Wednesday 1st April - Where your treasure is

DAILY BYTE

[Today and tomorrow’s devotions were adapted from Dallas Willard’s ‘The Divine Conspiracy.’]

Jesus warned us of the danger of seeking for security outside of the Kingdom by teaching us about our treasures. Treasures are things we try to keep because of the value we place upon them. They may be of no value whatsoever in themselves; nevertheless, we take great pains to protect such things. Thus we are said to treasure them.

Of course we may also treasure things other than material goods: for example, our reputation, or our relationship to another person, or the security or reputation of our school or our business or our country. The most important commandment of the Judeo-Christian tradition is to treasure God and his realm more than anything else. That is what it means to love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. It means to treasure him, to hold him and his dear, and to protect and aid him in his purposes. Our only wisdom, safety and fulfilment lies in so treasuring God. Then we will also treasure our neighbours rightly, as he treasures them.

Everyone has treasures. This is an essential part of what it is to be human. To have nothing that one treasures is to be in a non-human condition, and nothing degrades people more than to scorn or destroy or deprive them of their treasures. Indeed, merely to pry into what one’s treasures are is a severe intrusion.

People in concentration camps and those homeless folk who come to live on the streets go to great lengths and even risk their lives to hold onto to things that may be simply ridiculous to others. None of them is without some treasure. It will be perhaps a photo or old letter or some ornament or trinket.

We reveal what our treasures are by what we try to protect, secure, keep. Often our treasures are totally worthless to other people. Sometimes, of course, they are not. And that is the case with money, wealth, material goods.

So, to discuss our treasures is really to discuss our treasurings. We are not to pass it off as dealing merely with ‘external goods’, which are ‘non-spiritual’ or just physical stuff. It has to deal with the fundamental structure of our soul. It has to do precisely with whether the life we live now in the physical realm is to be an eternal one or not, and the extent to which it will be so.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Holy God, help us to understand exactly what we do treasure and give our hearts over to. Help us to recognise how powerfully our inner impulses to treasure things are, but keep us treasuring the right kind of things. The kind of things that you O God also treasure and value.. In Jesus name. Amen.

FOCUS READING

Matthew 6 :19-21 (MSG)

Don't hoard treasure down here where it gets eaten by moths and corroded by rust or—worse!—stolen by burglars. Stockpile treasure in heaven, where it's safe from moth and rust and burglars. It's obvious, isn't it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being.