Heavenly Treasure Matthew 6:19-24 Introduction For the past several months we’ve been studying the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus takes the central teaching of the Christian faith – the gospel – and explains how that message looks when it is lived out. I like to think of the Sermon on the Mount as the gospel on parade. It is the gospel for real life. The gospel at ground zero. The gospel at street level. This is what a person’s life looks like as they embrace the message of the gospel. Now this morning, after having spent time working through the Lord’s Prayer a line at a time, we’re ready to move on to the next section of Jesus’ message. It begins in Matt 6, v 19 and goes through v 34. Let’s read it together. <Read the text> The passage has two main sections. The first we’ll look at this morning – vv 19-24, and the next one we’ll consider after Easter (next week is Palm Sunday). Now as you begin to consider these two parts, you might be tempted to think that the first one – vv 19-24 asks the question, “What do you really value?” while vv 25-34 asks, “What do you worry about?” And that’s not bad – at least for a preliminary reading. But in reality, the two questions – what do you value and what do you worry about are really the same question, just approached from different angles: you value what you worry about and you worry when what you value is threatened. I’ll say that again: you value what you worry about and you worry when what you value is threatened. So if you want to find out what you really value, what makes you tick, what you’re ten fingers and ten toes committed to, look to what makes you anxious. Fear is inverted desire. If I am afraid of being seen as an idiot, then I want to be seen as intelligent. What I value is intelligence. If I am afraid of my job’s insecurity, then I want job security. What I value is security. And on and on. The point is that if you want to find out what you really value, identify what you worry about. You value what you worry about. But you also worry when what you value is threatened. If I value my children’s welfare, then I worry when they are in danger. If I value my livelihood, then I worry when there are company layoffs. If I value my reputation, then I worry when people think ill of me. Again, we could go on and on. The point here is that you worry when what you value is threatened. Therefore there is a sense in which Matt 6:19-34 is making one big point; a call to value the kingdom of God above all things. It’s summarized nicely in v 33. Read it. <Read the text> Seek first the Lord’s kingdom and his righteousness. That is a summary of what it means to live out the gospel in daily life. With the God as the sun of your life, the planets of your existence will be in proper orbit – not flinging out into the dark, cold, remote recesses of the vacuum of space. This morning’s text – vv 19-24 – lays the foundation for that point with three key illustrations for what life is all about: (1) life is about what you treasure; (2) life is about how you see; and (3) life is about who (or what) you serve: your treasure, your vision, and your master. Let’s take those one at a time. Your Treasure: Life Is about What You Treasure Read vv 19-21 with me – a text about treasure. <Read the text> Now at first it might seem like Jesus is talking about money and material possessions. He isn’t. So often this text is used as a passage about giving money to the church and the poor. Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, not on earth. Invest in the kingdom. Make your check payable to R W Glenn Ministries, P O Box $$$$, Honolulu, HI, $$$$$. Now this is not to say that this passage has nothing to do with how we use our money. It certainly does. But how we use our money is just the tip of the iceberg. And it is a very easy application of the principles that Jesus lays out for us because everyone – from the time that Jesus first spoke these words to this very moment – everyone can identify with the use and need of material things. And as we work through this text, we are going to talk about money (because Jesus does). My point is simply to say that Jesus isn’t in the first place talking about money. He’s talking about something much bigger. He’s talking about what we treasure. Look again at vv 19-20. <Read the text> Do you see where it says “store up”? Verse 19: do not store up; and v 20: but store up. Well, what the text literally says is do not treasure earthy treasure, but treasure heavenly treasure. Jesus is not talking about putting something in a heavenly bank. He’s not saying, “Be obedient, and your obedience will be like making deposits in the Sovereign’s Bank”; or “Give a lot of money to charity, and your giving will be storing up for yourself all kinds of dividends in the Bank of Eternity.”  It all comes down to what it means to treasure something. To treasure something is to cherish it, to see it as most valuable, ultimate, and precious to you. So by telling us not to treasure earthly treasure but to treasure heavenly treasure, Jesus is telling us to value, to count as precious, what is most valuable and precious in the universe: the Lord himself – his kingdom and his righteousness as it is found in Jesus. Ultimately, it is a call to set our hearts completely on the Lord Jesus Christ. And, of course, what all this presupposes is that everyone seeks after treasure. Everyone treasures some kind of treasure. Everyone assigns value to something and orients their whole life around it. This text presupposes that our tendency is to value what is earthly, transitory, evaporating, and finally unsatisfying. We need to transfer the funds of our hearts to a heavenly bank account. We are called to bank all our hopes on the Lord. That’s why Jesus warns us. He says, “If you count as precious anything other than him, you will lose it” – v 19. <Read the text> Moth and rust destroy it. That is to say, it is subject to decay. Thieves break in (lit. “dig through,” as would have been the case in the mud and brick homes of ancient Palestine) – they break in and steal. That is, our earthy treasure is vulnerable. It will disappear even as you are fighting tooth and nail to keep it safe. And we all know this by experience. It is incredible really. Let’s say there’s something you want. Something you’ve longed for all your life. Let’s say you treasured recognition. All your life you wanted people to make much of you, to recognize you. You wanted fame. Now here’s how treasuring that works – until you get it, you’ll be full of anxiety, frantically looking to see how you can get it. Take the right auditions. Have the right hair. Sculpt the right body – whatever. As you face rejection and continue to live your life in anonymity and obscurity, you’ll find yourself more and more anxious (and depressed). “When is this going to change? Is there anything else I can do.” So until you get what you treasure, you are full of anxiety and often depression because you don’t have it. What happens, though, if you get what you so eagerly sought? What happens when you get what you treasured? (I’ve heard this often from celebrities). What happens is you find that your treasure isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You become disillusioned. “Is that it? Is this what I was longing for? Is this all there is?” And you can become deeply depressed – as depressed as you were when you weren’t getting your treasure. So on this side of your earthly treasure, is angst (and often depression), and on the other side of your earthly treasure is disillusionment (and often depression). This is what Jesus is warning us about. “Listen,” he says, “if you set your heart on anything or anyone other than the Lord, you will be anxious, disillusioned, depressed, and ultimately dissatisfied.” So do not treasure transitory, vulnerable treasures – fame, respect, security, good looks, financial freedom – do not assign a value to things which don’t last and aren’t ultimately satisfying to your soul. You are assigning a value to something that can’t bear the weight of your investment. You can’t build your life on something so fleeting. You’ll end up devastated. That’s in part what Jesus is saying in v 21. Look at it with me. <Read the text> For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Jesus is protecting our hearts from anxiety and disillusionment and despair. Whatever you treasure is where your heart is, so if what you treasure is destroyed or stolen, what will happen to your heart? It will be “stolen” and destroyed, too. You see this so vividly in The Lord of the Rings. Whoever comes in possession of the ring of power, the dark, sinister ring of power, calls it, “My precious.” And because what has become precious to its possessor is something dark and sinister, the one who owns it is destroyed by it. The creature, Gollum, who was once a jolly, Hobbit-like creature, once he came into possession of the ring, became something less than human, animal like – fixated on the ring even as his precious was what was responsible for his devolution into a vile, sick, perverted, twisted, sub-human existence. Now the things that most of us treasure are not usually overtly evil. They are things like a good marriage, obedient children, a decent-paying job, a nice neighborhood, an annual vacation. But what Jesus is saying here is that if you make precious anything other than himself, your life will be off-kilter, perverted, sub-human, less than what it was meant to be. This is because you were made for him. Colossians 1:16 puts it like this: “For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities-- all things have been created through Him and for Him.” So to treasure anything other than Jesus is to live completely contrary to your design. And you know that when you force something, like a tool, to do something contrary to its design, you end up ruining both that appliance and the object you were trying to fix.  Jesus doesn’t want this for us. He doesn’t want this for anyone. He says, “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly.” Jesus does not want us to be miserable. He wants our happiness. He wants to see our hearts satisfying with what is most satisfying: the one we were made for! So if you have felt anxious that you haven’t yet gotten the treasure of your heart, if you have felt disillusioned on the other side of your treasure – take that as a gift. It’s a gift because it is evidence that you were made for something more. I love how C S Lewis puts it: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” This is why Jesus tells us not to treasure earthy treasure, but heavenly treasure. He’s out for our joy, our happiness, our true and lasting satisfaction – in Him! So then, the first illustration that Jesus gives to show the need to center our lives on the Lord is about your treasure. What do you treasure? What do you live for and long for? What do you cherish? What is most precious to you? If it is anything other than Jesus Christ, you will finally be miserable. Your Vision: Life Is about How You See The second illustration – again it’s illustrating the same point – is found in vv 22-23. It has to do with your vision. Check it out. <Read the text> I know that this illustration might seem out of place, or at least difficult to understand, but it really isn’t. It’s pretty simple, really. Your eye is a lamp. It allows you to see where you’re going. If you go blind, you can’t see where you’re going. You will be in darkness. So here we have a metaphor for a spiritually sighted person and a spiritually blind person. And in keeping with the point of the paragraph, a spiritually sighted person is someone who lives with Jesus at the center of their existence. A spiritually blind person lives with anything else at the center. Without Jesus at the center of your existence your whole existence will be darkened. C S Lewis has said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen; not only be cause I see it, but because I see everything by it.” In other words, Christianity brings clarity to my world. Everything else makes sense in its light. Without it, life is muddy, confusing, dark, dank, and dangerous. This incidentally is why I don’t really like the hymn, “Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus.” It goes like this: Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in His wonderful face. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim In the light of His glory and grace. Now there’s a sense in which I understand what the writer is getting at – of course. The glory and grace of Jesus makes everything else in life pale in comparison. True enough. But I’m afraid that it leaves the impression that this is all that looking on Jesus does. The Christian faith, precisely because it is true, is the one thing that makes most sense of the world. It brings clarity. It illumines the darkness. So instead, I opt for the hymn “Spirit of God, Descend upon My Heart”: I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies, No sudden rending of the veil of clay, No angel visitant, no op’ning skies; But take the dimness of my soul away. This is exactly what Christianity does – it takes the dimness of our souls away. So here in vv 22-23, Jesus is giving us a variation on the theme he’s already addressed in vv 19-21. Whatever you orient your life around determines the whole course of your life. So be careful that you treasure what (who) matters most. Do not be blind to reality. Your Master: Life Is about Who You Serve Now the third illustration that Jesus gives to make his point is that life is about who or what you serve. Check out v 24. <Read the text> Now in point of fact, it’s not true to say that no one can serve two masters. It was possible in the ancient world to be a slave with co-owners, with two masters. But this is not what Jesus is saying. He’s not making some absolute and theoretical statement – he’s talking about something very practical. He’s talking about the practical impossibility of offering single-eyed allegiance to two masters. You can’t “offer total commitment to two different masters, since one will inevitably,” at one time or another “take precedence over the other.”  A slave with two masters can’t do justice to either: for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. There is no in-between. “Decision for one involves decision against the other.” “Therefore,” says Jesus, “you cannot serve God and wealth.” You cannot truly serve God and anything else – wealth or otherwise. Other masters will take you in mutually exclusive directions. Now I want to linger here for just a moment to consider just how profound this teaching really is. Jesus is stating something more than a proverb: no one can serve two masters. He is saying that what you treasure, what you live for, what you set your eyes on – determines your behavior. You perform for what you prize. You serve what you savor. What has the driver’s seat in your heart determines your behavior. That’s what Jesus means when he says, “You cannot serve God and wealth.” The principle here is this: you put yourself at great risk whenever you set your heart on something. Because “[t]he things we set our hearts on never remain under our control. Instead, they capture, control, and enslave us.” This is as iron clad as the laws of gravity. Whatever controls your heart will control your behavior. And perhaps the clearest place to see this is when money, wealth, material things occupy center-stage in your heart, when gold replaces God as your treasure. Jesus knows what makes us tick. And he knows that our favorite substitute for God as the center of our existence is money and material possessions. Why? Why is this a favorite of ours? Because it promises to deliver the same “goods” as God promises to deliver – and it does a pretty good job of it…at least, for a time. Think about it. Money promises to give us comfort, stability/security, freedom, status, and power:  If you have enough money, you don’t have to “do it yourself,” you can watch the landscaper beautify your yard while you sip a lovely beverage from the comfort of a lounge chair. If you have enough money, you don’t have to worry about your future: your next meal, whether or not the kids will be able to do that activity, a potential job loss. If you have enough money, you can be your own boss, you can work the hours and days you choose – you can do what you want instead of being subject to some half-wit office manager. If you have enough money, you can feel like you’ve finally arrived, rather than constantly as a second-class citizen. And if you have enough money, not only do you not have to do what other people say, but you can finally call the shots – throw a little money around and people start scurrying into place, ready to serve you. Now as soon as you make the comfort or security or freedom or status or power that money can buy the center of your life – they things inevitably and invaribly exert greater and greater influence over you. They make demands of you: Thou shalt not be the first to leave the office. Thou shalt not give too much of your money away. Thou shalt not wear second-hand clothing. Thou shalt not drive a second-rate car. Thou shalt not enroll your kids in a second-tier school. Thou shalt not spend time with poor people. Thou shalt not put up with inferior service. And on and on and on. And because you are committed to money as your master, you obey and obey and obey. Only, it never seems like your money master is satisfied. It keeps upping the auntie. It keeps raising the bar. Until, like John D Rockefeller, you answer the question, “How much money is enough?” with “A little bit more.” What controls your heart will control your behavior. And because of this, you have to be careful what you commit your heart to – very careful. But, you say, if what controls your heart controls your behavior, what’s to prevent the Lord from doing the same thing that money does? Shouldn’t we be just as careful entrusting our hearts to God? Actually, no. This is one of the things that makes the Christian faith so amazing.  Jesus has just said that setting our hearts on earthy treasure will leave us with moth eaten, rusty, stolen, broken hearts. What consumes you will consume you. On the other hand, the opposite is true of the Lord. If you are consumed with the Lord, you are safe, secure, happy, and free. I love how Jonathan Edwards puts it: “There is no such thing as excess in our taking of this spiritual food. There is no such virtue as temperance in spiritual feasting.” And the reason for this is that you and I were made for it! The reason why nothing else satisfies is because we weren’t made for it. We were made for God. Until we realize that – everything our heart cherishes will, in the end, bitterly enslave us. But when God’s kingdom and righteousness is at the center of your heart, even the behavior he calls you to only works to enrich your life – to make you beautiful. When God is “your precious” you do not become like the creature Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. You become what you were made to be! When you treasure the only thing truly worth treasuring, you’ll have a beautiful life. Jesus Died to Make You Precious But every treasure other than Jesus becomes precious to you will demand your destruction. Jesus is the only treasure who was destroyed for you to make you precious to him! I’ll say that again: every treasure other than Jesus becomes precious to you will demand your destruction. Jesus is the only treasure who was destroyed for you to make you precious to him! And until you see this, until you believe this, only as you believe this will you even want to treasure Jesus, only as you believe this will you even want to cherish him as your prize possession. When you see all that Jesus is for you through the gospel – all that he has done – what he went through to make you precious – he will become infinitely precious to you. And as he does, your life will change. You will have real security – what you treasure can’t rot or be stolen. You will have real clarity – what you treasure will illumine the totality of your life. And you will experience real change – when Jesus controls your heart, your behavior can’t help but change for the better. Your Approach to Money Shows How Much You Treasure Christ So let me ask you this morning? Is Jesus precious to you? Is Jesus your treasure? Maybe you wonder how you can know. Well, let me see if I can answer that from the passage. You may remember that earlier I said that even though this passage isn’t in the first place a passage about money, it doesn’t mean that it’s not at all about it. It is a text about wealth and material possessions. The last sentence of v 24 makes that quite clear: you cannot serve God and wealth. And for Jesus, the reason why he applies what I’ll call “the treasure principle” to our approach to money and possessions is because it’s a natural one. It’s the “most conspicuous” application of what he’s talking about. Now then, if our approach to money is the most conspicuous application of the treasure principle, then it is probably one of the best places to look to see where we are in our treasuring of Christ. Or I could put it this way: our approach to money and possessions reflects the extent to which we treasure Jesus. How you handle your money and possessions reveals your heart. Check out v 21 again. <Read the text> You see, Jesus isn’t only protecting our hearts when he reminds us that where our treasure is there will our heart be also, but he’s also revealing them. Since the heart is the “control center” of our life, what we treasure indicates where our personal priorities lie. And if you live for money more than you live for Jesus, your heart will be revealed by the way you use your money. So then, let me show you by your approach to money and possessions three ways that you can know you’re growing in your treasuring of Jesus: You love the rich. You do not disdain rich people. You don’t look down your noses at them. You resent them. “Look at their money, their homes, their cars.” And therefore you feel superior to them. If you dislike rich people, it shows that you’re superior to them. But when you treasure Jesus because he died to make you his treasure, you realize that you are a sinner. There is no room for superiority at the foot of the cross. On the other hand, you also don’t revere the rich, envy them, feel inferior to them. If you can’t believe that this rich person has befriended you. If it makes you feel bigger just to be friends with them, then you haven’t broken the power of riches in your heart any more than the person who disdains the rich. The power of possessions holds sway over you because you want what they have or are impressed with them for what they have. But when you treasure Jesus because he died to make you his treasure, you realize that you are deeply loved. Therefore you don’t have to feel inferior to the rich, either. The more sinful you know yourself to be, the less superior to the rich you feel. The more loved you know yourself to be, the less inferior you feel to the rich. And as a result, you don’t care about the allurements of riches, you just love the rich. You respect the poor. You expect to learn from them. You don’t look down your nose at them. Why? Because you treasure Jesus! The one who willingly became poor so that you through his poverty might become rich! How can you disrespect the poor, when your great savior was poor? And of course, this humbles you and moves you with compassion and love and respect toward them, seeing them as a mirror of who you are because of what Jesus has done for you in the gospel. And finally… You are promiscuously generous. A Christian who has really been freed from the power of money is looking for ways to give away his resources. How much should you give? Well, let the cross determine your giving. What was Christ’s giving like? It was sacrificial. It has to cut into the way you live. There has to be a cross in your economic life. I like how C S Lewis puts it: I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them. And, and the reason I like it is because it’s abundantly biblical. The only parameters for our giving now that Jesus has come are found in his cross. Unless there’s a cross in your economic life, you are giving too little. Your generosity needs to be promiscuous.  I get the idea of “promiscuous generosity” from the late second-century Epistle to Diognetus. In it, the writer describes the manners of Christians like this: “They have a common table, but not a common bed,” which, as Tim Keller puts it, the early Christians were promiscuous with their money and stingy with their bodies, while the pagans were promiscuous with their bodies and stingy with their money. These are the kinds of people the gospel makes us. Promiscuous with our money and stingy with our bodies. When we treasure Christ above all treasure, when we see how much he treasures us, we will be released to the freedom of liberal and joyful giving. But the only way to get here, and stay here, is to remember what we’ve said already: Jesus is the only treasure who was destroyed for you to make you precious to him! When you see more and more what Jesus has done for you on the cross, your heart becomes so spiritually rich, that your approach to money is radically altered. If Jesus is your treasure, you’ll love the rich. You’ll respect the poor. And your generosity will be nothing short of promiscuous. Conclusion So then, where are you at this morning? What do you treasure? Jesus is worth it. Let’s listen to him: Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20 "But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; 21 for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 22 "The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. 23 "But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! 24 "No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. Amen.