God, Money, and the Good Eye

Lately I've been reading Pastor John Piper's short book on Jesus' commands, In Our Joy, (which is itself a distillation of Piper's longer book on Jesus' commands, What Jesus Demands from the World) and I came across this excellent paragraph on God, money, and the good eye. Piper, expounding Jesus' words in Matthew 6:19-34, writes:

You have a good eye if you look to God and love to maximize the reward of his fellowship—that is, lay up treasure in heaven. You have a good eye if you look at Master-money and Master-God and see Master-God as infinitely more valuable. In other words, a “good eye” is a wisely valuing eye, a discerning eye, an astutely treasuring eye. It doesn’t just see facts about money and God. It doesn’t just perceive what is true and false. It sees beauty and ugliness; it senses value and worthlessness; it discerns what is really desirable and what is undesirable. The seeing of the good eye is not neutral. When it sees God, it sees God-as-beautiful. It sees God-as-desirable.

Please pray with me that we would see God as infinitely more valuable that all the riches of this world. Pray that we would love Him more than money and comfort and safety and our own lives!

Maybe I'll post more on this later - Jesus makes so many eye-opening, earth-shattering statements in the Bible that it would take several lifetimes to discuss them all.