Ash Wednesday

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21 - Ash Wednesday - February 18, 2015         
Where Our Treasure Is

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  “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” 

There’s something about wise sayings that if you say them enough times and really think about them they stop sounding all that wise and begin to sound painfully obvious.  Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.  A treasure is what you love.  You love with your heart.  So: Where what you love is, there is where you will love it.  It really is that obvious: Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.  But this is what makes it so wise.  Because it isn’t readily obvious.  It needs to be told to us again and again before it sinks in.  Such a simple truth to which any child can say no kidding needs to be drilled into our heads because of how hardheaded we are.  The enigma of what Jesus says is not in the words themselves — Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also — No, the enigma is in the fact that sinners are so foolish as to think that they can treasure something without that something claiming their love and stealing their heart. 

Sinners think they can serve two masters.  But they can’t. 

Ash Wednesday

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21 – Ash Wednesday – February 22, 2012
Our Father Who Art in Heaven

Our Father who art in heaven. 

What does this mean? 

With these words God tenderly invites us to believe that He is our true Father and we are His true children, so that with all boldness and confidence we may ask Him as dear children ask their dear father.  

There are two good reasons to pray to God.  First, He commands us to pray to Him.  “Call upon me in the day of trouble.”  Second, He promises to hear our prayer.  “And I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me” (Psalm 50:15).   If God didn’t give us His command and promise, we wouldn’t know whether or not we could or even if we should pray to Him.  But in His word He teaches us that indeed we can and indeed we ought to.  He also teaches us how. 

To pray means to ask.  We don’t tell God to give us anything.  We ask Him.  And we do so on the basis of His own kindness toward us.  Everything we have we receive from Him as a gift out of His fatherly divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in us.  It is as we confess, “we are by nature sinful and unclean” and “we have justly deserved [God’s] temporal and eternal punishment.”  When we pray to God, we’re asking Him to give to us sinners things that we don’t deserve to have.  And He does, He gives them.  We should thank Him for what He gives, and pray that He would continue to give it.  And we do.