What Do You Treasure?
“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Matthew 6:21
What do you value? What is precious to you? What motivates you? What drives your imagination? What do you spend your time, talent, and treasure on? Jesus says something interesting here, he says that what you treasure reveals where your heart is. We often take it opposite and think to ourselves, where are heart is our treasure will be there also. That seems to make more sense to us. The heart is the seat of our being. It involves our intellect, will, and emotion. When we hear the word “heart,” our first instinct is to only think about our emotions. As we have seen before, the heart is what directs our lives. It is out of our heart that our mouth speaks. This means that we can look at our unguarded comments, because what comes out of our mouths is a truer reflection of what is in our hearts than when we are careful with our word choice.
This means we can look at what we treasure, and it will reveal what we most value in our hearts. Why is that? Our desires, good and bad, flow from our heart and direct what we feel, say, and do. Our desires guide and govern the goals we pursue. To paraphrase Jonathan Edwards, we will choose what we desire most when we are forced to choose. There is an old idiom, “Talk is cheap.” This means it is easy to say something, but it may actually cost to do it. Our words are important, but they may not always accurately reflect what we really long for or desire. If we really want to know where our heart is, we can look at what we treasure. Centuries ago, John Calvin noted, “If honor is rated the highest good, then ambition must take complete charge of a man; if money then forthwith greed takes over the kingdom; if pleasure, then men will certainly degenerate into sheer self-indulgence.”
Core values are those deep motivations that direct and guide you as a person. Thankfully, God gives us the ability to evaluate ourselves and, with God’s enablement through the Holy Spirit, to change and redirect our hearts. If find we are valuing the wrong thing or not valuing something that we should, we can pray asking our Father to change our heart, and in the Holy Spirit’s strength actively choose to move in new directions. We confess things are not how they ought to be but because of grace we know that we are being transformed. Take some time to look at the things you treasure and prayerfully bring them to God. If there are things you need to change, ask God to give you the strength to make those changes and to create a greater desire for them in your heart.
Corporately we also have core values that guide our decisions regarding our resources and ministry focus. We cannot do everything, nor do we have the desire to try. Over the next month, the elders are prayerfully evaluating where we are as a church and what are our guiding values that direct us as a local congregation. There are two types of values we are looking at, “actual” values and “aspirational” values. Actual values are those things that we are passionate about that we are already doing and are what motivate us as a congregation. Aspirational values are those values which we see are biblically central to every local church, but they are values we need to grow in. From this we will seek the Lord regarding where he wants us to focus our energy in the years ahead and put those to use practically as what guides our strategy and programs.
