Christa Hudak, CFP®, ChFC®, CKA®, Financial Advisor and Chief Planning Officer for CoCreate Financial, shares her thoughts on a passage in Matthew 6:19 where Jesus directs people to focus on storing up treasure in Heaven. Calling upon her educational background in Biblical Literature, Christa shares some of the Greek and dives deeper into the idea that there are internal and external factors to the consumption of wealth. She challenges viewers to think through how we consume our wealth today and how Jesus may be directing us further in how to use our wealth.

Full Transcript:

 Hi, I'm Christa. I'm one of the financial advisors here at CoCreate Financial, and I also have a background in biblical scholarship, and I just love digging into the scripture, and God has so much to say about our finances and how that engages with our spirituality. And I was digging into a passage this week and it's Matthew 6:19 where Jesus tells us, do not store up for yourselves treasure on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasure in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.

And as I was looking at this passage, I was flipping through my Greek and just something stuck out to me that I felt like I really wanted to share with you and that is this word for rust. And The Greek word is brosis, and what's interesting about it is that it, it really isn't rust, it's the act of eating or consuming, or we could say consumption. And I certainly understand why the translators identified it as rust because they're thinking about something that corrodes and destroys and other translations, NIV uses vermin, and there's, you know, another translation I looked at that referred to it as eating insects where it's like they were digging into that eating concept and that felt like they had to add the clarification of insects.

But I think there's actually some significance in it just being this very neutral word of consumption, not being directly tied to a particular thing that is doing the eating, destroying, and making the wealth disappear because there's lots of things that consume wealth, but one of the main ones is our own consumption.

And when we use that in that neutral term, we can view it as your own consumption. So let's think about this verse again. Do not store up for yourself treasure on earth where moth and consumption destroy. And with this, of course, our own consumption is not inherently bad. We have to view it in this neutral way. You know, God gives us resources to use for our own consumption. We have to pay our bills, put food on the table, a roof over our heads, and those aren't bad things, and I think God even blesses us to really enjoy life sometimes. But at what point are you trading your present day consumption for treasures in heaven?

And I think that's a point worth digging into because as a financial advisor, what I see, the biggest thing that eats up people's wealth is their own consumption, and so I would really encourage you to ask that question and explore your own spending habits and, and what you're doing with your resources and what you might be being called to do with those resources instead, if you paired back your consumption or viewed your consumption in a different light. Once again, consumption's not bad or evil, and there's not a magic number where certain amount is too much, but I think Jesus is definitely talking about all the risks to our wealth, not just the external risks, but also the internal risk of how we use it and consistently always want more, and we can always use it to consume more, or we can use it to invest in treasures in heaven.