God in Sandals: Transformational Encounters With the Word Made FleshSample

An Incredible Find

Meditate on the significance of the next parable (Matt. 13:44). What did the man do to find the treasure? How did he react when he found it? Why did he make such a drastic decision? What does this reveal to us about our own spiritual experience?

A common custom in the time of Christ was to put items of great value in a jug and then bury them in the garden. Many popular stories of those times revolve around a fortune that a peasant found in one of these jugs buried on his land.

In this parable, a man finds a great treasure, probably as he was preparing the land for sowing. It is unlikely that he was specifically looking for it, so he would have been quite surprised. This is how we feel when we discover Jesus—not because we were searching for Him, as we often claim, but because He suddenly revealed Himself to us.

Judging by the man’s behavior, it is clear that the land did not belong to him. The law stated that any treasure found belonged to the owner of the land, so the man should have handed the treasure over to his employer. The treasure, however, was so extraordinarily valuable that he went home to sell all his possessions in order to buy the field.

The parable is not intended to evaluate the peasant’s morals but rather to illustrate what is required of us if we are to enter the kingdom of heaven. Notice that the man pays no price to find the treasure—only to keep it. The finding was an accident, but the keeping required a decision. Those who wish to respond to Christ’s call must be ready to give up everything for Him.

Luke tells us about three people who encountered Christ along the road. Each of them was bound by different considerations, and their commitments to this world kept them from responding positively to Jesus’ invitation to become disciples (see Luke 9:57–62). The rich young ruler responded as they did because he loved his riches more than he desired eternal life (Matt. 19:22).

Today we have lost this sense of sacrifice in the church. When we invite people to become Christ’s disciples, we often don’t emphasize that the decision requires our abandonment of everything for Him. Instead, we highlight the benefits of knowing Jesus and enjoying a relationship with Him.

These benefits are real, of course—the parable states that the man sold everything precisely because he knew that the treasure was worth much more than all of his possessions.

But when we don’t make it clear that new life in Christ requires us to turn our backs on everything we value, people tend to think that Christ is an addition that will simply improve the quality of their lives. Eventually, they will hit a crisis, because God’s intention for us is a new life, not our old life with a religious topcoat (Phil. 3:8).