The Treasure of Your Life
What are the things that are most treasured in a person’s life? Most anyone would rattle off a list of several items, possessions, or things that exist in a treasured status. What do you value the most in your life? What is your most treasured possession? Sitting on a bookcase in the front room are a few of mine. I never got to know my father. He died about a week and a half before I was born. On the shelf is his baseball glove. It has been there for years. It has his own handwriting on it from writing his name on the side. It is something of value to me. You probably could name your own things that would be similar. My wife still has the original piece of paper that she wrote her grandmother’s cobbler recipe onto over 26 years ago. Admittedly, it might be in need of a recopy, but that piece of paper is a treasure! We all have things we treasure, things we have assigned a value to that makes them more important than other things. But, what are the most valuable things any of us have?
Billy Graham, the evangelist, famously said, “Give me five minutes with a person’s checkbook, and I will tell you where their heart is.” To bring that into a more modern timeframe, a person’s banking app on their phone will tell you all that is needed to know about what is treasured. Jesus had a lot to say about things that are treasured here on earth.
In Matthew 6:21, Jesus said this:
Wherever your treasure is, there your heart will also be.
The point is that what we place value on will influence our hearts. And it is our hearts that direct the paths of our lives. The influence we have in the world is directly related to the condition of our hearts. Misplaced treasure creates distorted hearts. Distorted hearts bring all sorts of chaos into the world around us. But the true treasure of our hearts is not a glove, or a recipe written so many years ago. There are three things that will tell you the treasure of your heart. If you take stock of these three things you will quickly discover what rules your heart. Those three things are TIME, ATTENTION, and PRESENCE. That is what Billy Graham is referring to with his comment on the checkbook. Your bank account record will tell you what you spend your time, attention, and presence on every time. These three things will be a gauge to your heart.
TIME – the amazing thing about the world is that every single person has the same amount of time as every other person in the world. It is a question of how you choose to use it. You’ve got 24 hours, 1440 minutes, 86,400 seconds every day. Will you give that to things that don’t add value into the people around you, to the people you care about the most?
ATTENTION – You can only really have three or so priorities for any given amount of time. Priorities are those things that take your greatest attention. Will you allow things that don’t relate to those priorities pull your attention away?
PRESENCE – God only made one you. Right, right, the whole world is thanking Him for that one! Your family needs you and your real, true, and authentic presence. It isn’t going to be perfect, but you need to be around. It will rarely be perfect. It isn’t supposed to be. Just be there.
God has given each of us these three things in life that are of utmost value. They should be our greatest treasures and what we treasure in life rules our hearts. When we give these treasures to things that don’t matter our hearts will be corrupted and the world around us suffers. This challenge of Jesus is not a call to abandon the world, or the things in the world. It is a call to place the world in a right position in our lives. What does your banking app tell you about your time, attention, and presence right now? Where are you spending the most valuable things you have in life?