What Do You Treasure?

“Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart’s desires. Commit everything you do to the Lord. Trust him, and he will help you. He will make your innocence radiate like the dawn, and the justice of your cause will shine like the noonday sun.” ‭‭Psalms‬ ‭37:4-6‬ ‭NLT‬‬

Where is your heart? Jesus addressed this issue in Matthew 6:21. “Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be.”‭‭Matthew‬ ‭6:21‬ ‭NLT‬‬ Dealing with the issue of "Treasure" (Money, possessions, valuables) Jesus says that our hearts follow our treasure. What do you treasure? What is most important to you? Give me half an hour to examine your financial expenditures and I'll get a good idea where your priorities are. We all require basic needs (food, shelter, clothing, etc). However, we don't "need" all the "stuff" we have. Americans are consumed with materialism. Many garages are storage units. Our homes are filled with amenities that we lavish upon ourselves. Now there is nothing wrong with having things, but there is something fundamentally wrong with things having us. We must learn the principle that God is the owner of all things. We are the managers of His things. We cannot carry anything we now see or touch into eternity with us. Our hearts need to be focused upon the life to come, not this one. Yes, be a good manager of the things God allows you to use, but let me ask a question. Did God give you what you have or did you presumptively assert that because you had the credit to get it? Another question: If, indeed, God did bless you with something, why does He allow you to handle it? Was it for you to bow before in worship, spend much time trying to memorialize it, or was it to utilize to fulfill His will for your life. Letting God give us wisdom and perspective about all that we have is crucial to our understanding where our heart is. If our hearts are upon Him and we truly understand our mortality, we will sincerely do our best to look at life through God's eyes. When our hearts are His, then we can claim the promise of today's scripture. We can't use this passage as a blanket promise over all that we want. No! God is not trying to spoil us in our own self interest. God wants to bless us when we have a heart that is unilateral with His.  Does God want to bless His children? Absolutely!! However, there are two problems: our sinful nature and our fallen world. God wants us to remember that this current world will one day be no longer. “Since everything around us is going to be destroyed like this, what holy and godly lives you should live, looking forward to the day of God and hurrying it along. On that day, he will set the heavens on fire, and the elements will melt away in the flames. But we are looking forward to the new heavens and new earth he has promised, a world filled with God’s righteousness.” ‭‭2 Peter‬ ‭3:11-13‬ ‭NLT‬‬ With this fact in mind, we must realize that anything we have here is only temporary. How we use it directly impacts the corresponding treasure of our heavenly, eternal home! So, today, let us pray that God will place our hearts in line with His. Let us thank Him for everything we are and have! In return, let's let His Spirit guide us in our proper perspective of everything that our life entails. When this occurs, the richest blessings will become ours, riches that this world cannot afford. The greatest joy we can have in this life is in knowing the God who made us and saves us. Realizing that our lives are under His loving Lordship, we can joy to the fullest measure. Nothing in this world can do that!!