Hi Friends,

This past Sunday I preached on Luke 6:43-45 and how our behavior comes from what we are treasuring in our hearts.  I went over a tool developed by Christian Counseling and Education Foundation called the “3 Trees”

Change happens changing what we treasure in our hearts. Below are some questions to help you think through what you are treasuring.  These are taken from David Powlison in his excellent book, “Seeing with New Eyes”

1. What do you love? Hate?

2. What do you want, desire, crave, lust, and wish for? What desires do you serve and obey?

3. What do you seek, aim for, and pursue?

4. Where do you bank your hopes?

5. What do you fear? What do you not want? What do you tend to worry about?

6. What do you think you need? What are your ‘felt needs’?

7. What are your plans, agendas, strategies, and intentions designed to accomplish?

8. What makes you tick? What sun does your planet revolve around? What do you organize your life around?

9. Where do you find refuge, safety, comfort, escape, pleasure, security?

10. What or whom do you trust?

11. Whose performance matters? On whose shoulders does the well-being of your world rest? Who can make it better, make it work, make it safe, make it successful?

12. Whom must you please? Whose opinion of you counts? From whom do you desire approval and fear rejection? Whose value system do you measure yourself against? In whose eyes are you living? Whose love and approval do you need?

13. On your deathbed, what would sum up your life as worthwhile? What gives your life meaning?

14. How do you define and weigh success and failure, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable, in any particular situation?

15. What would make you feel rich, secure, prosperous? What must you get to make life sing?

16. What would bring you the greatest pleasure, happiness, and delight? The greatest pain or misery?

17. What do you see as your rights? What do you feel entitled to?

18. In what situations do you feel pressured or tense? Confident and relaxed? When you are pressured, where do you turn? What do you think about? What are your escapes? What do you escape from?

19. What do you pray for?

20. What do you think about most often? What preoccupies or obsesses you? In the morning, to what does your mind drift instinctively?

21. What do you talk about? What is important to you? What attitudes do you communicate?

22. How do you spend your time? What are your priorities?

23. How do you implicitly say , ‘If only…’ (to get what you want, avoid what you don’t want, keep what you have)?

24. Where do you find your identity? How do you define who you are?

Take some time and go through these.  Discuss them with a close friend or your spouse.  God wants to meet us where we are at, but he loves us too much to leave us where we are at.  He wants to transform us by his grace through changing the false gods we can treasure and leading us to find our true treasure in Him.

Grace and peace,

Pastor Jeff

Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.