Treasures in Heaven
Matthew 6:19-24
 
Let's turn in our Bibles this morning to Matthew chapter 6, Matthew chapter 6. We're going to begin a study in the next section of our continuing examination of the Sermon on the Mount
 
verses 19-24
 
Now the question that arises out of this text is a very simple one, where is your heart?
 
I'm talking about, in terms of the investment of your life and your motives and your attitudes and your thought patterns. Where is the concentration and the preoccupation of your life? What do you spend most of your time thinking about? Most of your time planning? Most of your energy is dispensed toward what particular object?
 
Chances are if you think about it very long and you're like most people the answer is, some thing, a house, a car, a wardrobe, a bank account, a savings account, a bond, a stock, a, an investment, furniture. A thing. We really are creatures committed to things. That's part of the curse of the society in which we live.
 
Most all societies are like that. Even in societies that don’t have a lot of things, they wish they did, and they are consumed with things also. Those things may be the necessities of life, but the next meal, the next medicine, whatever it is, is where their heart is.
 
No doubt about it: Ours is a society of things.
Sadly, the leading religionists of the day of Jesus had the same problem. They were totally consumed with things. Among all of the other problems of the Pharisees this was also to be included, they were thing oriented, they were greedy, they were covetous, and they moved toward grasping more things.
 
And so as we come to this element of The Sermon on The Mount in Matthew 6:19 to 24 Jesus directs some statements about things, to the Pharisees who were abusing this whole matter of possessions.
 
Now remember, the thrust of the whole Sermon on the Mount is basically to deal with the inadequate, insufficient standard of the Pharisees and reaffirm God's divine standard for life in His kingdom. They had invented a whole system of religion that was substandard, manmade, inadequate, inefficient, ineffective.
 
And so the key to the whole sermon is in Matthew 5:20 where the Lord says, "Unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you'll not enter into the kingdom of heaven."
 
In other words, to be in My kingdom, you must live up to this standard, and He affirms the standard, and He does it in contrast to the Pharisees.
 
For example, in the beginning in chapter 5 He said, to be in My kingdom you have to have the right view of yourself.
 
Now the Pharisees are proud, egocentric, self‑sufficient, but you must be broken in spirit, mourning over sin, meek, hungering and thirsting after righteousness.
 
You must also have the right relation to the world. Now the Pharisees are part of the corruption, and part of the darkness but you must be salt that retards the corruption and light to dispel the darkness.
 
You must not only have the right view of yourself and the right view of the world but you must have the right view of the Word of God, and the Pharisees have developed their own system but you must know that the Word of God is what you must be committed to and not one jot or title shall pass from that law till it's all fulfilled.
 
And then you must have the right view of moral issues, chapter 5 verses 21 to 48, the Pharisees are only concerned with the externals, they're only concerned that they don't kill or they don't commit adultery or they don't do something else, but I'm telling you the moral issues are not just what you do or don't do they're what you think or don't think.
And so you must have the right view of moral issues.
 
 
Then in chapter 6 He says, you must have the right view of religious issues, For the Pharisees, they fast, they pray and they give but it's all hypocritical, you must fast and give and pray but with a right motive. In other words the whole sermon is set in contrast to the system of religion of the day dominated by the thinking of the Pharisees and the scribes.
And Jesus is saying, God's standard exceeds their standard and it is His standard required for being in His kingdom.
 
Now in chapter 6 verses 19 and following He says, you must also have the right view toward wealth, luxury, verses 19 to 24, and watch this, then from 25 to 34 you must have the right view of necessities.
 
So He's talking about things here, first luxuries and then necessities. First it's the wealth that we have and then it's just the necessity, to eat and to sleep and to have a place to, to stay, and some clothing to wear.
 
And in both cases the Pharisees had missed it. They had the wrong perspective of wealth and they had the wrong perspective of necessary things. And so in every element of Christ's message He sets Himself and His Word in contrast to the Pharisees. Your view of wealth and luxury must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees if you want to be a part of My kingdom.
 
Verse 19, they are doing exactly what God says not to do, laying up for themselves treasures on earth, they are consumed with greed and covetousness, and that is not the way it is to be.
 
So the text then, from verses 19 to 24 deals with how we view our luxuries, our wealth, more than our necessities.
 
This is especially pertinent for us because we live in a society where all of us have to deal with that because all of us are wealthy, in comparison to the way the rest of the world lives.
By the way, it’s interesting to me that after 18 verses dealing the hypocrisy of the religious system, prayers, tithes and fasting, Jesus follows by discussing greed. 
 
Where you have a false teacher, you get behind the scene and you often find out he's in it for the money. Our society is full of illustrations.
 
And the Pharisees were doing the same thing; they were using their religious position to fill their pockets. The system was a system that filled their greed.
 
I don’t think anything else puts more of a stench in the nostrils of God that that. They were using their religious position to get rich. Now, the Pharisees were living this way. To them to be rich was to be holy, to be rich was to say, hey, look how much I've got, God is blessing me, I'm rich because God is saying, you're so righteous I'm unloading it on you.
 
That's why when the Lord said "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into the kingdom." That was absolutely and utterly shocking, because to them riches were the stamp of divine approval on your life. 
 
All through their history they had been taught that. Way back in Deuteronomy 28 when the Lord had delivered Israel from Egypt and brought them to the edge of Canaan, the Promised Land, the Land of Milk and Honey, the land that God had promised to give them wonderful blessings. 
 
 
What they missed, and it is really one of the keys to understanding the kingdom of God is that the blessings He gives are never to be selfishly hoarded and stockpiled. 
 
And that is really the issue with which he deals here.  
He is diverting us away from covetousness.  So first of all He deals with the luxuries of life. 
 
Now in order to know how to handle our luxuries we have three sets of choices in this text.
 
There are two treasuries, there are two visions, and there are two masters, given in this text, and in each of situations, you have the very same principle hit from a different angle and then we are given some reasons why that principle is to be obeyed.
 
The principle is stated then the reasons are given in each case. And so we have to make a choice, we make a choice first of all verses 19 and 20 whether we lay up our treasure on earth or in heaven; we make a choice secondly in verses 22 and 23 of whether we are going to exist in light or whether we're going to exist in darkness, we make another choice in verse 24 whether our Master will be God or our master will be money, because it can't be both.
 
Now, let's look at number one choice, verses 19 to 21, two treasuries.  
 
"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth." Verse 20, "But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven."
 
 
Now that is a very simple statement. Two treasuries and you have an option to choose. You have a treasury on earth, you have a treasury in heaven, and Jesus said, Put it in heaven not on earth.
 
Let's go to verse 19, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth." What does that mean?
 
Well the word is where we get the word thesaurus which is a treasury of words. The idea is “treasure not up treasures.” Don't stockpile if you want it in a simple sense. 
 
The idea of the word treasure is to place something someplace, to stick it somewhere, to stash it somewhere. And so what the Lord is talking about not that which we use to live everyday but that which we just pile up. 
 
To put it simply, He is talking about luxury or security. It's all those things you don't use you just stash, somewhere, and keep saying they're so valuable, and so you keep them. The implication is that there is an abundance too numerous for use and so you just pile it up.
 
But what is He forbidding or condemning? Does He forbid a bank account, savings account, life insurance policy, a wise investment? Does He say we shouldn't possess anything? "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth."
 
The Lord never condemns possessions. We have the right to possessions that the Lord has given us. All He wants is to be sure that our attitude is right in the manner in which we possess them.
 
God is not withholding from us, God is a God of great generosity. In fact I think if you study the history of the world you will find that the nations that have been the most godly have known I the greatest prosperity. This is generally true; God is a God of generosity.
 
So what we have here is not some kind of a mandate that says we're not to possess anything, we're not to enjoy anything, we're not to accept from God's good hand those abundant things He's given us.  Rather, He is talking about the attitude toward what we have.
 
it's the issue of what you do with what you have, isn't it? Whether it's for you or for the kingdom of God, and His purposes.
 
The Lord is saying, Don't pile up stuff. The selfish accumulation of goods, extravagant luxury, hard heartedness toward the cause of God.
 
Look at the words in verse 19 again: "Lay not up," and here's the key, underline it in your Bible, "for yourselves,"
 
Isn't that the key? If I want to invest and pursue a successful business and be aggressive and work hard and be honest in what I do and do the best I can for others, and for God, and for my children, and for my parents, and for the poor, and for the depressed, and the oppressed that's one thing.
 
But when I start piling it up for myself in extravagant luxury and become materialistic then I have violated this principle. We are to lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven.
Now there's a reason for this. Two treasuries, why should we choose the heavenly one? Because in the earthly one "moth and rust corrupt, and thieves break through and steal." Verse 19 says. But in the heavenly one there's no moth, rust, and thieves don't break through and steal.
 
Now in Bible times wealth was basically kept in three ways. It was either in garments, grain, or gold. 
 
Take for example garments. In biblical times garments were a very, very important commodity. You will remember for example that Gehazi the servant of Elisha wished to make some forbidden profit out of Naaman's curing of leprosy, and so he asked for a talent of silver and two changes of garments because that was substantial wealth. Wealth had to be in a commodity, and wealth was expressed in fancy, rich, extravagant garments.
 
Do you remember Achan? In Joshua chapter 7, Ai said, “I saw among the spoils a goodly Babylonish garment and I coveted and I took it.”
 
Think about Joseph when he bestowed upon Benjamin his affection gave him five changes of garments.
 
You will remember that Samson said, if you can answer the riddle I promise you thirty garments and thirty changes. You see garments were always an expression of wealth because they were a commodity of great value. It was common for gold to be woven into the garment, the dying processes could be unique, the material was so hard to make and some of it was very fancy and people literally possessed their wealth in a garment.
But there's a problem with garments. Moths get to garments. But have you ever noticed that moths don’t eat what you have on? Have you not iced that?
 
They only eat what you store. We tend to hoard and we know that we have a lot of our treasure invested in our garments. And a lot of it's sitting around for moths. Moths will corrupt it; literally, consume it. 
 
Another way they stored their wealth was in grain. Do you remember the rich fool said, I will tear down my barns and I will build what? Bigger barns, to hold more of my wealth. And his wealth was in grain, and you notice the word rust?
 
In verses 19 and 20, actually the word means eating or consuming. Nowhere in the Bible is it used to mean rust. 
What it basically means is eating. And you know what the problem with grain is? Mice, rats, worms, vermin, they eat it.
 
And the problem if you have all your money in grain is that the little things that get in there can eat it.
 
There was a third commodity that they put their treasure into and that was gold or precious metal.
And the problem with that is a thief could break in and steal it. 
 
So your garments would be eaten by moths, your grain would be eaten by whatever kind of animal or insect or vermin got in it, and your gold would be taken by thieves. The point is this, you hoard it you lose it, it's unsafe and insecure.
 
There is no place of security in this life, and even if you kept it all till you died when you left you're going to leave it anyway.
 
Where's your heart? Martyn Lloyd‑Jones tells the story of a farmer. The farmer bounded joyfully into his kitchen one day and confronting his wife with a great big grin on his face he announced to her that their finest cow had just given birth to twins, one brown and one white.
 
He said, I feel the impulse to dedicate one of these cows to the Lord, we'll bring them up together and when they are at a marketable age we'll sell them and we'll keep the proceeds from one and we'll give the proceeds from the other to the Lord. His wife went right to the issue as wives are prone to do and said, which is the Lord's cow?
 
The white one or the brown one? He replied, well there's no need to worry about that dear, or to decide that now since we'll raise them together.
 
Some months later he entered the same kitchen a little more slowly, looking very sad. His wife asked why he was so sullen, to which he replied, I have bad news, the Lord's cow died.
 
Is it always the Lord's cow that dies or do you invest in His kingdom? Two treasuries, where's yours?
 
Second, two visions.
 
verse 22
 
Now, He's been talking about your heart and He wants us to have our heart fixed single mindedly and totally devoted on the kingdom of God, so that our treasure is there, our heart is there, our love is there, our passion is there, our burden is there, our investment is there, our all is there, and we're to have that single minded heart.
 
And then He illustrates that with the eye. Now follow the logic: the eye is an illustration of the heart. And the eye is like the lamp of the body. When we can see with our eyes, then our body is filled with the light that comes in from the world by which they perceive, and understand what's in their vision.
 
But if your eye is dark it is black, there's no light that comes in you perceive nothing. And that's the way it is with the heart. If your heart is toward God it lights your entire spiritual being. 
 
If your heart is toward the material things, toward the treasure of the world, then the blinds of your spiritual perception come down and you do not see, spiritually as you ought.
 
This is a spiritual metaphor. But there's a richness in here that I don't want you to miss. Look at the word healthy or single; I don't know what your version says in verse 22.
 
It says, "The lamp of the body is the eye; and if, therefore, thine eye be (single or) healthy," I want you to see something that I think is fascinating about that word.
 
 
The word is literally from a root which means generous. It is used that way many, many times, just give you three illustrations, James 1:5, "God who gives liberally." Or generously. Romans 12:8 Paul urges us to "give liberally." Or generously. Second Corinthians 9 he talks about the liberality or the generosity of the Macedonians. It is a word that means generous or liberal.
 
What’s the point? Remember, the eye is illustrating the heart. So the teaching is if your heart is generous your whole spiritual life will be flooded with spiritual understanding. Isn't that a great truth?
 
You know there are people who come to church and leave church, don't seem to change and they never grow and never seem to love the Word and never seem to be a witness to others and never seem to be productive in their life and they just stay the same way all the time.
 
 And when I see somebody like that they never seem to understand what's going on, they never perceive spiritual realities, I wonder to myself so very often if it isn't because they are so focused on the earth and so earthbound and so oriented toward treasures here that the blinds are down and they have no spiritual perception at all.
 
What the Lord is indicating is until you take care of the issues of wealth and money in your life you will never be able to deal with spiritual realities.
 
If you don't know how to take care of money why would God commit to you the true riches?
 
What’s at issue here is a whole lot bigger than money; what is at stake is our spiritual perception.
 
Verse 23
 
And there you're introduced to the evil eye, you've heard that phrase, haven't you? Gave 'em an evil eye.
 
You know what the evil eye is? That's a Jewish colloquialism, to mean grudgingly. For example in Deuteronomy 15:9 it talks about when you have a slave and it's coming to the Jubilee Year and he is to be freed, that you have an evil eye toward him. That is you are ungenerous, stingy and you grudge him that freedom. In Proverbs 23:6 it says, "Eat not the bread of him who has an evil eye."
 
In other words don't eat a bite of somebody's food if they grudge you every bite.
 
How about Proverbs 28:22, this is a tremendous statement, it says, "He that hastens to be rich has an evil eye, and considers not the poverty that shall come upon him."
 
You hurry to be rich and you will be ungenerous, grudging and selfish, that's the contrast.
 
So He says you have two treasuries. Wherever you put your treasure that's where your heart will be, and if your heart is in heaver where your treasure is you're going to have a generous spirit and that generous spirit is like a seeing eye that floods your spiritual life with perception.
 
If your treasure is in earth you're going to see nothing because the blinds come down in the darkness of your greed and covetousness and you will see nothing, and if that's the case the end of 23 says, "If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" It's just an exclamation where our Lord is saying, how total or how great is the darkness of one who should see spiritually but pulls the blinds through his own covetousness.
 
And so you have two visions potentially, two treasuries, and
 
Finally you have two masters
 
verse 24
 
Now anytime you get into this verse, someone always wants to disagree and offer a way two masters can be served. They have two jobs, and two bosses, therefore they serve two master. 
Or their mother-in-law lives with them, so he has her and his wife, therefore. . .
 
You see the reason people say that is because they miss what the word “serve” means.
 
It’s not talking about being an employee in an 8 to 5 job. It’s the word for slave, and you can't be a slave to two masters. Why not? Because slavery, by definition, means single ownership and full time service.
 
A slave was not a person; a slave was a thing. A slave had no rights. A master could beat a slave, kill a slave, sell a slave. A slave was a living tool, no different than a plow or a cow or anything else.
A slave was a thing. To be a bond slave, to be the property of a master was to be constantly, totally, entirely, 100% devoted to obedience to that one master, it would be utterly impossible to express that to two different masters.
 
That's the illustration used in Romans 6 when it says, "Now that we have come to Christ, we must yield ourselves servants to him." Because we are His slaves, we are no longer the slave of sin. God can only be served with entire and exclusive devotion. 
 
He can only be served with single mindedness and if you try to split it with money you will either hate one or the other.
 
Let me illustrate: Consider someone hears a message like this and they’re selfish and haven't been investing it in God's causes, and haven't been giving it to those in need and you've just been piling it up for themselves. 
And so while I'm preaching, the Holy spirit really begins to convict,, and they begin to resent God's claim on their life. And they resist the leading of the Holy Spirit. Why do they do that?
 
Because you can't serve those two masters. 
 
On the other hand, if everything you have you want to give to God, if every treasure you own in this world you want to pour out to Him, you despise the system that takes so much of it away from you, and it bothers you that gas prices keep going up because that means you have less to invest in God’s kingdom, there will be joy in the Word of God because of Who you serve. 
 
Single mindedness, you've got to choose your master. The orders of these two masters are diametrically opposed. The one commands you to walk by faith the other to walk by sight. The one calls you to be humble the other to be proud, the one to set your affections on things above and the other to set them on the things of the earth, the one to look at the things unseen and eternal, the other to look at the things seen and temporal.
 
One of these masters calls on you to live as a citizen of heaven, the other to love the things of earth. One calls for you to worry about nothing, the other for you to be all anxious and concerned.
 
Listen, here’s the deal: Singleness of purpose is the greatest secret of spiritual prosperity. 
 
It's that absolute focus that makes you spiritually rich.
 
Caleb, in the Bible put it this way, "I wholly (w‑h‑o‑1‑1‑y) followed the LORD my God."
 
David put it this way in Psalm 16, "I have set the LORD always before me."
 
Paul, “For me to live is Christ”
 
Where's the safest place then to put your treasure? Well, where you're going to have the clearest spiritual vision. 
 
And where you're going to be able to serve the right Master.
 
The possession of wealth is not a sin, but it is a great responsibility. 
 
Lord, said the Old Testament saint, give me enough so I don't starve and doubt your faithfulness, but don't give me too much or I'll forget You.
 
What Jesus is saying here is this, people in My kingdom don't amass fortunes for themselves, they don't stockpile things for themselves.
 
Scottish pastor Alastair Begg tells a story of a little boy swimming in a river, flailing around and flashing his arms splattering the water and on the shore immediately in front of the little boy is a sign, No Swimming.
A man walks by sees the little boy and he says, Laddie, you can no read the sign? No swimming.
 
He said, please sir, I'm not a-swimming I'm a-drowning. Sometimes swimming and drowning look a lot alike, don't they?
 
There are some people in the church who think they are a-swimming but they're a-drowning. You need to examine your heart, what's your attitude toward luxury, wealth, money?
God has been so good to us, and filled our lives with so many good thing. We are blessed to be able to invest in eternity. 
 
God help us to put these things to practice.
 
Let's pray.