The Lamp of the Body

Matthew 6:19-24
Richard Spencer | Sunday, January 18, 2026
Copyright © 2026, Richard Spencer

This is a familiar passage and it is easy to just read it and move on without stopping to consider the full importance of what our Lord said. The main point of the passage is simple enough to grasp; that we cannot be double minded in serving Christ. We cannot serve both God and money. In fact, we cannot serve both God and anything else. But, while that message is simple, it is something we must guard against all of life. And this is especially true for those of you who are young, although there is a danger at every stage of life.

When you are young, you still have a great deal to look forward to. Life has many legitimate pleasures and things to plan for. Finishing school, getting your first career-oriented job, getting married, having children, buying a house and so on. We need to be very deliberate to guard our heart against allowing any of these things to take first place in our life.

In middle age there is danger that the shear busyness of life can cause us to lose proper focus. The tyranny of the immediate can take over and prevent us from properly focusing on God’s kingdom. But don’t let that happen! You must do your job and all sorts of other things, but make sure that even as you do them, your number one priority is the kingdom of God.

And there is also a danger that is specific to old age. We may think that we have completed the work God has for us to do so we can just coast on into heaven. But if you are still breathing, God still has work for you to do. We often cannot do the same sorts of things that we used to do, but if we are still alive God has work for us to do. Therefore, we need to seek to know and do what that work is. Perhaps it is nothing more than encouraging those who are younger by speaking of God and all that he has done and showing forth the joy of the Lord even as the pleasures of this life ebb away.

Therefore, whether you are young, old, or in between, you need to take to heart what Jesus told us in these verses. He gives us both a negative and a positive command and then explains the importance of these commands as well. We are first given the negative command, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth”, and attached to it is a partial reason for the command. Treasures on earth are not of great value because the earth is “where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.” In other words, any treasures we have here are temporary and easily lost, which severely limits their value.

We are next given the positive command, “store up for yourselves treasures in heaven”, and it again includes a partial reason. Treasures in heaven are better because heaven is “where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.” Heaven is eternal and unchangeable, so heavenly treasures are of infinitely greater value than earthly treasures.

And then we are given an explanation for why these commands are eternally important. We are told in Verse 21 that “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” And Verse 24 provides a sort of summary statement that makes it clear how important it is for your heart to be in heaven, rather than on earth; it says, “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.”

In other words, you must make a choice between God and the world, or you could say, between heaven and hell. And while this last verse speaks specifically about money in our translation, the original uses an Aramaic word, mammon, which is more general. It refers to riches of all kinds, money and property. And in the context of the Sermon on the Mount, the meaning is even more general; it refers to anything in this world that we value more highly than the kingdom of God. And we must remember that the kingdom of God is eternal. This is, again, a greater challenge for those of you who are younger, but we must all remind ourselves frequently that this life is short and, when it ends, we begin an eternal state, which is either in heaven or hell.

Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 by speaking about those to whom the kingdom of God belongs. They are poor in spirit, they mourn, they are meek, they hunger and thirst for righteousness and so on. And then, in Matthew 6:1, Jesus said something very important. He said, “Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” And if you have no reward from our Father in heaven, it means that you won’t be in heaven.

Jesus then goes on in the passages that precede our verses to talk about those who “have received their reward in full” here in this life, and he contrasts these people with those who will receive a reward from our Father in heaven. How awful it will be for anyone who receives his reward in full in this life, for, as Jesus asked, “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36) Our souls are eternal, so the answer to this rhetorical question is obvious. Whatever pleasures or troubles we experience in this short life pale in comparison with what we will experience for countless lifetimes in eternity.

With this context in mind, the meaning of Verse 24 becomes clear; if you love anything in this world more than God and his kingdom, you have your full reward here and now and you will have no reward in heaven. In other words, you will not be in heaven; your eternal destiny is hell.

But even Christians are often tempted to value the things of this world more than we should. Therefore, Jesus gives us this stern warning to show us just how important it is that we check our heart. If we spend nearly all our time, energy and passion pursuing worldly things, we are wasting our time because this world is passing away; and, more importantly, we are demonstrating that our heart is not truly devoted to Christ, which raises a serious question about our salvation.

Friends, if we have been saved and have any inkling at all of just how amazing that is, we should be more focused on doing things that have eternal value. As we heard in the first sermon of the year, we want to make sure that 2026 is the year of the Lord, not the year of me. And that should be true of every year that God grants to us. If we focus on ourselves here and now, we are also receiving our reward in full here and now, and that would be very sad indeed.

There are, of course, many mundane things that we must do to survive and to obey God’s command to work six days. But we must do even these necessary, mundane tasks with an eye toward serving God. We should want our personal life to honor God. We should want the way we perform at work to honor God. We should want the way we maintain our possessions to honor God. We should want the attitude we have toward promotions, awards and worldly victories or defeats to honor God. And the list goes on. In other words, we should want to live the 1 Corinthians 10:31 overcoming Christian life, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”

Now you may have noticed that there are two verses in our passage I have not yet mentioned; Verses 22 and 23. We may be tempted to skim over these without a great deal of thought. This is, in part, because they are somewhat enigmatic, so we often allow ourselves to be content with the main message and not spend much time looking into the metaphor that Jesus uses. But we need to pay attention to these two verses, they are very important. Jesus said, “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” It is these verses I want to focus on this evening because the metaphor used here contains an important clue to help us both in examining ourselves and in living an overcoming Christian life.

The first thing we need to do to profit from these verses is to understand what Jesus meant when he said that “The eye is the lamp of the body.” And that is my first point.

I.             The eye is the lamp of the body

This is, as I noted, an enigmatic saying, but it is, nonetheless, clear that these verses deal with how we make decisions; what we look at and consider valuable and what we do not consider valuable. The context, after all, is all about the decisions we make. Are we making decisions to store up treasures here on earth, or are we making them to store up treasure in heaven? In other words, do we have an earthly focus or a heavenly, eternal focus? Are we spending our time and talent trying to make this life more comfortable and enjoyable, or are we primarily concerned with what Jesus himself told us is the one thing that we truly need, which is salvation (Luke 10:42)?

And so, the main meaning of these verses is clear; we need to have proper priorities and keep our eyes fixed on eternal heaven, not this life. But there is more that we can learn from the specific metaphor that Jesus used, the eye is the lamp of the body. Therefore, let’s consider this saying more closely.

A lamp is something that gives light so that we can see properly where to go and what to do. And light and darkness are also frequently used in Scripture as metaphors for good and evil. In fact, God himself is called light. 1 John 1:5 says, “This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.” And John goes on in Verses 6 and 7 to say, “If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.”

Now our physical eyes are the particular parts of our body that respond to light and allow us to see where to go and help us in doing whatever the task at hand is. But what does it mean to say that the eye is the lamp of the body? Jesus is speaking of a metaphorical eye here, not a physical one. This metaphorical eye is what allows information in and, in fact, filters that information. If this metaphorical eye is focused on what is true and good, we are full of light; in other words, that which is good and righteous. But if our metaphorical eye is focused on what is evil, then we are full of darkness. And so, we need to consider our metaphorical eye and determine what information it allows in, or you could say, what it is focused on.

It will assist us if we consider our physical eyes first. They provide us with a physical picture of the world by focusing on a tiny portion of the available information. Visible light only comprises one very small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but it is the part that is most useful in our day-to-day activities. Other parts of the spectrum, like ultraviolet, infrared and microwaves, are useful sometimes, but we would be overwhelmed with mostly useless information if we saw too much of the full spectrum. Therefore, our eyes are designed to focus on the information that is most useful to us.

And notice that our physical eyes can be good or bad. Things may appear out of focus, or our vision may be clouded by cataracts, or we may be color blind, or even partially or totally blind. Any of these conditions reduce or, in extreme cases, destroy our vision.

And now, returning to consider our metaphorical eye, we should ask; “What determines whether it lets in light, that which is good, or darkness, that which is evil?” And what determines whether it lets that information through in a blurred or distorted way, or clearly? I think the answer is your worldview, which refers to the fundamental beliefs you hold about the world we live in.

The late Phil Johnson wrote that, “Understanding worldview is a bit like trying to see the lens of one’s own eye. We do not ordinarily see our own worldview, but we see everything else by looking through it. Put simply, our worldview is the window by which we view the world, and decide, often subconsciously, what is real and important, or unreal and unimportant.”[1]

When he says that our worldview “is the window by which we view the world” he is speaking about the same function as the metaphor Jesus used. Our worldview determines how we interpret everything in the world and, therefore, it determines whether we are filled with light or darkness. Our metaphorical eye has all sorts of information available to it, just like our physical eyes have the full spectrum of electromagnetic radiation available to them. But, just as our physical eyes only respond to a small portion of that spectrum, so our metaphorical eye only responds to some of the information available to it. And, as Philip Johnson said, “our worldview is the window by which we view the world, and decide, often subconsciously, what is real and important, or unreal and unimportant.”

I said that our worldview is our beliefs about the world we live in. And, at the core of our worldview is our understanding of who we are, why we are here, and where we are going. In other words, at the core of our worldview is our answer to the most important questions in life. Questions like: Is there a true God who created all things? Am I a creature made by God or the result of some natural process? Will I be judged at the end of my life, and if so, by whom and based on what standard? Is there something after this life, or do I simply cease to exist?

And notice the two options that Jesus offers. He said, “If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light [that is, goodness]. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness [that is, evil].” I think we can quite reasonably extend the metaphor as I will in a few minutes, but no matter how we do so, we must maintain that there is a fundamental, binary difference between a good and a bad metaphorical, or we could say, spiritual eye. And that difference is whether you have been born again or not. If you have not been born again, you are spiritually blind. As we are told in Psalm 14:1, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” But if you have been born again, then you can see; you are no longer a fool.

In John 3:3 Jesus told Nicodemus, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” This statement fits perfectly with the metaphor Christ used in our passage. If you have not been born again, your metaphorical eye cannot see the kingdom of God. Therefore, you interpret everything you experience from a godless perspective. In other words, your metaphorical eye will not let the light in, only darkness. In John 1:4 we are told, “In him [referring to Jesus] was life, and that life was the light of men.” And John goes on in Verse 9 to say that “The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.” And that true light that came into the world is Jesus Christ. If your metaphorical eye filters him out, then you have no light in you, only darkness.

And in Verse 23 of our passage, Jesus said, “But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” In other words, if the only “light”, or information, that your metaphorical eye allows through is filtered by a worldview that denies Jesus Christ, the darkness that is in you is extreme.

The apostle Peter wrote about the unrighteous, whom God is holding for the Day of Judgment, and in 2 Peter 2:17 he wrote that “These men are springs without water and mists driven by a storm. Blackest darkness is reserved for them.”

As I noted, darkness is frequently used as a metaphor for evil in the Bible. Consider, for example, what Jesus said in the parable of the banquet in Matthew 22, which was part of our daily reading today. Remember that all kinds of people were invited to the King’s banquet, but there was one man who came in not wearing the proper clothing, which represents his not being clothed with the righteousness of Christ. And in Verse 13 we read that “the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”

And, in John 3:19-21, Jesus concluded his comments to Nicodemus by saying, “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”

And so, the bottom-line difference here is between a believer and an unbeliever. And when I say a believer, I mean someone who believes in the true and living God, not someone who believes in one of the many man-made gods. In other words, I mean someone who has been born again.

The Bible also uses the heart as a metaphor for our innermost being, which includes our worldview. And most of you are familiar with the passage in Ezekiel 36:25-27 where God says, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” This is speaking about new birth. God makes a radical change in the core of our being, which fundamentally changes our worldview. In other words, it takes away our metaphorical, or spiritual blindness and gives us spiritual sight. We are enabled to see properly because we believe in God. We stop being fools, who say there is no God, and we are made wise, for the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Psalm 111:10)

But, if you have not been born again, you cannot believe in the true and living God. You may believe in a god of your own imagination – there are many such gods out there, but you cannot believe in the God spoken of in Genesis 1:1, where we read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” You cannot believe in the God spoken of in Psalm 139, where King David tells us, “O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. … Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD. … For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. … All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” And you cannot believe in the God Paul described to the Greek philosophers when he said that “From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.” (Acts 17:26)

And because those who have not been born again cannot believe in this God, they interpret everything in life incorrectly. They usually ascribe things that happen to random chance and coincidence, neither of which is a causal agent; but even if they don’t, they do not ascribe them to the sovereignty of God. And they most likely believe the illogical idea that man has a libertarian free will; in other words, that he is free to do good or evil and can choose to accept or reject God’s offer of salvation. But even if they don’t believe that, they do not realize that God has ordained whatever comes to pass and that a sinner cannot please God as we are told in Romans 8:8. They most likely don’t believe in miracles either; but even if they do, they don’t think they are signs from God pointing to his absolute sovereignty over creation. And they do not believe, as we are told in 2 Corinthians 5:10 that when we die, “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.”

In other words, those who have not been born again simply cannot understand reality properly and they cannot live to please and glorify the only true and living God, the Creator of all things and the Author of life. Their spiritual, or metaphorical eye is bad and so they are filled with darkness. And that statement is true no matter how nice and well educated and entertaining they may be. Being nice doesn’t save you.

We have a natural tendency to think that the worst sins are murder, assault, grand theft and other crimes against human beings. But such thinking shows that our metaphorical eye is not working very well! The truth is that all sin is, at its core, rebellion against God. It is a rejection of his goodness and sovereignty and deserves eternal punishment because it is against the only true, perfect, eternal God. And so, the first application we can gather from this passage is that we must be born again. God must do a work in us to enable us to see his kingdom, to take us from spiritual blindness to having sight. He must change our worldview. If he has not done that to you, cry out to him for mercy. He delights in showing mercy to those who see their own sinfulness and need for a Savior.

And now I want to move on to my second point and speak to those who have been born again. And so my second point is a question for believers: How well does the lamp of your body work?

II.           How well does the lamp of your body work?

If you have been born again, then you have the metaphorical, or spiritual eye necessary to see the kingdom of God. But none of us have perfect spiritual vision. Sin is still with us as long as we are in this world. And therefore, we have work to do. And I think this metaphor provides us with a wonderful way to examine ourselves and to see what we need to do to improve our spiritual vision and live for God’s glory.

In the quote I read earlier from Phil Johnson he noted that we aren’t ordinarily aware of our worldview and how it affects our understanding of the world. But that doesn’t have to be the case. We can make ourselves aware of this lens through which we perceive everything and, even more important, we can work to correct this lens whenever we discover it to be faulty.

That is, for example, what the apostle Paul did when he was speaking to King Agrippa. In what is one of my favorite verses in the Bible, Paul asks a rhetorical question. In Acts 26:8 he asks King Agrippa, and those who were with him, “Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?” Now think about that question for a moment. Paul’s is pointing out that if you believe in the true and living God, the one who created all things out of nothing, you should not find it difficult to believe that he can raise someone from the dead. In fact, it is patently absurd to think that God, who created all things, should have any difficulty at all in raising the dead. Paul’s point, put into the framework of the passage we are examining this evening, is that if you find it incredible that God raises the dead, your spiritual, or metaphorical, eye is not working properly. Your vision is clouded by letting some of your old, sinful nature cloud your perception. In other words, your worldview is not correct.

And notice that you can take just the first part Paul’s rhetorical question, “Why should any of you consider it incredible that God …” and put almost anything after it. When you consider who God is and all that he has done, it is obvious that he can perform any miracle he chooses to. Given that he was able to create this entire universe, it necessarily follows that he can destroy it or bring about any change he desires. Jesus told us explicitly in Mark 10:27; that “all things are possible with God.”  And we recently read Genesis 18:14 where the pre-incarnate Lord asked Abraham, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” The obvious answer is no.

Therefore, we need to constantly check our metaphorical, or spiritual vision. Are we taking the infinite, eternal, unchangeable, triune God into account in our thinking at all times? If we are not doing that, our thinking is faulty, our worldview is wrong, and, to that extent, we are allowing darkness into our life.

And we can see our thinking by examining the decisions we make. And I’m not just talking about the “big” decisions; think of 1 Corinthians 10:31 again, it says, “whether you eat or drink”, and nothing is more mundane than that. We don’t just need to honor God or include him in our decision making for the big decisions in life. We can see where our heart lies – in other words how our metaphorical eye is working – in all of the small decisions we make every day.

Yogi Berra was famous for his line, “If you see a fork in the road, take it.” And, while it is obviously funny, it illustrates something important. There are lots of forks in the road of life. It is impossible to avoid them. You must take a fork; in other words, you  must take one path or another. Most choices are very minor, like what shirt will I wear today? But none of them are without any importance at all because even the most trivial of them depend on our metaphorical, or spiritual eye, the lamp of our body. What do you consider important? What do you not consider to be important? Do you want your clothing to catch the eye of a certain person? Or do you care about whether you honor and obey God in everything? If you never think about these things in minor decisions, it becomes easier and more natural to ignore them when you make major decisions as well.

And every major decision you make in life leads you down a different path, which will have its own unique forks. If you put yourself on the wrong path, those forks can all be bad. You can find yourself in a situation that doesn’t appear to have any good choice to make. If that ever happens to you, I guarantee that you have one good choice to make, repent! Cry out to God for wisdom. Go talk to your parents, elder or pastor. Confess the mess you have made and ask for counsel for how to get back on the right path.

There are lots of examples in the Bible of people making wrong choices. They are there as warnings to help us learn how to avoid making similar mistakes. For example, we recently read about Abraham’s nephew, Lot. He and Abraham had both become wealthy while they were in Egypt and so, when they returned to Canaan, we are told, in Genesis 13:6-7, that “the land could not support them while they stayed together, for their possessions were so great that they were not able to stay together. And quarreling arose between Abram’s herdsmen and the herdsmen of Lot.” And so, Abraham said, in Verse 9, “Let’s part company. If you go to the left, I’ll go to the right; if you go to the right, I’ll go to the left.” And we then read that “Lot looked up and saw that the whole plain of the Jordan was well watered, …  So Lot chose for himself the whole plain of the Jordan and set out toward the east. The two men parted company: Abram lived in the land of Canaan, while Lot lived among the cities of the plain and pitched his tents near Sodom.” (Verses 10-12)

What a tragedy! Lot parted company with the man of God and pitched his tent near the wicked town of Sodom. And that choice put him on a path with different forks; in other words, different choices to make. But the only good choice would have been to repent of having focused on riches in this life and to go back to be with Abraham. And you know the story. Lot ended up moving into Sodom and it brought great disaster to his family and even brought trouble to the Israelites for generations to come because of Lot’s offspring, the Moabites and Ammonites, who were enemies of Israel.

We can easily come up with other examples of people who made bad decisions because they were not focused on pleasing God. The metaphorical eye of their body was not focused on the right things, their worldview was not right. They were focused on storing up riches on earth instead of in heaven. You can look at Cain when he chose to give an offering he knew was not right. It led to his being depressed and God came to him and said, in Genesis 4:7, “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.” Cain also failed to repent and change and was destroyed. We could also look at King David when he sinned with Bathsheba, or King Solomon when he acquired all of his foreign wives, or King Zedekiah when he refused to listen to the prophet Jeremiah, or Judas when he agreed to betray Jesus. All of these men showed by their actions that their metaphorical eye was bad, at least for a time. And they all paid a price, sometimes only temporal pain, but sometimes eternal destruction.

And we must all recognize that it takes continued effort for us to avoid making serious mistakes. The Christian life is a journey, but the path is narrow and can be dangerous. We have real enemies and we need to be sure that we can see the path clearly at all times. Walking on a dangerous path in the darkness is not safe or wise. (RRS)

Therefore, the main message, or application, from this sermon is very simple. Pay attention to your metaphorical eye, your worldview. Examine to see how it is working. What are you thinking about? How are you thinking about it? Does God enter you’re your thinking at all times, or only when you are in church? Is the gospel clear to you? Are God’s promises clear to you? Do you believe his word?

If your physical vision is impaired, it can often be corrected by glasses or surgery. But if your metaphorical vision is impaired, you must work to correct it. Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 10:5 that “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” This is what we must do to correct our metaphysical vision. It is a very difficult task. It is much easier to make yourself go and out dig a ditch, or do some strenuous physical activity. Controlling the mind is far more difficult. But it is absolutely necessary to have clear spiritual, or metaphorical, vision.

We must read the word of God daily. Study it. Believe it. Obey it. Live under authority. Take advantage of every opportunity and means given to you by God to check your spiritual vision. Make sure that you are focused on the right things and that you are interpreting everything in the light of God’s word. God is truth and his word is truth and it is the truth that will set you free.

But Satan wants you to believe lies. And the world is under the control of Satan, so we are surrounded by lies. Some are obvious, but some are very subtle. So test everything and hold onto what is good. But be sure that you are testing everything by God’s standard and by viewing everything through a biblical worldview.

And recognize that the world has an entirely different standard. You cannot expect them to approve of your standard or even to understand your standard. You must be ready to stand against the world. And you can only do that by working diligently, day in and day out, to make sure your spiritual vision is clear.

If we all do that each and every day, then we can truly make 2026, and every year after that, the year of the Lord, rather than the year of me. And doing that is what is best for each of us eternally because rather than receiving a temporary reward in this life and then spending eternity in hell, we will receive an eternal reward in heaven that far outweighs any troubles we go through in this life.

In John 8:12 Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” And in John 12:46 he said, “I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.” It is my prayer that all of us will have spiritual eyes that are trained by the word of God and daily experience to let in the true light, that God may be glorified and we may be blessed. Amen

[1] Phil Johnson, in Foreword to Total Truth by Nancy Pearcy, Crossway, 2004