Empty-handed

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Last week a friend of mine suffered a heart attack. Even without all the modern technology at the doctors' disposal, they would have known where to find her heart as they worked to repair the damage.

It's not always so easy to find a believer's spiritual heart.

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matthew 6:19-21, NIV).

As the Fall approaches, the last flurry of garage sales appear. In the Spring the junk collected over the winter is displayed in the hopes that it might be someone's treasure. In the Fall, the stuff accumulated over the summer heads to the curb with the expectation that others will haul it away before its owners need to come up with a creative way to store it in an already crowded basement or garage. Suddenly what was a treasure now isn't, and our hearts have moved on to crave other things to take the place of what was once so important that we couldn't live without.

Debt hovers over the heads of most people in this country. What we thought we needed, what we possess because it was important at the time, now possesses us. We had to have it, and it now has us by the short hairs.

Many people are saying goodbye to children going off to school. It's a painful process—after the first experience of leaving home, I forbade my parents to go any further with me than the front door of their home! Our treasure is leaving and the world has changed. We can't hang onto them anymore.

And so the warning from Scripture. What we treasure reveals where our heart is and if we want what is most valuable and what will never become old, useless, or move away from our protective care, we need to focus on building our live around what is eternal—His kingdom, His righteousness (6:33).

It's not easy because our need quickly becomes greed, our want slips into wantonness as we put other things and other people in the place that God and His will need to occupy in our lives.

Matthew says that we can't serve two masters. He specifically mentions money, but we can easily expand that to include whatever represents "wealth" to us. We have to make a choice between the eternal and the temporal. To try to balance the two is impossible: they pull in two different directions. To try to keep them both as the focus of our lives in to invite heartbreak. We can be assured that the temporal will be lost to us. But how much more sorrow comes when we realize that we we are about to enter etenity empty-handed as well.