Where do you keep your funds? For folks at the top of the middle-class strata, a financial portfolio is warranted. You never want to keep too much cash just sitting idle in your average checking account. But for folks a way down from “upper” the question has less meaning … we keep our funds in our rent, in our utilities, and in the food we put on the table. For folks even farther down, it is not as much an issue of managing cash, but rather, managing credit and debt. But no matter where you sit, the question is still relevant from a different perspective … what do you use your funds on, or plan to use them on? From this angle, each of us might have more in common than we think. We ALL use whatever funds we have, to maintain us, to maintain our families, and to try to put our children (if we have any) more ahead of where we started out.
So for nearly all American Christians, we value our funds, our currency, in what it is able to do for us, and for our families. Money then, becomes a tool. It is a mechanism we exchange for the basic needs of life. On occasion, we have more than we need of it, and so we use it on something we “want” rather than something we “need”. Even the poorest of us have spent credit dollars on something we wanted instead of something we needed, knowing that may not have been the wisest of decisions. But the mechanics remain the same, and so our valuation remains the same.
But then, what happens when heaven becomes our home? All of the sudden, currency has zero valuation. It no longer exists, even as a mechanism for exchanging goods or services. We have everything we need without effort, and what we create finds its highest meaning in being given to someone else to bring happiness to another. It would be harder to define the exact opposite of where we are now, than to simply picture what life in heaven will be like. So how do we bridge the divide? How do we find a practical way of transitioning our current currency valuation to our future state currency valuation without becoming destitute or going without the basic needs we have on a day-to-day basis? Most Christians rarely attack this question. Fear keeps them from thinking about it. But as it happens Jesus lays out for us an excellent transition plan in His Sermon on the Mount. Matthew continues recording it in chapter six of his gospel.
Picking up in verse 19, Jesus says … “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:” To transition how we think about currency valuation, we must begin by recognizing that wealth itself is transient. Beyond the addiction of always wanting “more” no matter how much we have now, there comes with it, an intense fear that we will lose even what we have. Banks are built upon this fear. We secure our currency in banks, because to keep it all at home, is to invite a burglar to a field day when they learn of this. Keeping our money in a bank, insured by the FDIC, our funds are supposed to be largely safe from theft. Until the theft comes in a three-piece-suit costing more than your home; packaged in the form of securities that not even the best accountants can easily decipher, with interdependencies so entangled it makes a plate of spaghetti look linear. When the theft happens this way, the FDIC is no match for it. Banks can easily collapse. Your funds can easily disappear. And your wealth, your savings, your insurance for your future, becomes a footnote in history about the next great depression as something too big to fail, does.
So the first counsel Jesus offers, is to change the strategy about where we place the currency we value. He continues in verse 20 saying … “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:” As it turns out there is a better place to put treasures, it is the eternal city of heaven, where not a single thief makes his home. Where no bacteria exist to destroy, rot, or age whatever you place there. Now this sounds wonderful, except that the mechanics are clearly a bit fuzzy. How does one place funds we will need access to, into the heaven first national bank, given the light years of interdimensional separation that exist between us and our God. Could our angels become our currency couriers? Or is there a more instantaneous method of making deposits and withdrawals?
Jesus continues in verse 21 saying … “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” This winds up being a very profound statement. Jesus reverse engineers our mechanics of deposits and withdrawals. Currency, no matter what format we currently value, coin, cash, certificates, stocks, bonds, etc.. should not be where our “hearts” are. We use that currency on ourselves and our families today. It is the object of our spending that winds up being closer to where our hearts are. We love our families. And sadly, as our spending patterns reveal, we love ourselves quite a bit too. But there is a fix for this. If we begin to examine our funds as a tool, a continuation of what we already do. But instead of using the tool on ourselves, we begin to use the tool, on the people we love, the people we hate, and the people we hardly know … we start making deposits of our currency into the city of heaven. In point of fact, we are exchanging our currency from disposable formats to permanent ones.
Money does not make it to heaven. But your wife does. Your son does. Your daughter does. The co-worker who edged you out of that promotion does. The boss who makes your life miserable does. The homeless man you are sure spends all your donations on liquor and drugs does. Some guy in Africa you never met, and at the moment, could care less about, winds up in heaven, because the tool you employed here was translated into a tangible demonstration of love, meeting the needs of that person you never met, showing him Jesus in a real way, and making him curious about the love of this God he hardly ever knew until a random missionary introduced him. You yourself, have never been to Africa, or Asia, or downtown L.A. on skid row. You yourself, may not have ever moved much off of the pew you sit on at church week-to-week. But your current funds can travel very quickly, and be translated into permanent impacts in the lives of people you may hardly know, or care about, or frankly dislike.
Imagine what your co-worker thinks when you take the time to shop for their child to buy them something they wanted at a holiday. Or to meet a need they may be struggling with when life presents the challenges it does. Translating currency into real world impacts, into tangible offerings of love, has a heaven bound deposit on the transaction. And when you submit yourself to your Lord, the passion He puts inside of you for other people is so intense, you may wind up going through your earthly currency very fast, in favor of heavenly currency. What you value changes. And it must. For the American currency system is headed for the fires that will purify the earth. But your co-worker does not have to be. The guy who calls himself your sworn enemy, can still be the guy you spend eternity with. Not begrudgingly trying to find the far side of heaven where he will not be. But the guy you want to live right next door to. The guy you keep trying to give your mansion to, but he won’t take it, insisting you take his instead. The kind of real love you will have for each other in heaven will be so intense, you will think he is family. And he is. Not because of birth, but because of choice. Ultimately because the currency you had here was nothing more than a tool, to help get him there. Otherwise it was worthless.
This comes because what you value changes. What you focus on changes. It is a post-transformation realization such as nothing like it before. Jesus continues talking about that change resuming in verse 22 saying … “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” If we focus on the real value of finding ourselves, and the community we touch and encounter in heaven, the light we will reflect will be enormous. Jesus continues in verse 23 saying …” But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” First, this second portion of this text is not about your particular salvation. You may be saved because of the grace and mercy of God, no matter what or how you spent your funds on in this world. But if your focus with your funding is centered upon yourself. It will be spent upon yourself. And the opportunity you had to use it as a tool for the salvation of others is squandered and wasted, and will never return again. You cannot get that time back or the impacts you might have made. You cannot back up time and do it right a second time. You have only one shot to get it right, and the community you encounter has only that single shot from you as well.
How great the darkness! To be in heaven and have the Schindler’s List moment; realizing there could be so many more people here if you had been willing to part with your funds and your love more generously here on earth. If you could have seen what your currency was truly valued at, and used it to bring others to Christ. You would not retain a penny. But the Monday Morning Quarterback realization does nothing to change the game that has already been played. If your co-worker is lost to heaven, he is lost forever. And YOU above all others will feel that loss, because in your heart of hearts, you know you could have done more, but instead you held on to your funds and your love, fearing a reduction in either.
Jesus then summarizes the problem with money we refuse to value in the light of heaven in verse 24 as He says … “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” You cannot serve God and the acquisition of funds. Spending your life making money. Spending your life making just a little more of it. Winds up exhausting the time clock of the life you have been granted. The abundance of your life’s work is not spent moving souls to the Kingdom of Heaven by introducing them to Jesus. It is instead spent in meetings, in office politics, in debating financial strategies with the spouse, in trying to recover from the challenges life throws your way. The abundance of your life is spent battling the effects of stress, because currency acquisition is a cruel mistress, unforgiving, and fickle. While you give your life and time to it, it gives you back nothing but a hunger for more. An aching hole of more and more and more.
When at last you look back upon your life, how many meetings will you remember, and how important will they be? Would you not trade the accumulation of whatever wealth you have, for just more time to insure the love you could have expressed is expressed? If I am always working to sustain myself. I am always working. Period. The scraps of what is left, are scraps, not the bulk of what we had to offer, but the left overs. It is the left overs we offer to our families. The left overs we offer to our church. Nothing to the co-workers, the folks we don’t know, and the folks we don’t care about … because to prioritize, I must reserve what left overs I have for the folks closest to me. And so we live our lives content to share only our left overs with those we love most, and we call this “normal”. And it truly is. It is the normal Satan has convinced us all, is the only way we can survive.
But Jesus continues to offer us another way. And the sermon was far from over …
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