"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." ( Matthew 6:19-21 )
If there is a verse to contend against the prosperity/health-wealth gospel of our day, surely this is it; but it's so much richer than just that.
This often quoted verse is from what has become known as Jesus's "Sermon on the Mount." What Jesus has been getting at in this sermon, and in all of his teachings, is that it's not about the surface and what things look like on the outside, it's about the heart.
It's not about having "an appearance of godliness," but about having a new heart that only God can give to us. ( Ezekiel 36, Jeremiah 31:33, Hebrews 8:10, Psalm 51:10, 2 Timothy 3:5 )
We may be in Christ, bought by His precious blood, and yet these hearts are still prone to wander. This is how God works it. Like the children of Israel rescued out of slavery in Egypt by the mighty hand of God, they witnessed with their own eyes, what appears to be, the greatest miracle the biblical narrative knows. Our hearts constantly need to be directed to the love, mercy, and grace of God on our lives, lives once condemned and held in the bondage of sin, now set free by the power of the Holy Spirit, who indwells us, to the finished work of Christ.
Do we even realize how much we depend on His keeping power?
"Oh to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be! Let that grace now, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee. Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love; here's my heart; O take and seal it; seal it for thy courts above."
Somedays I think the greatest blessing is to know in every single detail and circumstance of our lives how very much we need Him in every way possible.
When we are in desperate situations that cause us to remember how faithful God has been in our past, as we continue to hold onto Him for dear life, and because we know He kept not only his part of the covenant, but our part too, a bit more of our hearts are planted in heavenly soil.
One of my "life verses" is 2 Corinthians 1:9. I read this verse for the first time over twenty years ago when I desperately needed something from God to hold onto, something that helped me make sense of the problem of evil and revealed to me that somehow, someway, God in his sovereignty had a plan I could not see or understand. I was okay with the suffering he allowed me to walk through as long as I knew it was Him and not me.
The verse is in the context of Paul's suffering in Asia.
"For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead."
Have you ever felt like you received a death sentence? Like things were so difficult you spared even of life itself? If so, we can take great comfort first in knowing that Jesus not only felt this way too, but He actually served the death sentence out on a Roman cross on our behalf. Willingly. He bore the weight of our sin "for the joy set before him." ( Hebrews 12:2 )
Now God raises our hearts dead in trespasses and sin to new life.
Our struggle and this knowledge of the sacrifice of Christ deepens our trust into a rich and abiding faith. What develops is not surface level, but heart changed and changing, a new life becoming what we are by the grace of God, the atoning work of Christ on our behalf, and the direction and finishing work by the power of the Holy Spirit.
An even greater miracle than the parting of the Red Sea is a heart that only God can make new and keep for Himself. Through the trials and the joys we grow closer to Christ, our hearts become more devoted to Him than ever and our treasure chest fuller in Heaven.
Because Christ is our treasure.
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| If you're owned by Great Pyrenees, you'll totally get this. lol |
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