Everlasting November 16, 2025 Devotional

MATTHEW 6:19-21 | ¹⁹ Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, ²⁰ but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. ²¹ For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

How rich is Jesus’ teaching! In these verses, He contrasts a life devoted to personal accumulation, in which we are focused on individual success, status, comfort, and security with a life devoted to blessing others and building God’s kingdom. Earthly treasures, He warns, are fragile and temporary. Power and status fade, comfort and security eventually give way to age, decline, and death. The symbols of success are impermanent and get passed on to others in the end. Trusting in things temporary and unstable will lead to disappointment. Materialism can be all consuming too since protecting and maintaining possessions is a perpetual war against the forces of disintegration, natural, and historical. The moth and rust represent the way natural forces diminish things, which tend in every case, to finally give way to entropy (second law of thermodynamics). Thieves show us the way history can destroy or diminish possessions via war and conflict, or lawsuits, or theft, or market volatility, or currency devaluation. These threats can free us from our ultimately fruitless drive to achieve security, or they can reinforce it.

What kind of investor are you?

Gracious God,

Order my devotions so I can use temporal blessings for eternal purposes. I ask in the name of Jesus, who invested everything for me.

Amen.