Where is Your Treasure
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
Matthew 6:21
The rich young ruler who came to Jesus was so filled with his piety, his riches, and his greed that he revolted when Jesus informed him that the price of eternal life was to “sell out” and come and follow Him. He went away sorrowfully, the Bible says, because he could not detach himself from himself. He found it impossible to become “poor in spirit” because he had such a lofty estimate of his own importance.
All around us are arrogance, pride, and selfishness: these are the results of sin. From the heavens comes a voice speaking to a tormented, bankrupt world: “I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see. . . . Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:18, 20).
Heaven in this life and the life to come is not on a monetary standard. Nor can flesh and blood find the door to the Kingdom of heaven with its contentment, peace, joy, and happiness. Only those who are poor in spirit and rich toward God shall be accounted worthy to enter there, because they come not in their own merit but in the righteousness of the Redeemer.
Someone has said, “A man’s wealth consists not in the abundance of his possessions, but in the fewness of his wants.” “The first link between my soul and Christ,” said C. H. Spurgeon, “is not my goodness but my badness, not my merit but my misery, not my riches but my need.”
Where is your treasure? In the bank? In the driveway? In the mirror? Or are you storing up your treasure in heaven?
Our Father and our God, I come repenting of my materialism. You have blessed me beyond belief, yet so often I still want more. Forgive me, Lord, and help me to find contentment in whatever situation I find myself. Help me to know my wealth is in You and Your Son who saved me. Amen.
Billy Graham, Unto the Hills: A Daily Devotional (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010).