Luke 12:16-21
“The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’
“‘Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”
“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
“This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”
I think that all of us carry a secret number around in our heads. That number isn’t our Social Security number or the PIN number for our debit card; that number represents how much more money it would take for us to be really happy, really secure.
Take a moment and think about your number.
Got it?
When I was a college student my number was about $100. I really thought a hundred bucks would do the trick. When I was a young married guy my number would have been something like $1000; you know, enough to have a little breathing room. Today, with two kids in college and two more headed that direction, my number is somewhat higher! But I have a number and so do you.
While there’s nothing wrong with earning and saving money; and nothing wrong with sound financial planning; the number we carry around in our heads can eventually become that which both distracts and distorts our hearts.
That number can create worry, stress and fear. It can create greed, unhealthy ambition and workaholism.
It can cause us to sacrifice our time, our families, our health and our faith on the altar the number builds in our hearts.
In Jesus’ parable of the “rich fool” the number takes the shape of a bigger barn. This parable is jarring to a reader embedded in our North American culture because, at first, the man’s vision for a bigger barn seems to make perfect sense! Isn’t this exactly what we would expect a successful farmer, businessman, or entrepreneur to do? Of course it is!
Build a bigger barn; build a bigger warehouse; build a bigger operation; build a bigger company; build a bigger house; after all, bigger is always better right? I mean, is there really any other option?
God’s response to the man tells us we are asking the wrong question:
“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
Jesus is telling us that the question is not the size of our barns or the number we have tucked away in our heads, but rather, the condition of our souls.
As pastor and writer John Ortberg has eloquently put it, when you play a game of monopoly, no matter how many houses and hotels and streets you own, eventually it all goes back in the box.
The same is true in our lives!
Jesus is not saying that material success or shrewd financial planning is wrong; he is saying that building bigger barns without an eternal perspective is pointless and foolish!
Notice the rich man’s motivation:
‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”
See it? His motivation is himself. He sees his crops as his; he sees his barns as his; he sees everything through the lens of his own comfort and pleasure.
The gaping hole in his perspective is that God isn’t part o fit. He fails to recognize that all he has comes from God and belongs to God. He fails to ask whether God has a greater purpose in mind for his wealth than storing it up for himself.
God’s word for him is stark, “You fool!”
In the parable of the sower that we have been studying all week, Jesus says:
The one who receives the seed that fell among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful.
Jesus is warning us that wealth has a way of choking out gospel growth in our hearts; making us unfruitful in his kingdom.
May we allow the gospel to penetrate deep into the soil of our hearts so that when we are blessed with abundance our desire is not to store it up for ourselves, but rather to invest in the kingdom harvest.
Pastor Brian Coffey
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