If you pick up any of the Sunday papers today, you’ll find supplements and sections devoted to travel, to cars and motoring, to money, to business and to fashion. These are the things that our society lives for and treasures.
The problem with our love affair with money, clothing, possessions and travel is that we end up serving them. Like alcohol, like drugs, like so many things – we start off using them for our ends, but our money is always trying to turn the tables on us, so that it becomes the master, and we do its wishes.
Money is like seawater. The more of it you drink, the thirstier you become.
And so it is that many today are trapped on the treadmill of their dream careers. I’ve bought this house, but now we both need to work to pay the mortgage. Our children have started at that school, but keeping up the fees means we need to put the long hours in. Last year’s holiday was the best yet, but we paid for it on credit, and now I need all the overtime I’m offered to sustain the payments. Please could someone stop this treadmill. Stop the world I want to get off. … Sorry, if you could just run a little faster please.
And not only do we end up serving them, but these things do not last. Clothes wear out. Cars rust. Burglars steal. And whatever we’ve got left after these pests have had their turn, inflation erodes away. And none of it goes with us when we die.
Treasure in Heaven
I’ve got some really good news for you this morning. Jesus offers an alternative. A real alternative. Something much better. In verse 20 Jesus offers us treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal.
Treasure in heaven. Treasure that lasts. Treasure you can take with you when you die.
But how do we get there? How do we have this treasure?
Heaven is not the sort of bank that you can walk into and make a deposit. There is no exchange rate between treasure on earth and treasure in heaven. No amount of giving to charity, going to church or helping the blind across the road will appear on your statement in the bank of heaven.
Jesus has already said: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Entrance into heaven is a gift. Pure and undeserved gift. You get to heaven when you die by knowing Jesus. Jesus said: I am the way, the truth and the life – no-one comes to the Father except through me. Only the death and resurrection of Jesus opens the doorway to heaven. Only his friends get to go there. But Jesus invites us all to come to him, to trust him, to know him, to receive our citizenship of heaven as a gift.
And having done that, there are ways we can live that store up treasures for when we get there.
In heaven, the best bit of all will be that we will know Jesus, and we can get to know him more and more now. Knowing Jesus now is storing up treasure in heaven.
In heaven, we will be like Jesus; all the self-centeredness will be gone from our lives. But we can grow in our likeness to him now, too. Being more like Jesus now is storing up treasure in heaven.
And one of the greatest joys in heaven will be seeing others there, so why would we not take every opportunity to tell people about Jesus? How he loved them enough to die for them so that they can have their sins forgiven. How they can know Jesus for themselves and join him in heaven when they die. When you get there, meeting people for whom one of the reasons they are there is because you pointed them the way, will be true treasure.
The news gets better still. What Jesus does next is develop two ways in which the offer of treasure in heaven can impact life here and now.
Light to the Eyes
The first is that we can live in the light, not in the dark.
There’s nothing worse than being in the dark. You can’t see where you’re going. You get lost. You trip over.
Many people live their lives in the dark. They don’t know where they’re going, or what they’re life is all about.
In offering us treasure in heaven, Jesus also offers us an alternative to fumbling around in the dark. He offers us the chance to see where we’re going, to live in the light of God’s truth, with true purpose and direction.
And the way we turn the lights on is all to do with our eyes. Here’s what Jesus says in verse 22: If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body is full of darkness.
If you want to live in the light, says Jesus, make sure your eyes are healthy. Make sure your attention is fixed on the right thing. And the clue to what he means is to realise that in Bible times, if you say someone has bad eyes, that’s a way of saying they’re mean, stingy and selfish.
Jesus says that if your gaze is fixed on your own possessions, like Smaug the dragon in the Hobbit: How can I hold onto this stash? How can I get a little bit more. You’ll find you’re in the dark. You’re lost.
But if your gaze is fixed on God, his priorities, his ways, and how you can serve his kingdom and live in a way that has eternal value, you’ll find you’re in the light. You are living for something worthwhile. Your life is going somewhere.
A New Master
But Jesus has even better news for us than this. Not only can we have treasure in heaven. Not only can we walk in the light. We can be free. Our money doesn’t need to own us anymore. Our desire to consume doesn’t need to control us. We can be set free.
In verse 24, Jesus talks about changing our master. This is the best promise of all.
If you are unfortunate enough to have a complete tyrant of a boss at work, you’ll know the truth of this. If your boss likes to make promises on your behalf, without checking how long something would take you. If your boss assumes you can work Saturdays without asking first. If you’re regularly shouted at and blamed for things that were not your fault. You’ll know the relief when things change and you finally get to work for someone who values your work and who respects you. Suddenly things are much better.
Well your money, your clothing, your career, your wish to travel, your mortgage, your targets for your retirement pension – these things make a truly awful master. If that master is telling you what to do, where to go, and who to spend time with, you’re living in a cruel regime.
What Jesus promise is a new master. Instead of serving our money, we can serve the God who made us. Instead of serving our possessions, we can live for the Jesus who died for us.
The problem comes when we try to do what so many people do and serve both masters. Jesus says it’s impossible. We cannot serve two masters. But some of you are thinking that it is possible. After all you do it all the time. You have 2 part-time jobs. You study, but work in McDonalds in the evenings. You serve your employer midweek and your family at the weekend. You serve the church on Sunday and yourself on Saturday.
But not when you realise that Jesus is talking about slave-masters. He’s using the language of first-century slavery. If you were someone’s slave, you were their property. Exclusively owned by them. You worked full time – at their disposal 24 hours a day and seven days a week. You cannot do that for two masters at once.
And you cannot do it for God and money either. If you’re God’s now, if you live for him, you can’t also live and work for someone else, not even your money. But that doesn’t stop most of us from trying. Wanting to be God’s, but also wanting to have all the same things that everybody else has – membership at the same clubs, holidays to the same places, driving the same cars, living in the same large houses. But it can’t be done.
Jesus is not saying that money is bad. He’s not saying that leisure, that goods, that time off, that nice clothes are bad things. God made them, and they’re good. But what Jesus is saying is that they make terrible masters, and it is impossible to have them as master as well as having God as your master. It’s one or the other.
We are being offered the best news of all. A new master.
Yet many of us don’t take what is being offered. We don’t refuse it by outright saying no. We refuse it by wanting to serve money too, and in so doing we turn down the opportunity to give ourselves over to God.
Conclusion
So what Jesus has done for us here is to ask us three questions.
Where do you want your treasure? In heaven or on earth. I can tell you which kind of treasure will last longer.
Where do you want to live – in the light or in the dark? I can tell you which way of life is less bewildering.
And who do you want to serve? Who do you want to live for? Jesus or money? I can tell you who makes the better master.
Some of us have very little money, and having enough to get by on is a daily worry. We’ll come to that very real challenge next time.
But for the rest of us, we all love money. It’s in the air we breathe in England in the year 2012. What Jesus offers us is our freedom. We don’t deserve it – we’ve chosen money as our master, and by rights he should leave us to our choices. But he died and rose again to give us a way out. A way to be forgiven for our materialism. A way to find a new master, a new direction and a lasting treasure.
And that way is to live for him, with single-minded devotion.