And when the moth and the rust come, and the separating, bony fingers of the skeleton Death filch away at last your treasure, what about you who are wrapped up with it, implicated in it; so grown into it, and it into you, that to wrench you from it opens your veins, and you bleed to death?  There is a pathetic inscription in one of the rural churches of this country, in which two parents record the death of their only child, and add, ’All our hopes were in this frail bark, and the shipwreck is total.’  I have heard of a man that might have been saved from a foundering ship, but he lashed his money-bags round him, and he sank along with them.  ’Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,’ pierced by all the wounds, gnawed by all the moths, rotted by all the corruption that affects it, and when the thief, the last great thief of all, comes, you will only have to say, ’They have taken away my gods, and what have I more?’ And the answer out of the waste places of an echoing universe will be, ‘Nothing!  Nothing!’

III.  Now, lastly, let me show you the persuasive in my text.

‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,’ therefore, says Christ, ’lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal.’  If my treasure is in heaven it is secure.  And oh! brethren, we need for our blessedness, we need for our rest, we need for our peace and joy, to know that the thing which we count best shall never be taken away from us, and we cannot have that certainty in regard to any treasure except the treasure that is in God.  All outward things which we say we possess are incompletely possessed, because they remain outside us.  However intertwined with them, we are separate from them, and we are just so much intertwined with them that the separation from them is agony, even if it is not death.  What we need is to be so incorporated with, and infused into, what is our treasure, that we are quite sure that as long as we last it will last, and that nothing can rend it from us.  ‘I bear all my goods with me,’ said the old heathen.  We should be able to say more than that.  I carry all my good in me, because my good is God, who is in the heavens, and though in the heavens, dwells in the hearts that love Him.  Then in all changes, ’life, or death, or things present or things to come, height or depth, or any other creature,’ we can afford to smile on, and say:  ’You cannot take my wealth from me, for I am in God, and God is in me.’

Further, if our hearts are in heaven, then heaven will be in our hearts, and here we shall know the joy and the peace that come from ’sitting in heavenly places in Christ Jesus,’ even whilst on earth.  There is no blessedness, no stable repose, no victorious independence of the buffets and blows of life, except this, that my heart is lifted above them all, and, I was going to say, is inhaled and sucked into the life of Jesus Christ.  Then if my heart is where my treasure is, and He is my treasure,’ my life is hid with Christ in God.’  If my heart is in heaven, heaven is in my heart.