What Are You Holding On To?

This Sunday at our Sydney campus, T.Y., one of our shepherds (alongside his wife Subin), opened up Matthew 6 and asked a question many of us are quietly carrying around: if God is so ready to give us full life, what's actually stopping us from living it?

T.Y. started honestly. When he first heard our year-long question, "what does full life look like?", his mind went to the future. Things to achieve. Things to build. Things to improve. Sound familiar?

But somewhere in the middle of the year, something shifted. Jesus isn't holding the full life back for some future version of us. It's on the table now. As Pastor Josh put it last week:

Full life is not even a question. God is already ready to give you the full life he imagined you to have.

So T.Y. asked himself the obvious follow-up. If God is that generous, what's getting in the way? When he sat with this week's passage, one answer surfaced: worry.

"You worry too much"

Last time T.Y. preached, he was engaged. This time, he's married. And marriage, he joked, has a way of exposing things you didn't know were there.

Subin told him recently: you worry too much. He was surprised. He always thought of himself as a pretty chill guy. But she could see what was running underneath the calm exterior, the constant thinking ahead, the quiet attempts to head off everything that might go wrong.

Subin has been unwell for a season. And in that season, T.Y. found himself spinning out, not so much about her health, but about whether she'd still get to live a full and meaningful life. Whether things would turn out the way they'd hoped.

When he told her all of this, she said something simple that landed hard:

God has the best interest for me, so you don't need to be worried about me.

That sentence exposed something. He says he trusts God. He believes the Father is good. But underneath, he was still quietly trying to secure the future himself. He wanted enough control to make sure life would turn out well.

And then he opened Matthew 6, and it felt like Jesus was addressing that exact instinct.

A culture that runs on securing the future

T.Y. named the air we breathe in Sydney. The pressure to plan. Career, housing, marriage, the next getaway, retirement, the kids' education. Rising costs, less certainty than there used to be. Even when we plan well, many of us still feel anxious.

He was careful here. He wasn't saying planning is wrong, or that we should live recklessly. He was naming something deeper. Anxiety isn't just a feeling. It's a signal. It reveals what we actually believe is holding our life together.

And that's where Jesus starts.

Treasure, heart, master, anxiety

T.Y. walked through Matthew 6 and pointed out a progression most of us miss. Jesus moves from treasure, to the heart, to who we serve, to what we're anxious about. These aren't four random sayings stitched together. They're linked, and they all trace back to the same question: who do we believe God is, and who are we actually serving?

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven... For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Earthly treasure, T.Y. said, is the stuff we can see and hold. Possessions. Status. Even health. Things we reach for to feel full. But those things don't last.

Heavenly treasure looks different. It's the things that carry on into God's kingdom. Loving God. Loving our neighbour. Trust, compassion, forgiveness, relationships. Those last.

He reminded us who Jesus was preaching to. Many in that crowd were poor, sick, scraping by day to day. And Jesus tells them not to store anything up. For them, this would have sounded almost unrealistic. Even for us, living in relative abundance, we can still operate from a scarcity mindset. T.Y. confessed it shows up in his own heart, sometimes catching himself counting the cost when giving to missionaries, to people in need, even to his own house church and family.

Then he landed a line that stuck:

What we treasure doesn't reflect our heart. It shapes it.

The good eye and the bad eye

The next bit can feel a little strange at first reading. The eye is the lamp of the body. Healthy eye, whole body full of light. Bad eye, whole body full of darkness.

T.Y. gave us the Jewish background. In that world, a "good eye" meant generous. A "bad eye" meant greedy, stingy, calculating. So Jesus is saying: a generous heart fills your whole life with light, and it spills over to everyone around you.

We've all felt that. When someone is generous, there's warmth around them. T.Y. pointed to the way Jen and Dan, Tony and Marie open up their homes after Sunday lunch. The way house churches on Friday nights welcome people in, feed them, care for them.

And then, with a grin, he gave us the flip side. The stingy heart is closed, calculated. Maybe you've found yourself tallying up exactly how much you spent cooking for house church this week. (Noah?) He swears that one was him, back in the day.

The point underneath the joke is sharp. Generosity shows a heart that trusts. Stinginess shows a heart trying to secure life for itself. And if even the light in us turns to darkness, T.Y. said, that darkness doesn't only affect the people around us. Our own spirit suffers.

You cannot serve God and money

From treasure and heart, Jesus moves to masters. No one can serve two. Eventually we will love one and hate the other.

T.Y. paused on the word "money" here. In the original, it's mammon. Aramaic. And it's not just currency. It's almost a rival god. It stands for our drive to secure our own lives, what Pastor Josh calls the three S's: security, significance, satisfaction.

And that, T.Y. said, is what sin is at the root. Trying to meet our deepest needs from our own resources. Believing we can build a full life out of what we have and what we can control.

The tricky thing is how normal it looks. Career. Money. Relationships. Anything good can quietly become the thing we depend on instead of God. And when it does, it stops being a gift. It starts holding us.

So Jesus says: every heart will eventually choose a master. Are you trusting God for your security? Or are you trying to secure life yourself? You can't grip the controls and live in the freedom of his kingdom at the same time.

"Therefore, do not be anxious"

Then comes the line we usually quote on its own: do not be anxious about your life.

T.Y. pointed out the "therefore." Because of everything Jesus just said about treasure, heart, and master, therefore, don't be anxious. The peace Jesus offers isn't a mood. It flows from where our trust sits.

He admitted it can sound naive. Come on, man. I've got a real family to feed. Is this even practical? But Jesus is going deeper than feelings. Anxiety is the symptom, not the disease. It exposes who or what we actually believe is holding our life together. Is it God? Or is it mammon?

When our security sits in things we can control, we hold those things tightly. The career we're chasing. The next investment that we hope will work out. And the moment those things wobble, anxiety rises. That's not a character flaw. That's the natural cost of trying to hold our own life together.

"How many of you guys are worried?" he asked. Then admitted he'd been pretty worried about this sermon himself.

Look at the birds

Jesus doesn't just say stop worrying. He offers a different way to live.

Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow...

T.Y. told us something he'd noticed that morning. He'd been practising the sermon, looked outside, heard a sparrow, saw the greens in the garden, and thought, "man, that's Jesus right there."

Jesus isn't saying life takes no effort. He's saying your life isn't sustained by your effort. It's held by the care of the Father.

And maybe, T.Y. suggested, the reason we find it so hard to choose heavenly treasure, the reason generosity feels so risky, is that we keep trying to give out of our lack, carefully calculating any surplus. The full life we're trying to secure by control can only be received by trust.

Less control. More trust in the Father. When that shift happens, generosity stops costing us. We give out of abundance we've already received, not out of fear of running out.

If you're not sure God cares, look at the cross

T.Y. knew the next question. What if I struggle to believe God cares about me? His answer was to point at the cross.

He who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

Even if we lost everything, T.Y. said, we'd still be free, because we already have eternal life in Jesus. The joy of that salvation is what frees us to trust God with the rest.

And then the invitation: seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Our needs still matter. But when God's reign becomes our priority, we can finally trust him with the rest. We're no longer driven by the need to secure our own future. We're free to focus on what actually lasts.

The honest question

T.Y. left us with a question worth sitting with:

What are you holding on tightly to right now because you're afraid God won't hold it for you?

Our worries usually point at it. Whatever you can't stop checking, planning around, controlling. That's the place Jesus is gently asking you to loosen your grip and trust the Father instead.

Then he painted a picture of what a community living this out could look like. House churches with open homes, shared resources, people cared for. Not because we have it all figured out. Not because our lives are perfectly secure. But because we believe our life is held by the Father. When people see a community living like that, they see a glimpse of something bigger. The kingdom of God breaking into Sydney, and from here, out to the ends of the earth.

Free to trust, free to let go

T.Y. closed with one last story. The story of someone who lived all of this perfectly. Jesus himself.

Jesus trusted the Father completely. "Not my will, but yours be done." He didn't hold back. He gave his whole life for us. And the Father did not fail him. God raised him from the dead, and what looked like total loss became victory.

That's the God we trust. A Father who follows through. Because of Jesus, we have nothing to lose. We have eternal life. And so we can live with conviction.

We're free to trust the Father. Free to let go of control. Free to be generous with the kind of generosity shaped by Jesus and fuelled by trust in the Father. And as we live this way, T.Y. believes it will flow out from us. Into our families. Into our church. Into our city. To the ends of the earth.

So this week, hear the question again, and answer it honestly: what are you holding on tightly to because you're afraid God won't hold it for you? Loosen your grip. The Father has you.