Where Is Your Treasure

Where Is Your Treasure?

Sermon on the Mount # 10
a sermon on Matthew 6.19-23 by David C. Mauldin Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama

In the church newsletter for this month I wrote one of those little short stories I throw in from time to time to get your attention. In it I jokingly mentioned preaching about the sin of owning too many books. I trust everyone got the joke. If you didn’t, come take a look at my study sometime, and don’t forget to look in the closet. If owning books is a sin, my soul is in mortal peril. Although I was joking, and despite my extensive library, I actually do believe you can sin by owning too many books. … Two questions just popped into your head: What planet is this guy from? And how many books?

The answer is not a number, as if 999 books is OK, but 1,000 offends God. What I am getting at is much more subtle. As you might suspect if you have been following this series on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the answer goes back to the condition of your heart. If you love books more than you love God, then one book is too many. In fact, you do not even need to own one. If you love God more than you love books, you might own millions of books and never sin.

I use this example to approach Jesus’ teaching in our passage this morning. What is your treasure? Where is it? Before we can move on into the passage, let me clear up a misconception my example might cause. The main point of this sermon is: If you love God above all else, then you priorities fall into place naturally and all your lesser loves will be sound and healthy. If you love something else more than God, it becomes an idol. Idols destroy you. Be careful with this. You can apply it falsely and dangerously if you do not pay attention to what it means to love God. You might say, for example, “I love to steal. My pastor says that as long as I love God more than I love stealing, I am OK.” That does not work. If you love God you will want what God wants. You will desire to please God. God hates stealing because it hurts the one who is robbed and the one who steals. If you love God, you must give up some things that in your broken and sick sinful condition you think you love. Loving God means loving others, hating evil, and using things for the purpose God gave them.

Throughout this sermon, when I talk about our treasures and potential treasures—the things that bring us happiness or joy or fulfillment—I will be talking about things that are good and wholesome. There is nothing inherently wrong with books. Lots of people would say there is something very good about them. But they are a lesser good, not our highest good. They are blessings from God. They are not our treasure. The same holds for every good thing.

C.S. Lewis was once asked which of his books—meaning the ones he owned, not just the ones he wrote—he expected to have in heaven. He answered, “Only the ones I gave away and never got back.” We store up treasure in heaven by giving it away on earth. As Jesus said, “You must lose you life if you want to find it.” Love gives, and love is how we store up treasure in heaven. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s put Jesus’ words under a microscope—and then into our hearts.

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,” Jesus tells us. And we ask, “What do you mean by treasures on earth?” The answer here is easy. He means the good things God gives us that make life possible and pleasant: food, clothes, homes—basically wealth. Jesus had more to say about money than any other subject. He considered it a very spiritual subject. Our treasure on earth could also include things such as social standing, a reputation for intelligence, fame, friends, family, and who knows what else? The list might be as long as the population of the earth. What is your treasure? We all have one, even if only in the desires of our heart, because we have been made that way. God created us to treasure him. But when we do not treasure him, we are sure to treasure something else. When he is our greatest treasure, we are right to enjoy the blessings he gives us, so long as we also keep in mind our neighbor’s need. Not to enjoy good food, for example, smacks of ingratitude toward God. Yet to hoard good food while one’s neighbor goes hungry is far worse.

“Instead,” Jesus advises, “store up treasure in heaven.” The reason is obvious. Treasure in heaven is lasting; earthly treasure is not. Jim Elliot was a Christian missionary to Ecuador in the mid 1950s. In 1956 he was martyred as he tried to evangelize a particularly violent tribe living in the jungle. Years before he had written in his journal, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Whatever your earthly treasure is, you will lose it sooner or later—even if you are an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh who is buried with most of it. But treasure in heaven is eternal. So what is it? I believe above all it is God himself. He is our true and greatest treasure. When you give yourself freely to him in love, you will find you are doubly blessed. First, you will know God as your Father. The glory and majesty of God cannot be imagined. Even a glimpse of God makes you forget yourself as you are caught up in rapturous awe. Second, because God is love, God loves to give not only himself but many other blessings as well—a good creation, the fellowship of other people, families and friends and the beauty of nature, learning and leisure, meaningful work, the excitement of romance, and the thrill of a well-played Super Bowl. In next Sunday’s reading, Jesus is going to tell us not to worry about the lesser goods. God knows our need and is more than eager to care for us. We must instead seek first the kingdom of God. God is our treasure. His promises are our treasure. We store these up by loving God and giving ourselves to him. Also by loving other people the way Jesus taught us to love.

The kicker of the passage is verse 21: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” As I have said before, when the Bible uses the word heart, it means more than your emotions. In biblical usage the heart is the source and center of (1) our feelings, emotions, desires, and passions (what we usually mean by the word heart), (2) our understanding, thought, and reflection (what we usually mean by the word mind), and (3) our will and resolve. It is our innermost part, our ego, our person. It is what the word I refers to when we begin a sentence with I. Jesus seems to believe that we cannot have a treasure both on earth and in heaven. We must choose. And the choice we make determines who we are.

“The eye is the lamp of the body,” Jesus continued. This is a confusing teaching. What does Jesus mean? We moderns know that the eye functions passively. Light enters the eye, and it passes information along to the brain—kind of like a video camera. The ancients thought of the eye as more active than that. The eye casts its gaze upon things. It goes out of you to find what is in the world. They may have been technically wrong, but they were right about how we use our eyes. We look. Where do we look? What do we cast our eyes on? Jesus talks about the eye the way he talks about the heart. If the eye is—the Greek word here can mean either “sound and healthy” or “generous,” then the body will be full of light. But if the eye is evil, the whole body will be in darkness—and if the source of light is dark, how great is the darkness!

The sound eye is on God. The generous eye sees its neighbor the way God does. The light of God shines within such a person, and that light shines out too. The evil eye looks to the things of the world. It looks out for number one. Such a person has only darkness within. Therefore we must love God with our hearts (in the biblical sense) and our eyes.

Before we move on I need to explain something about storing up treasures in heaven. Jesus talks about it as if it were an investment. And it is. It is an investment that pays off when the kingdom of God arrives. But there is a marvelous difference between this investment and the kind you are accustomed to. Normally when you make an investment, you set money aside and you can’t touch it. If you have a 401(k), you can’t get at the money until you retire. Otherwise you face a tax penalty. That money is off somewhere else trying to grow so that it will be bigger when you need it. Treasure in heaven can be enjoyed now. The big difference between treasure on earth and treasure in heaven is that one lasts and the other doesn’t. It is not the case that earthly treasure can be enjoyed now, but if you decide to give it up you can enjoy a heavenly treasure when the kingdom finally comes. Not at all. As I have said, God is our greatest treasure. You can know him now. The peace and joy he gives can be tasted today. The love of heaven can be anticipated by our love for one another. We do not have to wait.

Thinking about our love for God and how it brings all our lesser loves into harmony reminds me of something C.S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce. If you are not familiar with that book, it has nothing to do with a marriage breaking up. It is about heaven and hell. In it a bus runs between the two places, and some of the residents of hell take field trips to heaven. As Lewis envisions them, heaven and hell are not different geographically so much as heaven is more real than earth and hell much less. The residents of hell are like ghosts in heaven. Most of them chose to go back to hell, and they do so because they are unwilling to give up whatever it is that separates them from God. They love something else more. The tragedy is, if they do give it up, they get something better in return; yet many refuse.

One woman in the book comes to heaven to find her son. Her guide tells her she will of course be allowed to see her son as soon as she is able. She needs to be thickened up first. “You will become solid enough for [your son] to perceive you when you learn to want someone else besides [him],” her guide explains. Her son was to her an idol. She loved him above all else, even God. And her love for him was selfish, as the dialog discloses. Unfortunately, she never got over this and returned to hell unhappy.

You may think this is ridiculous. A mother’s love for her child is a good thing, not a sin. But Lewis chose it for that very reason. He could not think of any earthly thing that is higher, nobler, or purer than a mother’s love. Yet even this can be corrupted by sin and made selfish. Even this can become an idol when God is not loved more.

Notice that none of the examples I am using are bad in themselves. Books, a mother’s love. These are gifts from God. Yet no matter how good they are, they are less than God.

Some people do not want to love God passionately, with all of their heart, mind, soul, and strength. They do not want to seek his kingdom first. They want a little corner of their life called “religion” that works with all the other parts to make them happy. God is like AAA. Call him when you break down somewhere. This is disaster—for two reasons: First, Jesus doesn’t do a partial job. He wants all of you, and he is not willing to settle for less. He is the Great Physician. You are sick. If you make God a small part of your life, you are still sick, but now you don’t know it! That’s much worse.

Second, we human beings were designed by our Creator with a need for him. There is a God-shaped black hole at the center of our souls. Nothing but the infinite God can fill it. Until he does, you can go through life throwing all kinds of stuff in, but nothing will ever give you lasting satisfaction. The best you can do then is stay busy so you don’t have to think about it or numb your soul with relatively good but lesser things: entertainment, career, and so on.

Basically, what Jesus says in this passage—and what I am trying to explain—comes down to this: You can look for your treasure on earth, but you will not get lasting satisfaction. You will ultimately lose both your treasure and yourself. Or, you can look for your treasure in heaven. And here is the amazing part: when God is your treasure, you find that everything else you need is thrown in as well. Make peace the greatest love of your heart, and you will never find lasting peace. Make God the greatest love of your heart, and you will know both God and the lasting peace only he can give. Make happiness your treasure, and you will never hold on to happiness for very long. Make God your treasure, and you will have both God and true happiness forever. See how it works? Isn’t it amazing? If you love God above all else, then your priorities fall into place naturally and all your lesser loves become sound and healthy. You will know God, and with him come all the blessings he loves to give to his children. Amen.

rev_mauldin@yahoo.com
February 4, 2007

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