'Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,' therefore, says
Christ, 'lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth
nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and
steal.' If my treasure is in heaven it is secure. And oh! brethren, we
need for our blessedness, we need for our rest, we need for our peace
and joy, to know that the thing which we count best shall never be taken
away from us, and we cannot have that certainty in regard to any
treasure except the treasure that is in God. All outward things which we
say we possess are incompletely possessed, because they remain outside
us. However intertwined with them, we are separate from them, and we are
just so much intertwined with them that the separation from them is
agony, even if it is not death. What we need is to be so incorporated
with, and infused into, what is our treasure, that we are quite sure
that as long as we last it will last, and that nothing can rend it from
us. 'I bear all my goods with me,' said the old heathen. We should be
able to say more than that. I carry all my good in me, because my good
is God, who is in the heavens, and though in the heavens, dwells in the
hearts that love Him. Then in all changes, 'life, or death, or things
present or things to come, height or depth, or any other creature,' we
can afford to smile on, and say: 'You cannot take my wealth from me, for
I am in God, and God is in me.'
Further, if our hearts are in heaven, then heaven will be in our hearts,
and here we shall know the joy and the peace that come from 'sitting in
heavenly places in Christ Jesus,' even whilst on earth. There is no
blessedness, no stable repose, no victorious independence of the buffets
and blows of life, except this, that my heart is lifted above them all,
and, I was going to say, is inhaled and sucked into the life of Jesus
Christ. Then if my heart is where my treasure is, and He is my
treasure,' my life is hid with Christ in God.' If my heart is in heaven,
heaven is in my heart.
Further, my text is a promise as well as a statement of a present fact.
Where your treasure now is there will your whole self one day be. A man
who has by God's grace, through faith and love and the wise use of
things temporal, chosen God his chief good, and possessed in some degree
the good which he has chosen, even Jesus Christ in his heart, that man
bears in himself the pledge and the foretaste of eternal life. So the
old psalmist found out, who lived in a time when that future world was
shrouded in far thicker clouds of darkness than it is to us, for when he
had risen to the height of saying, 'My flesh and my heart faileth, but
God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever,' he immediately
sprang to this assurance--an assurance of faith before it was a fact
certified by Revelation--'Thou wilt guide me by Thy counsel, and
afterwards receive me to glory.' The possession of Christ for our
treasure, which possession always follows on our estimating Him as such,
and desiring to have Him, that possession bears in its bosom the germ of
the assurance that, whatever befalls my physical life, I shall not be
less immortal than my treasure, and that where my heart to-day, by
aspiration and desire and faith and love, has built its nest, thither I
shall follow in His own time. They that have laid up treasure in heaven
will at last be brought to the enjoyment of the treasure that they have
laid up, and to the possession of 'the inheritance that is incorruptible
and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.'