Matthew chapter 6 verses 19 through 24, these are God's words. Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in 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 good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness! No one can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon. So far the reading of God's inspired and inerrant word. Dear children, it is very important for us that whether in our family worship times or in your secret worship times, that those be the times when you are doing the great thing in your life, the main thing in your life, the thing that all the other things serve. So that when you come out of your worship time into your work time, it is for the purpose of serving and knowing and pleasing and being sustained by and honoring the God who made you, the God who redeemed you, that He would be your delight in all of those things, that His glory would be your goal in all of those things, that He would be your strength and your hope in all of those things. We are those who do many things, but you can only really ultimately treasure one thing. We'll see that especially in the last part in verse 24, which talks about the two masters and the mammon and so forth. But coming out then of the instruction about our works of mercy and praying and fasting, there has been these two possible rewards. And now the Lord is reminding us that you can either have one or the other. You cannot aim at both. You cannot aim to be seen by men and aim to have God himself as your reward. so that the reward that you have in the secret place, and remember that we've heard throughout that the secret place is not just the closet, although the closet can be good training for focusing on the secret place. The secret place is the heart, the conversation between your soul and God, the interaction between you and your heart and your soul and God, something that membership in our family, and your interaction with us, and your listening to me, and your participation externally in the congregational work, none of these are necessarily indicators of what is going on between your soul and God, that you must deal in your heart, in your soul, in that place where only God has access. You must deal between you and God, and you must find Him your treasure. You must lay up for yourself, as it were, then, treasure in heaven. Everything else, everything else is going to ultimately be lost. And the praise of men is lost very quickly. The admiration of men is lost very quickly. People are fickle. They will turn on you. in quite a moment, they will turn to some new thing. And if they don't turn on you, they will just forget you, which can also end up being very hurtful and very painful if you have put a lot of stock in what they think about you and how they feel about you. their interaction towards you. And so this, truly they have the reward, truly they have the reward, truly they have the reward, has been about a reward that is not very good at all. And even if you happen to be one of those ultra rare cases who are esteemed throughout your earthly life, you're quickly forgotten. as soon as you pass from this world. But there are all sorts of things that we are tempted to invest our lives in, to spend our time in trying to attain and planning how to obtain first. We spend our thoughts and obsess about in our thoughts and in our hearts. that we desire and we think that we will really feel fulfilled in life if we attain to that thing. And even in the pursuit of those things, you attain to it, then it's not so satisfying as you thought it would be, which, of course, is by design. You weren't created for any earthly things. You were created for the Creator. And so those who go after that which this world, which can be obtained in the creation, find themselves continually unsatisfied, and even that which you have is taken from you while you live. So that, you know, that which was very rare in their days, it was very difficult to obtain very fine clothing. And yet God had so designed his creation that the larva of tiny creatures and insects, moths, would eat up the finest clothes in the world. They didn't care if it was purple silk. In fact, maybe they thought purple silk was a special dainty. And so moths would eat some of the most valuable things they had. And then there's the rust. And the word here is for any kind of corrosion or degradation, not just of metals that are being oxidized. And of course, much more than just iron, which could be oxidized. but any sort of degradation, wood that decays over time, even stores of grain that go stale or mold or any sort of thing that a man might store up that corrodes or that a man might build that corrodes over time. And then if he has something that does not corrode, especially of course, you know, the precious metals that do not oxidize like gold, in particular, or jewels that are not metals, but of course they don't corrode, gemstones. those things become the special targets of the last thing mentioned in the illustration in verse 20, the thieves. That's what the thieves are coming after. And so it all may be taken from you in just the providence of this life, and it will all be taken from you at the conclusion of this life. 1 Timothy 6 says, it is sure that you brought nothing into this world and you will bring nothing out of it. And so there's this dreadful folly in having our hearts and minds consumed with earthly things. But I think when we ask ourselves, what do I spend my thoughts on? What am I desiring? What am I aiming at in life? But what are the things that thrill me to think about obtaining and grieve me to think about failing to obtain or losing? We must humiliate ourselves before God and admit that there is way too much of this laying up for ourselves, treasures on earth, and not nearly enough. of laying up for ourselves treasures in heaven. We can even think about the things that our thoughts are spent on and the things that come out of our mouths. If we are not speaking much of Christ and much of the Lord and much of His goodness, and His power and His mercy, His salvation, His justice, His truth. But if we speak much of our own, if our speech to others is much concerned with advancing particular political opinions rather than advancing the knowledge of God and Christ, the spread of the gospel, the sanctification of believers and the building up of believers into Him, which building up may form particular political opinions. But there's a difference, isn't there? Which one is the main thing in our thoughts? Which one is the main thing in our interactions? And so there's this great difference between the treasure that is in earth and the treasure that is in heaven. Now we've seen already in the first half or so of this chapter that the treasure that is in heaven, the reward, that is in heaven is God himself. He is the reward that we have in secret. And the amazing thing is that someone who is on the earth can have a reward in secret that is actually kept in heaven. And so we can have delight in God himself and we can have increasing knowledge of him, increasing desire of him, fellowship with him. We can have increasing conformity to him. All of these things you will have in glory. These are the things that are promised to us when we enter heaven, when a believer departs from this life, that he would be made perfect in holiness and that he would enjoy this new sinless estate that he would be increased to this perfectly accurate and yet ever-increasing knowledge of God and enjoyment of God, that we would have this ever-increasing capacity for enjoying him, so that even though we enjoy him fully, we will enjoy him increasingly, because we're still finite and our capacity can be increased. Those, of course, who start with a greater capacity will have an ever-increasing capacity that is greater than the ever-increasing capacity that they might otherwise have had. So there's actual difference in reward. There are those in glory whose rewards are greater than others. And so there really is a laying up of treasure That is, in heaven, as you spend time understanding God and growing in your walking with Him and enjoying Him and loving Him, as you're putting sin to death and enjoying an increasing absence of sin and overcoming of the evil one, like we heard in 1 John 2 with that which youths should count as precious and valuable. in 1 John 2, 12 to 14 yesterday. All of these things are treasures which belong to the reward that we have in God himself, the reward that we will have in heaven. And the amazing thing is that we can already begin enjoying that reward now. Because our communion with God, our adoption by the Father, our union with the Son, our being indwelt by the Spirit means that treasure that is in heaven does not mean treasure that is exclusively future. Because we have in Jesus Christ the triune God himself already. And so we're already investing in the heaven market, as it were. You know that for your future care and hopefully your children's children's future care and so forth we are careful with how we invest even the earthly things that God has given us which are are not bad and will be useful for their service of the Lord, your service of the Lord, your ability to walk with Him in different ways as things must not be an end to themselves, but we're very careful of what we invest in. Could you imagine if there was like an ETF, an electronically traded fund where you could invest in heaven? It would be a no-brainer where we invested our time and our energy, our thoughts, our affections, our desires, and so forth. So lay up your treasure in heaven. And as you do so, you'll find that your heart follows, that that at which you aim is going to direct how you think and how you feel, how you process things, how you decide what to do, along the way, like someone who is in a sort of wooded area that you could easily get lost in, but it's not too thick. And there's a building in the distance or a mountain in the distance, even better, that is very, very tall. And the way that you know that you will keep going in the right direction is not by watching your feet and looking around in the woods, which could be very confusing and you would have this wiggly and wayward and maybe even going around in circles and ending up in the same place again and getting lost. But if you had that great thing that you were going toward, Then it would keep your your mind and your heart your life Moving towards that thing and you would make this direct progress towards it. Well where your treasure is there will your heart be. God actually uses this prioritizing of him and of what we have just been describing as heavenly treasure as that which rightly orders all of the thoughts and all of the feelings and all of the desires along the way in your life so that the way not to live a confusing, spinning your wheels, going around in circles life, is to keep your eye, keep the direction of your heart on Him Himself, for which purpose He has blessed us, especially with this instruction for the morning and the evening worship and the Lord's day and the public worship and the Lord's day and the morning and evening secret and family worship. These are ways by which we keep returning our focus. We come back to that which is the great treasure, even though we have very imperfectly treasured Him and all that is connected with Him, but we keep coming back so that where our treasure is, there will our heart be. Your treasure shapes your heart. We sometimes think that our heart shapes our treasure. Praise God that that's not true because that our remaining sinfulness, our remaining fleshliness would be a deal breaker for us. We would just be stuck treasuring earthly things because our corrupted hearts would keep shaping our treasure. But it's not your heart that shapes your treasure, it's your treasure that shapes your heart. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. And so God continually uses His worship to direct our attention to Him, and He uses then His worship as a means of grace. This is one of the many passages that teaches us and reminds us to use the means of God's grace that He has provided for us. that God in his grace is the one who changes our hearts, that there is strength and life in God, especially in Christ and our union with him, especially in the work of the Holy Spirit and applying Christ to us for the formation, the shaping, the growing, the purifying, the healing, the strengthening of our hearts towards God. And here he says, the great thing, or one of the great things that he is doing by the Spirit's use of the means of grace, one of the things that we should be aiming at as we attend upon the means of grace and walking with the Lord. is that he would continue to form our hearts and shape our hearts. Now, this treasuring God is then described as the eye. It says the lamp of the body is the eye. And so he's describing very much what we do with our earthly being, our earthly self here by the heavenly-mindedness, or to use something a little closer to the organ that's in the illustration here, our heavenly viewpoint, our setting our minds on things above, to use the apostles' word from Colossians. And he describes now our earthly self. The word body here is not precisely the same as the word for corpse that that we had a couple weeks ago in Romans 12 to offer our body as living sacrifice. This one does include, very intentionally, the physical, but it's the self more generally considered, including the body and the soul. but our self that is especially functioning in and interacting with the earth. And now he describes the self as a room and the room has a lamp in it. Now, if the lamp is not good, if it is not sound, if it is not properly singly serving its purpose, That's the idea behind this word for good, which is not the ordinary word for good. Functioning properly according to its design is the idea here. And in their case, if the lamp didn't have the right kind of fuel, if the oil in it was dirty, or if there wasn't enough, or there's something wrong with the wick, or Perhaps it was a lamp with a glass over it and the glass is smudged or smoked and flickering. That would not be a good lamp. A good lamp would have everything in order and it would shed light upon the whole room. And so here he's taking the treasuring of God, the having the whole of our life governed and flowing out of our soul's conversation with God and interaction with him. And especially here, interaction with him that is not figments of our imagination or primarily a function of rising and falling feelings, but actual interaction with the God who has revealed himself to us in the Bible. knowing His Word, knowing the Scriptures as His Word to us, and interacting with Him who has revealed Himself in the Scriptures, actually crying out to Him and lifting up our heart to Him in continual prayer, and of course also set times of prayer. And so this having the treasuring of God himself in the secret place and that the eye then being the lamp of the body, as it were, your whole body, he says, will be full of light. That in a room where the lamp, and we know he's picking up now from an earlier illustration where the lamp is on its stand and it's got the mirror behind it and it's been placed for that purpose. It's gonna fill your entire body with light. If you get God as your reward and depending upon him and being devoted to him and delighting in him, if you get that correct, it is going to have this pervasive permeating effect on the whole rest of your life, where you will be filled with light. And of course, someone who is filled with light, what do they do? They also shine, don't they? And so he's really now giving us the key to all the way back in chapter five, to shining where God has put you, is having God himself as your reward in the secret place of the heart and having your mind set upon him who is in heaven, which will not only order the whole rest of your life, but it will make you one by whom others enjoy the light of the Lord or may receive or see the light of the Lord. However, There are those who think that they have light, but their eye, their so-called light is darkness. So he says, if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. We say, of course, that's true. You know, all those without the biblical worldview, they are getting everything wrong. Well, many people who speak that way think that they have light. But the idea of this sole conversation with God and depending upon him and being devoted to him and delighting in him, that all just sounds like spiritualized rubbish. They'll even say, they'll refer to biblical piety as pietism. And so the same sort of person who would say, yes, all those people's eye is bad. They are full of darkness. They do not have the biblical worldview like I do. They think they have light in them. So he says, if therefore the light that is in you, and you know, Greek doesn't have air quotes, but you can tell that that's the idea that's indicated here. If therefore the quote unquote light that is in you is darkness. How great is the darkness? Here's someone who thinks he has a biblical worldview, but he does not have the treasuring God and treasuring that which is eternal way of thinking, way of life. And so he's actually in greater darkness than the one who doesn't have light or doesn't think he has light because he thinks he has light, but he's wrong. It's like a blind person hallucinating an idea of the room, but the room is still full of darkness. And so he concludes the passage by reminding us that you can't choose both at once. You can't choose both at once. You can only be a slave of one master at a time. And it is the word for slaving. It's not from the root for service, from which we get the word for deacon or the corresponding verb. It is the word for slave. Actually, it's the corresponding verb to the word for slave. that is in verse 24 twice. No one can slave for two masters. You cannot slave for God and mammon. And the word mammon here had come by this time generally to mean riches or wealth, but originally it means anything that you place your confidence in, or if we may use this helpful word that combines the idea of that confidence and wealth, and the treasures in verses 19 through 21, anything that you put the stock of your life in. And so you can only put the stock of your life in God. You can only have God as your wealth. You can only have God as your confidence. You can only have God as your hope. Because anything else that you are aiming at with your life, and especially that you are hoping in and resting upon is going to become a master and you will be its slave. And you can only be the slave of one master at a time. Perhaps an employer, you could serve multiple employers. You're off the clock at some point. And so you are, when you're in the service of the one, you serve the one's interest. When you're in the service of the other, you serve the other's interest. But a slave always serves his master's interest. Even if he's loaned out to another, he is serving the other for the sake of his master. And so that which you put your confidence in in life is going to determine who your master is, whose slave you are. And if it's yourself, it can't be God. If it's yourself, then you're deceived because you are going to be aiming at and desiring something else for yourself. other than God, and that will be your master, no matter how free or independent you think you are. As it says, no one can serve two masters, either he will hate the one and love the other. Just as we heard in James chapter 4, the love of the world is enmity with God. And so if you live in love with anything, if you live out of love for anything other than God, you ultimately hate God. You cannot say, I live, you cannot have politics be your life, or wealth be your life, or influence be your life, or the praise of men be your life, or the affection of particular individuals be your life. If any of those things are your life, then you will ultimately hate God. But if you are loyal to God, then you must despise everything else. This doesn't mean be hateful towards everything else, but it all must be put in its place. You consider it as of comparably infinitesimal value because of the infinite value of God himself. And so you're going to have decisions in life, sometimes it's even big ones. If we were really following this, it would be much more common for a Christian to have a choice between two jobs and not have wealth or advancement be the primary consideration. The primary consideration would be, will it be near a faithful church? Will it enable me to minister in my family well? Are there opportunities there for serving the Lord? Is the work that I would be doing How would it be doing lasting and biblical good to others? And maybe even in an earthly way, but the idea is ordered under God. And yet you have people who choose a job that makes more money than they need and advances them, so-called in their career. You know, whatever that means, your title is also going to perish with you when you go to your grave. But men go after things like that, where it's going to have a great cost in the sort of church that they can attend, and the time that they can spend with their family, and in the heavenly mindedness that they are able to maintain, and the kind of work that they're going to be doing, and so forth. And so may the Lord give you, my dear family, Bit by bit, morning by morning, evening by evening, Lord's Day by Lord's Day, to treasure Him who sees in secret, to treasure God as your reward and the things that are then connected with Him growing in your understanding of scripture, growing in the accuracy and the richness of your theology, your doctrine. growing in the killing of sin and the enjoyment of holiness, growing in your desire for the Lord and your satisfaction in Him, and all of these things that are part of the reward of heaven, because God is the reward of heaven, and with God is your reward. May He give you to live well even now upon the earth. Amen, let's pray. Our gracious God and our Heavenly Father, we thank you and praise you for the perfection of your word. Thank you for giving us your Son, our Lord Jesus, to be our prophet, both in all of the words of scripture. which he has given by his Spirit, carrying the prophets along as they wrote, and also in these words that he spoke when preaching to his disciples. And we know, Lord, that just having the words written on the page or sounded in our ears cannot give us this changed heart, this treasuring of you, this good eye that we have been hearing about, but your spirit using these words, writing the truths upon our hearts, making your word to abide in us. He is the one who gives us these things. And so we pray for that ministry of your spirit in us and to us. We ask in Jesus name, amen.