Parable of the Hidden Treasure

Matthew 13:44

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure, buried in a field that a man found and reburied. Then in his joy he goes and sells everything he has and buys that field.”

                A lot of the time I believe we can let the Gospel affect us to a certain degree, and then we make it stop when it starts to reach certain areas. If we look at the short parable above we see that the man found a treasure, and it doesn’t say that he just went back to that spot on Sundays to look at it and enjoy it. It doesn’t say that he just took the really really good things that he want, that fit in with his lifestyle, and left the rest. No, it says that he left every single thing he had, he literally sold everything so that he could buy the field that the treasure was buried in.

                Just from the text alone we can see that the treasure is meant to be the “kingdom of heaven”, and what I believe the text is trying to get across here is that when we come into contact with the Kingdom of Heaven, it should change us forever. Like I mentioned before, I believe that we as Christians can come into contact with the Gospel, and only let it go as far as we want. We profess Christ to be our Lord and Savior at church, but we don’t want Him to mess with the things that we do on Friday and Saturday nights. Or we don’t want him to change the way we act at work, or how we treat people. We become pretty successful at sectioning off our lives to the parts we want God to be a part of, and the sections that we don’t want Him to be a part of.

                But that isn’t the picture that we see in this one verse parable. We see that the man who found the treasure was willing to give up everything he had ever accumulated in his life to buy this field that the treasure was in. But why? Why would you give up everything that you have worked your entire life for to have a treasure in a field? Well, the obvious answer would be because the treasure in the field is worth more than whatever it is you have been working so hard at your whole life. But in today’s world we would rather for the story to say, “and he took the treasure home, and kept living his life the same way, except he had more money now.”, but that’s not the way that it goes. This treasure has affect the WHOLE life of this man.

                Well now this has me begging the question, what kind of treasure is it? How do we find something so awesome that we are willing to give up our whole life for it? Well this treasure is a life whose identity is found in Jesus Christ. We find this treasure when we realize that we are meant for something more than just this earth and the time we spend here. C.S. Lewis said ““If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”  We have to realize that we were made for a different world. This is not our home. We were made to have a perfect relationship with God and that will only happen when we are reunited with Him. And the way that we find this treasure is by recognizing that we are sinners, and that God cannot look upon sin, but He was gracious enough to provide a way for us to be free of sin, and that is through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

                Once we find this treasure it should affect our whole lives. Not just the part that is in church on Sundays, or Wednesdays, but the whole of it. It should affect the way that you treat your husband or wife. I should affect the way that you talk to the co-worker that you don’t get along with. It should affect the way that you interact with your parents, whether you’re young or old. It should affect every single aspect of your life.