Matthew 6:19 (CSB) – “Don’t store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.”
Would you attempt to free-solo El Capitan in Yosemite, one of the most dangerous mountains in the world to climb without ropes, safety gear, or any preparation? No fitness training, no free-solo practice, and no emergency survival training. Just lace up your sneakers and head up the granite wall. This is precisely what many of us Christians are attempting to do every day as we seek to possess this world’s wealth without almost any spiritual preparation.
Jesus consistently and repeatedly warns against what so many churches now seek and celebrate. He was clear: worldly wealth is insecure, fleeting, and a spiritual trap to the soul. Yet today’s western churches either ignore his words or reinterpret them into something he never meant by carving out exceptions he never gave. We say it’s fine to pursue wealth and live in comfort, as long as we’re also “generous.” We justify consuming far beyond our need by quoting, “God richly provides us all things to enjoy” — as if indulgence were a fruit of the Spirit. And we footnote Jesus’ command not to store up treasures on earth with, “unless you’re being responsible about it.” Where Jesus blessed the poor and pronounced woe upon the rich (Luke 6:20, 24), we bless the rich and pity the poor. But, what are we missing about Jesus that we’ve done this to his teaching?
We’ll answer this question in just a moment, but first, most of my readers are likely to assume that I’m (just) talking about the Joel Osteen “prosperity-gospel” variety of churches. However, I’m also talking about our average twenty-to-thirty person evangelical churches, who piously thank God for his blessings upon this, “the wealthiest nation in the world“, and humbly asks for his wisdom to be “good stewards of his blessings“, all the while doing the opposite of what Jesus taught about money. Not only do we spend almost all the money God “blesses us with” on ourselves, but we also take out record levels of credit card debt buy even more than “God’s blessings upon us” can afford. Sure, we don’t espouse some of the most extreme heresies of the prosperity gospel, but there’s functionally no difference between how we often live our lives with respect to money and how the prosperity-heretics live their lives.
Unfortunately, today’s political narratives pose one of the biggest obstacles to understanding Jesus’ teaching on wealth. Jesus is neither a socialist nor a capitalist. Instead, his teachings are capable of being applied within any human economic system, not as an affirmative force, but as a dissenting voice, opposing both the coercive redistribution of wealth and our individual hoarding of it. So, we must learn how to hear Jesus with fresh ears if we’re going to understand him.
To begin, Jesus consistently warned that wealth competes for our trust, our loyalty, and our love. He saw how easily it deceives us, how subtly it pulls our hearts toward security in this life and away from dependence on God, which is why he said, “You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24). And Jesus saw how greed divides and turns people against those we’re meant to love. But somehow, greed has become an acceptable sin in much of the Church. We denounce sexual immorality but turn a blind eye to lavish lifestyles, hoarded wealth, and systems that take advantage of the poor.
So, what do Jesus’ teaching about wealth mean?
The early Christians got Jesus on this: they held possessions loosely, shared, and saw wealth as a tool to serve others, not as a symbol of righteousness or divine approval, but of the glorious grace that God had lavishly poured out upon the world in Jesus! And they eagerly embrace this grace by joyfully showing the love God had showered upon them to others. To the early Christians, greed, not poverty, was the enemy to be overcome. It still should be. Riches were a trust from God meant to display his love to all. The giver enjoyed the giving as much as the receiver enjoyed the receiving because each was enjoying their part in the display of God’s lavish grace.
So, we must revisit the above question again: what are we missing about Jesus that we’ve done what we’ve done to his teaching about wealth?
I think this question is most easily answered by answering another question: where is our treasure? Put simply, what we’re missing about Jesus is the treasure that he is. By missing him as our treasure, we have only this world’s treasures, which is why we ignore and reinterpret what Jesus taught.
We must repent of materialism. We must challenge the theology of abundance that forgets the poor. We must return to Jesus’ call to radical trust — seeking first the kingdom of God, not the comforts of this passing world. But, most importantly, we must recover Jesus as the treasure of our hearts!
A Dedicated Faith 