Where Is Your Treasure?

“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” - Matthew 6:21

Righteousness and covetousness have an inverse effect on one another.  One tethers you to this world, and the other liberates you from it. One invests you in the natural, and the other divests you from the natural.  What you fear to lose, is what you treasure.  This is where your heart truly is.   

In this temporal world, when we live in the presence of something, we can begin to lose sight of its value.  The average American probably does not appreciate running water like someone from a third world country who has never had it.  We take it for granted, we count on it as status quo and eventually, we are discontented and covet something better.  The running water is not enough, it needs to be temperature controlled.  It needs to be in every part of the house, etc.  However, just because it is a “standard of living” does not mean that you treasure it.  On this point Jesus’s words pierce like a sword.  The Pharisees loved the high seats, the show of sacrifice, the long prayers.  They were quick to display their abundance of gain, and slow to relinquish it.  It was more than their standard of living; it was their treasure.  When Jesus came, he stripped away all that.  He told everyone to give in secret, pray in secret, and to humble themselves.  He told to “lay not up for yourselves treasure on earth.”  He brought salvation down to man and obliterated the need for a high priest.  In doing so, he ripped everyone from the covetousness and drew them to righteousness.  He commanded them to refocus their investment of our greatest asset (time).  To place it not in things temporal, but in things eternal, because where your “treasure is there will your heart be also.”   The Pharisees did not take kindly to this radical, so they had Him killed.  He preached a gospel that told them to abandon what they loved most, a gospel that would strip away their treasure, but offer them a God’s treasures.  Is it not the same today?  We like our comforts, our pleasures, and our way of life.  We love our family, our friends, and our future.  Some of it is standard of living and creature comforts, and some of it is treasures on earth (what cannot abandon will tell you which is which).  Jesus takes all that (food, raiment, family, friends, etc.) and rolls it up into one word “life.”  He says: “lose your life.”  Jesus calls us to abandon it, die to it, lay it down and follow Him.  If you do, if you fall radically in love with Jesus Christ, then you will find life.  When you treasure this world the heart clings to it and you are drawn away from Christ.  When you break from the world and treasure heaven then your heart is in Jesus Christ.  Jesus Christ will wreck your life and give you life.  He will strip away the covetousness but grant righteousness.  

To the carnal heart, it is a great thing to lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, because earth is the only treasure.  Like the Pharisees, your heart will adamantly reject the very notion of it and even seek to destroy it.  However, when you are genuinely converted, washed in the blood and sanctified by the Spirit; brought into that born-again experience.  It is a great delight to lay up treasure in heaven.  You see this as wisdom as much as righteousness.  For, why would you put treasure in this corruptible world?  Have you not seen how truly fragile this world is?  Why would you spend your precious time here gaining the things that are, here?  “For what is a man profited, if he gains the whole world, and lose his own soul?”