The Treasure Principle

Show Notes

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy … but treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Jesus makes it pretty clear in Matthew 6 that we can’t serve both God and money. On this episode, we’ll talk about a way to make the decision easier … the treasure of giving.

• We’re unpacking the treasure principle. Our friend Randy Alcorn wrote a whole book about it with that title. The idea is that where your treasure is, there your heart will follow.
• Now, why is it so important to understand this? Because giving generously breaks the power that money has over us, and it allows us to experience Kingdom life more fully.
• Jesus tells us our hearts become more rooted and attached where we've chosen to invest our material wealth. The treasure principle is real and it’s beautiful. It points the way to an amazing adventure with God.
• Holding money with an open hand and allowing God to use it is the only way to get free of the grip money has on us.
• Jesus knew the correlation and told us how to break the connection. We see that in His encounter with the Rich Young Ruler, found in three of the four gospels.
• That man approached Jesus because he wanted to know how to inherit eternal life. From a place of love, Christ told the man to give his possessions to the poor and follow Him so that he would have treasure in heaven. Jesus offered him the path to true freedom. The rich young man was unwilling and walked away sad because he had many possessions. He just couldn't do it.
• Now, Jesus wasn’t saying that money is bad and the rich won’t go to heaven. And He wasn’t saying we should give everything we have to the poor. He was only revealing what the man treasured in his heart … and showing how money gets in the way of surrendering our hearts fully to God.
• This story offers the powerful hope that God can break the power of money in our lives through our generosity. That’s because biblical generosity is also powerful, and it allows you to discover the freedom it brings to your financial life and the blessing it offers to the world around you.
• When we allow God’s grace to loosen the grip we have on our stuff, we have the privilege of being an agent of grace in others' lives.
• In his book Never Enough financial author Ron Blue tells how he once experienced this gift of grace through giving in a fast food restaurant. He was at a Chick-fil-A eating breakfast, as he often did. He’d come to know a woman named Rachel who regularly took his order.
• She was friendly, always welcoming Ron with a smile. That particular day he thought, “I wonder if Rachel can take tips?” Ron looked at the twenties in his wallet and thought, “I’ll give her a twenty.”
• Just then, Ron says, the Holy Spirit interrupted his thoughts, calling him a cheapskate. “You have plenty of twenties … why not give her five of them?”
• So instead of a single twenty, he obediently folded over five of them, so she couldn’t see the amount. He handed them to her and walked out, feeling good about yielding to the Spirit’s prompting.
• But that’s only half of the story. The next week, Ron was back and Rachel pulled him aside. She said, "Thank you so much for the money! I needed new tires and really thought I’d use your gift to buy them.
• “But that day, my daughter came home from school and told me about a classmate who had lost everything in an apartment fire the night before. I knew that her family needed the money worse than I did, so I gave them the $100 instead."
• Naturally, Ron was surprised as Rachel went on to share more of her story. She was a mother of five who had moved to the U.S. from Central America to give her children a chance for a better life. Although she certainly could have used that money … her heart was on the lookout for ways to bless others.
• Ron was humbled and profoundly reminded of the power of generosity. He says that he’d given out of his abundance, but Rachel turned around and gave out of her poverty. She had very little and really needed those tires but took action to love her neighbor, sacrificially.
• Ron says he was stunned by the grace of the Kingdom. Moving a little bit of treasure toward eternity had a huge impact on his heart. It reminded him again that giving breaks the power of money.
• Giving always breaks the power of money, transforming our hearts in the process. That’s the treasure principle.

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• Sound Mind Investing