Matthew 6:19–24

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, 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 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 the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

Jesus tells us to store up treasure in heaven, for our hearts will inevitably pursue our treasure. What we ultimately value will tug at our “hearts”, our personalities, our dreams, our time, our imaginations, our inmost beings, and we will pursue it. That thing becomes our god.
If what we value is merely material, our god is materialism. But if all we cherish most belongs to the eternal realm, then our whole being will pursue what is of transcendent significance.

There is something about God and money that makes them tend to mastery. Either you are mastered by money and therefore ignore God or make him a bellhop for your business, or you are mastered by God and make money a servant of the kingdom. But if either tries to master you while you are mastered by the other you will hate and despise it. This is why Jesus said it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Much money makes a cruel master.

Let’s be more specific. If Jesus means “devote your life to accumulating treasure in heaven” which can mean increasing your joy in God in heaven, what is the main thing he has in mind that we should do now?

It seems from the context it would be that it is giving rather than accumulating. If laying up treasures in heaven is the opposite of laying up treasures on earth, then probably laying up treasures in heaven will be NOT laying up treasures on earth but giving them away in ways that magnify the worth of Jesus.

Luke 12:32–33, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. 33 Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys.”

Here Jesus explains how you “provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old” and how you “provide yourselves with treasure in the heavens that does not fail,” namely, “Sell your possessions and give to the needy.” That’s how you do it.

In other words, possessions on earth are not for accumulating, they are for distributing in ways that Christ is honored and our joy in heaven is increased.

Luke 14:13–14 where Jesus tells us to give to those who can’t pay us back. Why? Jesus answers, “You will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.” In other words, when you give freely and generously because you trust Jesus to take care of you, you are laying up treasures in heaven. You will be rewarded at the resurrection of the just.

19 Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal [or where the stock market can erode it all]. 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Jesus does not say, “Guard your heart”; he says, “Choose your treasure.” He says, Your heart will follow your treasure, so choose the right treasure.

if what you value the most has to do with treasures down here, things that may in themselves be good, things to appreciate and for which to give thanks, if that is the entire horizon of your treasure, that is where your heart will go.

Often in the Bible “heart” has to do with the essence of what any human being is: who you are, what you think, what you cherish. And if what you value out there has to do with everything in this life and that’s all, then that is where your heart will go.

That is where your creative imagination goes; that is where your energy goes; that is what you think about; that is what you hope for, what you dream about.

If you are a Christian, then at some sort of level you will also believe, say, that there is a new heaven and a new earth to be gained, but such belief will not mean a blessed thing about how you live unless the new heaven and the new earth are something you yearn for, something you treasure. If all your treasures belong to this life, then belief that a new heaven and a new earth are coming will not shape you in any powerful way.

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves dig through and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not dig through and steal.

“Make sure you choose the treasure of heaven itself, the treasure of the new heaven and the new earth, because your heart will follow your treasure.” Whatever you value the most, that’s where your heart runs.

If what you treasure the most is advancement at work, that’s where your imagination goes. That’s where your daydreaming goes. That’s where your energy goes. That’s where your creativity goes.

If what you value the most is the progress of your children, that’s where your heart goes. If what you want the most is a really fat retirement package, then you start thinking money. That’s where your heart goes.

What Jesus says is, “Choose your treasure, and make sure it’s eternal treasure, because that’s where your heart will go.” I suspect that if you and I don’t very often feel homesick for heaven, if our hearts don’t start beating when we think of the prospects of a new heaven and a new earth, it’s primarily because that’s not where our treasure is. That’s not what we value the most.

This future life is traditionally called ‘heaven’, for several reasons. God dwells in heaven, so those who live with him after death will be in heaven.

What does this mean then—when the Lord Jesus Christ says, “Lay not up for yourselves [treasure] upon earth”? It means, Stop treasuring treasure, that is, when your money possesses you rather than you possessing it, when you see wealth as an end in itself rather than a means to an end, you have begun to treasure treasure.

We need to fire up our imagination so we see what it is that the Lord Jesus is commanding us to treasure, to think about, to value, to run after.

Few passages in all of the Bible are more calculated to do that than Revelation 21–22. These chapters are deeply symbol laden,
“I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Rev. 21:22).

The new birth transforms our hearts, causing a change in our affections, the things we treasure, and our purpose for life. The Bible describes this as moving from darkness and into light (1 Pet. 2:9). We are brought into fellowship with God and are given the ability to know and love God (John 17:3).

This new life enables us no longer to treasure the trappings of the world, but to overcome the world and find freedom from the bondage of sin

How many preachers, how many sermons, how many churches, as a habit, make us feel homesick for heaven? How many times do we wake up in a week and think, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Jesus came back today, this Monday, soon.”

We’ve now become so sophisticated that we say, “Well, of course, we know he’s coming back. That’s a creedal point, but meanwhile, I’ve got to plan my strategy for the next 10 years.
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” In other words, Jesus is telling us to invest much treasure in heaven because our hearts will follow our investments.

That is one of the reasons why it is perennially dangerous to be rich. If you have a great deal of treasure here, your heart will head in that direction. Wondering how the stock market is doing or wondering if there is some sort of attack that is imminent or perhaps somebody is going to steal it or the like.

Whereas, if your greatest treasure is in heaven, then that’s what you’re thinking about.

It is extremely important, then, for Christians to maintain a high valuation of our ultimate destiny, of what is transcendentally and eternally important, if our hearts, our whole beings, are to pursue those goals. In other words, by constant reaffirmation, by constant meditation on these things, what we treasure most must be secured in heaven, or that’s not the direction in which our hearts will naturally gravitate.

Your heart will actually go after the stuff you really, really cherish, which means part of our mandate as Christians personally and part of our mandate as teachers in the church of the living God is to get people to treasure eternal things. It’s to hold up in front of people the glory of the eternal.

To be genuinely heavenly minded with treasures over there will affect how you handle your neighbor, it will affect what you do with your money, it will affect how you distribute your time because you’re heavenly minded.

If, in fact, you constantly emphasize how Christianity changes how we live here, it changes our dynamics and our relationships and what we do with our families, all of which things are true and none I want to diminish in the slightest, but with the eternal dimension lost, sooner or later our hearts get drawn only to the things that will not last.

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” One of the entailments of this, then, is one of the important ways we foster godliness, we encourage righteousness in the church, is by making eternal things, heavenly things, gospel things, God-centeredness so attractive that everything else looks shoddy and cheap.

Do we hunger and desire for that?

There are many reasons why we do not really treasure heaven all that much:

1) Even when we take the Bible seriously, heaven can be reduced to a creedal point but not something that evokes images in our imagination and causes us to say, “Yes, yes, even so come, Lord Jesus!”

2) In some cases it’s biblical ignorance.

3) In some cases we are seduced by the treasures of this world.

4) In some cases it is because we have subjected ourselves to visions of a new heaven and a new earth that are pathetically small.

5) We sometimes think that the new heaven and the new earth will mean that we suddenly know everything. I think we’ll just be on the next stage of learning a great deal. After all, we’re told that there will be people there “from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9).

Those distinctions are going to apparently continue in heaven. Residents of the new heaven and the new earth will not all have white faces like mine. I suspect that all the languages will be there, too. And if it takes me a million years to learn Mandarin, who cares? We’ll be growing forever and ever in the diversity and richness of this culminating abode.

C. S. Lewis, War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with normal life. Life has never been normal.

For Lewis, the desire for security must find its satisfaction in something other than the world’s situation as it presents itself at any given moment. One’s character begins to shrivel up and shrink so as to correspond to the finite and temporal things to which it has become attached. His audience may complain of death and the pains that surround it, or they may cry to God that His world is unfair, but as Lewis reminds them, God never intended for them to be satisfied in this world.

There’s a great deal in the Bible that just doesn’t make sense anymore unless you have an expectation of life to come.

We’re heading for the crown of life. We have this new birth, this new birth that reverses death, gives us the Holy Spirit already as a down payment of the promised inheritance, gives us the communion of saints, gives us freedom from conscience, turns us away from the enslaving power of sin, brings us into the fellowship of God’s people, and ultimately makes us look forward to resurrection existence, a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.

That’s what we’re heading for. That’s the framework in which we think. Anything less than that is simply pagan thinking, and all of this has come about because of God’s goodness

The Light of Your Body

verses 22 and 23: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:22–23)

He’s not talking about the eye of the body; He’s talking about the eye of the soul. And, He’s comparing the eye of the soul to the eye of the body. Our Lord here is talking about sight physically, and insight spiritually, and He uses your physical eye as an illustration because it’s your physical eye that lets in the light. It’s the light that enables you to see. And so, what ourLord here talks about is the single eye and the sinful eye. “If [your] eye be single, [your] body [is] full of light … if [your] eye be evil”—and the word for “evil” there is the word that means “sinful”—“[then your] body [is] full of darkness.”

So, you have the single eye, and you have the sinful eye. Now, a single eye is an eye that is healthy, an eye that is focused. And, what is it focused on? Of course, it’s focused on the Lord.

What is the sinful eye? If the single eye is an eye that is focused, the sinful eye is an eye with double vision. James says that, “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.” (James 1:8) But, the sad thing about the man with double vision is that he thinks that he sees. You see, Jesus said, “If … the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:23) It’s bad when a man is in darkness and knows he’s in darkness, but isn’t it tragic when a man is in darkness and thinks he’s in the light?

Do you know in the book of Judges what it says about a time of moral declination? It says in the book of Judges that “every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 17:6; 21:25)

These people that are trying to lead this nation, they’re not doing what they think is wrong; the tragedy is that they’re doing what they think is right, and they’re so wrong. When the blind lead the blind, they both fall in the ditch. “Every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 17:6; 21:25) It is morality by majority rather than the Word of God. And, “if the light that is in [you] be darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:23)

You Can Not Serve Two Masters

verse 24: “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” (Matthew 6:24) Now, what is mammon? Just an Aramaic word for “possessions.” It came to be the god of wealth, the god of personal possessions. You can’t serve both. Now, Jesus, here, did not say, “You ought not to try to have two masters.” Jesus didn’t say, “It’s better not to have two masters.” What Jesus Christ here is talking about is an impossibility: you can’t serve two masters. It’s absolutely impossible.

The word that he uses for “master” is the word kurios: “lord, a slave owner.” Now, if you are my slave, you can’t be anybody else’s slave. We’re not talking about somebody that you serve, in the sense of your willingness. Willingness doesn’t have anything to do with this. We’re talking about a master and his slave. And, Jesus said, “You can’t be a slave to two any more than you can walk in different directions at the same time.” “No man can serve two masters.” (Matthew 6:24) It is absolutely, totally impossible.

You say, “Well, I don’t want to be anybody’s slave.” You already are. “He that serves sin is the slave of sin.” (Romans 6:16) You say, “Well, I’ll do as I want.” Yes, you’ll do as you want, but you’ll never do as you are. You’re free to do as you want, but you’re not free to do as you ought, until you become a slave of Jesus Christ. You’re the slave, the servant, of Satan. Make sure, friend, that it is real worship that you get.

So many people think that coming to church on Sunday is worship—coming, sitting, listening to Adrian preach is worship; listening to the choir is worship. And then, you go back out to that other world, and you’re trying to serve God and mammon. You can’t do it. You deceive yourself. Our God is not a moonlighting God. He doesn’t have a duplex for a throne. There’s one God. “Thou shalt [serve] the Lord thy God, and him only.” (Matthew 4:10; Luke 4:8) And, if He is not Lord in the true sense of the word, you haven’t got the real thing.