Laying up Treasure in heaven.

(Matthew 6: 22-24)

The Lamp of the Body.

What Jesus has been teaching here is about how if you invest your “treasure”, in the right place, your heart’s will follow. Get your priorities straight and you will get rewarded with what really matters, in this life and in heaven. This is about the posture of your heart. Which is why he says in verse 22.

22 “The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

(Matthew 6: 22-23)

The 1st illustration is about the eye and the second which will follow later is in a couple of verses will be about what will happen if we try to serve two masters. 24 where he will say, no one can serve 2 masters. The second illustration we will look at in the next episode.

I’ve quoted this time from the New King James Version, and it says, “the lamp of the body is the eye”, therefore if the the eye is good the whole body is enlightened, and then he goes on to talk about a bad eye. In the original King James Version this was translated as, “when the eye is single/singular”. When it is synoptical, (Like the Gospels themselves) when it has a single vision is a better translation. The original word that's translated, “good” actually means single focused. Focused on one thing. It’s talking about have a singular focus, focused on one thing. One thing commentators grappling with what this means have come up with such phrases as, devoted to one purpose, having undivided loyalty, in other words to focus on God free from distortion from other issues.

That is really drawn out for us in the next illustration about the fact that you can't serve God and mammon. Let me put it like this, have you ever heard the song that say’s, “I only have eyes for you”. That's what this is talking about. Jesus is describing someone who only has eyes for God. They have a single focus and that single focus is the highest form of devotion. Our focus should be on the eternal values of God, treasure in heaven or as Paul says in Colossians described it, it is about “setting your affections on things above”. Being focused on the Lord, focused on doing his will, and doing his work as best you can discern it.

The next words out of Jesus mouth ask us to envision the eye as the lamp of the body. This is highly figurative language but if the eye is single and its focused the whole person is spiritually illuminated. That means that if you got this thing, He is talking about straight, then you got everything including life straight. If you have that type of focused perspective, then. things fall in place. Your priorities are right you can see where you are, and you have light to help you see where you are going. He says you need a single eye that focuses on eternal values, and on the Lord and that gives you a proper perspective on life. On the other hand, let's suppose you’re in darkness then the light that God places in you enables you to get your eye focused and fixed on something else.

If your living in darkness then you don't know where you are you don't know where you're going to, you can't see life in its proper perspective. You need to be careful because it is highly likely you are going to stumble into something or trip over something. Imagine being in a darkroom and having a lamp, when you light the lamp you can find the door and with that single lamp can navigate you way through without bumping into something or tripping over something. You can’t navigate the room if you turn off the lamp and you're in total darkness. You’re back to constantly stumbling and tripping.  That's what's true spiritually does it helps you see thing straight. Jesus says if you get this straight in this way, if you're focusing and you have a fixed vision on the Lord and the eternal stuff, you can avoid the traps. Keep on the straight and avoid the bunkers on a gold course of life, or if you don’t mind me mixing my metaphors you can keep you out of the quicksand, the mirey clay of life, because you can see where you're going.

There is another side to the coin that Jesus is presenting here, and that is, if you don't get this straight, you’ll mess up, and you'll mess up big time and your whole body will be left stumbling in darkness. So that was his first symbolic illustration. The Eye is the lamp of the body, where we focus our attention will either lead us into light or darkness.

You Can’t Serve Two Masters

The second illustration comes from the common experience of many people in those days, that of slavery. Verse 24.

No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

(Matthew 6: 24)

This verse captures what this whole section has been about. That is, you need to be loyal you need to love the one master who is the focus of your singular attention. Because if you have two you can't love and serve both. You can't serve (the word means to be a slave of) two masters. It can't be done. You can't serve mammon which means the pursuit of wealth, riches. You can't serve money and you can't serve God at the same time; it cannot be done. A slave can’t have two masters, why not, because the essence of being a slave is ownership, total indebted servitude. You are owned by one master, so Jesus says you can't kid yourself and think well I'm going to serve money sometime and then the Lord at other times, no, you got to decide who gets the priority you got to decide whose first.

Commentators who have grappled with this talk about  having undivided devotion and undivided loyalty in that you are giving yourself totally to one person. It an impossible situation to become a slave to two masters. If that were the case, we would soon learn that he cannot respond to both of their demands, eventually maybe even immediately we will disrespect one and serve the other. We will by nature become devoted to one and despise the other.

In near eastern thought the concept of hate and love had little to do with emotion and feeling, the way we look at it today. At that time they tended to have a simple view of such things by saying these thing we signalled by focusing on what we people where devoted to, in other words what priorities they set. In other words, if a person has split loyalties and tries to focus his attention on two masters, he will eventually have to turn his back on one of them. The demand of the job of servant makes it impossible to honour both. You can't do the job of a slave and have two masters; it simply cannot be done. As someone once said can't dance to the music of two orchestras at the same time.

We all serve something, as Bob Dylan wrote, “You Got to serve somebody”. Well maybe we should stop and ask ourselves what you serve.  The answer is it is the thing that currently demands your time, and determines your priorities, and dictates how you spend your time and resources is the thing that you serve.

Jesus says, you can't do both, you cannot serve God and something else He has to be first. What a radical life changing statement that has the potential to be. If this is going to be the way you live, the internal values have to take priority. And Jesus is saying that you should make the decision to switch you focus, switch you attention to from lay up treasure for yourself treasure on earth, and your new singular focus should be on laying up for yourself treasure in heaven.  As a bonus the added benefit of living that way is revealed to be something that is permanent, and nothing can destroy it. That is the only way you can have undivided love and loyalty to God, and that's the bottom line in verse 24, is to recognise, “You cannot serve both God and money”, That's the point. If we value that which is eternal, we must choose to serve God. If we value that which is temporal we will choose to serve money. 

This passage is nothing less and one of the most powerful appeals that I know of as to why you should give yourself and your life unreservedly in total devotion and service to God. Because if you pile it up down here, it's going to go up in smoke later anyway. It is only that which is done for the Glory of God that will last. We need to be jerked into thinking about some eternal realities occasionally, and this verse does that. Otherwise, we fritter away and waste our time rather than use it to invest in building the Kingdom of God.  All of this adds up to the fact that if you are doing anything else the reality is that not only can you not take it with you, but it all gets burnt on the bonfire of the vanities.

Two Illustrations for Two Illustrations.

Alright let me conclude by giving you a couple of illustrations. There's an ancient Talmudic legend about 3 merchants who were crossing a desert one moonless night and suddenly they were startled by a voice that came out of the darkness and commanded them to pick up stones as they went. They were to journey as far as possible during the night before they stopped in the morning.

The were told that when daybreak came, they could open their bags and see what they had gathered. Then the voice said, they would be both happy and sad at the same time. So, without hesitation they went on their way picking up the stones in their sacks as they went, and they continued on their way. As the progressed the bags got heavier, and their burden increased.

When they stopped the next morning, they found their bags had precious jewels in them. Then they understood what the voice had meant when he said you will be both happy and sad.  They were glad because of the riches that they had picked up and they were sorrowful that they hadn't collected more.

I've often thought of this in terms of myself and I've often thought of this in terms of being a Christian. The thing we pick up can often seem a burden, but I think we're going to stand before the Lord and be embarrassed and we didn't spend more time picking up the burdens of serving other people and serving God more . I think Jesus is telling us something, those who believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, need to give this very serious attention, because he knows something, and he is trying to tell us this is what we need to be doing. Let me finish with an illustration from Victorian times, it seems a little cruel by today’s standards, but it makes a point well. There is the story told of a man who lived in the 19th century and lived in the City of Bristol (which is on the Southwest coast of England) and his wife decided to get a cat.  She loved that cat, but the man detested the cat, he said it made him feel ill, (maybe today we would recognise he was allergic to it) Anyway he said that she should get rid of it. But she said she was going to keep the cat, no matter what he said. One day she went out of town he put the cat in a bag with some rocks and he dumped it in the Avon River.

When she returned and found her cat missing, she was overwhelmed with grief, but her husband told her, “I know how much that cat meant to you I'm going to put an ad in the paper and offer £5 reward to anyone who will return that cat to you”. Not surprisingly the cat didn't show up and the man said, I know how upset you are so I’m going to put another add in the paper and I'm going to increase their reward to £10. A friend of the man saw the ad and said you must be mad, there's not a cat on the earth worth £10. The husband replied if you knew what I knew you would know I could afford to be generous.

To flip that idea and look at the other side of metaphorical coin so to speak. I think if we had an inkling of an idea, and we had just a glimpse of how this idea could change our lives, and the blessing that await us, we could afford to be generous, and we would radically re-prioritise the way we lived our lives from this day forward.