For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Matthew 6:21 (NIV)After fasting, Jesus turns to a teaching on money and desire that is among the most direct in the entire sermon. He is not primarily making an argument about financial management. He is making an argument about the heart. Where your treasure is, he says, your heart has already gone. Not will go. Has gone. The direction of desire is not something you can separate from the object it has settled on. And you cannot serve two masters. That sentence has no exceptions.
Read Matthew 6:16–24 before you work through today. The fasting instruction follows the same structure as giving and prayer: not if you fast but when, and the warning about performing it for an audience. Then Jesus moves to treasure and where it is stored. And then the eye as the lamp of the body. And then the two masters. These are not unconnected topics. They are all addressing the same underlying question: what are you actually living for?
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
When you fast, do not look sombre as the hypocrites do. The public fast was a recognisable practice in first-century Judaism. If you were fasting as an act of spiritual devotion, you might let it show: the unwashed face, the dishevelled appearance, the visible signs of abstinence. The audience would recognise the signals and respond with the appropriate reverence for the person's discipline.
Jesus says: wash your face. Anoint your head. Look normal. The only one who needs to know you are fasting is the Father. The fast that is invisible to everyone except God is the fast that is actually between you and God. And it has the same dynamic as the hidden prayer and the anonymous giving: when the audience is removed, you discover whether you actually wanted the practice or just the credit for it.
Do not store up treasures on earth. Moths eat fabric, vermin corrupt grain, thieves steal. Everything earth can offer is subject to decay and loss. Not as a moralistic warning about materialism, but as a simple description of what earthly things are: temporary, vulnerable, non-transferable. You cannot take them into the next age. You cannot hold them against the kind of loss that eventually comes to everything.
Store up treasures in heaven. Jesus does not explain precisely what this means, which has produced a great deal of speculation. What is clear from the context is that it means orienting your life around what lasts, around what has Kingdom value, around what contributes to the age that does not end rather than the age that does. The acts of generosity, faithfulness, love, and justice that are done for God rather than for the watching crowd are stored somewhere that moths cannot reach.
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. This is stated as a fact, not a warning. Jesus is not saying: be careful or your heart will follow your treasure. He is saying it already has. The heart does not choose its direction independently of its investments. What you give your resources to, your time and attention and money and energy, that is where your heart currently lives. To find out where your heart is, look at where you actually invest. The heart follows the treasure, not the other way around.
The eye is the lamp of the body. This image is often disconnected from its context, but it sits between the treasure teaching and the two masters teaching for a reason. In the ancient understanding of vision, the eye was not a passive receiver of light. It was understood to project something outward, to engage actively with what it saw. The good eye, the generous eye (the word halos can mean both good and single, and the Aramaic word it likely translates meant generous), illuminates the whole body. The bad eye, the greedy or stingy eye, fills the body with darkness.
What you look at with desire, what you set your gaze on, shapes the whole of your interior life. If you look at the world through the eye of generosity and grace, the whole body lives in light. If you look at the world through the eye of acquisitiveness and scarcity, the whole body is in darkness. And the darkness of someone who thinks they are in the light is particularly dangerous, because they have no category for their own blindness.
No one can serve two masters. This sentence has no escape clause. Jesus is not saying it is difficult or inadvisable to serve two masters. He is saying it is impossible. A slave belonged to one master. That is what belonging meant. If someone held a claim on your service, it could not be divided.
You cannot serve both God and money. The Greek word is mammon, a term for wealth and material possessions that carried a sense of trust and reliance, the thing you lean on when you need security. Jesus is not saying money is evil. He is saying that money as the thing you lean on, money as your security and your hope and your future, is a master. And if it is your master, God is not. The two cannot simultaneously hold that position.
The test is not how much money you have. It is what you do with your interior life when the money is threatened. What you feel when the financial news is bad. Whether your sense of security rises and falls with your bank balance or with the character of God. That is where you discover which master you are actually serving.
"Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The heart does not choose first and then invest. It invests and the heart follows. To find where you actually live, look at where you put what you have. That is where your heart is right now."
Jesus says the heart follows the treasure. So follow the treasure backward to find the heart. Look at the last month of your calendar and your bank statement or spending record. Where have you actually invested your time and your money? Not where you wish you had. Where you actually did.
Write three observations about what that reveals about where your heart currently lives. Not as a guilt exercise. As an honest assessment. Then bring one specific shift to God: one place where you want to redirect your investment so your heart can follow into a different place. Make it concrete. Make it soon.
Father, I have followed my treasure and found my heart. It is not always where I thought it was. The calendar and the spending tell a story that my stated priorities do not always match, and I am bringing that honestly to You today rather than dressing it up.
I want to be a person whose treasure is stored in what does not decay. Whose security rises and falls with Your character rather than my bank balance. Who looks at the world through generosity rather than scarcity. I cannot get there by deciding to feel differently. I have to invest differently first, and let my heart follow.
Show me the one investment to redirect. The one place where I can move my treasure toward what lasts and let my heart follow it there. Not a complete overhaul. One step. One real movement of my actual resources toward what You are after. I will do that. Tell me where. In Jesus' name, Amen.
Working through this series? Get The Cracked Vessel in your inbox so you never miss a day.
Subscribe Free →