Living for the Line: An Eternal Perspective

There is a strange thing about the way most of us make financial decisions. We agonize over choices that will not matter in a year, and we rarely stop to weigh them against the one timeline that will never end.

James tells us something we already know but seldom plan around:

"...yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes." James 4:14 (ESV)

Your life is a vapor. You do not actually know how long you are planning for. But you do know the full extent of eternity. And when you set the two side by side, your time here pales in comparison to the time that is coming.

That is the lens I want to put on our finances. Not to pile anxiety onto your money decisions, but to add some real weight to how we spend. In doing so, I think we will also find that it removes financial anxieties for us to consider eternity in our financial life.

"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Matthew 6:19-21 (ESV)

Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say to stop storing up treasure. He says stop storing it up here.

Money is the tool, not the point

Here is where a lot of us get turned around. We hear "treasures in heaven" and assume the lesson is that money does not matter. It matters. It is important. It is one of the primary tools God places in our hands to do eternal work. The problem is never that we take money seriously. The problem is when money becomes the focus instead of the tool, and eternity quietly slips into the background.

I see this fear play out in two very different scenarios.

There is the person who feels behind. Maybe there is debt. Maybe savings are thin, or the paycheck is spent before the month is over. For them the finish line is always just a little more income, and if they could only reach it, the worry would finally stop.

Then there is the person who has what they need and cannot loosen the grip. They have planned so carefully for the “short term” of this world that they have forgotten it is God who gives and God who can take away. Their eyes are fixed on a plan that ends the day they do.

Both are staring at the dot.

The dot and the line

Randy Alcorn has an illustration that I think about often. Draw a small dot on a page, then draw a line out from it that runs off the edge and keeps going. The dot is your life on earth. The line is eternity. Most people spend their whole lives living for the dot. Wisdom is learning to live for the line.

Once that clicked for me, I started to see investing differently. True stewardship is understanding the perspective of eternity in each of your financial decisions.

Think of it like a light. In a dark room, the little flashlight on your phone is powerful. It fills the space, and you can get real work done by it. Now carry that same phone outside at noon on a clear day. The light is still on, but you cannot even tell. It is swallowed up in the radiance of the sun.

The perspective of eternity in our finances is like when we go outside with the light. Some of the worries and focuses from our finances seem so significant day to day - like the light in a dark room, but when we go outside and see things in comparison to eternity it shapes how significant it actually is.

Setting your mind

If we are not supposed to store up treasure on earth, what do we do with saving, investing, and prudent planning? Isn’t that the application of stewardship?

I hold it in two parts.

First, the warning is really about excess, and especially about striving for excess. You should not save simply to have more of it. Saving is wise when it is matched to a real, future purpose (a home, an education, a season of generosity, a retirement costs). A savings number with no purpose beyond the number itself is exactly the pattern Jesus warned against. This is part of why I am such a fan of setting financial finish lines, which I wrote about in "A Line in the Sand."

Second, it is wise to plan well but foolish to set your mind on those plans. You can build a careful, God-honoring financial plan and still hold it openhandedly, knowing it could change overnight. Jesus told the story of a man who could not:

"But God said to him, 'Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God." Luke 12:20-21 (ESV)

His financial plan was excellent. His problem was that it stopped at the edge of the dot.

Because Scripture says so much about money, many faithful people carry a quiet fear that they are not stewarding it well enough. But the large amount of teaching on money does not mean money is where our focus belongs. Even as we handle it, our eyes stay fixed somewhere else.

"So we do not lose heart... For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal." 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 (ESV)

Paul was writing about affliction, but the posture carries over to our finances as well. Set your mind on the things that are above (Colossians 3:1-2). Look to what is unseen. Let the eternal shape each decision here in the present.

Where is your hope set?

If you take one thing from this, take this. Anxiety about money is almost never a circumstance problem. It is a hope problem.

We have sat with clients who have millions and still watch the account, wondering if it will be enough. We have sat with clients living paycheck to paycheck carrying the exact same worry. The answer for both is not a change in circumstances. It is a change in what they have attached their hope to.

I preached recently on Ephesians 1 and spent a long time on hope, on what it means to have "the eyes of your hearts enlightened" to the hope to which He has called us. Here is what I keep coming back to. When we set our hope on our riches, we set it on something that can be taken from us as quickly as it was given. Balances fluctuate. Unexpected expenses arrive. Jobs are lost. Paul told Timothy to charge the rich "not to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God" (1 Timothy 6:17). Riches are, by their very nature, uncertain. God is not. He is in control, He is faithful to His promises, and He does not change.

When eternity moves back into focus, a couple of things naturally follow:

First, freedom from anxiety. Not because the circumstances got better, but because our hope moved to something more steady than the numbers.

The second is open-handedness. This is not giving away everything you own. It is a posture, an openness about how God might have you steward what He has entrusted to you.

The third is a deeper reliance on prayer. When you stop trying to force every outcome yourself, you start asking for wisdom from above (James 1:5) about how to steward what is actually in your hands.

Christ is the treasure

Come back to the last line Jesus gave us: "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

This was never really about money. It is about the heart, and the heart follows the treasure. Store up treasure on earth and your heart will spend its short life bound to the dot. Store up treasure in heaven and your heart is drawn, all the way down the line, to Christ Himself.

He is the treasure. Not a means to a more comfortable life, but the eternal reward that makes every lesser thing grow dim by comparison. And this is where joy, not guilt, becomes the engine. John Piper put it as well as anyone: "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him." When Christ becomes your satisfaction, open hands and generous plans stop feeling like a sacrifice and start feeling like the most natural thing in the world.

A step for this week

Keep eternity in front of you. However you do that, do it.

At your next financial decision, and even in your ordinary spending this week, pause and ask one question: what is the eternal impact of this? The Puritans kept skulls on their desks, a practice they called memento mori, "remember that you must die." It sounds morbid until you realize what it was doing for them. It kept eternity in view while they still lived, and worked, in the here and now.

If you want help holding your finances this way, it is a gift to walk with an advisor who shares the same eternal perspective. You can find a whole network of them among the advisors at the Christian Financial Advisors Network.

So here is the question to sit with: If you really believed that this life is the dot and eternity is the line, what is one financial decision you would make differently this week?

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