In the middle of the Sermon on the
Mount Jesus says, “Store up your
treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy them, and thieves
cannot break in and steal them.”
What does he
mean? How do we do this, store up
treasures in Heaven? We attribute divine
authority to Jesus; he is God in human flesh.
When he speaks, we are hearing God’s word. Nothing could matter more than knowing what he
means and understanding how to do what he says.
How in the world do we store up treasures in Heaven?
This is the finale of a series of talks about the
Afterlife. How do we prepare for
Heaven? I do not mean, how do we get to
Heaven? Jesus gets us there. His death on the cross covers our sins. His forgiveness makes us new. When we give our lives to Him and acknowledge
Jesus as Lord, we are adopted as sons and daughters of God. God will take us to be with Himself. Are we ready for eternity spent with God?
This is a potentially odd thought. Conventional wisdom is Heaven will be
awesome, wonderful, fun, beautiful, joyous, unending bliss. However, conventional wisdom, or popular theology,
declares that all good people go to Heaven.
If someone is not guilty of genocide or child molestation, he qualifies
as “good.”
The Bible shatters this thinking. In fact, in the words of the Apostle Paul,
all sin and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). Jesus makes the statement that there is “only
one who is good” and we know he means God.
Only God is good! The whole good people go to Heaven when they die
idea is crushed. In fact the New
Testament says very little about going to Heaven when we die.
The theme of the New Testament is that in the coming of
Christ, the Kingdom of God has been established. During his earthly ministry, Jesus announced
the Kingdom. After his resurrection, he
charged his church to continue announcing the Kingdom and inviting the lost and
hurting world to come to him for life, truly abundant life.
As we live and announce the Kingdom, in the course of
devoting our lives to that Kingdom, we are told to store up treasure in Heaven
where it cannot be destroyed. It cannot
be robbed. Nothing will happen to the
treasure we hold there. It is always
there for us, an eternal inheritance. To
live into it and really get what Heaven is and be ready for life in Heaven,
life with God, we need to know what Jesus meant. We need to know how to store up our treasures
so we’ll be ready when it is time to go.
Quickly a couple of tangents: first, storing up treasure
in Heaven should not be thought of as doing good works to accrue merits. Our heavenly joy will not correspond to our
effort as Christians. This is
different. This is not a merit based
type of idea.
Second, failure to store
up treasure in Heaven is not the same as losing salvation or experience
disappointment in the afterlife. The
criminal on the cross who acknowledged the authority of Jesus probably did not
spend his life storing up treasure in Heaven.
He came to faith right before he died.
He will be with God eternally. It
will be as good as being with God is.
It is not accruing merits;
it does not negate conversions to Christ that come late in life.
So what is it then?
What is it to become a Christ-follower and then spend 20, 50, 80 years
of life storing up treasures in Heaven?
I turn to the work of Christian philosopher and writer
Dallas Willard and quote him at length.
He writes
Invest your life in what God is doing, which cannot be
lost. Of course this means we will
invest in our relationship with Jesus himself and through him to God. But beyond that, and in close union with it,
we will devote ourselves to the good of other people – those around us within
the range of our power to affect. … And we also care for this astonishingly
rich and beautiful realm, the earth itself, of which both we and our neighbors
are parts.
Thus to “lay up treasures in heaven” is to treasure all of
[the] intimate and touching aspects of heaven’s life, all of which God is doing
on earth.
The person who treasures what lies with the kingdom [of
Heaven] sees everything in its true worth and relationship. The person who treasures what is “on earth,”
by contrast, sees everything from a perspective that distorts and
systematically misleads in practice. The
relative importance of things is, in particular, misperceived. The person who is addicted to drugs or to
some activity is but an extreme case.
All else is seen only in its relation to the object of the addiction.[i]
The first answer is relationship. What is it to lay up treasures in
Heaven? It is to put a top priority in
life on knowing Jesus. That matters more
for the Christ-follower than happiness marriage, than the success of our kids,
than the responsibilities of our work.
If any of those things competes for our loyalty and our time and energy
with knowing Jesus, we sacrifice those things to know Him, and to follow and
worship Him. I would contend the more we
follow Jesus the better we are in our marriages, our parenting, and our
work. But if it helps to rank things,
knowing Jesus is our top treasure.
Immediately we see in Willard’s comment and in our
reading of the New Testament, to know Jesus is to know God. And to know Jesus is to love people; this is
not just any kind of love. Because we
are committed to Jesus, our love for others is for their benefit, overflowing
with grace and forgiveness, and given without restraint. The way Jesus says it in Luke 10 and other
places is “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and
mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.”
How do we store up treasures in Heaven? We love God and love people. This is a matter of the heart.
Maybe in a talk about
Heaven, we want to hear about walking on clouds. Maybe we are interested in vivid accounts of
the heavenly beings described in Ezekiel in the Old Testament and Revelation in
the New. Maybe we would anticipate in a
talk about Heaven the promise, the hope, that we will spend eternity with
departed loved ones. I know I hope to
spend some time with my Grandmother. I’d
like to get to know the grandfather who died when I five. There is nothing wrong with these
questions. I believe we will see people
we loved if they walked with Jesus.
If we walk with God
today, now, that way of living, the God-oriented life, the Jesus-life, sets our
hearts toward Heaven.
How do we know our hearts
are Heaven-bent? What is the sign that
we have treasure stored up there?
Consider the words of Jesus that surround the statement about storing up
our treasures. He mentions
forgiveness. If we refuse to extend
grace and forgiveness to those who have wounded us, those wounds rule our
hearts and the love of God does not. I
don’t say this because forgiveness is easy.
Deep wounds are just that – deep.
They cut to the core. We need in
the core of ourselves, where the deepest cuts leave scars to discover the
forgiving love of Jesus. Once discovered
we extend that forgiving love.
Jesus speaks of the
spiritual discipline of fasting – self-denial.
Some in his day made a show of fasting.
They wanted everyone to see how holy they were in going without
eating. Their extraordinary sacrifice
was done to gain the admiration of the crowd.
The only time we should fast is if it draws us closer to God. We practice this discipline for the sake of
seeing God more clearly.
Fasting and forgiving are
quite different, but in both cases we deal with something uncomfortable. In one case it is our dependence upon
nourishment but also our temptation toward gluttony. In the other case it is our wounding and our
self-identity as a victim, one wounded.
In fasting we declare that as dependent as we are upon food, we depend
more upon God. In forgiving we claim a
new identity – not as a wounded victim but as a born-again child of God. Both are about orienting our lives toward our
Heavenly Father. Both lead us to
establish our sense of self in Him.
Jesus tells worry is a
sign we are not seeing ourselves as God’s children. God feeds the birds and drapes the flowers of
the fields with beauty human invention will never match. God loves us more than flowers or birds. God is aware of our needs and responsive to
us. Trust in God’s care is another way
we store up treasure in Heaven, but this trust means letting go of wealth as a
source of security and a provider of happiness. Believing that wealth will make us happy and
safe, we end up setting money as the prime master of life. No, says, Jesus, we cannot truly live that
way. It is either God or money – only
one can be master. It is either worry or
trust in God.
The laying up of treasure
defines our lives. We live as people of
faith and people who are faithful. We
live as people who love. We live with a
sense that we are loved. Clearly such
living marks us off, separated from those around us caught in the rat race, the
scramble for wealth and power. It is not
that we go anywhere. We are here,
announcing the kingdom. It is simply
that we are living a different story – God’s story. We are announcing that all around us are
invited to step out of a life that leads nowhere and into a life that leads to
God. We are in but not of the
world.
We are also preparing for
the life beyond death. Dallas Willard,
alluding to Jesus’s parable of the talents, writes
The universe will continue to exist … and we will actively
participate in the future governance of [it.]
… God’s plan is for us to develop, as apprentices to Jesus, to the point
where we can take our place in the ongoing creativity of the universe.
We will not sit around [in eternal heaven] looking at one another
but we will join the eternal Logos, “reign with him,” in the endlessly ongoing
creative work of God.
… The intention of God is that we should each become the kind
of person whom he can set free in his universe, empowered to do what we want to
do.
… We should expect that in due time we will be moved into our
eternal destiny of creative activity with Jesus.[ii]
Of course Dallas Willard cannot be more specific than
this although he does hazard a few guesses.
We must acknowledge that this is speculative as is any of vision of
Heaven.
I share Willard’s view because in my estimation, he
communicates well the vision of Jesus when Jesus talks about and demonstrates
the Kingdom of God. More than going to some Heaven in the sky, far, far away,
the eternal Kingdom is God’s Heaven and God’s Earth joining together in perfect
harmony, all pain removed, and all barriers to relationship with God
destroyed.
The more we live in love here and now, the more familiar
our entrance into Heaven will fell.
Jesus discussed spiritual discipline, forgiveness, and trust as specific
ways orient our hearts. We could comb
through the Gospels for more Jesus’ words, and we could add worship, but only
when worship is connected to mission. We
could add evangelism, but only when evangelism is done for the sake of love of
people, as an act of compassion. All
these specific works or categories are extremely important and are indicators
of our hearts. When our hearts are set
on Heaven, we enter Heaven prepared, with open eyes. We see clearly. All that we do here, things done and lives
lived in Jesus’ name continue there.
I close this morning and this series with the word of
N.T. Wright.
Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art
or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of His creation;
every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk;
every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human
beings and … ; and of course every prayer,
all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the
church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the
name of Jesus honored in the world – all of this will find its way, through the
resurrection power of God, into the new creation God will one day make. This is the logic of the mission of God. God’s re-creation of his wonderful world,
which began with the resurrection of Jesus and continues mysteriously as God’s
people live in the risen Christ and in the power of his Spirit, means that what
we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted. It will last all the way into God’s new
world. In fact, it will be enhanced
there. [iii]
Treasure Christ.
Live in love. Set your heart in
Heaven.
AMEN
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