My First Bible #16: Matthew 6:19-21

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.  (Matthew 6:19-20)


I had never coveted some of the things my friends had coveted when I noted down this passage, but I think for most of my life, I had wanted everything I could get. Underneath a calm and quiet veneer, I was grabby and grasping. Even now, the command not to 'store up' hits hard - a constant reminder that one of my tendencies is to want to hoard money, just for the satisfaction of knowing it's there.  

I have to make a distinction here - by way of a hopefully relevant side point: by condemning the 'hoarding' of money I am not condemning saving. My take on money is this: it is a good servant to be used for the kingdom of God, and in order to use money, you have to spend it.  In other words, the godly thing to do with money is to spend to enable things that bring God glory (and that is a very wide field, and includes supporting yourself and your family!). However, here's the thing: saving is delayed spending. We often need to save money - but this should only be so that we can enable it to be spent on the right things. Hoarding, on the other hand, is just wanting the money there for the sake of it. In the cold, hard reality of bank statements, the two might look exactly the same - especially if you are building a savings pot that is for emergencies where there's no specific 'spending goal' in mind.  It might even be quite hard to tell the difference.  However, it's the motivation that matters.  And I think our passage today helps to discern that difference.

But I think we need not confine this passage to money - although money provides with a wonderful array of analogies!   The act of 'storing up' suggests an amount of work involved.  First one has to acquire the treasures in the first place, and secondly one has to put effort into storing them effectively, constantly being on guard against the real or proverbial moths or thieves.  'Storing up', therefore, is proactive in nature.  It might be costly also - we put money, time or effort, or even our hearts in.  But, as the passage says, there are no guarantees.  These things do not last - their value depreciates or they are destroyed by others.  It may be money, it may be prestige, it may be an earthly empire of influence or even a project of something that is good.  But even all the good things of this life will pass away eventually.  In fact, it's not even about risk - like the investment small print: 'your capital is at risk.  You may get back less than you put in' - but an inevitability that these things will pass away.  No one gets to take any of it with them when they die.

Treasure in heaven, however, is eternal. This much we know from the passage: 'where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal'. But what is it? And what do we actually do to store it up? Jesus talks a lot about rewards, and treasures in Heaven in the Sermon on the Mount.  It's not unlinked to the 'Reward in Heaven' I touched on in the previous post.  So one obvious way would be to equate 'storing up treasures in heaven' to doing those things in the previous passages that  produce this reward - prayer, fasting, and giving to the needy - done in an attitude of worship (and not for our own self-righteousness or the approval of others).  As I discussed yesterday, this reward is not something separate that we get because we worship God, it is worship.  The most rewarding thing of aligning our hearts to his.

However, others when looking at this passage sometimes look a bit wider.  It's not just our own individual worship, but the Kingdom of God.  Now, the Kingdom of God is where God is worshipped.  So when we ourselves worship, the Kingdom of God is at hand.  But of course, the Kingdom is also a body - whose head is Christ and a Bride of Christ.  Building up that Kingdom means building up the faith of others, being a witness, and building God's church.  We can actually invest our money in the Kingdom, by using it to fund things that build up the church, but of course there are also many many other resources we can put in - our time, our prayers, our skills, our other material resources or assets.  And God's kingdom will not pass away.  John McArthur even once put it like this: "invest your money in the souls of men and women who will some day greet you in heaven with thanksgiving when you arrive".  When we invest in building the church, we are building something that will last.

So that's the choice of 'treasures' we have, but what of the last part of the verse: 'For where your treasure is, there your heart is also'.  This sentence tells us something interesting about motivation (which, incidentally, I've also heard elsewhere from non-Christian sources) - that people think motivation springs action, but actually, action triggers motivation, which itself motivates us to do the action again (i.e. if you want to start running, don't expect to feel super-motivated the first time you go out - just get out there and do it, and then you'll find you want to do it again because you felt good the last time).  The same can also be said for money: if you've invested money into something (literally as a shareholder or more figuratively - in the way that I 'invest' in my children's musical skill by paying for their lessons), you will care about the outcome of that thing.

Jesus' teaching here does not say 'put your heart in the right place, and they you'll seek after the right things'. Of course, if we were able to do that consistently, then of course that would be fine. But Jesus knows us, so he effectively (by way of paraphrase) says: 'seek the right things and put your energies in storing up the right things, and then you'll love the right things.' The action comes first, and then the motivation. We often value things because we invest in them, not the other way around.

And so, amazingly, this hard-hitting and profound teaching actually comes within the realm of the possible. It is far easier to give up all your money than it is to change your heart at will. Of course, that doesn't make it easy. But it does mean it speaks to our initiative. 

Does this make us legalistic? Of course not.  All the efforts we might put in to building the kingdom - our money, time, skills or prayer, do not save us.  We are justified freely by Jesus' death on the cross.  And the 'reward', or the 'return on investment', so to speak, is worship itself and the building of the Kingdom of God.  And of course, in order to desire to follow this teaching, we need to be wanting to follow God and love him with our whole hearts, even if it feels like our hearts haven't got the memo. So it can never be a case of thinking we're justifying ourselves by giving away money.  This is about practice - the way that our practices contribute to our spiritual formation.  Spiritual formation is just a fancy way of saying the way in which our hearts are aligned with God's and, as a result, we are slowly transformed to become more like Jesus and the people he wants us to be.

And so, let's look at where we're putting the resources we have to invest - monetary, time, effort, focus, skills - anything from a sizeable disposable income to just that five minutes we have at our disposal in the morning, or before we go to sleep.  What's the first priority for the things we have a choice with?  Let's invest them in treasure that lasts.

The summer I was 17 years old I read my Bible cover to cover for the first time.  I was captivated and completed the whole thing in 4 months.  Although I clearly read it at quite a pace, I still jotted down passages that sprang out to me in my still relatively new faith.  I still have that Bible, and the scraps of paper are still there, bookmarking each verse.  So I decided to go through, 18 years later, and visit each of them.  They are from the Good News Bible.