Before I begin, I wanna say welcome to Jan Stoutite. Welcome, good to have you here, one of our missionaries in some other part of the world. How long are you here for? Okay, okay, great. Okay, oh, quickly, okay, very good. Well, thanks for being here with us. In 2014, Microsoft, the software giant, paid $2.5 billion to buy Mojang, the Swedish company that created Minecraft. It's a video game company. The deal made Marcus Persson, a billionaire, and his net worth as a result of this transaction, became $1.3 billion. He became one of the richest men in the world. The person promptly outbid, I call her Bayonce at home, Bayonce and Jay-Z for a $70 million home in Beverly Hills, and the listing on the, if you're ever looking for a home in Beverly Hills, referred to this home as an overwhelming sensory experience. The home was outfitted with insane amenities such as the following. Hermes chairs and throw rugs, Robert Cavalli sheets, 24 Robert Cavalli designed place settings priced at $3,700 a piece. 15 bathrooms, each of which was fitted with a toilet that was worth $5,600 each. Wow. A person said that he grew up in a relatively poor family. His mother was a nurse. His father struggled throughout his adult life with drug addiction. But a year later, a year after this transaction, a year after he became a billionaire, He tweeted out through Twitter, I always call it Twitted, he tweeted a series of statements that I think is very interesting. August 29th, 4.48 a.m., he tweeted, the problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying. The human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance. Three minutes later, hanging out in Ibiza, I'm sure I mispronounced that, island off the coast of Spain, with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I've never felt more isolated. Two minutes later, when I sold the company, the biggest effort went into making sure all the employees were taken care of, and they all hate me now. Three minutes later, he tweeted, found a great girl, but she's afraid of me and my lifestyle and went with a normal, normal person instead. I have to imagine when Microsoft first made its inquiry into this company, Marcus Persson perhaps could hardly even believe it. And then when they settled on a price, he thought that his wildest dreams had actually come true, to have a net worth of $1.3 billion. I think perhaps we've all thought about what it would be like to have absolutely, as wild as our imagination could be, not a financial care in the world. While I'm preparing for this morning's sermon, I read a couple of times a sermon by C.S. Lewis the weight of glory. And one of the opening statements is very poignant. He writes, our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. And with that, I want to introduce our sermon, the last sermon for this year. As you know, we've been working through the Gospel of Luke. I've taken a small few of the parables to do a short mini-series during the month of December, and I'm gonna do another parable, but not from Luke, because this parable has only been found in Matthew, and I've been meditating on this parable for about a year and a half, and I wanted us to look at these two twin parables with the hopes that we can become a people that are practically impossible to please. We become so impossible to please that the only thing that will ever please us is heaven. So to that end, we're gonna consider these two very, very short verses, three short verses from Matthew 13. The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls who on finding one pearl of great price went and sold all that he had and bought it. These parables are the hidden treasure parable and the pearl of great price parable are twins. They're both saying the same one thing. They're placed side by side in order to impress upon us the significance of what is to be most important to us. Let me give you some qualifications when dealing with parables. These are not historically true stories, even though there is some truth to them. There's no such person who Jesus is referring to here that he knew that found these things in a field or went and found this pearl, although it's not unusual for these things to have happened. Let me also say that these parables are not dealing so much with personal ethics, business ethics, personal integrity. I mean, there'd be all kinds of things we could say, you know, how could we, this guy do this thing, he's working for somebody, he finds something on someone else's property, shouldn't he have an obligation to go and reform the person? None of that stuff is really germane to this parable. But what is germane is the most important thing that you could ever want Jesus does in fact offer you and the question is whether or not we perceive it. Parables really are extended metaphors, they're metaphors, they're ways of looking at things, figures of speech as it were and we're dealing with something far more important than the things I mentioned. We're dealing with something very eternal, something very, very deep. So let me quickly interpret these parables and then we'll draw them out for us as we finish out this year and move into the next year. The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which a man found and covered up. This actually is not very unusual to have happened. There were no such things as safety deposit boxes, personal safes inside your own home, There were no storage units where you have a garage door to close, lock it behind a gated wall that required a certain key punch to get in, a place of security. There were no such things back then, although this is not an unusual practice. Because there were no such places where one could keep most of their belongings, it was not unusual for somebody to have belongings that were very valuable, heirlooms, coins, jewelry, In order to preserve them, it wouldn't be unusual for somebody to put them in a container that could withstand the elements and go someplace on your property and bury them. Of course, without realizing what was happening, some bad things could happen because often nations would come in and invade and properties would change hands over the years. The catch, of course, is if you were the person doing the burying If you also forgot to inform somebody about where the actual burial place was, and you were carried off in slavery or happened to die and didn't inform anybody, those belongings would be lost forever. And over the course of a number of generations, a given piece of property would change hands until eventually somebody would find it. In this case, we have somebody who perhaps was, Jesus is imagining somebody who is working for somebody who owns the land. And perhaps in this particular land, there are stumps to clear and rocks to dig out. And so this man has been hired to go and dig them out in order to make the place fertile to harvest and for crops and so forth. While he's using his axe, he knows what a rock sounds like when it hits. He knows what a stump sounds like when it hits. But he knows also what it sounds like when broken glass is shattered. So here he is in the middle of this field, all by himself, and his ax hits the ground, and he heard pop. He knows what that sound is like. He's seen pottery hit the ground before, popped, and so he gets his ax, he digs away, he finds a broken piece of glass, a broken piece of pottery, and upon closer examination, he finds something of value there, coins, jewelry. He digs around a little more, and he finds not only just one, but a number of jars, and he knows exactly what this is. And so he goes, and it says, with joy. Goes and acquires as much as he can of his own, sells it all, and goes and buys that field. The second parable is very much like it. A merchant specializing in buying and selling pearls. Pearls back then were even more valuable probably than they are today. In the year that Cleopatra lived, which is around 50 years before the birth of Jesus, it was reported that she owned a pearl worth 25 million denarii. But denarius is a one day's wage. 25 million days wages is what this pearl was worth. Close to $4 billion in her own time. So here's a story about a man, a parable, specializing in pearls. He's an expert in pearls, and he happens upon this man who's selling this pearl, and maybe this man knows what its value is, maybe he doesn't. But the merchant knows, and so he leaves, and he goes and liquidates literally everything he owns, impoverishing himself and everyone connected with him, and goes and buys this pearl. And what's the main message? What's the main message for us at the end of this year? The main message for us going into the next year is this. The kingdom of God is worth it to give up literally everything to get. The kingdom of God is worth it literally for each of us to give up everything in order to acquire. Let's look, I have three challenges for us today as we consider this last Sunday of the year and going forward in the next year. Three challenges. The first challenge is to a challenge to our small aspirations. If the kingdom of God is more valuable than anything that you could possibly imagine, and that's exactly what these people found in this parable, more valuable than they could ever imagine. then your aspirations, very likely, are too small. Initially, I thought I would label this first point a challenge to our values, and I think there is a sense in which that is what's happening here, but I don't think values says it quite adequately. We talked about today, in a couple of songs that we sang, about the idea of our longings, our aspirations, our wishes, our hopes. The very things that our hearts could possibly imagine, dream about. Our ambitions are too small. Our aspirations are too small. It says then, in joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. It says in joy. It doesn't say he went and sold everything he had, he bought these things and then later on had joy. Quite the opposite. He first had joy, it was the very joy of what he was going to acquire that moved him to go and sell everything he had. Jesus calls this here in Matthews, the kingdom of heaven. Now, Luke is not Jewish. Luke is a Greek-speaking Christian, a medical doctor. And so when you read the parables in Luke, he speaks of the kingdom of God in Matthew. Matthew is Jewish and very much concerned to protect, not misusing the name of God, says the kingdom of heaven, kind of in quotes. But the reader will understand what he's getting at. Both are saying the same thing. Both are saying that to get heaven is not some grand thing. To get heaven is not some grand object like streets of gold or pearly gates or mansions in the sky. No, to get heaven is to get God. To get and to have God is better than the best of all human joys that one could ever hope to imagine. This is a consistent theme throughout the Bible. To get God and to have God is greater than the greatest and wildest dream you could possibly imagine you could ever possess in this world. But our hearts deceive us. Our own longings convince us that what would really make us happy is something earthly. Wow, to have a net worth of $1.3 billion we might be tempted to say under our breath. Maybe we wouldn't actually say it. We would think it. I would settle for one-fourth of that. Boy, I'd be happy with that. Would we? Really? I'm gonna say there is a legitimate place for earthly happiness, nothing wrong with earthly happiness. Earthly happiness is not sinful, wrong, or corrupt in itself. Such earthly happiness is a gift from God. What is sinful and what is wrong and what is corrupt about earthly happiness is the idea that earthly happiness is the highest happiness there is, and it is not true. When anyone first approaches God for salvation, such a person often has a very little understanding of what they're really asking God for. Often a person who approaches God for the very first time has a heaviness in their hearts, wanting relief. Or perhaps they have serious marital problems. They don't want their marriage to break up, and so they come to God and ask for help. Or maybe they're in financial bad straits, perhaps on the brink of bankruptcy. Lord, help me, I'll do anything you want. And God intervenes, and a person is converted. But over time, a person will realize that he has been forgiven a lot more than when he first realized it. And he also realizes the blessing that God gives us in Jesus Christ is far richer than anything he had ever even thought of. When Jesus says this, the kingdom of heaven is like pearl, like hidden treasure, he's challenging the smallness of our imagination, the smallness of our aspirations. Are your aspirations too small? Are you thinking, boy, if I really had, if I really, I could really be happy if I had that. I could really be happy if I had this. I'd really be happy if I had her. I'd really be happy if I had him. Your aspirations are too small. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity said this, imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps you can understand what he's doing. He's getting the drains right, stopping up the leaks in the roof and so on. You knew that those things needed doing and so you're not surprised when he attends to them. But presently, he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense to you. What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house From the one you thought of, throwing a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards, you thought you were being made into a decent little cottage. But he himself is building a palace because he intends to come and live there. You see how small your aspirations are? You have a sense in which that God is making you into something far more grand, far more beautiful, far more lovely. We sang, how lovely is your dwelling place. That's you. He's gonna make you into something that is fitting for an eternal king. And he needs to renovate and sometimes overhaul the things that he's making. And if you've ever done some demolition on your house, it can be pretty ugly. Painful. And sometimes that's exactly what he's doing when he's running us under and through, breaking us down, refitting us, and it's never very easy. Our aspirations are too small. The kingdom of heaven is like a fine pearl, the pearl of great price, hidden treasure. A second challenge is a challenge to our faith. I'm defining faith as perceiving an object's true value. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. We've already alluded to it. It takes faith to see a pearl could be that valuable. A treasure could be that valuable. What are we really drawing from this? The way to experience the kingdom of God is to be willing to sell everything. Now I have to tread carefully here because it says elsewhere in the Bible that to enter the kingdom of God, we have to be born again, John chapter three, verse three. Now Jesus is not saying here, he's not offering an alternative method by which we enter the kingdom of God and sell everything we have, total commitment, that's gonna merit the kingdom. No, that's not what he's saying at all. The only way a person can enter the kingdom, the only way a person can be converted The only way that person can be transferred out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of his beloved son is by the gift of repentance and faith that God gives to all of those who are his. Nothing changes here. To realize what it means to enter the kingdom is to receive Jesus Christ as Lord, to trust in him, to submit to him, to give our lives over to him, to ask his renovating work to begin in us by the Spirit of God. But as I mentioned, the first time we ever enter the kingdom of God, by grace, by faith, we don't really understand fully what it means, what it's about. And eventually we have to come to terms with what it means to be a kingdom citizen. What it means to live out the implications of the kingdom of God. We who now belong to this kingdom. What does it mean now to have Jesus as our king? Well, right here, right here. For it to live out the full implications of the kingdom of God, we have to sell everything. Be willing to sell it all to have nothing but Him. See, faith perceives an object's true value. It means this, I'm gonna say it a number of different ways. It means this, you look at anything in your life and say, nothing is more important to me than Jesus. If the choice between this thing and Jesus, If the choice between that person and Jesus, if it's a choice between that activity and Jesus, you must be willing to say, I will suffer the loss of anything, any person, any activity in order to keep Jesus, and that's what it means to be in the kingdom. It takes faith to believe that he is more valuable than all the things that we ascribe value to. For example, we ascribe a great degree of value to our own image, how we perceive ourselves, how we want to be perceived. If you're afraid to publicly identify yourself with Christ, wherever you are, in school or work, in your neighborhood, in your family, If you're afraid to let people know that you're a Christian. Now when I say that, I'm not talking about being rude or unwise or offensive or inappropriate or being a bore or being insensitive in order to boastfully announce Christ as Savior and King. You understand what I mean by that. But taking all those qualifications into the mix, if we're unwilling ever to publicly identify ourselves with Jesus Christ, then your image is more important to you than Jesus. What you're saying is the choice between Jesus and my image, I choose my image and not Him. I'm really not as concerned with what He might be thinking. I'm concerned about that person's approval of me over anything else. Also the case with everything else in our life, with our use of money and our sexuality. If you say I'm willing in order to keep Christ, I'm willing But if I have to do that with my money, or if I have to do that with my body, I'm not willing. You're really saying there is something that I'm not willing to sell. You're not willing to have Jesus as your king. You wanna retain some measure of your own personal sovereignty. You don't wanna transfer your allegiance to his sovereignty. You wanna retain some of it for yourself. on the assumption that you cannot trust Him with that that you won't sell away. Another way to put it is this, I will obey Jesus if, I will obey God if, and whatever is on the other side of that if is something that you're not willing to sell. Let me put it to you this way, If you say, I was a Christian and I tried to work hard at being a Christian and look what happened. I trusted and followed the Lord and some very, very significant things in my life were taken away. How in the world could that happen? I'm not willing to do that. You're really saying is there was something I wasn't willing to sell and when God touched it, I rejected it, rejected Him. I'm not willing to go there. Another way, another way to say it is this. The only way to be in the kingdom is this, you're willing to say there is nothing that I won't sell to keep Jesus. I won't sell this if it means, I won't be willing to sell that. If you're in some academic environment or some environment where you're in a public speaking arrangement and everybody who is around you has this attitude They say something like this, nobody in their right mind today holds those views anymore. Nobody in their right mind believes those things anymore. Nobody really who has any intellectual respectability holds these views anymore. You have to be willing to say, I do. And not just over a cup of coffee at a Starbucks. You have to say it woven into your entire work so that your whole work is so saturated with the sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ that you do all of your work in a very distinctively different way. And it's obvious that you have not sold out. If the kingdom of God is worth it to give up everything to get, you have to ask yourself, who am I really serving? A third challenge, the challenge to indecision. Indecision, this is the punchline for the parable. Most of the time when you see a parable, it's always like the last sentence that's the punchline. And here it's basically the same punchline in both parables. And then in his joy, he goes out and sells all that he has and buys that field. He acts. He gets it. He wants it. He goes and chooses it, does whatever he needs to do to acquire it, to make it his own. Nothing's gonna hold him back. Solomon put it this way. Wisdom is supreme, therefore get wisdom. Though it costs you all you have, get it, get it. The same is true for the kingdom and the king. It is worth giving up all you have to acquire. Don't sit back. Don't see how it pans out. Buy it now. Get it now. Sell all you have if you have to. Don't leave home without it. Get it. Don't allow anyone to talk you out of it. Don't allow anything to stop you on the way, to distract you. No. Go get it. Now. It's one thing to contemplate, to weigh out the implications. Jesus affirms that that's necessary. But don't be forever on the fence. Choose. Buy it. Get it. Acquire it. Own it, is what he's saying. Jesus demands unconditional surrender. But he promises unimaginable splendor. Notice they go on their way with joy. I mentioned before, it doesn't say he sold it and then acquired it and then afterwards had joy. No, there was joy in the anticipation of owning it. With joy, he liquidated everything. With joy, he went off and sold everything. This is the way we are to live the Christian life. The totality of the Christian life is to have a sense of joy in something that we do not fully possess in the flesh right this very minute. The kingdom is already and not yet. We are already in the heavenlies in Christ and not yet. We're already in possession and not in possession. We're already raised and not yet raised. In joy we've owned and yet we don't fully have it. in this life, and that's why the saints could go through what all the saints in history have gone through, and in Hebrews it says, all these people did not receive what they had been promised. They saw from afar, and it motivated them to continue to strive toward it. Same with us. Right now we don't see intangible form. We don't see Christ glorified. We ourselves, while we are in fact glorified, we're not really. So how can we actually make this work? How can we make it work? How can you have joy when your entire possessions are being liquidated? How can we have joy when we're getting rid of all of our stuff in order to attain? Well, Paul tells us, he says this, as he was suffering, as he was being beaten, as he was being cast aside, it says, I reckon the sufferings of this present time are not worth being compared with the glory that should be revealed in us. There's the answer right there. This is how we do it. We do it by, he says, I reckon. I reckon, I count it up. I think about it. I consider. So we bring our 2015 to a close, and as we anticipate 2016, I want to challenge you with this. I'm going to use this same word in a number of ways, but it means basically the same thing. Reckon, to count, to consider, to think, to calculate. where we are putting our minds to evaluate and to appreciate until what we're observing and what we're appreciating begins to move upon us and move into us and begins to change our affections. Every time you come to church this year, I want you to come to church with this in mind, to calculate, to count. Every time you open your Bible, I hope you open your Bible regularly every week, and sometimes we forget, what is the goal of reading our Bible? Well, I'm gonna tell you what the goal is. The goal is for you, in your Bible reading, to reckon, to calculate, to observe, to add up, add up all of the things that are yours in Jesus Christ. All those things that are actually yours. So that as you begin to calculate them and add them up and total them up, that begins to enter inside of you and pretty soon your affections begin to be altered in a very significantly and profound way. This is what Paul did. He said, although I myself might have confidence even in the flesh, if anyone else has a mind to put confidence in the flesh, I far more. And he lists all the things that made him great, that made him a well-renowned rabbi. He says, I was circumcised the eighth day of the nation of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law of Pharisee, as to zeal. There's no one who persecuted the church like I did. No one. As to righteousness found in the law, blameless. My net worth was in the billions. That's what he's saying here. But whatever things were gained to me, those things I've counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. There is nothing, nothing, nothing more valuable than that. So what does it mean to count Christ as your treasure? What does it mean? Well, I'm gonna give you a case study very quickly, and then we're gonna wrap up, because we're almost done here. Don't turn there, but go back there sometime this week to Joshua chapter seven, where you find the story of Achan. Of course, this was the story where, as you recall, Joshua was initiating his conquest. The first city he happened upon was Jericho, and Jericho was God's tithe. It was his. The totality of all the proceeds that would be claimed would go into the temple. No one wants to take anything of it, but of course, you know the story, he goes in. And when he eventually confesses, he says, I was in Jericho, in this particular place, and I saw this wonderful robe from Babylonia. I saw 200 shekels of silver. I saw a wedge of gold that weighed 50 shekels, and I coveted them in my heart. That's a negative example, I'm gonna say. But he's doing the same thing that Jesus is saying in this parable. He's reckoning, he's adding up. I mean, how does a person know? He probably picked it up, he looked at the back of the tab and said, where was it manufactured? Oh, this is what a Babylonian, so wow. He ran it across his face. I've never felt anything this soft before. Put it on his nose, he smelled it. He looked around, he found, you know, here's a wedge of gold. Unbelievable. Here's silver 200 shekels. My word, I've never even imagined. Then he begins to think. How much can I carry in my own robe here? What's he doing? He's calculating. He says, I covet it. See, when Paul says, I reckon, I count, that's what he's doing. He's doing it so much that he's reckoning all the valuables that he has in Jesus Christ, he himself begins to lust for it himself. Pretty soon, he's been bewitched by the beauty and the glory of God. And so when he goes through suffering, he still is distracted by the beauty and glory of the kingdom. When he's receiving his 39 lashes times five different times, he's still captivated by the beauty and glory of the gospel. That's why he can endure it. Now, it surely had hurt him, 39 lashes times five. 40 lashes was the death sentence. He came within just a hair's breadth of dying five times, and yet, this is what enabled his, I reckon the sufferings of this present world are not worthy to be compared. Not worthy to be compared. Do we think that? Have we allowed the reality, the counting up of all that we have in Jesus Christ to move us so much that we don't need a single thing in this life? Yes, it's wonderful to have them. We need to be good stewards with it. But if I lost it all, I'd be okay. We're entering into a new year, 2016. How we need this. This is what we need. This is what's gonna enable us to make progress. Wherever God is gonna take us, wherever he's gonna take you, there's nothing more valuable than this. John Steinbeck in his short novel, The Pearl, I credit my wife with reminding me of this story. A young man, a Mexican Indian poor man named Kino. Kino's wife and he had a son who, early in the book, was bitten by a scorpion. And so Kino travels by boat to a coastal city in order to get the help that he needs from a doctor. And the doctor despises him because he's poor and of a certain race. And Keno needs to get services. His son is gonna pass away, so he needs to help to get money to pay for the service. And so he decides to go and dive for pearls, to sell those pearls to get the money he needs for the doctor's care. And while he's diving, he happens upon an unusually large oyster. He throws it in the boat, goes back down and gets more. He doesn't even open it right away, but when he gets up into the boat and he's ready to go home, he opens it up and discovers in this oyster an unusually large pearl, a pearl that is so valuable that he would be set and his children would be set for a number of generations to come. And he realizes he's hit the jackpot. But even before he gets back to shore, apparently others have also discovered his discovery. And so Kino's life is, instead of taking a turn for the worse, he thinks it's for the better. But people want that pearl. The doctor who rejected treatment all of a sudden now wants his son as one of his patients. The townspeople want this pearl. They know where Nino and his family lives, and on a number of occasions he goes through where he's fighting these people off to protect his pearl. At last, when Nino defends his family for the last time against these assailants, he kills every single one of them, but in the firefight, his own son is murdered And his wife then takes him to the shore, and he tells his wife, throw it in. He says, no, you must. And so he takes the pearl and throws it as far as he can into the water from which he had taken, and the story ends. Kind of a downer. But Jesus says his pearl is not like John Steinbeck's pearl. His pearl is not even like Marcus Persson's pearl. Those pearls corrupt. Those pearls corrupt not because there's evil inherent in those objects, but there's evil inherent in us. And God, in sending His pearl of great price, He gave up all that He had and allowed His own Son, His own pearl of great price, to suffer on the cross, so that we could be liberated forever for everything that corrupts us. And so when we trust in Him, we can receive and or discard all of our earthly happiness. We can use it as what it is, simply a gift. If God decides to take it away, it's his anyway. We can use it as stewards if we want. We can be much, we can be generous with it, we can use it for our family, but it doesn't own us, he does. If something costs $500, Is that expensive? Well, you'd say, well, it depends on what it is. Well, how about a doormat? Would you pay $500 for a doormat? No. Would you pay $500 for a new Porsche? You might say, I'll sell it to you right now, and you might say, well, I don't have a cent in my pocket. I'll be back in one hour with $500. We wouldn't hesitate. We would go, and in one hour, we'd find it somewhere. The kingdom of God will cost you everything you have, but is it expensive? Not a bit. You give up nothing of lasting value. And in exchange, you get the whole earth. And on top of that, heaven is thrown in. Don't leave today without it. Own it. Receive it. Get it. It's yours if you don't turn away from it. Receive Him. Receive the pearl of great price. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you for this final exhortation, this exhortation that reminds us of what we're really to be about. A very, very simple thing. We are to be about the business of valuing you. And when we value you, when we're willing to allow nothing to separate us from you, everything in our lives is set aright. That doesn't mean everything in our lives is everything we hope it will be. But everything is set aright. We're really free people. Nothing in this world owns us ever again. We are free to receive it or not, to use it or not, to own it or not. We're not lessened or made richer by any of these things when we are infinitely rich in Jesus Christ. How we need to be people liberated. to walk in a world that gives us almost every single day a counterfeit pearl, persuading us, and sometimes we cooperate with that persuasion. You're thinking that we really can't be happy without it. Oh yes we can, when we have the true pearl of great price. Would you be pleased in this new year to give to us what we, really what our hearts long for, our hearts long for Yes, our hearts have temporary longings and those are appropriate and those are things that make us human, but ultimately we were not even made for those things, we're made for you. Would you be pleased to impress upon us the reality of what it means to know and own you? To know you, to be owned by you, to have your name. Give us Desires that are insatiable for the one thing, for the one thing, for the one person, the kingdom of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. And we will know what it means for the very first time to walk in freedom. Help us to do that. For Jesus' sake, amen.