Reading 12
Where your treasure is
The reading
Matthew 6:19-24
Don’t lay up treasures for yourselves on the earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consume, and where thieves don’t break through and steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is evil, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t serve both God and Mammon.
The companions
Psalm 49:16-20
Don’t be afraid when a man is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased; for when he dies he will carry nothing away. His glory won’t descend after him. Though while he lived he blessed his soul, and men praise you when you do well for yourself, he shall go to the generation of his fathers. They shall never see the light. A man who has riches without understanding, is like the animals that perish.
Ecclesiastes 5:10-15 (selected)
He who loves silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he who loves abundance, with increase: this also is vanity. The sleep of a laboring man is sweet, whether he eats little or much; but the abundance of the rich will not allow him to sleep. There is a grievous evil which I have seen under the sun: wealth kept by its owner to his harm. As he came out of his mother’s womb, naked shall he go again as he came, and shall take nothing for his labor, which he may carry away in his hand.
The note
Three pictures, one argument. Storage fails first: moth, rust, theft. Everything you accumulate has a decay path and he names three of them.
The eye is the aperture. What you let in sets the light level for the whole body, and a bad aperture does not give you a dim picture. It gives you darkness you mistake for sight. That is the frightening one.
Then employment. Two masters, and the claim is not that serving both is difficult. It is that it does not work. One of them ends up despised.
The line to stay with is the direction of cause. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Not: love the right things and your spending will follow. The heart follows the deposits.
Which means you can find out what you actually love by reading where things went, and that record is already written down without your help.
This week
Open your bank statement and your screen time report for the last month and read them as one document. Between them they record where your hours and your money actually went, which the passage says is where your heart already is. Do not make a budget. Do not resolve anything.
Read the two lists and say out loud what they show. Most people find one line they did not expect and cannot defend. Note it. That is enough for one week.
Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain).
This page is made for paper too: print it and the reading prints clean, ready for the table.