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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