Don't store up treasures here on earth where they can be eaten by moths and get rusty, and where thieves break in and steal. Store your treasures in heaven, where they will never become moth-eaten or rusty and where they will be safe from thieves. Wherever your treasure is, there your heart and thoughts will also be.
6:19-21

The discipline of simplicity is not the most pleasant of spiritual disciplines, but it remains one of the most important. We so easily allow our lives to be defined by possessions, status, and all manner of social expectations. Being a disciple means shedding ourselves of anything that blurs our vision of Christ. No person better illustrates this than Francis of Assisi.

His father, Pietro, was a wealthy Italian cloth merchant, and he taught the adolescent Francis the family business. But when Francis entered his early twenties, he began to think his life was becoming too complicated, too concerned with status and wealth.

One day Francis impulsively took fine fabric from ...