Where your heart lies
What we love determines who we are and how we live. Solomon of old knew this and expressed it in the Proverb:
Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it Proverbs 4:23
Our lives flow from our hearts. Our fundamental allegiance in life, that on which we place our hopes and dreams and longings, is the very thing that will determine the people we become, and the lives we live. Jesus said something very similar: For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:21)
When Jesus refers to ‘treasure’ he is not speaking about the loose change in your pocket (or purse). He is referring to everything we value highly, which may be the contents of our savings account, our pension pot, our house, our relationships, our leisure lifestyle – basically that which we value most. Once we identify our treasure, we recognise what makes us tick and this explains why we live our lives as we do.
I recently read a biography of Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest man. He initially made his money from the internet payment company Paypal, before branching out to found the space exploration company SpaceX, the electric car manufacturing company Tesla and the solar energy firm SolarCity, amongst other ventures. You might think that the world’s richest man would live his life in the pursuit of riches. However, that is most certainly not what animates Musk. Accumulating wealth is of no great interest to him, other than as a means to realise his true ambitions. He is evidently a highly demanding workaholic, who is motivated towards saving the human race from the catastrophe of climate change (hence electric cars, solar power, etc). For similar reasons, he also wishes to advance humanity to the stars, making our species less dependent on planet earth. He is convinced that we need to learn to live on other planets, and so he is determined to make travelling to space cheap, which, in relative terms, he has accomplished with SpaceX. He can launch rockets at a fraction of the price of traditional companies.
Musk, by all accounts, works relentlessly to make his dreams come true. He is inspired by his ambition of clean energy, clean travel and space exploration. Everything he does is driven by these obsessions. In many ways, what he has achieved is both exemplary and admirable, although few of us would want to live with a man whose obvious obsessions so clearly rule his life!
In his case, it is relatively easy to see how his dreams and heart-desires have directed and driven his life. Who he is can be traced to what burns in his heart. But Musk is not unusual in this. He is only unusual in his ability and success. The same principle that makes him the product of his heart-desires works in all of us. We may be less ambitious, but we are no less who we are because of what we treasure.
Let me take you back to Jesus.
Before explaining that where your treasure is, there your heart will be also, Jesus gave us a top investment tip. He warned against storing up earthly treasures and counselled us to invest our lives in ‘heavenly treasures.’ Earthly ambitions and goals and products won’t last. The biggest of all investment crashes comes at the end of life and these things get left behind and are exposed as being of no lasting value to us. All the more reason to heed the proverb and guard our hearts.
How do we guard our hearts? First of all, by being honest about what is first in our hearts, what our primary concerns and loves truly are. Then we can reassess those priorities in the light of Jesus’ instruction to ‘seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness’. This time of pandemic will have revealed to us (and, let’s be frank, to all who watch us) what is first in our hearts and lives. I am surely not the only one finding I must honestly reconfigure those priorities.
Your minister,
Martin