“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
– Matthew 6:21 (NIV)

“I absolutely LOVE my car!” “I just LOVE that movie!”
I have said these things, and many more like them. But, do I really mean them? Do I really LOVE my car? A movie? Maybe I need to think about how I express the feeling that I have for something before I throw the word “love” at it. Sure, I am grateful for my car. It is comfortable and safe and gets great mileage. And yes, there are movies that I will watch many times over because they are highly entertaining. However, to love these things is perhaps taking it a bit too far. Would I be heart-broken without my car? Would I feel empty inside if I could never watch a particular movie again?

What Jesus was pointing out when speaking about our “treasures” was the reality of this world. Sadly, he had seen people holding on to their possessions as if they would die without them. When people said they wanted to follow him, Jesus told them to let go of everything else and put him first. In hearing this, most of them turned away. They could not fathom a life without their stuff, their family and friends, their inheritance.

Jesus was trying to explain to us that if we put our whole selves into things, buying things, hoarding things, reaching for more and more, that our hearts would eventually become lost in those things. We would be chained to the new car smell that we loved. We would be imprisoned in the enormous house on the hill that we simply adored. We would be left alone with no human contact when we poured everything into the addiction that we couldn’t live without.

The point that everyone seemed to miss here is that Jesus was also telling us that when we take our treasures and ourselves and pour them into following him, living as he lived, and loving as he loved, we would find our heart fulfilled, and at peace. He wasn’t telling us we must trash everything else about our lives, the world, and the people around us. He was telling us to put him first. In so doing, everything else would become much simpler. We would become more generous, more loving, more tolerant and more accepting. We would find we needed so much less from the world and had so much more to give – because it is in and through the love of Jesus that our hearts experience the change from self-concerned to other-concerned.

For where my treasure is, there my heart will also be. What do I treasure today?