S.O.T.M. The Effects of Sin [Matthew 6:19-24]

Brian Larkin

The sermon on the mount • Sermon • Submitted 3 years ago

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S.O.T.M. The Effects of Sin [Matthew 6:19-24]

Stand for the reading of the word of God [Matthew 6:19-24]

We have been in this text for a couple of weeks and so far we’ve been dealing with what we might call the direct teaching of our Lord concerning the matter of treasures upon earth and treasures in heaven. But we can’t just leave it at that because surely there is something more here. When studying scripture we often pay attention to the direct teaching but sometimes we miss the indirect teaching or lesson. We should pay attention carefully when studying the word for the indirect lessons, and we have done that from time to time in our study of the sermon on the mount.

Our Lord is of course concerned with the practical aspect of this matter, but obviously there is something else involved as well. In warning us about this very practical matter, He also deals incidentally with a most important doctrine, although He does not set out primarily to do that. We might ask. Why is it instructions like theses are necessary? Why is it that the Bible is full of this kind of warning? It is to be found everywhere; this is only one example, but there are many others which we could take. What is it that makes it so necessary for our Lord, and the apostles afterwards, to warn us as Christian people about these things?

Surely there is only one answer to that question. All this is simply due to sin and its effects. Sometimes we may tend to say, ‘I am a Christian; I have a new view of things, and I do not need this instruction’. And yet we’ve seen these last couple of weeks it is necessary, and we all need it. In various ways all of us are not only being attacked by laying up treasures on earth, but are being conquered by it. There is only one thing that explains that, and that is sin, the terrible power and effect of sin upon mankind. So that here we can see that, as our Lord expounds His teaching, gives His commandment and states His reasons, He is incidentally telling us a great deal about sin and what it does to man. We’re going to lift out 4 effects of sin on mankind and how it affects everything.

Sin has disturbed the normal balance in man

The first thing we must note is that sin is obviously something that has entirely disturbed and upset the normal balance in man, and the normal functioning of his qualities. There are three parts to man. God has made man, body, mind and spirit, or, if you prefer it, body, soul and spirit; and the highest is the spirit. Next to that comes the soul/mind, and next to that the body. Not that there is anything wrong with the body, but that is the relative order. The effect of sin is that the normal functions of man have been entirely disturbed. There is no doubt that, in one sense, the highest gift that God has given to man is the gift of mind. According to the Scripture man was made in the image of God; and a part of the image of God in man is undoubtedly the mind, the ability to think and to reason, especially in the highest sense and in a spiritual sense.

Man was obviously meant to function in the following way. His mind, being the highest faculty that he possesses, should always come first. Things are perceived with the mind and analysed by it. Then come the affections, the heart, the feeling, the sensibility given to man by God. Then thirdly there is that other faculty, called the will/action, the power by which we put into operation the things we have understood, the things we have desired as the result of apprehension.

That is the way in which God made man, and that is how man was meant to function. He was meant to understand and to be governed and controlled by his understanding. He was to love that which he understood to be best; and then he was to put all that into practice. But the effect of the Fall and of sin upon man has been to upset that order and balance.

You notice how our Lord puts it here. He lays down His instruction: ‘Do not Lay up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ He addresses the heart first/feelings. Then He goes on to the mind/reason and says, ‘The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.’ The heart is first, the mind second, and the will [the realm of action] third; for ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.’

We’ve already considered the way in which earthly treasures tend to master and control the entire person-feelings, reason, action…heart, mind, and will. We weren’t concerned about the order when we dealt with them, but now we take note of the order our Lord puts them in because He is saying something that is simply true of the nature of man. Man, as the result of sin and the Fall, is no longer governed by his mind and understanding; he is governed by his desires, his affections and his lusts. Sin has turned everything around and disturbed the natural order and balance of mankind. That is the teaching of Scripture. We see that man is in the terrible predicament of being no longer governed by his highest faculty, his mind, but ruled by something else, that is secondary, his feelings.

There are many Scriptures which prove this. Take that great statement in John 3:19: ‘This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil’. Man, in other words, instead of looking at life with his mind, looks at it with his desires and affections and feelings. He prefers darkness; he is controlled by his heart instead of by his head. We must be quite clear about this. This is not to say that man as God made him should not have a heart, and should not feel things we were made that way, but. The important thing is that no man should be governed by his emotions and desires. That is the effect of sin. A man should be governed by his mind, his understanding.

This surely is the answer to all those people who are not Christian, and who say they are not Christian because they think and because they reason. The simple truth about them is that they are governed, not by their minds, but by their hearts and feelings and emotions and by their prejudices which are clouded by sin. Their elaborate attempts to justify themselves intellectually is nothing but an attempt to camouflage the godlessness of their hearts.

They are trying to justify the kind of life they are living by putting up an intellectual position; but the real trouble is that they are governed by desires and by lusts. They do not approach the truth about God with the mind, but they approach it with all these prejudices which come from the heart. As the Psalmist puts it so perfectly: ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.’ That is what the unbeliever always says, and that is why he says it; and then he tries to find an intellectual reason to justify what his heart wants to say.

Our Lord here reminds us of this plainly. It is the heart that covets these worldly things, and the heart in sinful man is so powerful that it governs his mind, his understanding and his intellect. The natural man likes to think of himself as a gigantic intellect, but the reality is he’s ruled by his feelings. This is one of the great tragedies about sin and its effect, it disturbs the order and balance of man.

Sin blinds people

The second thing that sin does is to blind man in certain vital respects. Of course that follows by a kind of inevitable logic. If the mind is not always in control there is going to be a kind of blinding. The apostle Paul’s way of putting it is this: ‘If our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: in whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of them which believe not’ (2 Corinthians 4:3-4). That is precisely what sin does it blinds man and it does it through the heart. We can see how our Lord illustrates that principle in this short paragraph at which we are looking. Sin blinds the mind of man to things which are perfectly obvious; and so, though they are so obvious, man in sin does not see them.

Take earthly treasures which our Lord points out. It’s a simple fact that none of them will continue. There is no need to argue that, it’s an obvious truth we looked at last week. People pride themselves on personal appearance that is bound to deteriorate. People pride themselves on their intellect which will eventually slip. People go to great lengths to amass great wealth and possessions that you can’t take with you when you die. If a person really faces that they have to admit it’s the obvious truth. Yet many are jealous and envious of one another, they will sacrifice everything for earthly things which they are bound to leave behind.

The real situation is so obvious, and yet they do not seem to see the obvious. If a person will say, ‘Well here I am today living in this world. But what is going to happen to me? What is my future?’, he is bound to say in reply, ‘I may go on living like this for a number of years, or I may not; I do not know. I may not be alive tomorrow; I may not be alive in a week; I do not know. But I know for certain that this is bound to come to an end.

There will be an end to my life in this world. I have to die; and when I die I have to leave all these things. I have to leave my house, my loved ones, my possessions. I have to leave it all behind and go on without them.’ We know that that is the simple fact. But how often do we face that fact? How often do we live in the realization of it? Is our whole life controlled by the consciousness of that obvious truth? The answer is, that it is not; and the reason for this is sin which blinds the mind of man to that which is absolutely obvious.

In the same way sin blinds us to the relative values of things. Take time and eternity. We are creatures here in time and we are going on to eternity. There is no comparison between the relative importance of time and eternity. Time is limited and fleeting, eternity is endless and absolute. Yet do we live as realizing these relative values? Is it not again a simple fact that we give ourselves to things that belong to time and entirely ignore the things that are eternal? Is it not true that all the things about which we bother so much belong to a very short span of time, and though we know that there are other things that are eternal and endless, we scarcely stop to think about them at all? That is the effect of sin—relative values are not appreciated.

As our Lord illustrates, take darkness and light. There is no real comparison between them. There is nothing more wonderful than light. When walking through a dark room you appreciate the light when reached. God Himself is light and ‘in him is no darkness at all’. We know the kind of deeds that belong to darkness, the things that happen in the dark, and under the cover of night. But there will be no darkness and no night in heaven. It is all light and glory always there. But how slow we are to appreciate the relative value of light and darkness. ‘Men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil.’

Then think again of the value of man and of God. The whole of life apart from Christianity is evaluated in terms of man. In this world man is the one to be considered above all, his being and his welfare. All who are not Christian are living for man, for themselves and others like themselves. God in the meantime is being forgotten and ignored. Man doesn’t hesitate to turn his back on God. Our worldly life is being put before God. This is blindness. The mind is blind to relative values. Think of men coveting earthly wealth and earthly riches, position and status, and putting all that before becoming ‘heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ’, before becoming inheritors of the whole world! ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’

Consider another aspect of blindness and that sin blinds us to what is true. Man is always trying to mix things which cannot be mixed. Still worse is the fact that he persuades himself that he can do it successfully. Man is quite sure this compromise is possible, and yet our Lord tells us it is not. There is no possible mixing of light and darkness. It is no longer light if you do, and it is no longer darkness. Neither can you mix God and money, for no man can serve two masters. It is one or the other, ‘for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.’ These are absolute truths, and if we were capable of thinking clearly we should recognize them as such. The truth is we cannot love two opposite things at the same time. Love is exclusive; it is demanding, and always insists upon the absolute.

It’s the failure to recognize this that is the trouble with the world. I strongly believe it is also the trouble with the Church today as well. We see the church today trying to mix things that are incompatible. If the church is a spiritual society we can’t mix the world with it in any shape of form. Remember ‘The world’ does not mean gross sin only; it may be things which are quite legitimate in and of themselves. But It is this constant compromising in the life of the Church that has been her ruin, ever since the days of Constantine and the mandated church/state. Once you have lost the division between the world and the Church, the Church ceases to be truly Christian.

But thank God for reforms and revivals and those people God has chosen that refuse to compromise. It is the only hope for the church today, when we refuse to compromise the truth of God’s word. For far to long we’ve been trying to sustain the church by worldly methods, and there may be appearance of success but it’s only an appearance. It is only when we come to realize that we are God’s people, and a spiritual people, and that we live in the realm of the spirit, that we shall be blessed and shall begin to see a true revival in the church.

Sin makes a person a slave to things that were meant to serve him

The next effect of sin upon man is to make him a slave of things that were meant to serve him. This is one of the terrible, tragic things about it. According to our Lord here, these earthly, worldly things tend to become our god. We serve them; we love them. Our heart is captivated by them; we are at their service. The very things that God in His kindness has given man in order that they might be of service to him, and in order that he may enjoy life while he is in this world has become his master.

All these things that can be so dangerous to our souls because of sin were given to us by God, and we were meant to enjoy them—food and clothing, family and friends and all such things. These are all but a manifestation of the kindness and the graciousness of God. He has given them to us that we might have a happy and enjoyable life in this world; but because of sin, we have become their slaves. We are mastered by appetites. God has given us our appetites; hunger, thirst and sex are God-created. But the moment a man is dominated by them, or is mastered by them, he is a slave to them. That’s the tragedy of man; he bows down and worships at the shrine of things that were meant to be at his service. The things that were meant to minister to man have become his master. What a terrible, awful thing sin is!

Sin brings complete ruin to mankind

The last point is the most solemn one. The final effect of sin on mankind is it entirely ruins man. That is the teaching of the Bible from beginning to end. This thing which came into life through the serpent in the Garden of Eden is intent upon nothing but our final ruin. The devil hates God with the whole of his being, and he has but one object and one ambition; it is to ruin and spoil all that God has made, and in which He delights. In other words, he is intent especially upon the ruining of man and of the world.

How does sin ruin man? Here is the answer as we find it in these verses. It ruins man in the sense that, having spent his lifetime in laying up certain things here on the earth, he finds himself at the end with nothing. After laying up for himself treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy, and thieves break through and steal, he finds himself face to face with the most powerful adversary of all which is death itself. Then this poor wretched man who has been living for these things suddenly finds himself with absolutely nothing—stripped with nothing at all but his naked soul. It is utter ruin. ‘What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’

This is made evident by our Lord in Luke 16:19-31, in the story of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man lived his whole life with wealth and honor and things of this world yet at the end he found himself in utter ruin. Think of all the things for which you tend to be living for at this moment, the things that really count, the things that really matter in your life. Then ask yourself this simple question: ‘How many of these things will I be able to take with me when I die?’

Still even worse in a sense is this at the end, those who are not in Christ, will find out they’ve been wrong their entire lives. That is what happened to the rich man in Luke 16. His whole life had been controlled by his heart, lust, passion, and desire for things and at the end he found out he was wrong. He pleaded with Abraham to send someone to warn his family not to make the same mistakes he did. He discovered that the light that was in him was actually darkness and that it was great darkness. That is one of the most subtle deeds of Satan. He persuades a man that by denying God he is being rational; but, as we have seen already several times, what is really happening is that he makes him a creature of lust and desire whose mind is blinded and whose eye is no longer good. The greatest faculty of all, the mind, has become perverted.

If you are not a Christian do not trust your mind; it is the most dangerous thing you can do. But when you become a Christian your mind is transformed, is put back in the center and you become a rational being. It’s wrong to think of the Christian faith as sob-stuff, or a crutch for weak people, or something purely emotional. The true view of Christianity is stated by Paul in Romans 6:17, ‘You have ‘obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you’.

The doctrine was preached to them, and when they came to see it, by God opening it to them, they liked it, believed it, and put it into practice. They received the truth of God first of all with the mind. Truth must be received with the mind, and the Holy Spirit alone enables the mind to become clear. That is conversion, that is what happens as the result of regeneration. The mind is transformed and is delivered from this bias of evil and darkness; it sees the truth and loves and desires it above everything else. That is it. There is nothing more tragic than for a man to find at the end of his life that he has been entirely wrong all the time.

That is why I am so adamant to labor this point this morning. Sin affects everything…sin is a total loss. And if you’re not living to serve God that will be your fate. But God forbid that would be the fate of anyone who hears this wonderful gospel truth. If you have not already done so go to God now and confess to Him that you have been serving earthly things, and laying up for yourselves treasures upon earth.

Confess it to Him, repent of your sin and turn to Christ, give yourself to Him, place yourself completely in His hands and ask Him to fill you with His Holy Spirit who alone can enlighten the mind, clear the understanding, make the eye single and enable us to see the truth—the truth about sin, and the truth that the only way of salvation by the blood of Jesus Christ—the Holy Spirit who can show us how to be delivered from the perversion and the pollution of sin, and make us become new men and women, created after the fashion and pattern of the Son of God Himself, loving the things of God and serving Him, and Him alone.

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