Treasure

Loving something with your heart is what I have been doing a lot of thinking about lately. Specifically, I have been trying to figure out what this heart thing is that does all of the loving. It is a big deal because it seems to me that the heart is the thing that is responsible for making me miss out on being young and cool. (see entry "It's Late, Could You Please Leave")

So how did I go about trying to figure out what this heart is? I started off with something a little weird. Please go along with me. I realized that I could make my finger, I was careful about which one, do finger thrusts even though I was verbally telling it to stop. This told me that there is something deeper than my voice or spoken command that tells my finger what to do.
When I did this it made me realize that there was something deep inside of me that made me do things. It troubled me that I could speak, “Stop,” and yet my finger kept on going. Now I don’t know if it is my heart keeping my finger going or not, but it is closer to being the heart than my voice is.

What I have decided is that the heart is that thing that moves me. It motivates me. It makes me go after things. When I move my finger and say stop something deep down keeps it going. This heart thing has a lot of power, and it does not always play fair. I mean it manipulates and schemes to get what it wants. We have all seen the guy that loves some girl, “with all his heart,” and he won’t let go when she sees that it is going nowhere. If he is not very careful he can follow his heart into all sorts of manipulations, contemplations and orchestrations. When that happens it is not very pretty.

I guess that is why the scripture says that the heart is deceitful above all things. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” I guess this deceitfulness has to do with the idea that you can keep your finger moving while telling it to stop. It goes even deeper than that. You can tell your mother that the dress she is wearing looks good when in fact you think it makes her look old. You can hate your brother while you are telling him that you love him, and you can entertain a lustful thought while sitting in Sunday school. See what I mean. The heart really is deceitful.

In a way this is the idea behind the Sermon on the Mount. You see, Jesus said that he came to fulfill the law and not to abolish it. He then talked about how if you harbor a hateful thought it is the same as murder, and if you lust it is the same as adultery. You see, what he was saying was that this deceitful organ, the human spiritual heart, was the primary spiritual battleground. Of course we can control our fist so that we don’t pound our little brother when he makes us mad. We can pretend we don’t have lustful thoughts in Sunday school. We can sit on the outside while we are standing on the inside, and we can tell our finger to quit moving when something deep inside us is telling it to keep going. We can do all of that and believe that we are doing a good job, but Jesus wants us to know better. He wants us to know that the battleground for genuine spirituality is not our fists, or our appearances, or our finger. It is the heart.

In World War II countless planes were sent into Germany to bomb their ball bearing factories. When I was a kid I thought that was really stupid. If I was a General, I would have bombed the tank factories and the machine gun factories and the plane factories, and we would have lost the war. In a lot of ways I do that now. I bomb my fists for hitting and my eyes for looking and my appearances for appearing, while my heart is still manufacturing the raw material for spiritual war. I keep bombing, but raw material is still being manufactured. I just can’t seem to get ahead.

At some point I need to find the ball bearing factory inside me and bomb the living daylights out of it. Look at Jeremiah 17:9 again. It says that the deceitful heart is incurable and beyond understanding. Pretty terrible prognosis if you ask me. It is especially troubling when we look at what Jesus said the greatest command was. Namely, “love God with all of your heart.” It seems kind of stupid to me to love God with something deceitful. If you think about it that is what James means when he talks about being double minded. Remember? A double minded man is unstable in all his ways. Our human heart is easily distracted because at its raw bottom reality it is an organ bent on self-preservation. I don’t mean that in a good way. I mean that in a prideful way. It wants to elevate us and make us the object of the praise of others. It wants us to be number one. It wants to love itself with all that it has. So you see bombing the heck out of it is probably the best solution.

There are a couple of places in scripture that make this puzzling command (loving God with all your heart) more understandable. Ezekiel 11:19 is a good place to find some understanding. In these verses, starting with 16, Ezekiel is passing a message on to the Jews in exile. He says,
"This is what the Sovereign Lord says, I will gather you from the nations and bring you back from the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you back the land of Israel again. They will return to it and remove all its vile images and detestable idols. I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them. I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They will be my people, and I will be their God. But as for those whose hearts are devoted to their vile images and detestable idols, I will bring down on their own heads what they have done, declares the Sovereign Lord.”

The old heart will never do. We are in desperate need of a new one, a better one, a heart of flesh instead of stone. Look very carefully however at the dangerous alternative, which is what happens when our hearts are devoted to our own… I know the scripture specifically says vile images and detestable idols, but I think that almost any words after “own” will be the same. For example, our own way, our own treasures, our own girlfriend, our own boyfriend, our own education, our own plan, our own car, our own career, our own etc.

Our heart pursues our own treasure. It pursues it fanatically. That is its job. It will manipulate, orchestrate, conjugate, irrigate, and sublimate whatever it can to get treasure. Remember that the scripture says that where a man’s treasure is, there will his heart be also. This is found in Matthew 6:19-24, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness, how great is that darkness! No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

These verses are really bad to the bone to me. This is where the whole idea of what the heart is gets crystal. Look at what happens when I take the word treasure and use it as a verb instead of a noun. Do not treasure your stores here on earth. Treasure your stores that are in heaven because your heart is what treasures things so make sure you treasure heaven.

Do you remember earlier when I said that the heart is what moves and motivates me? It really does. It is because the heart is the part of me that values things. I move away from things I do not value and toward things that I do value. It casts a new light on the great commandment. Love God with ALL your heart could be said like this, treasure God alone, and value Him above all else.

As many of you know I teach for money. Anyway, for awhile in the past I had a principal who wanted me to put up rules in my classroom. You know those silly things like raise your hand to talk and don’t cheat and learn everything you are taught. I became rather obstinate about refusing to post any rules. It was assumed that if I had more rules my class would run better. I refused to believe it.

I explained to my prinicipal that my classroom runs very smoothly in spite of the fact that I don't have a giant poster of rules hanging up on my wall, and I really do have rules that every student knows. She wanted to know what they were, and I said it depends on the situation. I went ahead and explained. I said my rules are very simple. Don’t embarrass me. Don’t be mean to others or me and do everything you can to make me happy. Sometimes I only have one rule, do what I want before I ask. She thought I was kidding. I wasn’t.

I think my classroom runs smoothly because I understand that controlling the symptoms is not very effective. The student has to know in his heart what I want and be willing to do it. Too many rules mean too many loopholes. Don’t forget that the heart is manipulative and conniving. It loves rules and guidelines that it can manipulate to its own ends. Remember, following rules does not make a student learn. In fact, sometimes rules provide all the distraction a student needs to avoid learning, and rules do not seem effective at controlling behavior believe it or not.

Not only are rules poor changers of a student’s conduct they don’t do a slapout good job for me either. Following all the Church rules does not make me love God with all my heart. It does not make me treasure Him above all else. It makes me resent Him. It makes me feel that our goals are not the same. Now we come to a new question. If following Christ is about having a radical change in our heart rather than following rules, how do we get that changed heart? That is a profoundly important question, but that will have to wait for another day.