The passage: Do not store up treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal. Store up treasures in heaven, where nothing destroys them and no thief can reach them. For wherever your treasure is, your heart will be there too.
To understand our Lord’s words is the business of life, because it is the main road to understanding The Word himself. To receive him is to receive the Father and so to have Life in ourselves; and that original Life, higher, deeper and simpler than any other, is the business of life.
The Word is that by which we live, namely Jesus himself, and his words show something of him in shadow and suggestion. Any utterance worthy of being called a truth is food for human beings; how much more The Word, who gives no abstract laws of our being but the living relation of soul and body, heart and will, strength and joy, beauty and light, to Him who gave birth to them all. The Son came to be, before our eyes and in our hearts, what he made us for, so that we might see the truth in him and cry out for the living God, who in the highest sense is The Truth: not as understood but as understanding, living, being, doing and creating the truth. “I am the truth,” said our Lord, and only those who are in some measure like him in being the truth can understand the Word. Let us try.
No doubt the Saviour would sometimes have spoken differently had he come to Englishmen instead of Jews. But his lessons would have been the same, for even when asked about a passing matter, he stated the great human principle in it, and that does not change as circumstances change. With the added experience of Christian ages, we should find his words easier to understand than his first hearers did.
What is the force of his For: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”? Its meaning is not obvious on the surface; it must be sought, because it is deep and simple. But it is so complete, and works so directly on the conscience through its poetry, that once understood there is nothing more to say and everything to do.
“Why not lay up treasures on earth?”
“Because there the moth and rust and the thief come.”
“So we would lose them!”
“Yes.”
“Does the Lord then mean the reason is that such treasures are transitory and corruptible?”
“No. He adds a For: ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’”
“Of course the heart will be where the treasure is; but what has that to do with it?”
This: what is with the treasure must fare as the treasure fares. The heart that haunts a treasure-house where moth and rust corrupt will suffer the same ravages and be rusted and moth-eaten itself.
Many a man and woman, fair and flourishing to look at, goes about with a rusty, moth-eaten heart inside that form of strength or beauty.
“But this is only a figure.” True. But is the reality less than the figure, or more? Do the rust and the moth mean more than disease, and the heart more than the heart? It means a deeper heart: your own self, not your body; the self that suffers not pain but misery, whose end is not comfort but blessedness, even ecstasy; the inmost chamber where the divine fountain of your being springs. God regards that heart, though you may never have known it was there, even when its writhing under moth and rust sends a dull pain to the outer heart. If God sees it corroded by cares and riddled by the worms of ambition and greed, that is your heart, for God sees things as they are. One day you will be forced to feel your heart as God sees it, and to know that the cankered thing within you is the centre of your being.
Nor does the lesson apply only to worshippers of Mammon, who give their best energies to accumulating wealth. It applies equally to anyone who worships the transitory: who seeks the praise of men more than the praise of God, who would make a show by wealth, taste, intellect, power, art or any kind of genius, and so gather golden opinions to be treasured in an earthly storehouse.
Nor only to these, but to those whose pleasures are more plainly transitory still, the pleasures of the senses in every direction, lawful or unlawful, if the joy of being is centred in them. The hurt is not that such pleasures are false, like the deceptions of magic; they are real pleasures. Nor is it that they pass and leave a fierce disappointment; that is so much the better. The hurt is that the immortal, the infinite, made in the image of the everlasting God, is housed with the fading and corrupting and clings to them as its good, until it is infected with their diseases. These are more terrible in it in proportion to its higher kind: what is mere decay in the one becomes moral vileness in the other, and what fits the one for the dunghill casts the other into outer darkness. It creeps into a burrow in the earth, and its budded wings wither and drop away, when it should have roamed the open plains and high table-lands, spreading young wings to the sun and strengthening them in further flights until they could bear the God-born into the presence of its Father in Heaven. Therein lies the hurt.
The man whose heart is sound because it haunts the treasure-house of heaven may be tempted of the devil, but he will first be led up of the Spirit into the wilderness.