Treasure Lost, Treasure Kept ...

What is the most important item you have in your home?  Is it your TV, maybe your computer?  Do you keep jewelry at home, or have you bought furniture recently for Christmas?  If for some reason, a thief managed to break in to your home, what would you fear the loss of the most?  We think about this before it happens.  We think about ADT or other services after it does.  If insurance does its job, the things we have, should be replaced (though with fine print that may never quite happen).  But I would venture to say there are things way more valuable than what I mentioned above.  The people you live with, would top the list.  When we look to protect and defend ourselves, the purchase of a gun comes to mind.  But no matter what scenario happens that robs us of what treasure we have, the common element is surprise.  Its not as if the would-be thief leaves a note on the door, scheduling the day and time they are expecting to come in and rob us.  That would be so far fetched no one (including the police I imagine) would believe it.  It just does not make sense.  No, the thief must count on the element of surprise to successfully rob us of our treasure.  We are just so complacent in our normality, we never expect it, until we are shocked that it happened to us.

Jesus understood this.  Though never having sinned, Jesus understands well both the motives and the methods of every thief ever born.  And frankly Jesus would redeem everyone of them if they would but let Him.  In the gospel of Matthew to his Hebrew contemporaries, Jesus discusses the element of surprise as it relates to His second coming.  In this case sad to say, but we just never seem to see it coming.  He picks up with this same analogy in verse 43 saying … “But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up. [verse 44] Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.”  There is more to this simple analogy than might first meet the eye.  It relates to the context of the previous texts in Matthew’s gospel of this same chapter.  Where it comes to being prepared for the Lord’s second coming; Jesus states one would be ready and taken, the other not.  One person, even one Christian, would be ready, the other not.  One person who truly understands the love of Jesus, that transforms, and teaches us to love others – the other not.

Imagine this statement is true, even within the household walls of one single family.  Imagine a husband who is ready, and his wife not.  Adam faced this.  Imagine a set of children ready, their parents not.  Imagine a sibling who is ready, and their other not.  It is most painful to think that even within a single family unit, one might be ready, with another not.  It is possible though; because salvation is personal and not transferrable.  As much as a parent might wish to lay down their own lives to see their children sparred, they cannot.  As much as a husband might wish to lay down his life for the sake of his wife; he cannot force his wife to truly know Jesus, and vice versa.  Sometimes when there is a person within a family who has great faith, perhaps a mother or grandmother, all the other family members look to her in matters of religion.  But her faith, is not your faith, her stories not your stories.  Her knowledge of the love of Jesus, is not your knowledge.  Each person must come to know Jesus for him or herself.  No one can be forced. 

And so, even within the walls of our own home, not everyone may have accepted what you have accepted.  If this is true, then the finality of the second coming is an event that seals life long trends, and life long rejections of a loving God.  If this happens, it would very surely cause our home to be “broken up”.  It is not the treasures of this world we would ever miss, compared to the infinite world we can barely imagine.  But the treasures of our family, of those we love – those are treasures that we would miss for eternity if we were to be deprived of their company and their love.  There are some treasures we will lose at His second coming, and find they were never really treasures at all.  And there are some treasures we could lose at His second coming, we will find had no price tag high enough in our eyes and hearts.  And worst of all, it is the surprise that might settle which is which.

This was the point of Jesus who treasures each of us more than His very own life.  It will be in an hour we think not.  In an hour when normal life looks so incredibly normal.  When everything that has carried on, continues to carry on, just like before for what seems like a million years.  Plans we make.  Lives we live.  Movies we watch.  Entertainment we pursue.  Careers we wish to grow.  And the love of families we enjoy.  All of it so utterly normal, so utterly routine.  Nothing special to catch the eye.  And then BAM!!  The clouds appear in the eastern sky, about the size of a man’s fist, growing as it approaches our world and becoming brighter.  Until a host of angels arrive led by Jesus Christ so enormous the sight of it cannot be contained across the entirety of our world.  That heavenly trumpet will blow.  No need for TV coverage, the naked eye will see it just fine.  And how we react to it, whether in fear for our existence, or in joy for our eternal reconciliation; will say a lot about whether we were ready despite normality, or lulled into the sleep of complacency up until then.  Will we suffer the tragedy of broken homes, because we just assumed each member of our family knew Jesus like we did?  Or is it we, who still need to know Him?

Jesus continues on the theme of continual readiness picking back up in verse 45 saying … “Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season? [verse 46] Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. [verse 47] Verily I say unto you, That he shall make him ruler over all his goods.”  A few things to zero-in on in these words.  To begin, note that we are not God, or Lords of any kind.  All of us on planet earth are servants of one sort or the other.  What we are given to manage (our treasures), are gifts from our Lord.  Our households, our families, our real treasures – are as much a gift and blessing from Jesus as anything else we might claim to “own”.  In point of fact, we “own” nothing, we “manage” His gifts because of His love for each of us.  To provide meat (or harvest) in due season; that is to say, to see the love of Jesus so fully infect us, that we cannot help but pour it out upon those around us.  Making the harvest greater by pointing the other seeds to the Master of the vineyard.  This is our highest honor, and best role, as manager of the gifts He bestows upon us.

Being faithful to Jesus Christ, that is, keeping our eyes transfixed on Jesus in submission.  Allowing Jesus to change how we think, what we want, and how we love – is being faithful to Jesus.  Our purpose here is only one role we are to play.  Our service continues into the new world.  Finding us willing to serve here, allows Him to assign us new things, a new purpose in the new world.  Again not as kings, or Lord, but as willing servants, set to manage whatever tasks He would assign us to do.  Ever dependent upon Him.  Ever filled with joy at whatever He would assign.  We will have learned that following the Lord’s instruction or plans, is infinitely better than trying to follow what we think is best.  A lifetime on earth is supposed to teach us this as well.  An extension of our service, is what is planned for the new world.  Not the beginning of it, but the extending of it.  For those who think they will begin to serve only after they have to, or only after the grave, they are mistaken and have misunderstood the joy of being a servant of the Lord in the first place.

Jesus compares those who are happy to serve, with those who think they are no servants at all as He continues in verse 48 saying … “But and if that evil servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; [verse 49] And shall begin to smite his fellowservants, and to eat and drink with the drunken;”  Notice what happens to the behavior of the servants who believe the delay in the Lords coming gives them a license to assert control.  They begin by trying to dominate other servants themselves, instead of accepting each one as an equal.  Husbands might try to dominate their wives instead of serving them and loving them so much they would give their own lives for them.  Relationships within families disintegrate as the role of servant is abandoned to seek the role of authoritarian.  We wish to see ourselves as benevolent dictators (like God) instead of servants equally praised and valued by the same Lord of Lord, and King of Kings. 

After asserting control over others which we should have never done, the next step in the regressive behavior is to fall into normality of seeking fun above most else.  This is not so much a condemnation of eating particular things, or drinking to excess – it is a warning about the normality of believing control rests with us, and pleasure seeking is the most important pursuit we have.  It is in this cesspool of complacency where evil is nurtured until the love-of-self blinds us completely to the love-of-others.  We fall completely out of harmony with God, and find ourselves completely in harmony with the world around us.  Each man or woman looking out for number one; because if I don’t, who will?  The degenerative addictive disease of evil can so overtake its human host, the human eventually becomes indistinguishable from the evil that grows wildly within it.  Without submission to Jesus, instead of asserting control, salvation becomes a theory never tested.  We talk about it.  But have no experience with it.  And our lives, and the evil of our deeds, testify to that lack of personal experience with salvation.

But evil cannot last forever.  There will one day come an end to it.  An arbitrary end enforced by a loving God after every chance has been offered and refused.  It is hard for us to believe this would be a willing outcome, but for those infected by evil, and devoid of love for others, it is not so hard to imagine.  Jesus describes the outcome for such individuals with heavy heart as He continues in verse 50 saying … “The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of, [verse 51] And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  Evil will one day be cut off from this world, and then from eternity.  The rewards for those who refuse to submit look nearly identical to those who falsely claim they submit.  Weeping and gnashing of teeth; not over who they are, or who they became, or even what they do – but of being caught at it, and busted by The Truth.

Evil never wishes to die, it only wishes to continue, and get worse.  Satan did not start out as Satan.  He was once Lucifer who broke trust with God over whether loving self was indeed harmful or not.  Who he has become answered the question of self-love and its real dangers for the entire universe.  The entire universe has learned that there is no “different” from God that is good.  God is the embodiment of all that is good, so if it is different from God, by definition it is evil.  The universe was forced to learn this lesson by the breaking of trust with God, that Lucifer did way back then.  The invention of pain and death was born into a universe who had never seen either, until “different” was introduced by Lucifer as an “alternative” to God.  And because Lucifer became Satan, pulled with him a third of the angels (now demons) and has spent 6000+ years trying to further hurt God by tempting His creations to abandon His love – we are the casualties of a war our Lord is trying desperately to save us from.

But evil does have an expiration date.  It will not last forever.  To save our treasure, we must submit it to Jesus.  We must stop looking for control over others and start looking through His transformative love to serve others as He did.  Submission to Jesus leads to continual readiness.  No other path does that.  No other self-described deity offers that.  And the idea of independence is merely a myth, one of Satan’s lies, to get you to believe that Satan does not even exist.  To save our treasure we can eliminate being surprised - by being continually ready, in continual submission, in continual service.  The changes that makes in our own lives, might serve best as the witness our own families need in order to see Jesus clearer.  And while salvation may not be transferrable, the love of Jesus for others is highly infectious, and appealing, and leads to a happiness none can take away.  To point others to His light and love, is to be prepared in a world that is not.  Let us make our servitude an extension of our lives into the new world of eternity, rather than a new discovery at that event.

But even so Jesus had more to say about being prepared …

 

True Currency Valuation ...

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 …