'For where your treasure is, there will your heart be
also.'--MATT. vi. 21.
'Your treasure' is probably not the same as your neighbour's. It is
yours, whether you possess it or not, because you love it. For what our
Lord means here by 'treasure' is not merely money, or material good, but
whatever each man thinks best, that which he most eagerly strives to
attain, that which he most dreads to lose, that which, if he has, he
thinks he will be blessed, that which, if he has it not, he knows he is
discontented.
Now, if that is the meaning of 'treasure,' then this great saying of nay
text is, as a matter of course, true. For what in each case makes the
treasure is precisely the going out of the heart to grapple it, and it
is just because the heart is there that a thing is the treasure.
Now, I need not do more than remind you, I suppose, that in Scripture
'heart' means a great deal more than it does in our modern usage, for we
employ it as an expression for the affections, whereas the Bible takes
it as including the whole inner man. For instance, we read, 'As a man
_thinketh_ in his heart, so is he'; and of 'the thoughts and intents of
the heart.' So then the affections, as with us, but also thoughts,
purposes, volitions, are all included in the word; and as one passage of
Scripture says, 'Out of it are the issues of life.' It is the central
reservoir, the central personality, the indivisible unit of the
thinking, willing, feeling, loving person which I call 'myself.' So what
Christ says is that where a man's treasure lies, not merely his
affections will twine round it, but his whole self will be, as it were,
implicated and intertwisted with it, so as that what befalls it will
befall him.
Now, further, notice that this saying, so obviously true, is introduced
by a 'for,' and that it is the broad basis on which rest the obligation
and the wisdom of the double counsel which has preceded, on the one
hand, the warning against choosing perishable and uncertain good for our
treasure, and mixing ourselves up with that, and on the other the loving
counsel to choose for ourselves the wealth which is perpetual,
unprecarious, and certain.
So I think we may look at these words from a threefold point of view,
and see in them a mirror that will show us ourselves, a dissuasive and a
persuasive. Let us take these three aspects.
I. Here, then, is a mirror that a man may hold up before himself, and
find out something about himself by it.
For, like other general statements of the same sort, you can turn this
saying round about, and take it the other way, and not only say, as the
text says, 'where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,' but,
'where your heart is, there is your treasure.' A man's real god is the
thing that he counts best, and for which he works most earnestly, and
which, as I said, he most longs to have, and trembles to think he will
lose. That is his god, and his treasure, whatever his professions may
be. Where your heart is, there is your treasure.
Now, of course, for the larger part of the lives of all of us, there are
certain lines laid down by our circumstances, our trades, our various
duties, on which the train of our thoughts and efforts must run. But the
question is, When I am set free from the constraint of my daily
avocations and pressing duties, and am at liberty to go as I like, where
do I go? When the weight is taken off the sapling in the nursery garden,
which has been hung on it to turn it into a weeping-tree, its elastic
stem springs to the erect position. Where do I spring to when the
weights are taken off? The mother bird will hover over her nest. Where
her treasure is, there is her maternal instinct. The needle follows the
drawing of the pole-star; the sunflower turns to the sun. 'Being let go,
they went to their own company.' Where do _you_ go? The reins laid upon
the horse's neck, it will trot straight home to its stable; 'the ox
knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib,' and our instincts are
not less sure than theirs. You go 'home' when you are left to
yourselves; where do you go?
We call ourselves Christians. If our treasure is in Christ, our hearts
will turn to Him. And what does that mean? 'Hearts,' as I said, mean
thoughts. Now, can you and I say, 'In the multitude of my thoughts
within me, Thy comforts delight my soul'? Does there come stealing into
my mind often and often the blessed contemplation of my wealth in Jesus
Christ? The river of thought brings down, in its continual flow, much
mire and sand. Does it bring any gold? Do I think about Christ, and find
it to be my refreshment to do so? An old mystic said, 'If I can tell how
often I have thought of God to-day, I have not thought of Him often
enough.' 'Where your treasure is, there will your thoughts be also.'
The heart means love. Where do my affections turn when I am set free?
The heart means the will. Is my will all saturated with, and so made
pliant by, the will and commandment of Jesus Christ? If He is my
treasure, then thoughts, affection, obedience will all turn to Him, and
the current of my being, whatever may be the surface-ripple--ay, or the
surface-storm--will be ever sliding surely, though it may be silently,
towards Himself. Ah! brethren, if we would be honest with ourselves and
look into this mirror, we should have cause to be ashamed, some of us,
of our very profession of being Christians, and all of us to feel that
we have far too much heaped up for ourselves other treasures and
forgotten our true wealth, and we should all have to pray, 'Unite my
heart to fear Thy name.' The Assyrians had a superstition that a demon,
if he saw his own reflection in a mirror, would fly. I think if some of
us professing Christians saw ourselves, as the looking-glass of my text
might give us to see ourselves, we should shudderingly depart from that
self, and seek to have a better self formed within us. 'Where your
treasure is, there will your heart be also.'
II. Now let me ask you to look at this saying, in the connection in
which our Lord adduced it, as being a dissuasive.
He applies it to both branches of His previous advice. He had just said,
'Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth
corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.' These are very
primitive methods of depriving men of their treasures, arguing a
comparatively simple state of society. The moth is that which destroys
wealth in garments, which was a great part of ancient Eastern wealth.
Rust rather means corrosion, or corruption, and applies to the other
great kind of primitive wealth, in food and the stores of the harvest.
And the thieves who dig through the mud wall of the house, and carry
away the owners' little hoard of gold and silver, point also to a
primitive condition of society. But whatever may be the special force of
these different words, they suggest to us this, that all that is here
has its own particular and special enemy which wars against its
permanence. There are _bacteria_ of all sorts, every vegetable has its
own kind. Every growth has to fear the gnawing of some foe. And so every
treasure that I can gather into my heart, excepting one, is threatened
by some kind of danger.
No man can have lived as long in a great commercial community, as some
of us have done, without knowing that there are a great many besides
professional and so-called thieves in it, that take away the gold and
silver. How many instances I can look back upon, of lords of the
exchange and magnates of trade, who carved their names, as they thought,
in imperishable marble on the doors of their warehouses, and then became
bankrupt and fugitive, and were lost sight of. We all know the
uncertainty of riches.
And are the other kinds of treasure that we cleave to more reliable?
Have they not their moths and their rusts? Is it pleasure? Well, I say
nothing about the diseases that fill the bones of many a young man who
flings himself into dissipation; but I remind you of just this one
thing, that all that pleasure tends to become flat, stale, and
unprofitable. That which the poet said of his own class, that it 'begins
in gladness, and thereof cometh in the end despondency and madness,' is
true of every delight of sense, ay! and of more than sense, of taste
and of intellect. As the Book of Proverbs has it, 'the end of that mirth
is heaviness.'
Brethren, the moth and the rust claim as their prey all treasures except
one. Is it love-pure, blessed, soul-filling, soul-resting as it is? Yes,
and on a hundred walls in any city there hangs, and in a thousand hearts
there hangs, that great picture where the feeble form of Love is trying
to repel from entrance into the rose-covered portal of the home the
inevitable and mighty shrouded form of Death. Is it culture? 'Whether
there be tongues they shall cease; whether there be knowledge it shall
vanish away.' The last illuminator and teacher, which is Death,
antiquates and brushes aside, as of no use in the new conditions, most
of the knowledge which men, wisely in a measure, but foolishly if
exclusively, have sought to acquire for themselves here below.
And when the moth and the rust come, and the separating, bony fingers of
the skeleton Death filch away at last your treasure, what about you who
are wrapped up with it, implicated in it; so grown into it, and it into
you, that to wrench you from it opens your veins, and you bleed to
death? There is a pathetic inscription in one of the rural churches of
this country, in which two parents record the death of their only child,
and add, 'All our hopes were in this frail bark, and the shipwreck is
total.' I have heard of a man that might have been saved from a
foundering ship, but he lashed his money-bags round him, and he sank
along with them. 'Where your treasure is, there will your heart be
also,' pierced by all the wounds, gnawed by all the moths, rotted by all
the corruption that affects it, and when the thief, the last great thief
of all, comes, you will only have to say, 'They have taken away my
gods, and what have I more?' And the answer out of the waste places of
an echoing universe will be, 'Nothing! Nothing!'