Tonight, I brought some of my most valued stuff that I wanted to share with you guys.
When I was younger, I was an avid collector of baseball cards. If you have been in my apartment and looked into the corner of my bedroom, there are about 15 boxes of baseball cards that are all filled. The best part of my collection though would me my collection of Ken Griffey Jr. rookie cards. Griffey has always been my favorite baseball player so when I went to the card shops I would always go straight to the pile of his cards to look through. I made it a goal to try and collect all of his rookie cards. The first three I found fairly easy but the fourth was tough. The fourth card is made by Upper Deck and not only was it a Griffey rookie but it was also the first card the company ever printed. It was very hard to find it for less and $150 and I never had the money to buy it. Two years ago, Melissa bought it for me as a present and completed my collection, which makes it extra special.
Sticking with the baseball theme, this is one of my favorite memories growing up. I had played baseball since I was five and was a decent player. One thing that I never did though was hit a home run. I always hit line drives and had a great average but never hit for power. In my junior year of high school I finally hit a homerun and ended up having the best game of my life. I went 2-3, with a double and a homerun, 5 Runs Batted In and 2 runs scored. The next morning I was in the paper in an article about my teams win. The feeling of hitting that ball and watch it sail over the fence sent shivers down my spine. There is no feeling like trotting around the bases and having your team maul you at home plate. That hit turned out to be the only homerun I ever hit in a game so this ball means a lot to me.
This next thing is a plaque for really the only award I ever won. In high school I worked for the YMCA doing almost everything that there was to do. I was a camp counselor, an after school counselor, a youth sports class teacher (including gymnastics at one point), a babysitter, a receptionist at the front desk, and a building supervisor. The only things I didn’t do were life guarding and tennis lessons. In 2000 my boss told me that he was nominating me for the Youth of the Year award which went out to a employee or volunteer of the YMCA who worked hard but also had a lot of involvement in extra curricular activities. I remember the afternoon that my boss called to tell me that I had won the award. I was actually going to the bathroom but my Dad decided he was going to crack the door open and slide the phone in to me. I picked up the phone and said hello at which point my boss asked me if I was sitting down. I just went, “Uhhh….yeah.” He went on to tell me that I had won the award and that I was going to be recognized at a huge dinner the next month. It was a great experience.
These last two things are probably my favorite things. Some of you will probably laugh at me but these are my memory boxes that are filled with things from two very important times in my life.
This first box is my Strive box. As most of you know, my senior year in high school and my freshman year of college I was in a band called Strive. Those two years were some of the best of my life. We put out one CD with 6 songs on it, we had t-shirts and stickers and everything. We play easily over a hundred shows during those two years. One weekend we played four shows in two days! The highlight of the band was being able to go on tour with Relient K for a weekend. The one show we played with them on Friday night I will never forget. There were about 750 people there, the biggest crowd we ever played in front of. We kicked butt though!! We had people who said we played better and put on a better show than Relient K. We made $1000 that one weekend and signed hundreds of autographs. We went out to dinner with Relient K, got to sit in on the only acoustic show they have ever done, and had a food fight down the highway with them. I will never forget that weekend.
This second box is my Melissa box. My fiancée Melissa is one of the most important people in my life and I would be devastated to ever loose her. This box is filled with memories and letters from the last four and a half years together. It brings me so much joy to dig through this box and read some of the letters that she has written me. It is a great reminder of the stuff we have down together as well. I have movie tickets in here, Red Sox tickets, a program from Blue Man Group, pictures from trips together, plane tickets, etc. I even have letters that I wrote to God when I first started to get up the courage to ask her out. Melissa is very important to me and I am one lucky guy considering that she agreed to marry me in August.
As we look over all of this stuff, one could make the argument that I have had a good life. I was a successful baseball player throughout my youth, I had a great job throughout high school where I was loved and greatly appreciated, I was in a band that did very well and had a lot of great experiences, I graduated college and have a great job that I wouldn’t trade for anything, and on top of all of that I am going to have a hot and talented wife at my side. As these things are important and great, but I would argue that these things do not give me life and in and of them selves only bring about death!! For the only thing that brings us true life is Jesus Christ! “I am the life! No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Tonight I want to look at Luke 12:13-21, where Jesus talks in a little more detail about life.
In this passage as Jesus is preaching, a man interrupts Him. “Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.’” This man, we can assume, just had a parent die and had his brother take all of the inheritance. The man recognized that Jesus was a great teacher and assumed that Jesus would help him with this issue of morality as Rabbis regularly would do. Jesus refused to get involved and bluntly said, “Who appointed me a judge or arbiter between you?” Jesus didn’t care about this!! Why? He didn’t care because his mission on earth was not to give answers to every issue of morality, to bring peace to everyone or to make everything in the world right. Jesus came to give us the opportunity of life and salvation through a relationship with God.
Jesus instead gives a warning. “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” It doesn’t matter how much stuff or wealth a man has, they do not bring or give life!! Jesus goes on in the remaining verses to tell a parable or story to help the people that surrounded Him understand this comment.
“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.’” This man did what most of us would do when we find ourselves in a time of abundance, he thought about himself and how he could store them. “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.”’”
“I’ll be set for life,” he said. “I’m going to just sit back and spend my days relaxing as other people wait on me.” Most people in our culture wouldn’t argue with this way of thinking at all. This is what shows like MTV Cribs or VH1’s documentaries on different celebrities show us. The general way of thinking is, “I got myself here! I did the work! I found the right jobs! I got the right education! Now I am going to enjoy it!” No doubt, this was the same attitude the rich farmer had. “I plowed the field, I planted the grain, I tended the soil, and I gathered the harvest. No I am going to enjoy it!”
Notice though, that Jesus does not agree with this way of thinking. In verse 20, God bluntly says to the man, “You fool!,” which I may add is the only time Jesus called anyone a fool, “This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?”
Why does God call the man a fool? He does so for two reasons.
First, look at the language back in verse 16. Jesus doesn’t say that, “A rich man worked hard a produced a crop.” He doesn’t say that, “The rich man worked hard and gained a lot of wealth.” He says, “The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop.” The man no doubt worked hard, but without God, who made the ground, and without His blessing and provision the crops would not have grown.
Second, as we just read in verse 20, when this man dies, what is going to happen to all his stuff? “Who gets all the stuff you prepared for yourself then!? Not you! Your stuff will be useless to you then! Someone else will get it and you will be left with nothing!”
Jesus explains in verse 21, “This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.” As we go through life and as we begin to compile “boxes of memories” and cool stuff like I have up here, we need to keep these two things in mind.
The abundance that some of us may find ourselves in or the cool stuff that we get or the relationships that we have in our lives all come because God has brought them into our lives. It is God who gave us our abilities and talents to work and make money. It is God gave people the ideas to invent cool things electric guitars and computers. It is God who gave us our personalities and different life experiences which help us to relate to each other in relationship. These things all come from God can not take the place of Him in our lives. If they do, we will be left with nothing when we die.
As I have stated before, when we die, all that we will have left is our relationship with God. When you have a relationship with God you will have eternal life waiting for you in heaven where you will truly be able to live! That is something we can begin to live here on earth, as Debi before she left, said that eternity starts now as you forever go deeper in a relationship with God. That is life; a life that can’t be taken away, a life that never goes dull, a life that is never boring! A life that can only be found in Jesus Christ through a relationship with Him.
