Where Your Treasure Is: Serving the Overlooked

To sum up Professor Princeton here, it's simply this, more status equals more insecurity. The more status you and I gain, the more status we chase, more status we have. The evidence is not that we feel more secure, it's that we actually feel less secure. Because part of it has to do with the idea of so much of status is about attention seeking and attention getting. When someone else has it, it means they're literally taking it from me and I start to wonder who I am. I start to wonder if I matter, which makes us kind of slaves to attention seeking. [00:31:18] (33 seconds)  #StatusBreedsInsecurity

Now this can be interpreted as this, where I direct my money indicates where my heart already is. And that's true. But there's also another way to think about it. Where your treasure is isn't just an indicator of where your heart has already landed. Because we can also read it like this, where I direct my treasure shapes my heart. It transforms me. Said differently, where the treasure is placed, the heart gets shaped. [01:01:53] (26 seconds)  #TreasureShapesHeart

at the end of the day, popularity is a search. It's a it's a it's like a solution for something. It's answering a particular question and the question that popularity is addressing is this question which everybody can relate. How do I know that I matter? How do I know I matter? Popularity just becomes a way to measure how I know I matter. It becomes the obsession and the way we met we measure how it is that we matter. [00:27:38] (22 seconds)  #PopularityAsValidation

We apparently are a community, a society, a world where this is how we live. Always be first and most. Always be first and most. Never be last or least. Whatever happens, get a lot of attention and feel little obligation to give any of it to anybody else. Always be first and most, never be last or least, get a lot of attention and make sure you don't share it with anybody else because that means they're taking something from you. [00:33:00] (30 seconds)  #FirstAtAllCosts

Again, the bible doesn't promise that we'll understand everything. In fact, one area that seems to kinda show up particularly in Jesus' ministry over and over again, it doesn't make sense to people who are observing it, is that Jesus repeatedly seems to be doing this one thing. He seems to be kind of saying that the people who didn't matter much to everybody else really mattered the most to him. [00:29:07] (19 seconds)  #JesusValuesTheLowly

Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, others worship their children, but everybody worships something. But workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants. What is workism? It's the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one's identity and life's purpose, how we build our status. [00:32:09] (22 seconds)  #WorkIsNotWorship

Now God's heart for the hurting, particularly the under resourced and the marginalized, is unmistakable in the Bible. And we give towards the work of empowering and serving people who fall into those kinds of categories. We discover that not only is our own heart's condition revealed, our own heart also can't help but become more aligned with God's. [01:02:20] (19 seconds)  #ServeAndBeTransformed

This is this is surprising to so many people because in the ancient world, the first century world, in a status and honor shame kind of world, people who didn't matter if you started to kind of care about them, it would lower your status. And people who are observing Jesus, who's claiming to be all kinds of things, which you may not be sure you agree with those things yet. But Jesus is making all these claims and people are watching him and the reason they say the reason Jesus can't be those things is because he keeps associating with people that nobody else cared about. The people who didn't matter much mattered most to Jesus. That is a reason for people going, it doesn't make sense. [00:29:26] (34 seconds)  #JesusDefiesStatus