Heavenly Wealth

Matthew 19:23

And Jesus said to his disciples, "Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven.

Being in Dallas, wealth and its trappings are everywhere.  In January, Kathleen and I will be moving down from our perch up here in North Dallas to Uptown.  Our surroundings will be quite different.  Pretty buildings, cars, and people will be everywhere.  It is a bubble.

My surroundings have had me meditating more and more on money and its effects.  There are a lot of verses about money, and I take them very seriously.  I am very cautious of wealth, for I fear its effect on me.  

One day, I got to thinking about not the money itself, but the effects of having it.  Here's what I mean.  There are many reason that we can want wealth.  Some of those reasons are immediately sinful, such as desiring prestige, purpose, superiority.  All of those are wicked from the off, period.  Yet, the other reason is we want nice things.  It is in this, that I have found an interesting insight into the human heart as it relates to God.

What we are longing for, when we long for nice things, in the end, is heaven.  Whether we know it or not, that is the truth, for you see, in heaven, the very streets will be paved with what we consider our finest good... gold.  When you picture heaven, do you imagine eating bad food, living in a run down house, or wearing tattered clothes?  No way.  We all see the same thing.  There will be no tattered clothes, no run down anything, and all food will be the most delicious and real.  So it is that we try to replicate that here.  We try to buy the things that remind us most of heaven.  

The problem is that our hearts aren't ready for heaven.  What will make heaven truly perfect will be the change in our hearts.  Until then, these heavenly reminders can actually be served to distract to the point of judgement.  We can come to idolize the very things that remind us heaven, and in turn lose our place there, for God is to be loved above all else.  So, we press on toward true wealth.  As it says, to store up our treasure in heaven.  We go on believing, hoping, and above all... loving.