Treasure In Heaven (Matthew 6:19-21) Series

Treasure in Heaven

Morning Lent Prayer Worship | Week 2: Stripping Away | Day 9

Matthew 6:19-21 (NIV)

INTRODUCTION

I want you to do something with me this morning. I want you to close your eyes for just a moment and think about the one thing in your life that, if you lost it today, would shake you to your core. Not your faith. Not your salvation. I am talking about the thing you check on first when you wake up. The thing you insure, protect, refresh, and return to when life gets hard. The account balance. The house. The career title. The relationship. The reputation you have worked for years to build.

You know what I am talking about.

Now open your eyes, because what just came to mind? That is your treasure.

Church, we are nine days into this Lenten season, and Week 2 has one assignment: stripping away. Self-denial. Surrender. And I need you to understand this morning that you cannot strip away what you have not first identified. You cannot surrender what you refuse to name. So today, before we do anything else, we are going to name it. We are going to sit down at the table of God's Word, open the books, and do a spiritual audit.

Now I know some of you hear the word "audit" and your stomach drops. That is because an audit does not lie. An audit looks at the numbers and tells you exactly where your money went, where your time went, where your energy went. And that is precisely what Jesus is asking us to do in Matthew chapter 6.

We use the word "treasure" and we immediately picture gold coins, bank vaults, a pirate's chest on a sandy island somewhere. But beloved, treasure is not only money. Treasure is whatever you value most. Treasure is whatever gets your first thoughts in the morning and your last worries at night. Treasure is what you sacrifice for without being asked. It is what you defend without thinking twice. It is what you organize your schedule around. For some people, treasure is financial security. For others, it is social status, or the comfort of a certain lifestyle, or the approval of people whose opinions they have allowed to become more important than God's voice. For others still, it is a relationship they are clinging to with both hands because the thought of losing it feels like losing air.

All of that is treasure.

And Jesus, the Son of God, the one who made every atom in the universe, looked at the crowd on that mountainside and said something that was as direct then as it is right now. He said: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin 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.

That is the Word of the Lord. And this morning, through the power of the Holy Spirit, I want to take that Word and press it into every corner of your life.

1. Evaluating Our Earthly Attachments

Let us start with Matthew 6:19. "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal."

I want you to look at that language for a moment, because Jesus was not being poetic for the sake of poetry. He was being precise. Moths, rust, and thieves. Three agents. Three methods. Three certainties.

Moths work silently. You do not hear them coming. You do not see them moving. You fold your best garment and put it in the closet, and when you pull it out months later, it is riddled with holes. The damage was happening the whole time, and you had no idea. That is what time does to earthly treasure. Quietly, invisibly, your investments age, your influence fades, your best years pass. The things you worked so hard to accumulate are deteriorating while you sleep.

Rust works from within. It does not attack from the outside; it starts at the core. And by the time you see rust on the surface, the damage inside is already significant. There is a kind of soul-rust that comes from placing all your hope in things that were never built to carry the weight of your deepest needs. When you ask a job to give you your identity, it starts rusting. When you ask a relationship to give you your worth, it starts rusting. Not because the job or the relationship is bad, but because they were not designed for that load.

And then there are thieves. Thieves do not announce themselves. They do not send a warning. They come suddenly, and they take what you thought was secure. One diagnosis. One economic collapse. One conversation that ends a career. One morning you wake up and something you were certain was permanent is simply gone.