Where is Your Treasure? Kelly Durant 5-2019
Matthew 6:19-21
19 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:
20 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
2. I can remember right after Regina and I were married in 1978 we traveled to the south of Brazil. We were traveling from city to city covering at least 30 cities in 6 months time and every day we would come home to talk about the people we prayed with to receive Jesus! Winning souls was our passion and it still is!
All day long we would go around with our guitar in hand to stores, hospitals, jails, and homes of people of prayer groups that invited us and we would pray and share Bible lessons. Our joy, our passion, and inspiration, was our experience with others as they would pray and accept Jesus in their hearts! We lived in the clouds and were in love with Jesus! We only owned a guitar, and our clothes in a few suitcases but we were happy just to experience the happiness of others as they accepted Jesus in their hearts! Sometimes we even would get the people on the whole bus we were on to pray with us too!
Those were days of freedom, days when the devils who hated Jesus could not get you with a lawsuit and since the 1970s, South America went from 4% evangelical to 30% in many parts and that is due to many groups sharing the gospel from day to day! We long to see the church grow again like that!
3. Speaking of sharing the gospel, where is your treasure? Today we are looking at the verses here in Matthew 6 and Jesus makes it clear, the greedy ambition of material wealth and temporary treasures you may have may be in conflict with God’s plans, goals, and values for you.
In the verses just before these Jesus, in chapter 6, Jesus is addressing the hypocrites who pretended to suffer from their sacrifice and spirituality. These were the Pharisees who pretended to give treasure to God, who fasted and wanted people to notice how they were suffering, with sour faces pridefully showing off. However, they like many religious leaders today, were actually rich and were not suffering at all. They were hypocrites!
Jesus knew there would always be these types of fake religious people, the type that wants to be seen as spiritual, but actually have no heart in it. A person who has their heart in the things of this world, anything but loving God with all their hearts, mind, and soul! All their treasure is destined to be lost and be a testimony against them!
4. Jesus said “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt” In Bolivia in 1978 I had a good Christian friend Aldo Gismonde, who had a very bad, fake-Christian wife. One gets to know people when you stay a few weeks in their house. They had lived in Miami and few years earlier and she thought she was the beauty queen of the city. What ever mood she was in, that was what you had to put up with as she was very domineering. Aldo said when she would get mad at him she would take all his savings and spend them on fancy clothes just to teach him a lesson to not make her mad. She would do this about once a month spending $300 to $500, which was a lot of money back then in Bolivia!
The point of this story is that one day she showed me that she had 2 gigantic suitcases in her house and explained that inside of them were some of the finest clothes of Miami. She had had the bag in storage a few months in the tropical humid heat of Santa Cruz. But what do you think I saw? When she opened the bags I saw all her clothes eaten up by moths and blackened by mold! I had never seen that before and it was quite an ugly sight!
This verse of Jesus of Matt 6:20 ‘about moth and rust corrupting’ became real before my eyes. Imagine, her treasure was worthless!
5. Just as in Jesus day there was an abundance of thieves as there are thieves today. I could talks an hour of all that was stolen from me in South America, but I will spare you that! But how many times have you and I suffered from someone stealing something from us? Raise your hand if you’ve been stolen from! You work many hours, even years of your life that afterwards it’s gone and you’ll never get your stuff back, in a flash it all disappears due to some low life thieves!
There is a quote about stolen goods. The person stolen from will often say, ‘Thank God my life was not hurt, thank God that it was a big loss but it was not everything, and finally thank God because I was stolen from and it was not me doing the stealing!
Imagine in Jesus day, thieves were crucified! And still, knowing what a horrific death it was, they would still do it! And today in a dozen countries your hand will be chopped off in public if you steal. And in many parts of the USA, people with guns can kill an armed intruder and not go to jail over it. Admittedly, thieves are hated, and yet many do not get the punishment they deserve. Why accumulate so much in life if it can be stolen from you?
6. The punishment of the rich is they do not sleep at night worrying about all their wealth! Many rich people, like the ones in Hollywood, are overcome with fears, worries, and a heavy conscious of guilt to the point they take drugs or drink to try and forget it. They have to pay body guards and not go out in public. What kind of a life is that? And then they forget God!
The essence of Matthew chapter 6 is clear; Jesus is telling us to have a simple life, to not have material things as our priority, and to have our treasure in the things of God which will last forever in heaven! Sure we need things, but God supplies all we need but we must seek Him first. Matt 6:33.
What are the things of God that bring treasures in heaven? That is what we will examine today! All scripture is placed in a context. Jesus in the chapter begins with attacking the religious hypocrites, then goes on to the Lord’s prayer and how to pray; then he attacks the hypocrites again that fast only to get people’s attention, not because they really want a connection with God, and then he explains about where your treasure is. Here is the lesson: do not come under the spell of exaggeratedly wealthy false teachers with their hypocrisy, learn to pray to not be tempted, and place priorities on heaven!
7. If we look at the next verse, Matt 6:22 Jesus defines how to identify your focus in life, if your focus is evil, (involving hypocrisy, materialism, or Satanic indulgences) this evil focus will only feed your self-interests, and imprison you into deep darkness. This bad focus seems to encompass the vast majority of people today, who degrade their selves down into repulsive debauchery right into the wide gate of hell! But not so with the redeemed.
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!
Consequently, a good person, one who follows Jesus, one who is sacrificial, loving, caring, sharing, and focused solely on being Godly, that person’s entire being is full of light. This is the true light and not some Luciferian one eye counterfeit! Secret societies offer you the light, the single eye, but it is fake esoteric wisdom, only Jesus has the true light of the world!
8. Just one more verse to affirm the point that we must have the Lord as the main focus of our lives, verse 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.
People who love God and others as their selves talk about God and others! But people who love only the things of this world, or their narcissistic selves only talk about that, about the riches they wish they have or wish they had.
True Christians love to invest in their church Corps, in their community, and in those who have a need, whereas those who only love this world, who suck up everything around them like a black hole, are destined to lose it all to someone else when they die. Better is it to serve God and have treasures in heaven, amen?Ephesians 2:10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
9. So when have you, I am concerned for your soul, ever with excitement shared with me or my wife about someone you witnessed to about the Lord? When have we ever seen you happy and overflowing with joy because you gave your testimony, or prayed with someone who had a need? When have you ever come to us to tell us that a certain scripture really convicted you and you were enlightened to learn more about God? I pray you are making the things of God your treasure!
There are very few here that do that, but very few in life though that will ever reveal to you that their treasure is in the things of God. This breaks my heart, and it breaks Jesus heart, to be aware of the reality that very few have their heart and treasure with living out a life full of passion on-fire-for-Jesus!
Don’t worry about the material, God will take care of you! I have seen miracles of supply happen over and over, but you have to be seeking God’s will for it to happen. Go for souls and go for the worst! Mark 16:15 And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” Obey Jesus commands with your heart and you will experience a happiness and bliss you never knew existed! Let God take care of your needs, seek first the kingdom of God! Don’t be like the fools who lose all their investments, who gain the world and lose their souls! Invest in souls for heaven and they will endure forever! This life is passing quickly but heaven is forever!
No comments:
Post a Comment