Sermon: What is Really Important in Life?
Or
Getting vs. Giving
Scripture: Luke 12: 13-21
This week I read a little prayer…
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray my Cuisinart to keep.
I pray my stocks are on the rise, and that my analyst is wise.
That all the wine I sip is white, and that my hot tub’s watertight.
That racquetball won’t get too tough, that all my sushi’s fresh enough.
I pray my cordless phone still works, that my career won’t lose its perks.
My microwave won’t radiate, my condo won’t depreciate.
I pray my health club doesn’t close, and that my money market grows.
If I go broke before I wake, I pray my Volvo they won’t take.”
This funny little tongue-in-cheek prayer represents someone’s idea of what’s important. ...important things in a privileged life.
The passage from Luke that we are going to be looking at today forces us to look at our lives and ask ourselves…”What’s really important in life?” Our scripture tells the story of a man who has plenty…more than plenty and what he does with his bounteous blessings.
This passage is very relevant to us today because most people in America have made their priority in life the attainment of enough money to live the good life. This country is a blessed country, with one of the highest living standards in the entire world. The life that most people live here in America is far beyond most.
I received this email from a customer of mine not too long ago and…it goes like this…
If you have had an education and know how to read, then you are more blessed that over two billion people in the world that cannot read anything at all.
If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the million who won’t survive the week.
If you have food in your refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of this world.
If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change lying in a dish, you are among the top 8% of the worlds wealthy.
And if you can attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death,
You are more blessed than almost three billion people in the world.
It’s amazing how humbling this realization is…to know that the poorest of us in this room are richer than most of the rest of the world and yet do we have enough? We sit and watch programs on TV like Lives of the Rich and Famous or Do You Want to Be a Millionaire Or Fabulous Wealthy Hideaways. And today, we are bombarded by advertisements showing us something bigger, something better or something different. In our American society today, the distance between comfortable and covetous may not be that great.
And that was what Jesus was trying to point out in our scripture today…when does having possessions become a sin…a sin to be reckoned with.
In the passage we read today, we find Jesus sitting and teaching his disciples, but also sitting with them were many just listening to him teach. He was trying to teach his disciples to fear God alone, when he is suddenly interrupted by a man who was not trying to learn what Jesus was teaching, but he was adamant about his own problem. He blurts out and asks Jesus,
“Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”
I’m sure Jesus stopped what he was teaching and looked over at this man and then said,
“Man, who made Me a judge or an arbitrator over you?”
Jesus refused to be sidetracked from his mission of seeking and saving the lost. He looked at that man and saw that the problem wasn’t the fair division of the inheritance, but one of ‘greed’. Jesus saw that not only did this man have a problem with greed, but also the man’s bother. Jesus knew that no settlement would be satisfactory, until both the brothers had a change of heart.
“A change of heart”…that was what made Jesus’ teaching so different. He knew that everything that comes from Man starts in the heart. We find Jesus saying in Mark 7 verse 20…
“What comes out of a man is what makes him unclean. For from within, out of men’s hearts come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man unclean.”
What Jesus saw coming out of this man was ‘Greed”, and so he begins to teach about the sin of greed in the parable of the “Rich Man”. After all my reading, I don’t believe that Jesus had a problem with a man having possessions or even being wealthy. Jesus was concerned with Man’s Heart…where is your heart? Is your heart turned toward getting more and more of what you already have…or is your heart bent on loving and giving to where it is needed.
Proverbs 21:26 speaks to this very point…”they are always greedy for more, while the godly love to give.”
Jake, my son called me the other day and we were talking about all the overtime he was having to put in at his job. I tried to tell him there were other things in life, but he was saying he needed to make that money. So, I asked him if he knew what all that money would get him after a few years…I said, all it will get you is “stuff”…more stuff than he’ll know what to do with.
Charles Swindoll has pictured it this way…imagine a shipwrecked sailor on a life raft in the middle of the ocean. His terrible thirst impels him to drink the salt water, but it only makes him thirstier. This causes him to drink even more, which makes him thirstier still. He consumes more and more of the salty water…until paradoxically, he becomes dehydrated and dies.
This illustrates that a heart bent on acquiring more and more of any earthly possession is dead end. Jesus said that one’s life does not consist in the abundance of His possessions…and yet Greed tries to convince us of just the opposite.
Starting in verse 16, Jesus gives us five principles of what happens when our hearts begin to focus exclusively on ourselves and we become greedy…
The first principle…when we focus on ourselves…we do not give God the credit for things he has done. Then He spoke a parable to them, saying: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully.” Jesus spoke of a man who was rich, a man who had honestly earned what he possessed…Jesus didn’t have a problem with that…Jesus was speaking of a man who was leaving God out of the picture…he was speaking of a man who was saying to himself…look what I have done…look what my fields have yielded…look at me and my wonderful problem.
Where was God in this picture…the fact that he was a steward over all that God had given him…the fact that God had blessed him with a good crop free of blight and disease… the fact that God had blessed him with such an abundance that ‘his cup overfloweth’…that his barns could no longer hold all that God had given him…this man was not giving God any credit for these things that he had done.
The second principle…when we focus on ourselves…we make plans but leave God out. “And he thought within himself, saying, ‘what shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops? So he said, I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build greater ones, and there I will store all my crops and my goods.”
There was nothing wrong with the man’s desire to build more barns; it was probably a good and prudent idea. The problem lays in the fact that there is not any thought of sharing his abundance with others.
It is interesting to note that in the parable the personal pronoun ‘My’ occurs four times and ‘I’ occurs five times. The rich man says…my crops…my barns…my goods. There is no thought to putting God into his life. In all his plans, he has left God out.
The third principle…when we focus on ourselves…we consider spending our resources only on ourselves. “And I say to my soul…soul, you have many goods laid up for many years: take your ease; eat, drink and be merry.” In this verse, the rich man is talking to himself and assessing his future physical well-being. This man thought that when he put his plan into action that he would have it made for years to come. He was convinced that his future would continually expand under his control. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was beginning to show traits of being a ‘Fool’.
In the book of James, it speaks about this rich man’s attitude in Chapter 4 verses 13-16 when it says, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”, whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.”
One of the most dangerous words in our language is the word, “Tomorrow”. When we speak of the future, we should say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” The Bible does not discourage us from looking into the future, however, as we make our plans, whether it be in business, in relationships, or in our personal lives, we are to do so from the perspective that ultimately God is in charge. With this in mind, we should plan with a humble heart, knowing that God is with us…to help us and to strengthen us in all we do.
The fourth principle…when our hearts are focused on ourselves, we store our treasures in the wrong places. “But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul will be demanded of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?” God is calling this rich man a fool.” In scripture, a fool is one who leaves God out of any consideration. In Psalm 14:1 it says, “ The fool has said in his heart there is no God.”
A man becomes a fool when he begins to think that all that he is and all that he accomplishes and all that he possesses is because of his doing. When men leave God out of their lives, the seven deadly sins are the inevitable result…and one of these deadly sins in Greed.
But, as I said earlier, I don’t see Jesus having a problem with us owning possessions…that is one way God blesses our lives…it is how we think about our possessions that makes the difference.
It’s very hard not to become emotionally attached to our things in this life. One experience I remember is the time when I had to deal with my aging parents. My father and mother had moved to Fort Myers, Florida during the last 20 some years of their lives. And I remember sitting with my father, at their kitchen table…he had had his third stroke and was now wheel chair bound. My sister and brother and I had arrived earlier that week to help manage a garage sale, pack up their things, arrange the sale of their house and reserve plane tickets for them to come back to Kansas, so that we could more easily take care of them.
My father and I were sitting there at the kitchen table, looking out the window at the huge moving van, trying to stay out of the way of the movers as we watched them take one trip after another of the remaining earthly possessions of my parents to the truck. I watched a tear roll down my father’s cheek and I realized that he was having to let go of the many wonderful things that God had blessed him with.
It’s really amazing how God’s absolute truths quietly slip up on you and hit you in the side of the head. I realized then and there, that “you can’t take it with you”…that God blesses you with many things, but they are only on loan for you to use…that you are only a steward of the things of this life.
And finally, the fifth principle…when we focus on ourselves…we will find ourselves in conflict with God’s Plan for our lives. “So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”
Riches have one major weakness; they have no purchasing power after death. All our earthly riches will do us no good once all we own is a small six foot plot of ground, unless our riches are used to help others…unless we use our abundance to bring others to the belief that giving is better than getting…that God blesses the giver and places treasures in his house for the righteous person. Until we can come to this realization, we have not brought God into our lives…we have not opened our eyes to what Jesus taught… and we are not living the Christian Way.
We started out this morning, looking at our many earthly riches and then discussing how Jesus told the parable of the rich man. As we think about what’s really important in life, it all seems to boil down to two options for us…
Do we want a life that is dependent on things of this world or do we want to live a life, knowing there are no guarantees of permanence in this life, but knowing that treasures await us in heaven and knowing that we have a bond with our God and our Creator?
There is no escaping the fact that we are part of this world…but that shouldn’t stop us from realizing that we are also part of God’s great universe. And even though we are daily immersed in the cares and concerns of this life, that shouldn’t keep us from knowing that this life and everything in it was given to us by a Loving and Caring Father.
So our decision comes down to a very simple question.
Are you going to live for yourself or for God?
Amen.
