Well, good morning, Christ Covenant. It’s great to be with you again today. It’s hard to believe, if you’re like me, that we are in the month of August. How did that happen? And I know that months as we started this whole strange season we’re in you probably thought by now, in the month of August, we’ll be past the time of masks and social distancing and alas that’s not happened. But nonetheless, we’re grateful to be together once again, even in strange ways, here at Christ Covenant Church.

I want to welcome not only each of you behind your masks but also all those back at home watching on video. We’re so excited you’re with us and joining us as well this morning,

And if you make our way through this long, hot summer, we are making our way through a sermon series in the parables. And so if you have your Bibles, Matthew 13 is where we are. So let’s turn our attention there, Matthew 13. And as you’re turning again to Matthew 13, I remind you, and maybe you’re new here to this series, we’re working our way through one chapter of Matthew that’s packed with parables, and these are some of Christ’s most famous and well-known and interesting parables and we’ve been making our way through them bit by bit, little by little, and today, and this may be encouraging to some of you, today we only have three verses.

Just let that sink in for a moment, right? When’s the last time you heard a sermon on three verses? Now, I didn’t pick it this way, it just landed in my lap, but actually in three short verses, we have two different parables. Now as you’ll see when we read these, these are very related, but these are three wonderful verses, and maybe even some of Jesus’ most famous parables, as brief as they are.

So let’s listen here in verses 44 through 46 of Matthew 13 to parables that you will, when we hear them, know these are very well-known.

Verse 44: “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 value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”

Amen. Let’s ask God to bless this passage to us today. Let’s pray.

Lord, in so many short words, it seems so few, there is so much to say. And Lord you have a great message to us today. May we have ears to hear what a great treasure the kingdom is. We pray all of this in Christ’s name. Amen.

Okay, so I’m just going to put it out there. My favorite movie growing up, when I was just a kid living in the 1980s, yes, that’s when I grew up, was Raiders of the Lost Ark. I can remember the very first time I saw that film completely blown away by this massive, adventure, action film as the archeologist Indiana Jones traveled all over the world, fighting the Nazis, and things are blowing up and burning down, and there’s a big pit filled with snakes and exciting things, and of course, the center piece of the whole movie, if you’ve seen it and I’m sure you have, is that Indiana Jones at the core is a treasure hunter and he spent his whole life hunting treasures as an archeologist, but now he’s come to the greatest treasure you can possibly dream up, the Ark of the Covenant, could it be there, buried somewhere in the sands of Egypt, and sure enough, as the movie unfolds, he finds the most amazing lost treasure that’s ever been discovered.

Now, of course, it didn’t turn out like he thought it would. You open that treasure, ended up being more dangerous than anyone anticipated, but thing that captured the imagination of a generation and me as a kid was, wow, what would it be like to be a treasure hunter?