Christ's Lessons about Feelings Following Actions

Mat 6:21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

The word translated here as "treasure" is the Greek thesauros, which should be familiar to anyone who has used a thesaurus, which is just the Latin version of the Greek term. What is the connection? Thesauros is a storage area for valuables, like the vault of a bank or a locking safe. So, as a thesaurus is a storage place for valuable words, a treasury of words.

What Christ is describing to here is not only what we find valuable, but how we choose to protect what we find valuable. The contrast is between the earthly/social storage of valuables, which by definition cannot work because everything on earth degrades over time, and a heavenly storage area, which protects such valuable because heaven is beyond the reach of time.

The term for heart, kardia, does refer to the physical order, but like the English term, it is used to mean the center of anything, such as the heart of the woods or the depths of the sea. The hearts is also the center of our emotions and passions. In Greek literature, the heart is the source of love, courage, and fear. In a clear sense, it is the center of our awareness.

Christ is making a very sophisticated point here about the order of things. First, he says that our actions determine what we accumulate, contrasting spiritual and earthly valuables. He then says that our feelings are determined by the type of value we accumulate. In other words, we change our value system and what we care about depending on how we act. If we accumulate spiritual "wages," we come to care more about the spiritual, but if we accumulate physical or social wages, we will come to care more about physical or social things.

This is part of the process that Christ describes as humanity perfecting itself. When we care about physical/social things, those things are taken away from us by the passage of time. When we care more about spiritual things, we accumulate those things over time. Again, Christ represents this as a natural process, part of the balance of the universe. As we move the center of our awareness toward the spiritual, we are perfecting our awareness of things as they are.