Where is our treasure?

Hi everyone, glad to be back after the Christmas break and hoping that you all had a Christmas which was good for all the best reasons; including presents but especially full of the Lord.
God willing this year we will all grow in faith and learn to love the Lord more and more!

Here's the first thought for the new year...
In Luke, Matthew and Mark, there is a story about a rich man who comes to Jesus and asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life. After establishing that he had been a keeper of several commandments all his life, Jesus tells him that he still lacks one thing; he tells him to go and sell everything he has and give to the poor and then he will have ‘treasure in heaven’.

We can find ourselves in exactly the same position as this man, when we desperately want eternal life. We want to know that God will look with favour upon us rather than with anger; we feel our own sin, our own failings and our need of God. All these things are wonderful things to feel a need for, because God wants broken and humble hearts to come to him and he's promised not to turn any away, but then the Lord sets out the true picture before us; he says, ‘you want my treasure, but you’ve got your own treasure and you can’t get mine without giving up your love of your own’. This is how the rich ruler found himself. In his case he didn’t go after the heavenly treasure with all is heart; his heart was divided. The Lord was telling him that if he wanted heavenly treasure it would take all his heart, not just some of it!

As Christians we know our treasure is in heaven; we have been in the position that the rich ruler found himself in, but instead of coming away sad, we came away happy! This is wonderful but now we have to put our money where our smile is so to speak. We have to show that we really mean what we have said. This is often harder than we think and to a lesser or greater extent all Christians have problems dealing with the treasure which we have clung to all our lives; things we love and which are always after our affections. This makes us sad because we know that the Lord has loved us so much that he has even died for us and yet our affections still seem to be captivated by other things.

It's this second application of the story that I want to concentrate on in the follow up posts, under the headings of 'Now that I'm a Christian what about...?' I hope they prove useful.