Living a Life that Counts – Part II
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2012 · 12 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.”
Do you know that 15% of all that Jesus said relate to this topic of money, this is more than what He said about heaven and hell combined. And yes this is some of the most radical teaching from our Lord and yet some of the most neglected teaching as well. And the theme is about how to find security for the future.
Verse 19 says, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth.” So Jesus is teaching us that there is no security in material things. Any type of material treasure here on earth can either be destroyed by elements of nature (moth, rust, or tornadoes) or stolen by thieves and reduced by the stock market.
And Jesus says that the only investments that are not subject to loss are “treasures in heaven.” And this radical financial strategy is based on the principle that Jesus is teaching us that says in verse 21, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” If your money is in the stock market then your heart and desire are also there.
If your treasures are in heaven, your interests and your thoughts are centered on heavenly things as well. Jesus is forcing al of us to think where our heart really is. Is it with al our earthly stuff and if so how are we going to treat our bible? Or is it related to heaven and then what are we going to do with all our earthly treasures?
Jesus knew that it would be difficult to make His followers understand how this teaching on security for the future would work. And so He used an analogy of the human eye to teach a lesson on our spiritual sight.
He said in verses 22 and 23, “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!”
It is through the eye that we can see and if you have good eyes, “your whole body will be full of light,” meaning that our whole life benefits from having proper vision and will be blessed by having good eyes. On the other hand if we have bad eyes then we can see things blurry only and sometimes we cannot see at all and instead of light we only see darkness and our whole way of life is impacted negatively.
Jesus wants us to understand that good eyes belong to a person whose motives are pure, who has a desire to know God better and who is willing to accept God’s teachings even if he does not understand them totally. His whole life is flooded with light. This is a person who believes Jesus’ words and who does what they say, who does not live for earthly riches but who lays up treasures in heaven. He or she is convinced that this is the only true security that there is.
But if your eyes are bad you are a person who tries to live in two different worlds. You don’t want to lessen your attention to your earthly treasures, your big bank account and your expensive habits and yet you want treasures in heaven as well. These teachings of Jesus seem impractical and impossible to him. He lacks clear conviction and guidance and as such is full of darkness.
And Jesus adds this statement at the end of verse 23, “If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” In other words, if you know that Christ warns against trusting earthly treasures, and yet you ignore that and do it anyway, then the teaching that you have failed to obey becomes darkness, or spiritual blindness. You are unable to see the true riches that God has in store for you.
If laying up treasures in heaven is the opposite of laying up treasures on earth how do we understand what we should do here and now? The opposite of laying up treasures on earth would be to give your treasures away such that we magnify Christ. Luke 12: 33 says, “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.”
In other words, we should not accumulate wealth on earth, you will accumulate wealth in heaven if you distribute it is ways that Christ is honored. Rick Warren, the pastor who wrote ‘The Purpose Driven Life’ and ‘the Purpose Driven Church’ who is quite wealthy once was asked if it was OK for a Christian to be rich. He answered, “Yes, it is OK to live rich, but it is not OK to die rich.”
Do you know that all that attention on your earthly stuff doesn’t really make you happy? Do you know that the opposite is true, that giving to others instead will make you happy? Look at Proverb 14:21, “Blessed is he who is generous to the poor.” And Proverbs 22:9 says, “Whoever has a bountiful eye will be blessed, for he shares his bread with the poor.” Acts 20:35 says, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
There is no correlation between having lots of stuff and happiness despite what people claim. Living a simple life with a passion for advancing the kingdom through giving will be a far happier life than living in luxury. And this is hard to accept. Statistics say that young people are far less likely to give than older people and that the single person gives far less than the married person. Christians, please prove them wrong!
And then to teach us how serious this is in verse 24 God says, “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.”
It is impossible to live for God and to live for money and to drive that point home it is expressed in terms of masters and slaves. “No one can serve two masters.” One of them will inevitably take precedence in terms of loyalty and obedience. And so it is with God and mammon, they present rival claims and we all have to make a choice. Either we put God first and reject the principle of materialism or we chose to live for things that look attractive but are temporal and refuse God’s claim on our lives.
And what is the lure of earthly riches? Sometimes it is a believe system that there simply is no other way, that we have to work hard to eat and live and buy our necessities and if we don’t do that we will starve, we will lose our house and car and be homeless on the street. We worry about doing what God says and we worry about what will happen if we only focus on Godly things.
We don’t really trust God in the sense that He will provide for us. If we do not tithe it sometimes can be related to a fear that without a job we cannot survive this recession. And God knows all our thoughts and all our worries. And that’s why He provided the verses right after these in Matthew 6:25-34 with the heading of “Do not worry.”
Matthew 6:25-30, “25 Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”
“27 And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? 28 And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?”
We all tend to worry about our future. The problem is not so much what we eat or wear today, but what we will eat and wear twenty or thirty years from now. And when we worry about that it means that we have no faith in God’s love, wisdom and power. We deny the love of God by implying that He doesn’t know what He is doing. And it denies His power by implying that He is not able to provide for our needs.
And so we devote most of our energy on making sure that we have enough to live on. And then before we realize it we are old and grey and our lives have passed us by and we have missed the central purpose for which we were created.
God did not create us in His image with no higher destiny than to consume food. Now some of us live like that is our only purpose but that is not God’s design. We are here to love, to worship and serve Him and to represent His interests all over the world. Our bodies are intended to be our servants, not our masters.
“The birds of the air” in verse 26 illustrates God’s care for His creatures. They preach to us how we are not to worry. They neither sow nor reap and yet God feeds them. And since in God’s hierarchy in creation, we are of more value than the birds, then we can surely expect God to take care of our needs. If God sustains, without their conscious participation, creatures of a lower order, He will all the more sustain, with their active participation, those for whom the world was created.
This does not say that we do not need to work for our current needs. Paul reminds us in 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.” Nor should we conclude that it is wrong for a farmer to sow, reap and harvest. These activities are a necessary part of providing for his needs. What Jesus forbids here is multiplying your storage barns and filling it with excess stuff and thinking that your future security is just based solely on your own effort.
Just see what Luke 12:16-21 says, “16 And Jesus told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, 17 and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ 18 And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”’ 20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 21 So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”
Worrying about the future not only dishonors God, it is also totally futile. God says in verse 27, “And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” Yes, you can shorten your life by worrying, but you cannot lengthen your life. Being anxious and fearful shows that you have totally forgotten the promises of God or you remember them but simply do not believe those promises.
And next in Matthew 6: 28-30, the Lord teaches us that it is silly to worry so much about clothing and food. “And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?”
If God provides such elegant apparel for wildflowers, which do have a very brief existence and then are used as fuel in an oven, He will certainly care for His people who worship and serve Him. This is an issue of trust, do we trust that God will provide for those who seek first the Kingdom?
You can see the same thing in Luke 14:13-14, “But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, 14 and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For 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 in heaven.
If your goal is to provide for all you future financial needs then your time and energy would have to be devoted to accumulating future reserves. But you would never be sure that you will have enough given that there is always the possibility that the stock market will collapse again, or that there is an unforeseen catastrophe or a prolonged illness or a paralyzing accident.
Living for God by storing up treasures in heaven by doing good and by representing Him all over the world is trusting God with unshakable confidence that He will provide for us. We just need to provide for our current needs and everything else should be invested in the work of the Lord. We are to live “one day at a time for Him,” right?
So give with the right attitude, give out of a heart of love. And give to the right people, your church, the poor, other Christian ministries and view all your giving as if you give to the Lord. And give the right amount, that is begin with 10% of your income as a foundation for your giving to the church and give additional sacrificial offerings in proportion to what you receive.
Do you know that giving with the right attitude will result in spiritual blessings here on earth and will draw you closer to Christ and giving will develop a Godly character in you? Do you know that giving also can produce a material increase to the giver so you can continue to give and allow you to store up more treasures in heaven? Are you willing to start this now? Are you serious?