If you have your Bibles and you want to follow along, please open them up to the book of Luke 12:13. It will take us a few minutes to get there, but we will get there pretty shortly. As you know, we have been going through the series “Do not conform. Be transformed.” It is based on a passage found in the book of Romans 12:1-2. It says “Do not conform to the pattern of the world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The idea behind this series is that we would look at various patterns we would see out there in culture. Patterns that try to shape us into the culture’s way of doing things and examine some of the consequences for following those patterns and then provide a bridge to some sort of a biblical response. Today, we are going to look at a pattern that I think most of you should be aware of. It is called the pattern of materialism. I want to stop right here because I know that when I put up a word like materialism, some of you are holding your wallets and thinking there goes Chuck. He is going to do another sermon on tithing. He is going to try and strong arm me into giving more money. I want to calm your fears right now. I am not going to do that. I am not even going to put pictures of kids up that are going away to camp and you need to sponsor them. I am not going to put videos of the kids in Africa that need water filters and that sort of thing. Although it was a good thing. In fact, we raised over $3,000 for those kids for the water filters. That is a good thing. But really I am not here today to try and strong arm you into giving more money. But if after the sermon any of you are feeling this conviction to drop an extra buck or two into the offering plate, don’t worry. Chuck is not going to stand in your way. Don’t worry about that whatsoever.
Today, we are going to look at the pattern of materialism. I think that most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, we know that materialism exists in the culture. Especially in the culture of America. When I was trying to think of a video or media thing or an image that would really help us to understand that materialism and the emphasis on the more is very prevalent. The commercial that came to mind was the AT&T commercial with the little kids talking and the little girl starts saying “we need more, we need more, we need more”. Anybody familiar with that particular video? It is a cute one. But just in case you haven’t seen it, I thought I would let Eric play it for us right now. I love that commercial and I like the little kid that is sitting on the right going like this the whole time very distracted. We laugh at that commercial because it is funny but really because it is true. When it comes to life, we want more and more and more. AT&T has figured it out and Verizon has figured it out and every major business in America figured out that for Americans more is better. We are a very materialistic culture by and large. I want to talk about some of the evidences of the fact that we are a materialistic culture.
Before I go there, what I want to do is give a working definition of materialism. I think this is from Webster’s Dictionary. It says “materialism is a preoccupation with or emphasis on material objects, comforts, and consideration with a disinterest in or rejection of spiritual, intellectual, or cultural values”. That is a long definition and kind of a complicated definition. I thought what I would do is shorten it and give it Chuck’s definition. Materialism is simply a preoccupation with stuff. That is all it is. We go out of our way to get stuff and when we get the stuff we try to hold on to the stuff. To me that is what materialism is. When I thought about the evidences of materialism in the culture, so many things came to my mind I didn’t know where to begin. So many examples I could use. What I thought I would start with is just simply my own house. Some of you have been to our house and you see that the Gohn family has a lot of stuff. Probably too much stuff. Really, it hasn’t always been that way. When I left Oregon in 2001 to go attend seminary with my two lovely children, Austin and Natalie, I liquidated my house, sold my house, got rid of a bunch of stuff and actually was able to put pretty much all my belongings into a mid-size U-Haul. I moved to Johnson City, TN where I spent three years in seminary and then it so happened that I met my current and wonderful wife, Debbie. Debbie had some stuff. She had a lot of stuff. She had about three times my stuff. Instead of moving to Pittsburgh with a mid-size U-Haul, we ended up with two large U-Hauls coming into Pittsburgh. That was nine years ago next month when we came into Pittsburgh. What was nice about it was that when we came into Pittsburgh up on Highland Place, there were so many people from the church there ready to help us unload our stuff. Some of you were there. I was thinking about that. A few weeks later I was talking to somebody in the church saying wasn’t that nice. People showed up and they just were so gracious. I am just so thankful that they were willing to come and help us unload our stuff. The lady said to me don’t be too thankful because most of them really weren’t there to help you. They just wanted to see what kind of stuff you had and how much you had of it. It is true I think. We have a lot of stuff and most of us have too much stuff. If you are like me, you are not satisfied with the amount of stuff you have so you go around on Monday night and look around the neighborhood and you see what kind of stuff people are throwing away so you can take more stuff home even if you really don’t need it.
As a side note, I have a nice guitar case in the back seat of my car, I don’t play the guitar, but it was on the side of the road and I could not resist it, so if you need a guitar case, it is all yours. For evidence of materialism, we don’t have to look farther than our own house. We really don’t have to look farther than obviously the TV set because we are bombarded with image after image, message after message, 24/7 all these commercials. Statistics say that by the age of 20, a person has seen one million commercials. The marketers have gotten really sophisticated because they are able to target those commercials towards certain demographics. I really didn’t believe this until one night I was sitting there watching the NBC Evening News the other night. These commercials came on for denture cream and reverse mortgages and Viagra. I am looking at Debbie saying why do they show all these types of commercials during the NBC Evening News. She looked at me and said I hate to tell you this but it is because only old people watch the NBC Evening News. The kids don’t watch the news or they watch it on the internet. The commercials are really targeted towards the older demographics where the internet tends to be targeted a lot more towards the younger demographic. Really when it comes to materialism, we are bothered by it, but I think we like the idea of ads because we know that gives us options. In America, we are all about having options and having choices in things. We know that we have a lot of choices. All you have to do is walk down the aisle of a local grocery store and you see all these choices and different products. Within a particular product category, you have a lot of different brands. You have all sorts of brands of pet food, or toilet paper, or toothpaste. I was reading that apparently there are 40 different flavors or toothpaste in America right now. As Americans, we have come to expect that. We expect to have choices. We want choices. We want to have those options out there. If we don’t get it, it kind of annoys us. We take that for granted.
Think about somebody who is just coming to the country for the first time. Think how they deal with all these choices. They come from a country where they have one or two products with a limited number of brands and they don’t know how to deal with it. They experience what is called choice anxiety. They really don’t know how to handle all these different choices. I remember several years ago I was taking a Russian class at a community college because I was going to Russia on a short-term mission trip, so I wanted to learn some basic Russian. I remember talking to the Russian instructor after the class one day. She mentioned to me that she was going to return back to Russia. I was thinking that is kind of sad. I said to her, won’t you miss all the choices you have in America? She looked at me kind of strangely. She said what do you mean? You Americans are so obsessed with choices. Why do I need seven sweaters for seven different days? I really don’t need that. I looked at her kind of funny, but it was true. We have to have all these different options where she felt we were too caught up in all these choices. Consequently, she even mentioned how we ended up not spending time in meaningful relationships because we had far too many distractions in life.
A sign of materialism is the advertisements, the number of choices, but it is also just the availability of being able to purchase items really anywhere we want 24/7. We look around the country and we look in the area and we local malls, and if you travel around the country you just see malls popping up everywhere. One of the largest malls in America, I think it is called the Mall of America in Minnesota. I was reading a statistic that said 40 million people go to that mall every year, which supposedly is more than the total number of visitors to Disneyworld and the Grand Canyon combined. I was reading another statistic that said for the average American there is 16.5 square feet of mall space. That is how much mall space there is in the United States. And if you are someone who doesn’t like the malls like me, you don’t have to leave the comfort of your own house. You can do most of your purchasing simply by sitting on the couch. You don’t even have to change your clothes. You can sit there and purchase just about anything if you have a credit card and an internet connection. My goal this year is to do all my Christmas shopping online and that I will not ever have to go to a mall because I really don’t want to go anywhere near a mall during Christmastime. These are just evidences of a materialistic culture. All we have to do is look around our home. All we have to do is look at the commercials on the TV and look at the variety of choices. Look at the availability of shopping experiences out there.
As good as all those evidences are, really we don’t have to look too far to find evidence for materialism because all we have to do is look in our own heart. It is in our heart where we find the biggest evidence for materialism. Some of you who are familiar with the Old Testament know the name King Solomon. King Solomon was a very wealthy man. He was probably the wealthiest person in the Bible. Over 3,000 years ago he nailed this idea of the problem of materialism having to do with the human heart. He writes in Ecclesiastes 5 “Whoever loves money never has money enough. Whoever loves wealth is never satisfied enough with his income. This too is meaningless. As goods increase, so do those who consume them. What benefit are they to the owner except to feast his eyes on them?” He is hitting at a reality. He is hitting at a place deep within us that is true. There is something in us that is never satisfied. It is always looking for more, more, more. When we think about materialism, we can’t point to the corporate world. The corporate world is not the problem. What they are doing is just accommodating what is already in our heart. That is all they are doing. It is really an issue of the heart. It is an issue of a dissatisfaction that is going on here. A dissatisfaction that we can never fulfill so we keep buying and buying and buying trying to seek a fulfillment by things. I mentioned last week a quote by one of my professors, Mark Sayers. He is kind of an expert in culture. He writes this “The entire media culture that we are immersed in each day is dedicated to keeping us dissatisfied. The unhappier we are, the more we will buy. Advertisers constantly force us to compare our lifestyles and appearances with those of others with the goal of making us feel dissatisfied with what we already have so that we will let go of our cash.” It is just a paraphrase really of what Solomon was saying 3,000 years ago. We are just dissatisfied people so we go out there and we buy stuff. We ask for things and the business world, the marketers, the manufacturing companies produce for us. Then we buy the things and we think they are going to satisfy some deep hole in us. They don’t so we buy more. We buy something different. We just keep buying and buying and they keep fulfilling it for us. It is not the advertisers that are to blame. It is not the businesses. It is something that is going on in the human heart.
As I have mentioned, there are always consequences to patterns out there. With the pattern of materialism, there are all sorts of consequences. The most obvious being just how much debt there is out there. I was reading a statistic and I don’t know if it is that current, but basically for people who use credit cards, 61% of the people that use credit cards have an average balance of $12,000 in any given month. That credit card debt is at an interest rate of 16% which equates to about $1900 a year in interest charges. That is just the average. So obviously there is a consequence of materialism that you see in a credit card statement. It even goes deeper than that. Materialism makes our lives complex, and it creates anxiety. If you go out there and purchase a car, you can’t wait to get it off the lot but then you have the car payments and the insurance payment and the title and the registration and all the different fees associated with it. Obviously you have the upkeep so you are worried about getting your car repaired and paying for repairs. Home ownership, as nice as it is, it can be a real hassle. You have to shell out the property taxes. You have to shell out the insurance. The monthly mortgage payment. You have to furnish your house. You have to have things to take care of the things like the lawn. You have to have the tools to fix the leaks and things that go wrong. You have all these different things that all of a sudden make your life more complicated. Not only is it more complicated, but sometimes it creates anxiety within you. What do you we do? We have all this stuff that we don’t want people to mess with so we put secure locks on the door. Some people go out and buy things like guns. Some people go out and buy sophisticated alarm systems to protect that stuff or they download sophisticated anti-virus software or they sign up for identity theft protection and all this kind of stuff to protect their stuff. Materialism has a cost. It brings complexity. It brings anxiety to your life. Not only that. For some people who are really bent towards accumulating things, the really materialistic people, they are not going to stop short of getting what they want to the point of doing something immoral or possibly illegal or just downright dumb.
There is a passage that Paul speaks about in 1 Timothy where he speaks of this. He says “People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction.” That is one we can all probably relate to. Basically he is saying when people are pursuing wealth, oftentimes they fall into doing dumb things. They get caught up in get-rich-quick schemes. They get caught up in some sort of multilevel marketing thing. They get into this thing where they are convinced if they put their money here they are going to get a quick return. Some sort of a Ponzi scheme or something like that. What often happens is they lose their money. They lose the wealth that they have worked so hard for. For the people that are really intent on getting stuff, they sometimes go and do something illegal. All you have to do is watch the evening news or open a newspaper or look on the internet and you see people that are always committing petty crimes because they want to get more stuff. They want to have more stuff so they do petty robberies and different things like that and end up spending a lot of time in jail.
I was thinking about a high-profile person who would be a good illustration for this particular passage. The name that came to mind is a person by the name of OJ Simpson. Anybody recognize that name? OJ Simpson was a phenomenal football star. I don’t think he won the Heisman trophy but he was nominated for it and he was an NFL player. He was the first to rush 2,000 yards or something. I can’t remember all the statistics but he was a very good, promising NFL player. Back in the 90s, he was accused of murdering his wife. He was let off of that particular accusation. He got free. But then he did something really stupid. He was having a hard time making money, so one night he went into a Las Vegas hotel room with a bunch of thugs and he pulls out a gun and roughs up some of the guys in their hotel room because supposedly they had some of his stuff. Some of his memorabilia. It was worth a couple thousand dollars and now he is back in jail spending time. He is a picture of the ruin and destruction. In fact, I have a picture of him. On the left there is OJ Simpson as a star. On the right there is OJ Simpson as an old man and an old convict. Ruin and destruction because he went after something that he didn’t want to do honestly. He went after it through a dishonest gain. We have the consequences of temptation to do dishonest gain. We have the consequences that relate to complexity and anxiety of a life. The main consequence is that when we pursue wealth, it pulls us away from our relationship with God and his church. Later on in that same passage Paul writes “For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Some people eager for money have wandered from their faith and pierce themselves with many griefs.” Wandered from the faith. If we thought about it long enough, we probably would think of people that have wandered away from their faith because they get so preoccupied with the might dollar or pursuing wealth, chasing after dreams, chasing after the vacations. Maybe they have gotten themselves so deep in debt that they have to take a second job and they can’t go to church on Sunday. You see them gradually wandering away from the faith, from the church, and their relationship with God.
My point is that when it comes to materialism, there clearly is a pattern of materialism and really the pattern of materialism or the pattern of more is really not all cut out the way society or culture makes it to be. It is really not that good of a thing. As we think about the answer, the answer always comes back to Jesus. Obviously Jesus provides the answer. The answer is actually found in this passage that I spoke about earlier. It is Luke 12:13. What I am going to do is read through that passage all the way down 13-21 and then I am going to go back and highlight a few of the key verses before we close it off. Reading from Luke 12:13. (Scripture read here.)
A little bit of background. We don’t know exactly what led up to this, but the idea is that Jesus in this stage of his ministry is going around doing what he does best. He is teaching and ministering to the people. Because he was such a good teacher and a miracle worker, he attracted a crowd. Out of the blue, some guy says Jesus I need you to deal with this issue. I have this inheritance issue with my brother and I want you to solve it. It seems like a very random request but really if you know the situation it is not totally random because Jesus was considered a teacher and he was considered a rabbi. Rabbis would have the ability not only to deal with religious things but also civil matters, court-related issues. It would be common for someone to ask Jesus to deal with something like that. He says Jesus help me. Make my brother divide his inheritance. But rather than allowing himself to get pulled into a domestic dispute between two brothers, he decides instead he is going to go to the heart of the issue. The heart of the issue is greed. Jesus says “‘Man, who appointed me as a judge or arbiter between you?’ Then he said to them ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed. A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” What Jesus is saying is it is not about the inheritance. It is about the thing in your heart and that thing is called greed. That is what he wants to deal with. It is not just the fact that it is greed. It is the fact that because of the greed he has distorted perspective on life. He thinks his life is all about accumulation of things.
What Jesus does as he often does is he goes on to tell a parable. A parable is simply a story. It is not necessarily a true story. It is basically what they call an earthly story that has a heavenly point. Using earthly type figures and analogies but it has a heavenly meaning. He goes on and tells the story and says “The ground of a certain rich man produces a good crop. He thought to myself ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I will do. I will tear down my barns and I will build bigger ones. There I will store all my grain and my goods.’” When we think about this, the brother is probably sitting there listening to the story and thinking what is wrong with that? That is perfectly logical. You run out of places to store your crops just tear down the barns and build bigger ones. Even today we know that there are businessmen and businesswoman out there that basically are running corporations and have to make decisions especially when it comes to storing inventory and product and that sort of thing. When they get to be very successful what happens is they have to build bigger warehouses and move offices and all that kind of stuff. Perfectly acceptable. This brother is probably sitting back and saying so what, big deal. What Jesus is doing is trying to pull him into the story a little bit.
As we read scripture sometimes, we don’t pick up on the nuances in scripture as easily. We tend to read the stuff really quickly. I guarantee you that the Jewish ear, someone who is familiar with the Jewish law, the first five books of the Old Testament, would pick up on something here. They would pick up on how many times this person uses the word ‘My’. I have no place to story MY crops. He says I will tear down MY barns. He goes on to say I will store all MY grain and MY goods. He is exposing that this man is very possessive. This man has actually credited his wealth, his possession to himself and his own abilities. The Jewish ear listening to that would immediately think something is very wrong here because we were taught since a very early age from Deuteronomy 8:18 that says “But remember the Lord your God for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth.” Every Jew was taught from the littlest age that God was the one that gave you the ability to make wealth. God was the one that gave you the resources and God was the one that gave you the ability. It had nothing to do with you.
What we have is Jesus painting a picture of an arrogant, greedy man. So arrogant that in the next line he basically says you know what I have made so much money, I am just going to sit back and enjoy the rest of my life. He goes on to say “I will say to myself ‘You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink, and be merry.’” That is called an epicurean philosophy. The epicurean’s were philosophers who had this idea eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you will die. This is the attitude this guy has. I have all this stuff accumulated. Someday I am going to die down the road but right now I am going to sit back and enjoy life. Again, the listeners, including the brother, were probably thinking what is wrong with that? The guy worked hard. He was a good businessman. Shouldn’t he enjoy what he has earned? It is not about the possessions. It gets back to the attitude.
This is where Jesus decides he is going to insert a new character. The new character is called God. God comes along and sees this and it says “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?’” Up to this point in the story, there was no mention of God, spirituality, or anything going on there. It was all about things. It was all about material. The whole picture was about the material. The crops, the grains, and everything else. It is a picture of a man that goes through life who focuses all on the material. Has no sense there is a spiritual world out there. In that spiritual world are not just the angels and demons. There is the God who created you and the God who gives you the ability to work and the God who has the power of life and death over you. He comes in and presents this figure that basically says to the man “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you.” What he is letting the guy know is you better start packing your stuff or you better get ready because in a couple hours you are going to be dead. You are going to lose your life. To make matters worse, he presents a rhetorical question, which is basically that the man knows the answer and God knows the answer. He says “Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?” The obvious answer is I really don’t know. I have no idea who is going to get my stuff. All I know is when my heart takes that last beat, my stuff is going to be scattered. It is just going to go out. This is another idea that is confirmed in so many places in the Bible. One passage that I think brings it out the best is in the book of Psalms. Psalm 39:6 that says “Man is a mere phantom as he goes to and fro. He bustles about but only in vain. He heaps wealth not knowing who will get it.” Isn’t that true? We spend our life accumulating stuff. The 401Ks. The houses. The cars. The boats. The knickknacks. The computers. The technology. The money. All this stuff. We really don’t have a clue who is going to get it. Some of us think we like to know who is going to get it. Some of us think our kids are going to get it. We are going to put it in our will. But the reality is we don’t know how much of that they are going to get. We don’t know what they are going to do with it. We don’t know who they are going to marry. They can marry a very wise person or a fool. The fool squanders the money. We just have no clue where our stuff is going to end up. I don’t think we would like to know where all our stuff is going to end up because we know that all those little favorite little knickknacks and things we bought and all those things we have invested in end up in an estate sale, a flea market, or out at the auction barn and the auctioneers are just pushing that stuff through as fast as they can. People out there picking through your treasure that you put all your time and money in and they are just picking through it like it is nothing. I hate to say it but that is the sad reality. It is a sad but very true picture. So true that an atheist cannot deny this. This is reality. This is absolutely true that can be confirmed over and over and over again. I hate to depress you because this is kind of a depressing sermon. Last week’s was a little bit more depressing because I spoke on death. I got a lot of flak about that one. This one probably comes second because it is very depressing. He is not just talking about the man that is fighting with his brother. He is not just talking about the crowd that is following Jesus. He is talking about the crowd today. He is talking about the world, but he is talking about Christians. He is talking about everybody in this room including me. The difference between the people in the world and the people that would call themselves Christians that have a born-again relationship with Jesus Christ is that we have a hope. Our hope is Jesus Christ. You have an answer. The answer is basically found in Jesus’ last words. He goes on to say “This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.” Again, this is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself, like the man in the story, who is not rich toward God. The answer says be rich towards God. That is kind of a complicated statement because what does it mean to be rich toward God? I don’t have time to unpack it, but the whole idea is that God is a rich giver. My favorite passage John 1:16 “From the fullness of his grace, we receive one mercy after another. Grace upon grace.” He is pouring it out. He is opening that valve up and pouring out these riches to us and everything else. What he is saying is receive those riches and give them out to somebody. Take them and push them back into taking care of his creation, his people, his environment, but also his agenda. Pushing his agenda forward. The good news about doing that even when you start letting your stuff go, what happens is you not only get free from enslavement to your stuff, you begin to receive stuff back in ways that you never even expected. Not material blessings but spiritual blessings. It is all summed up in the last passage out of Proverbs 3:9-10. It says “Honor the Lord with your wealth, with the first fruits of all your crops; then you barns will be filled to overflowing and your vats will brim over with new wine.” This is a picture of something. It is called abundance. This is a picture of the abundant life that is available through Jesus Christ. It is not a picture of material wealth. It is a picture of spiritual wealth that is available to anybody who decides they want to put their trust not in their things but their trust in Jesus Christ. It is there.
In closing, it can’t be denied that we live in a materialistic world. A pattern of more. I want more. I want more. I want more. The answer is not going out there and saying we are going to boycott all these corporations out there trying to sell us stuff or we are going to get the anti-virus stuff to stop the spam and emails or whatever it is that is trying to sell us stuff. The answer is transformation of the human heart. The way you change the world is start with the heart and it begins with your very own heart. Before you can go out and change the heart of the world, you have to make sure that you are not dealing with any sense of greed. I will tell you right now, everybody in this room, including yours truly, has some greed in their heart. How do I know? Because we live in a materialistic culture and we all are sinners. I know we are materialistic. If you don’t believe me, just go home and look around your house, look around your apartment, look at your checkbook and see where you spend the money, and I guarantee everybody deals with greed. That is not a major problem but all you have to do is be willing to get yourself again on the operating table and allow God to do some open heart surgery into your heart. Allow him to shine his light in there. Allow yourself to receive what he is trying to say because so quickly when God says something you just want to push it away. If you allow God to get inside your heart every time you are experiencing some form of greed and you say God forgive me. Let me get past this. Let me get past this. Over and over. Eventually, what happens is you start actually doing what he tells you to do. How to respond with riches towards others rather than riches towards self. After a while, it doesn’t become an issue any more. After a while, you begin to see that you are being changed. You are being transformed. No longer conforming. You are being transformed into the newness of life that the Corinthians tells us about. You are being changed. You are becoming somebody who does not put the focus on the material world that feeds yourself but again focusing your riches towards God. Again, as this passage says “Honor the Lord with your wealth, with the first fruits of all your crops; then your barns will be filled to overflowing and your vats will brim over with new wine.” Let us pray.
