Living a Life that Counts
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2012 · 5 February 2012
“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 lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness! 24 No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”
Now the question that comes out of this text is a very simple one, where is your heart? Verse 21, “It's wherever your treasure is.” What preoccupies your life? What do you spend most of your time thinking about? Chances are if you think about it the answer is, some thing, a house, a car, a wardrobe, a bank account, a stock, an investment and furniture. We really are creatures committed to things.
Well, I have some bad news for you, I just want you to know that your things can't last. Oh, maybe an error in judgment, maybe a loss of concentration or maybe you'll just lose it in the stock market. Or maybe they'll wind up a mass of mangled metal being towed off to the junk yard. And what about all those things in your house? Well, lock the door and hope someone doesn't steal them.
And so as we come to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:19-24 Jesus directs some teachings about things to the Pharisees who were abusing this whole matter of possessions. Sadly, they were totally consumed with things. Among all of the other problems of the Pharisees they were greedy, they were covetous, they were manipulative, and they constantly moved toward accumulating more things.
Now remember, the thrust of the whole Sermon on The Mount, in Matthew 5, 6, and 7, is basically to sweep aside the inadequate, insufficient standard of the Pharisees and reaffirm God's divine standard for life in His kingdom. They had invented a whole system of religion that was man made and inefficient. Jesus teaches that to be in His kingdom, you must live up to a Godly standard, and He teaches it in contrast to the Pharisees.
So in essence our text then, from verses 19 to 24, deals first with how we view our material possessions compared to our spiritual possessions in verses 19 and 20. And then in verses 21-23 Jesus teaches us that it all relates to where your heart is, whether your heart is open to God or not and verse 24 says that no matter how hard you try, you cannot do both.
Now, to the Pharisees to be rich was to be holy, to be rich was to say, look how much God is blessing me. That's why when the Lord said in Matthew 19:24, "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into the kingdom," that was utterly shocking. Because to them riches were the stamp of divine approval on your life, you had it because God gave it to you because you were so righteous. And they equated money with the blessing of God, which was their whole system.
Now where did they get this concept? Well, just look back at Deuteronomy 28. When the Lord had delivered Israel from Egypt and brought them to the edge of Canaan, the Promised Land, the Lord laid down some conditions for them to enter the land, and on the basis of those conditions were some great promises.
In Deuteronomy 28 :1-2, the Lord says as they are preparing to go into the land, "Now it shall come to pass, if you diligently obey the voice of the LORD your God, to observe carefully all His commandments which I command you today, that the LORD your God will set you high above all nations of the earth. 2 And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, because you obey the voice of the LORD your God.”
And the opposite in Deuteronomy 28:15-18, “But it shall come to pass, if you do not obey the voice of the LORD your God, to observe carefully all His commandments and His statutes, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you: 16 Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the country. 17 Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. 18 Cursed shall be the fruit of your body and the produce of your land, the increase of your cattle and the offspring of your flocks.”
So these were material blessings and material curses, they were earthly, visible and tangible blessings. In other words it seemed to say that material blessing is a sign of your obedience, material poverty is a sign of your disobedience. But they misinterpreted the beginning and did not read further where in Deuteronomy 30:6 God explains what He really wants and that is obedience to love God with all your heart and soul and that blessings are not all material in scope only.
Now the Old Testament warned us against this, Solomon said he was rich and yet it was vanity, and all vanity. In the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:17 God said, "You shall not covet.” The Old Testament is full of warnings against riches, Proverbs 23:4 says, "Do not toil to acquire wealth." In Proverbs 28:20 it says, "A faithful man will abound with blessings, but whoever hastens to be rich will not go unpunished.”
In other words the Bible warns against greed and covetousness and hastiness and being rich. But in spite of all of those warnings that say you cannot both serve God and money people still do it and ignore God’s warnings. Luke 16:14 says, "The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all these things, and they ridiculed him.”
And so it's against the backdrop of the greed of the Pharisees that our Lord speaks, and what He is saying here is that we must have the proper view of money and wealth and possessions. Now listen, we're living in America in this time of recession, aren't we?
Now I can tell you there's one simple reason for all these money problems and it is greed, pure and simple. And you can play around with all the periphery reasons but until you deal with the heart of man you will never be able to deal with the problem of recession in a free society because greed dominates how freedom functions.
The problem in the heart of man is not the periphery, the essence of the problem of man is greed, and you have to divert his heart from covetousness and that's what our Lord wants to do in this text, is divert us away from covetousness.
You see we must handle our possessions and our money and our wealth and our excess like we do anything else, First Corinthians 10: 31, "Whatever you do, whether, you eat, or drink, or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God." Unfortunately we do so much of it to the indulgence of self, that's the problem.
John Stott has said, "Worldly ambition has a strong fascination for us, and the spell of materialism is very hard to break." Even if we give our tithes faithfully, have we solved this problem? Not necessarily. God doesn't want to get something that's given because you're afraid of Him, He wants to get something that's given because you love Him that comes from your heart, see?
And so the Lord doesn't give us some kind of an absolute, legalistic standard here, He merely gives us a principle, and when you hear the principle which says, lay up treasure in heaven, or serve God not money, you might at first say, “Well that's kind of vague, but it won't be by the time we're done.” But it's vague enough to deal with your attitude, and not just with some external formula, so be ready to let God change your attitude.
The Bible contains more than 2,350 verses dealing with money and possessions. Jesus taught more about money than about heaven, hell and almost any other subject. Jesus states a foundational principle in this text: The way you perceive and manage material things is a reflection of your heart! According to surveys, tension in the home over money is one of the most common causes of divorce.
The Apostle Paul said in 1 Timothy 6:10, "The love of money is the root of all evil." It isn't money that's the root of all evil it's the love of it. You can be very poor and have none of it and still love it like mad. You just can't get a hold of it. You can be very rich through inheritance and do not really care for it that much. It's the love of money that corrupts.
You remember the story of Solomon who kept amassing fortunes until he became the wealthiest man in the world, and when it was all said and done he said, "Vanity, vanity; all is vanity." It did not fulfill him; instead it gave him emptiness, uselessness and meaninglessness. The Bible gives us many other illustrations of those people who because of the love of money were devastated and destroyed in some degree or another.
So let us look carefully at what Jesus teaches us. Let's go to verse 19, "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth." What does that mean? It's a play on words, it means, do not treasure up treasures, don't stockpile it or place something someplace, or stash it someplace.
What the Lord is talking about here is not that which we use to live everyday but that which we just pile up. It's not our necessities, it's not that which we use to meet the needs of our own life, of our family, of the poor, of the Lord, for setting aside money for the future or for making wise investments that we may be better stewards of God's money in days to come.
Jesus is not talking about that which is active; He is talking about that which is stockpiled just to amass for our own selves. That's what He's talking about, He's talking about excess, He is talking about that which is beyond what we can use. The implication is that there is an abundance too numerous for use and so you just store it up.
Now, what is He forbidding? Does He forbid a bank account, savings account, life insurance policy or a wise investment? No. Does He say we shouldn't possess anything? Does He say that you should sell it all and walk the street with a brown bag and be a hobo? No.
Well what about the rich young ruler, Jesus said to him, "Sell all you have and give to the poor." Have you ever noticed that that's the only person He ever said that to? Did you notice that He didn't say that to Mary and Martha? Because He liked to go to their house, and when He got there I guess He liked their cooking too.
And He also said in Matthew 19:29, " And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.”
The Lord does not condemn possessions, the reason He told the rich young ruler to sell all he had was because that ruler was more interested in all his possessions then in God. All he owned stood between him and God, and until he got rid of that there was no connecting up with God.
In fact in Exodus 20:15 it says, "You shall not steal." This statement of God in the Ten Commandments assumes that something can be mine that you can't have. We have a right to possessions. You not only have no right to steal what is mine, you don't even have a right to want what is mine because Exodus 20:17 says, "You shall not covet." So the Lord recognizes the right of personal property.
For example in Deuteronomy 8:18 it says, "For it is God that gives you the power to get wealth." God has given us the resources, the abilities. In First Corinthians 4:7 it says, "And what do you have that you did not receive?" God wants us to know those things and to have those things that came from God. In fact in First Timothy 6:17 it says, "God gives us richly all things to enjoy."
And when you study the Book of Proverbs again and again the Bible encourages us to be careful how we handle our funds so that we make wise investments. So what does laying up treasures in heaven mean? It means to distribute and to share the riches God has given to us both physical and spiritual, it means teaching others about God, it means using our excess money for mission efforts in your neighborhood, in your state or in some far away place across the ocean, it means sharing the love of God everywhere.
Did you know that Abraham was very rich and was also called a friend of God? And that God made Job wealthier than held been before and so much so he couldn't count it. And did you know that Zacchaeus was rich and yet was counted to be a son of Abraham?
What is the key that makes them friends of God? The key is their heart attitude, that first of all they love God above anything else. That’s why it says, “22 The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”
Jesus is teaching that the same way your eyes enable a person to see physically, the heart of a person enables to see God spiritually, to understand what God teaches us. If your spiritual eye, your heart, is good then the rest follows in serving God, but if your heart is bad, all your actions and thoughts will draw you only farther and farther away from God where there is no light but only darkness.
We all pride ourselves on multi-tasking, right? We like to be involved in many things at the same time. We think that serving God is just one of the many things we should do, serving God is reserved for Sundays or maybe only a part of Sunday. But that is not what God is teaching, Matthew 6:33 says, “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
Seeking first the kingdom of God means that serving God comes first and foremost in our lives. It means that God is where our heart is, it means that serving Him is more important to us than our family and our work. Does that show up in your daily life?
So listening to what God says this evening. How good is your eye, how good is your heart, where do you invest your excess in? Where is your focus? What do you think is most important? Verse 24 says, “24 No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”
God tells us that we cannot have the same priority for God’s work and for anything else. There are so many things in our life that take our focus away from what is the most important in our life, and that is God. Listen to God, let us store up treasures in heaven by serving God with all our heart and mind and strength, Amen? Let us pray.