In one of the companies I worked for before I started training to be a minister the boss was, how can I put it, not likely to win the "Nice Person of the Year Award." One particular incident among many stands out in my mind. He and his brother were talking on one side of the office while I made them coffee. The coffee machine broke and spilt all over me, scalding me. I was in agony and I'm really not the stoic type so I was showing that I was in agony. I yelled in pain at one point trying to get some of my scalding hot layers off me and the two men looked round at me and then calmly resumed their conversation. The coldness of their response shocked me. If they had even laughed or jeered it would have felt better.
To them I simply did not exist as a person.
For many people God is like that. We do things in his presence, think things or say things that we simply would not do if we took on board the fact that he is a person. Throughout chapter 6 of Matthew Jesus labours the point that God is a person, not a thing. The Kingdom of Heaven is about a person, not activities and objects.
Jesus language throughout chapter 6 is striking. The name "God" is only used twice, in verses 24 and 30 but twelve times Jesus refers to God as "Your Father" or "Our Father." In each teaching section or sermon point Jesus moves the listener from thinking about an activity to thinking about the person behind that activity. He moves them from thinking about an abstract idea such as religion or God to being aware of the existence of a person, our Father.
God can be a very abstract idea.
Do you believe in God? Yeah.
Does it make a difference? Ummm....
Jesus replaces this abstract idea with a person. Do you do good things in the name of Christianity? Who for? You? Your religion? God? Do it not as a performance for yourself or others Jesus says, but a single-person-audience performance for Your Father.
Do you pray? Who to?
This seems an odd idea but so often, especially with public prayer, it can be a performance, and not for God. Are you praying or talking to yourself? Do you pray to a person who hears you and is real or just stress out inwardly?
The same with fasting or engaging in any other "religious" practice. Who is it for? Are you aware that there is a person there? A person who calls himself your Heavenly Father?
This is why Jesus speaks so confidently about not storing up treasure on earth and leaving aside our worries.
When we are dealing with an abstract concept of God, that far off impersonal being, dealing with our lives then maybe some prudent investment in the things of this world is called for. As the last few years of financial collapses have told us it is unwise to bank on an abstract notion. But to Jesus God is not some abstract being, out there somewhere, he is our close and loving Father. Always there, always near, always in charge and always loving.
Everything we do is done in the presence of this loving Father. Religious things, non-religious things and irreligious things. He is a person and when we realise that we discover that we have no choice but to respond to him.
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