(Joshua 24:14-15, 1 Kings 18:20-21; Luke 16:9-17)

In the latter part of my time in Colorado, one snowy February, the summons went out for a special presbytery meeting. From the letter, it was clear that something significant had happened, something bad, and so I made it a point to get down across the mountain to be there. I was glad I did, because it truly was a major deal: the presbytery treasurer had embezzled a significant portion of the presbytery’s reserves, and so it was necessary to discuss the financial ramifications of his actions—particularly the effect on new church plants—as well as the legal situation.

The treasurer, it should be noted, didn’t take the money for himself, but for his company—he was an executive in a small Denver corporation; in fact, he always insisted that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that he had merely found the presbytery a better investment opportunity. It might have been a more convincing argument if he’d asked permission first instead of doing it underhandedly; but while I don’t know about interest, he did repay all the money in the end.

Still, what he did was wrong, because he lost track of whom he was supposed to be serving: he used his position with the presbytery not to serve the presbytery but to serve his company. He had been entrusted with money by the presbytery for a particular purpose, but chose not to be faithful to that purpose—instead, he took it on himself to use the money for a different purpose, to serve his own ends and his own plans with it instead of those of the presbytery. This is true even if he really did believe he could make the presbytery more money by going his own way, because that wasn’t properly his call to make—not on his own hook, anyway. It was not his place to make his own plans for how to use the presbytery’s money, regardless of what he thought he could do with it.

Understanding this is the key to understanding Jesus’ message in Luke 16:9-13—which is not, by the way, an explanation of the parable of the crooked steward in verses 1-8; actually, it points forward to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus that concludes this chapter. We tend to think of money as something that’s ours, that we have the right to use as we see fit; but Jesus wants to bring a radical change in the way we think about money, and so he challenges that view in a couple different ways.

First, note that he talks about two kinds of wealth. The NIV reads “worldly wealth,” some of your translations have “unrighteous wealth,” and I recall seeing someone translate this “dirty money.” Literally, what it says here is “money of unrighteousness,” and I think the NIV’s on the right track in understanding this: it’s not that money is itself unrighteous, but that it’s so woven through all the evil things we do, and there are so many evils done for money, that it’s contaminated. Jesus sets this in contrast to “true riches,” and also to “the eternal dwellings”—there’s something better for us, and our purpose should be to use the wealth of unrighteousness, which will eventually fail, to gain that something better. We should seek to use the money we have not to bless ourselves or keep ourselves secure, but to bless and serve others, and to carry out God’s will and purposes, not our own.

Second, in conjunction with this, Jesus describes money as a test. On the grand scale of things, he suggests, money isn’t all that—it’s just a little thing, of no enduring importance; and if we can’t even be faithful with such a little thing, if we can’t be trusted to handle it with integrity and in a way that benefits others, then why would anyone give us anything better? Money is less important for what we can do with it—even for the good things we can do with it—than for what it reveals about us, about our character and the state of our hearts. God has far better things to give us than money, but as a rule, he won’t give us the greater blessings if we misuse the lesser ones, or turn them into idols.

We always need to test our hearts on this. I’ve wondered at times, as we’ve asked ourselves why this congregation isn’t growing the way we’d like it to, if perhaps God is waiting to pour out greater blessings on us because we can’t quite be trusted to be faithful with the ones we have. It’s as tempting for churches as for individuals, after all, to put our trust in money rather than in God; if increasing our numbers, both in terms of people and in terms of giving, would lead us to trust even more in money rather than to give God praise for his provision and trust him even more recklessly, then why would he give us more? One wonders if that was the problem with the Pharisees—if their rise in importance had gone to their heads, had turned them to love money more than God.

If we want God to bless us, we need to take our eyes off the blessing—whether the one we want, or the one we already have—and just focus on him; we need to trust him that all will be well whether he blesses us or not. “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and then—then when you’re not really worrying about all these things anymore—only then will all these things be added unto you, because then it won’t be the things that you’re after.” If we want God’s blessing, we need to want him more.

As we’ve talked about before, this matters a great deal because the core issue isn’t how we spend our money, but why—what matters most to us, what or who we love most; it’s about our worship. Jesus comes back to that point again here, asking us this time not where is our heart, but whom we will serve. We tend to think we have the choice to serve God, to serve someone else, or to serve ourselves, but Jesus says no: if you think you’re living to serve yourself, all that means is that you’re a slave and don’t even know it. If your life is directed toward money—making it, spending it, investing it—then it’s really money that’s calling the shots; it’s not serving you, you’re serving it.

And here’s the kicker: that’s absolutely incompatible with serving God and following Christ. You cannot serve two masters, because the time will come—probably quickly—when they’re pulling you in two different directions, and you’ll have to choose between them. You’ll have to decide which one you truly love, which one you actually trust to take care of you, and which one you’re really committed to following; and you’ll have to cast your lot, one way or the other. Following Christ will mean being called to do things that don’t serve your money, as it will mean giving up certain pleasures, as it will mean letting go of power and control—for the same reason that for Abraham, following God meant putting his son Isaac on an altar on Mount Moriah: to force us to choose, in the starkest possible terms, whom we will serve. It’s not that God doesn’t know what choice we’ll make—but we need to know, and we need to make that choice.

And the only way to make that choice is to come to it, to come to the point where God calls us to do something that doesn’t make good financial sense, and to love him and trust him enough to let go of the money and do it. That’s not an easy test, but Jesus doesn’t just give us the easy ones. He doesn’t say, “The good news of the kingdom of God is preached, and everyone is allowed to make up their own minds about it”—no, he says, “everyone is forcefully urged into it.” (I know the NIV reads “everyone is forcing his way in,” but I think that’s wrong.) There’s an urgency to God’s appeal here, because there’s only so much time left, and we don’t know how much; and so he gives us the hard challenges on the big issues. He doesn’t call us to live by just a little faith—he calls us to put everything in his hands, to go out on the tightrope, where either we let go of our idols, or we fall. He calls us to live by a simple commitment—“Heaven or Bust”—and to use our money accordingly.

(1 Kings 3:5-14; Luke 12:22-34)

If you were here for the first two weeks of this series, as we were looking at what Jesus had to say about money in the Sermon on the Mount, you probably recognize that this is mostly the same material. It’s arranged a little differently and worded a little differently, but most of it is essentially the same. Some scholars like to take that and argue about what is “original,” assuming that Matthew and Luke changed stuff to suit them; which is kind of stupid, because it assumes that Jesus only talked about all of this once. In an age before newspapers and magazines, to say nothing of videocameras, TV and the Internet, I’m sure Jesus gave his sermons many times apiece; indeed, even today, people on the speaker’s circuit do that all the time. How many times did the President use his Slurpee line last year? As such, contrary to some of my academic brethren, I figure what we have here in Luke is a different version of the same message, which makes it worth our time to take both the similarities and the differences seriously.

First, we see again the emphasis on not being anxious, on trading in worry about what we have and don’t have for trust that God will provide for us, as he does for the birds and the flowers; given that he’s the one who gave us life, and he’s the one who created out bodies, it’s absurd to think that he can’t provide all the lesser things we need as well. More, given his wisdom and goodness, it’s equally absurd to think he doesn’t know what we need, or that he won’t provide for us if we depend on him. Jesus here is giving us essentially the same challenge God gave his people through the prophet Malachi, in a passage we’ll be reading in a few weeks: “Bring the full tithe into the storehouse . . . and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.” Just trust me, he’s saying; you’ll have everything you need, but without the worry.

Of course, if we’re honest with ourselves, a lot of our worry isn’t really about having what we need, is it? Most of us could do with less than what we have; it’s about what we want, the way we want to live our lives, what we’re not willing to do without. Most of us could live more simply than we do, and I certainly don’t exempt myself from that; and I’m sure we can all think of people we know who got themselves into financial trouble because they spent way more than they could afford on houses and cars and other things that were far more expensive than they needed, just because they wanted them. I’ve been thinking lately about the sister of one of my secretaries back in Colorado, who was overextended and in deep financial trouble even before the housing market started to crash; I wonder whatever happened to her and her husband and their two kids.

The truth of it is, as we talked about two weeks ago and see again here, the core issue in all this is idolatry: where is your heart? Who or what is really your first love? What are the priorities that determine everything else in your life? It’s not bad to have more than we need, but if love of money—or fear of not having enough—is calling the shots in our lives, then that’s our idol, that’s our treasure, and we need to cut it down. “Sell your possessions and give to the needy,” Jesus says, and immediately we start asking, “Sell how much? What do I get to keep?” We start defining the limits and trying to figure out what’s the least we can do to be good enough—it’s law-based thinking, and I caught myself doing it as I was writing this sermon; and it’s completely wrong way round. The real question is this: if we cared more about storing up treasure in heaven than in accumulating treasure on earth, if our hearts were really set on Jesus and he were truly our first love and our first priority, then how much would we want to keep, and how much would we gladly give away?

This has been a hard one for me in the last few years, because I never thought of myself as materialistic; indeed, I would have strongly resented the suggestion that I was. I could rationalize all the stuff I have—and pastors can be great rationalizers, as this cartoon shows; and it’s not like we’re particularly extravagant or buy things for which we have no real meaningful use. But as I was coming to realize the degree to which my life has been driven by fear and anxiety, I began to see that I did have a fear issue when it came, not to money, but to material things: fear that I would need something and not have it, and that if I didn’t have this particular thing, at some future point I would be inadequate, because I wouldn’t have the whatever-it-was that I needed. Trying to prepare for contingencies, to get a leg up on the future, by piling up stuff, rather than trusting God to take care of it—that, I think, is my main issue here. It’s stupid, and it’s twisted, and it’s not at all what Jesus wants from me; but it is, I think, all too sadly human.

And it all really flows, in the end, from us wanting what we want, rather than letting God teach us to want what he wants. We look for security in earthly things, even as untrustworthy as they are, because our hearts are set on an earthly security with earthly rewards. Why else would we use the word “securities” to mean stocks, bonds, and other investments? They’re not secure at all—just look at the New York Mets, who bought “securities” from Bernie Madoff; now they’ve been hit with a $1 billion IOU. Stocks, bonds, they go up, they go down—on the whole, they may do well by you, but you can never be sure about tomorrow. It’s all in God’s hands, none of our own. But we call them “securities” anyway because we want to believe that they can give us the security we want: enough money and things to kick back and live the good life, however we define that, without having to work any harder than we want to.

It’s a pleasant vision, but even if we get there, it could still all go splat at any time—financial crisis, medical crisis, family crisis, you can think of all the ways; and even if it doesn’t, is that really enough for us? In the end, human experience seems pretty clear: no, it isn’t. That desire for more, that we can be so prone to try to fill with ever more material things, is the surest sign that material things will never be enough. To find what we really need, we must look beyond the kingdoms of this world; and so we have this little verse, unique to Luke, that ties this whole passage together, verse 32: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

Note that. He doesn’t say, “It is your Father’s good pleasure to make you rich”; those sorts of financial blessings may come, or they may not. Instead, he tells us two things. One, if we seek his kingdom, we will receive it. There’s certainty there. If we seek for material wealth, we may find it or we may not—there are many who have gone broke trying to get rich—but if we seek the kingdom of God, we will get what we seek. And two, what we will get will be better than anything else we could ever find.

No, we may not have all the things we want—we probably won’t—but while God may not give us anything more than we need, he won’t give us anything less, either; and more than material things, he’ll give us his love, his peace, his joy, his hope, his power, his strength, and most of all, his life, and those will do more to bless us through the difficult times in this world than all the wealth of the Americas. And that’s just in this world, which will end, and maybe all too soon for some of us; when this world dies and is raised to new life as its maker died and was raised to new life, and all those things that were merely temporary markers of position have passed away, when all that remains is the kingdom of God—then that kingdom will be ours. Totally, without exception. Forever.

(Proverbs 6:6-8; Matthew 6:25-34)

Wired magazine published an interesting article this past summer on the effort, led by a biologist named Robert Sapolsky, to develop a vaccine against chronic stress. That might sound strange, but while stress doesn’t cause any diseases—we used to think it causes ulcers, but it’s turned out that’s not really true—it can have devastating effects on every major system in our bodies, making us far more vulnerable to disease, and making every disease we develop worse. As the article says,

The list of ailments connected to stress is staggeringly diverse and includes everything from the common cold and lower-back pain to Alzheimer’s disease, major depressive disorder, and heart attack. Stress hollows out our bones and atrophies our muscles. It triggers adult-onset diabetes and is a leading cause of male impotence. In fact, numerous studies of human longevity in developed countries have found that psychosocial factors such as stress are the single most important variable in determining the length of a life. It’s not that genes and risk factors like smoking don’t matter. It’s that our levels of stress matter more . . . the effects of chronic stress directly counteract improvements in medical care and public health.

The article goes on to cite a public-health survey called the Whitehall study, which has been tracking tens of thousands of British civil servants for over 40 years; they’ve found that even after you control for all other known factors, people at the bottom of the hierarchy died twice as often between the ages of 40 and 64 as people at the top. Why? Primarily because those at the bottom have considerable stress from the demands of their jobs, but absolutely no control over those demands. They can’t choose what they’re going to do, they have no status to defend themselves from those above them—there’s nothing they can do but to endure, and it’s literally killing them.

In other words, Jesus knew what he was talking about when he said, “Which of you by being anxious can add even a single hour to his life?” Anxiety is corrosive, and erosive: it wears away our energy, our character, and ultimately our lives, and eats away our relationships, dissolving the bonds between us. Chronic stress makes us more susceptible to the effects of stress, making us more anxious and more likely to perceive things as threats; the more anxious we are, the more anxious we’re going to be, the more mistrustful we become, and the harder it is for us to relax and rest.

This is the story of our culture, because ours is an anxious time. Part of that, of course, is the down economy, but that’s not all, by any means. Part of it is the tenor of our politics, which are very much anxiety-driven; that’s not the fault of all those high-powered political consultants running around, but they’re still doing their best to make it worse. I remember being struck during the 2000 political campaign by polls showing that over a quarter of the electorate professed to be “terrified” at the prospect of Al Gore becoming president, with a similar percentage saying the same thing about George W. Bush; and then, just as that was all settling down, along came 9/11 to give us all something to be terrified about. It certainly wasn’t going to get any better from there.

In times like that, people tend to look for comfort in what we think we can control; which was probably one of the things driving the housing bubble. There were plenty of people around talking about the dream of home ownership, and real estate as the safest investment, tying in to the deep emotional association between home and security; to have that go bust for so many folks was like having their legs kicked out from under them, like being hit from behind. I would say that’s the sort of thing that sends anxiety through the roof, except the roof isn’t there anymore—that’s part of the problem.

The reality here is that this kind of thing inevitably happens when we’re trying to be the ones in control. That’s really the root of anxiety: we’re carrying the weight of our lives on our own shoulders—we’ve given ourselves the full responsibility for making our lives happen and making everything work. We put our trust in things because we think we understand them, we believe we can control them; we think we know what they’re worth, and we trust in our own understanding and our own abilities.

Ultimately, we see ourselves as our own providers; at the practical level, we make ourselves the little gods of our day-to-day lives. As long as circumstances are favorable, we can pull it off, and we feel pretty good about it; but when circumstances turn, as they always do, it all comes crashing down, and we become anxious—we worry—because our little gods have failed. That’s why the New Testament scholar Robert Mounce declared, “Worry is practical atheism and an affront to God,” and it’s why Jesus calls us to something better.

The opposite of worry is trust, and the opposite of anxiety is faith; it is to release our lives to God and leave them in his keeping. It’s the spirit captured in Psalm 46:10, which commands, “Cease striving, and know that I am God.” Of course, this doesn’t mean to stop working and just laze around; the wisdom of Proverbs 6 has not been repealed. We are responsible to use the gifts God has given us to do our part in taking care of his people, and that includes being prudent to work to meet our own needs as much as we are able; this is part of the way he provides for us, through the abilities and opportunities he gives us. The point is not to stop working, the point is to stop putting our trust in our own work; it’s to do what God gives us to do and leave the rest up to him.

Now, you might say this is harder in difficult economic times like these, but I’m not really sure that’s true; it’s just a different challenge, that’s all. Right now, we’re most of us anxious about having enough—about being able to pay the bills, keep the house, put food on the table—and we’re driven by fear of going without and losing what we have. When the economy is better, that’s not so much of a question; but when there are more jobs to choose from, we have more opportunity to choose based on what will make us the most money rather than on what is most pleasing to God. Whatever the circumstances, the Devil’s going to try to use them to get us to put our trust in money instead of God.

If we let him, it’s a tragedy, because it makes us less than God wants us to be; and more than that, it’s foolish. As Jesus says, we have every reason to trust God—just look at the way he takes care of the rest of his creation. We try to find security through planning our careers, saving our money, and making investments—all wise things, certainly, but not what we make them out to be; the birds don’t do any of that, but they still have enough to eat. And look at the flowers—they don’t work at all, but they’re still more beautiful than any human being. Why? Because blessing comes from God, and only from God. Our own labors are necessary because God asks them of us, because he gives us work to do as a part of our own growth—he gives us the dignity of responsibility in our own lives, which we need—but their results aren’t truly in our hands; they are in God’s, and God’s alone, as the one who created all things and holds all things together.

This means that all our anxiety is ultimately for nothing, because putting our trust in anything other than God is doomed to fail; whether we rely on him or on the money we have in the bank, he will determine our success either way. All we can accomplish through our mistrustful worrying is to make ourselves sick, take time off our lives, and lose a lot of our enjoyment of them in the process; we can’t do anything to make them better than what God has planned for us, because it’s beyond our ability and the breadth of our understanding. God alone is able to guide us perfectly through the choices we make and the challenges we face, because he alone knows perfectly what we need and what is best for us, he is powerful enough to give us perfectly what we need and what is best for us, and he absolutely desires to do so; we can’t do that, and we’re the worst kind of fools to try, because all we ever manage to do by our own efforts is to get in the way.

What we hear Jesus saying here is what we hear God saying so many places in Scripture: “Just trust me.” Just lay down your anxiety, just lay down your striving, just lay down your frantic efforts to get things for yourself when I’m trying to give you something better. I know what you need, and I’m not going to fail you—I will take care of you, as I always have. Don’t worry about yourself—just put me first, make serving me your top priority, and I’ll provide for you, everything you need to do what I’ve called you to do and be whom I’ve called you to be. Don’t worry about the future—just do what I’ve given you to do right now, care for the people who are before you this moment, and let the future take care of itself, because I’m watching over it, too. Just let go, Jesus tells us, lay down the weight of your life, and let God be God; he’s better at it than we are. Give generously, live freely, and don’t worry about keeping yourself up—trust God to do that. He’s faithful, and he will never let you down. Never.

(Proverbs 19:17; Matthew 6:19-21)

I’m sure you’ve all heard “two kinds of people” jokes—they aren’t up there with knock-knock jokes or light-bulb jokes as a genre, but there are a lot of them around. There are two kinds of waiters in the world—those who can remember what you order, and those who bring you what you order. There are three kinds of people in the world—those who can count, and those who can’t. There are two kinds of people in the world—those who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t. And so on, and so on.

It’s exaggeration for effect, of course, as so much humor is; but when it comes to money, it’s no joke, there basically are two kinds of preachers in the world. On the one hand, there are those who talk about money all the time, usually because they want your money to become their money; of such preachers are media exposés made. And on the other hand, there are those who try to avoid talking about money out of fear of being mistaken for members of the first group.

And through the crack in between falls the gospel. And no, that’s not an overstatement, for effect or anything else. It’s not merely that Jesus talked a lot about money, either, true though that is; that means that if we aren’t willing to talk about money, we wind up shying away from a lot of Jesus’ teaching, which is a bad thing, but that’s not even the biggest concern. There’s something a lot deeper going on here, but we tend to miss it—and unfortunately, those of us in the pulpit all too often make matters worse when we do start talking about stewardship and giving. To understand why Jesus talks so much about money, we need to really dig into what he had to say about it, and so that’s what we’re going to be doing for the next several weeks; because no matter how hard we try, one way or another we will end up talking about money, and if we don’t let Jesus set us straight, we’re going to keep right on starting in all the wrong places.

Perhaps the most popular wrong place is to start from the budget: “We need this much money, so you need to give more.” It’s understandable; I’ve never met a church that couldn’t use more money, and I’ve known a lot that could have done wonderful things with a bigger budget. I’m proud of this congregation and all the ministry we do, and we’re running off of investments to keep most of that going; God has provided for us in some wonderful ways, which I take as a sign that we’re being faithful to do what he wants us to do, but it would be nice to be able to make our budget out of congregational giving, so that we didn’t need to sell stock to keep the operation going. That would give us a lot more flexibility to be creative in reaching out and ministering to our community. But you know, “we want more money” isn’t the main biblical reason God calls us to give.

Beyond that, of course, we can just hammer on giving as a requirement, our duty to God; which at least has the advantage of pointing out that giving is about God, not about the church budget. Unfortunately, it also pitches us headfirst out of gospel and into legalism—and quite frankly, all the way back to paganism, which is all about buying the favor of one’s preferred god or goddess so as to be able to claim favors. What’s more, it turns the whole thing into an exercise in religious manipulation and guilt-tripping, which is pure anti-gospel in its own right.

A far better approach is to talk about giving as part of our grateful response to the work of Christ: it isn’t something we do because we must, it’s something we do because we love Jesus and want to please him. In connection with this, we can also talk about the importance of giving generously for our spiritual growth, and about how that involves more than just money. It’s all true—Jesus calls us to be good stewards of all the gifts he’s given us, our time and abilities as well as our material wealth—and it’s all quite important, and we’ll be spending some time on that later on in this series; but it isn’t the place to begin, because it isn’t the fundamental issue.

The fundamental issue when considering our giving—what we give, how much, and so on—is an issue of worship. That might sound strange, because when we think of worship, we tend to think of formal services and singing and all the things we do here on Sunday mornings; but these are acts of worship, corporate expressions of worship, they aren’t the whole of worship. Indeed, they’re only worship at all if they’re expressive of the deeper reality of our hearts. Worship at its core is about who or what we value most, the people and things that determine our priorities; as Minneapolis pastor Rick Gamache put it, “Worship is my response to what matters most to me.” The original form of the English word is actually “worthship”—it means to ascribe worth to something, to treat something or someone as being of great importance to you. What you worship is what you prioritize, and vice versa; the priorities we set and the choices we make show us and those around us what we truly worship, and they also shape the worship of our hearts.

This is the critical point in this passage. Jesus offers us a practical reason to use our wealth and our abilities to serve him rather than ourselves—in so doing, we’ll earn a reward which is eternal and indestructible rather than one which is temporary and all too easily destroyed—and we’ll talk more about this later on; but he doesn’t stop there. Why is it possible to use earthly things to win heavenly rewards? Because God needs our stuff to carry out his plans? No, because it’s not about our stuff at all: it’s about our hearts. Because while we don’t always put our money where our mouth is, we do consistently put our money where our heart is; and because the more we put our money there, the more it will anchor our heart there. If we put our treasure in this world, we ensure that our heart will be in this world with it; no matter how many times we come on Sunday and sing about how much we love Jesus, our true worship will be of our career, our income, our investments, our possessions, our pleasures, whatever it is we treasure.

There’s a word for that, in Scripture: idolatry. Don’t store up treasure on earth, because in so doing we create idols, false gods on which we set our heart even though they cannot endure and will not save. Where you put your treasure is where your heart will be, so give your treasure to God. It’s not just about the old saw about hearses not pulling U-Hauls, which I understand Dr. Smith used to repeat—this isn’t just a matter of choosing the right investment plan. Rather, it’s about this question: are we truly worshiping Jesus Christ, or is something else guiding and determining our decisions? Because if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, but you don’t give him your money because you have a standard of living you want to maintain, then in reality, your bank balance is Lord. Your money is your treasure, and it’s an idol.

Maybe that’s a new thought to you, since the idea of money as an idol isn’t a common one in the American church. At least, that’s true on the conservative side, where we’re all good capitalists who pretty much regard money as a good thing—and to be clear, Jesus isn’t saying there’s anything wrong with having money. What’s wrong is when money has us, when getting and having and spending and saving is what drives our lives; which is all too common a problem, both for people and for churches, in our consumeristic, materialistic, individualistic culture. We cannot truly worship Jesus, we cannot honestly claim to be his disciples, if our decision-making is mostly based on money.

The fact is, Jesus’ call to let go of money, to let go of building up treasure on earth, is unsettling, as any call to lay down our idols is unsettling; money may not be all that trustworthy, really, but it’s what we’ve been taught to trust, and it works a lot of the time. Jesus came to set us free from idols so that we could love and worship the one true God with a whole and undivided heart, but like any sort of real freedom, it doesn’t come easy. To choose to put our treasures in heaven rather than on earth is to live by faith in a deeper and more radical way than most of us are used to doing, because it means that if God doesn’t come through for us, we’re ruined. But that’s what Jesus asks of us, and as unnerving as it can be, that’s good news, because God truly is faithful; those who put their trust in him will find hardship on the way, but they will never be put to shame, and in the end, their victory is secure, for Christ has already won it. In this is treasure greater than anything we can find in this world; it only remains for us to choose it.