Matthew 6:19-21
As young boys, my brother and I played coach-pitch baseball. Being on the team meant selling pizza coupons to support the league. To create an incentive, a local ATV store sponsored a new Honda 70cc three-wheeler. We didn’t grow up in a home where a purchase like this was normal, so the idea captured us like Ralphy with his Red Ryder BB Gun in A Christmas Story. We went through the neighborhood, the church, and every relative who would listen. Each pizza was another ticket in the drawing for that Honda 70cc.
We sold more pizzas than any other family in the league. Then, the day came for the drawing. We were dressed in our uniforms, and there it was. Scarlet red, balloon tires, dreams flowing, and within our reach. We could already imagine ourselves riding through the mud, smiling and laughing. The commissioner gathered everyone’s attention, then slowly reached deep into the basket of tickets. My heart is pounding just remembering this!
He pulled out a name. I heard my mom scream before it hit me. We had won. That was a remarkable day, and a memory that floods my heart with joy even as I retell it. Our hearts were in it to win it, and win it we did.
Today, we jump into a passage many know by heart and quote when loss happens. This is not a passage about money. It is a passage about the heart, with money as the diagnostic tool Jesus uses to expose where the heart actually lives.
“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.”1
Matthew 6:19-21 (ESV)
The Greek word for heart here is kardia. In Hebrew thought, the kardia was not the seat of emotion. It was the center of the inner person, the place of the will, the intellect, and the affections, where decisions and convictions are formed. MacArthur2 points out in his commentary on Matthew that the heart in this passage is cognitive, not just emotional. Jesus is not making a sentimental observation. He is making a diagnostic claim. Tell me where your money goes, and I will tell you what you actually believe.
C.S. Lewis preached at Oxford in 1941. His point was not that desire is wrong. His point was that our desires are far too weak.
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”3
Jesus is not telling us to want less. He is telling us to want more. The man who hoards earthly treasure is not too greedy. He is not greedy enough. He is settling for mud pies when his Father has offered him the sea.
When I was really young, our garage was broken into. My brother and I were preparing for school, backpacks on and lunchboxes in hand, when my dad came running through the back door of the house, hysterical. I can still hear him. “We’ve been robbed! Someone broke into the garage, and one of the three wheelers is gone.” We all went out and saw the window broken and the garage wide open. His three-wheeler had been stolen.
That feeling of vulnerability followed me into my early years of marriage and made me double-check every window and every door before bed. The moth, the rust, and the thief Jesus warned about did not come in three blows. They came in one. My dad’s three-wheeler had been carried out the back of our garage in the middle of the night. Our prize sat where his had been, just as exposed, just as borrowed. What revealed itself was not the value of the ATVs. It was how deeply our hearts had been connected to a machine. Our hands had not been loose. We held it the way men hold what they think they own. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.5 Nothing in that garage was ours to keep. And this helped let me see just that.
D.L. Moody preached this passage in the years after the Great Chicago Fire, where he had watched a city of believers lose everything in a single night. His pulpit on this passage was not abstract.
“We have a way of saying, ‘Such and such a man died worth his millions.’ Not at all. The man, when he died, was worth only what he had laid up in heaven. If he were ever so rich in this world, and hadn’t anything laid up there, he actually died a pauper.”4
The diagnostic of Matthew 6:21 is not a verse to recite. It is a tool to use. Men don’t mourn when they return rented tools. Your bank statement and calendar tell the story of your heart’s desire. It may be mostly in secret, but it will forever be felt. A lesson for every reader to check the return based on the kingdom’s accounting.
What does your bank statement say about you?
What is one specific category of earthly treasure you have been laying up that you could begin redirecting toward the kingdom this week?
Stay on Mission
Footnotes:
1. The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2001. Matthew 6:19-21.
2. John MacArthur, The MacArthur New Testament Commentary: Matthew 1-7. Chicago: Moody Press, 1985.
3. C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory.” Sermon preached at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, 8 June 1941. Published in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. New York: Macmillan, 1949, pp. 1-3.
4. D.L. Moody, “A Sermon About Heaven,” Moody Church Media archive (moodymedia.org). Public domain.
5. The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Job 1:21.
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