Get Rich or Die Tryin’

Luke 12:13-21

^13 Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” ^14 Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” ^15 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.”

^16 And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. ^17 He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ ^18 “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. ^19 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.”’ ^20 “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?’ ^21 “This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”

For one of you seated here, this is your lucky day! If you look under your seat you may find an enormous monetary reward. Take a moment and see if you can find it. Ah, surprise—everyone has a genuine million dollar bill taped under their seat. Did you read about the true story a few weeks about the guy who tried to deposit 999 one million dollar bills into the bank? It’s a true story. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,172532,00.html  I wonder if he was using these gospel tracts?!

Imagine for a moment that you were actually holding one million dollars. Since we are letting our imaginations run wild, also imagine that you do not owe any taxes on this money because it was an inheritance gift from your father. You already have half of it spent, don’t you? Feels pretty good, doesn’t it? Your dad left you a million dollars! He was a great guy, wasn’t he? Now imagine you just found out that he left your other siblings 2 million dollars. Now how do you feel? You’re holding a million dollars but you suddenly feel cheated.

This is just a taste of what the man in verse 13 was experiencing. It was common for Jewish rabbis to advise other Jews on matters of personal business. This man in the crowd naturally assumed that Jesus would arbitrate his right of inheritance. This man was not too happy, was he? He obviously felt cheated by his brother and therefore was demanding his rights. Money has a nasty way of dividing families, doesn’t it?

Jesus’ response was straight and firm: “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” This is interesting, isn’t it? One day Jesus will judge all of this man’s works—even this question that he asked about his inheritance—but for now Jesus refused to get involved in family disputes. The judge of all the earth is not interested in petty civil matters. Parents—what does this scene remind you of? It is a little slice of our daily life, is it not? The same thing happens to use when two or more of our children ask us to settle their dispute. Little Sally yells, “Mom—tell Billy to give me back my pencil.” What does Sally want from you? She wants you to run over to Billy, turn him upside down, shake him up and down and scream—“Alright Billy, give that pencil to your sister RIGHT NOW!” Then after you leave, Sally sticks her tongue out at Billy, so Billy yells, “Mom, Sally stuck her tongue out at me!” On and on it goes. For parents, especially moms, every day family court is in session!

Jesus did not answer the man’s question, right? Look again. Jesus actually did answer the man’s question, just not in the way he expected. Jesus turned to the crowd and said, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” There’s Jesus’ answer. The precise question of who gets what portion of the inheritance could not be answered because that was not the most important thing. Jesus peered into this man’s heart and could tell that this was not a civil matter or even a family matter—it was a heart matter. Greed had infested these two brothers and until that was rooted out and destroyed, nothing else mattered.

If you were one of Jesus’ disciples, right at this moment a strange feeling would have come over you and you would have thought, “I think I feel a parable coming.” And you would have been right! Jesus used this very teachable moment to teach the crowd and his disciples. I love the way this parable begins. “The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. Where did the crop come from? The ground produced the crop. I think Jesus is making the point that it was not by this man’s wisdom that he harvested a good crop, but the ground did it all by itself. This man’s bumper crop was not due to his expertise in farming, but rather it was an abundant blessing poured down from heaven.

For you gardeners and farmers, just imagine what that summer must have been like for this man. The spring sprouts in his fields would have been growing tall and strong. About mid-summer his hopes for an enormous crop would have been given birth. At the end of a long day of work, he would take a leisurely walk through the rows and think, “Could this really be happening? If this continues to grow like this, I will have the biggest harvest in the last 50 years!” He was already allowing himself to make big plans for the future. Isn’t this exactly the way we think about our future? We calculate how long we have until retirement, we add up our nest egg and extrapolate out ten or twenty years into the future. Then we put down our pencils and our calculators while a big grin appears on our face. “I’m gonna be rich! If I can keep working and saving at the current rate, if I can get 6 or 7% out of the stock market, I won’t have any worries at all when I turn 65.” Our mid-life calculations are like this man’s mid-summer walk through the crops—“could it be? Will it really be that much?”

This is precisely the moment when we need to hear Jesus say, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” Some of us falsely think that as long as we are giving to the church or trying to tithe, that our retirement funds and the rest of our things are more or less off limits to God. It’s so easy to compartmentalize our life, isn’t it? Our tithe belongs to God, but our TV viewing habits don’t. Our Sunday mornings belong to God, but our Friday nights belong to us. God can have my car, after all, it’s ten years old and not running too well, but he can’t have my boat, or my 4-wheeler, or my kids, or my days off or—heaven forbid—my hunting rifle. We need to be so careful that we do not divide up our lives into God’s part and our part. We need to be so careful that our planning for the future does not turn into idolatry.

The man in Jesus’ parable asked himself the question, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ What a difficult problem to have! It’s like saying, “the banks can’t hold all of my money.” We are not directly told this, but by the time he got to harvest season, I think he had already planned out what he was going to do? ‘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. This man had never been wealthy before. His barns had always been plenty big enough to hold the crops he needed to feed his family and his livestock. He wasn’t rich, but he always had enough. But now he needs to tear down those puny little barns and build bigger barns. Did you notice the plural noun there? Bigger barns. One big barn wasn’t going to hold the entire harvest. He was going to need several barns. His harvest had been an enormous success. If he were alive today, you would see him on a late night infomercial hawking his latest book and tapes. “I was just a simple farmer growing crops and I made millions, and I can show you how to do it. Just call the 800 number on the screen and for three easy payments of $39.99, you can have my latest tape series called, “You’re Gonna Need Bigger Barns!”

People from far and wide would have asked this farmer the all-important question—“how did you do it?” He would have said, “Well all I did was X, Y and Z.” Then they would all go home and do X, Y and Z in the hopes that they would also become rich. Why is that we are so good at imitating worldly success, but no so good at imitating Godly success? You know what I find truly scary is when churches start imitating one another. Whenever one church begins to have great success, by which I mean a lot of people are coming, all the other churches want to know exactly what they are doing so they can do the same thing in their church. I have been to the conferences. I have seen this happen innumerable times. One time I was at a Willow Creek conference and several times they told the group not to go home and try to imitate what they were doing. The problem is that their warnings fall on deaf ears. Thousands of pastors and lay leaders were sitting there completely enamored at the apparent success of the church and they were not about to listen to the warnings against imitation. What does every church do when they start to grow large? They build bigger buildings! Does that sound familiar!?

Did you notice how Jesus phrased this warning? He said, Be on your guard against all kinds of greed. In other words, there are an infinite number of things which can cause greed within us. It can be the common desire to be rich. It might be a fearful desire for your safety. You realize that if the bird flu doesn’t kill you, a dirty bomb from a sleeper terrorist cell will! Maybe you have a desire for sex or pornography. Maybe for you, your source of  greed is for prestige or honor. Maybe you have a compelling greed to be liked by everyone. Anything that pleases us can be a source of greed. Here is a simple definition of greed: loving creation more than the Creator. Why did God create so many wonderful things? He created them for our good and for his glory. All of the good things in creation were meant to point us toward Christ, but instead we get stuck on the created thing. Suppose you were hiking along a ravine and noticed a large, gold hunk of rock in the side of the hill. To your joy, you realize that it is a large piece of real gold worth thousands of dollars. What would you do? A smart person would realize that there is probably a lot more gold in them thar hills, so he would immediately purchase the property and convert his thousands of dollars into millions. The small piece of gold points to a bigger source of gold. But carrying the analogy back to creation, we are completely satisfied with the one piece of gold and fail to see the greater source. We enjoy the created things so much we forget about the source—the Creator.

Listen to how C.S. Lewis describes our worship of creation. “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." (Lewis, The Weight of Glory) This is precisely what happened to the man in this parable. He was far too easily pleased with his big crop and new barns. 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. There are two types of greed in this verse—materialism and hedonism. Materialism is the false pursuit of material things and hedonism is the false pursuit of pleasure. The man’s materialism is rooted in the phrase, “I have many good things’ and his hedonism is shown by the phrase, “take life easy—eat, drink and be merry.” The man’s materialism inevitably led to his hedonism. Remember, Jesus said there are many types of greed and these two are always linked together. Did you know there is a line of clothing called ‘Materialism’? At least they are being honest, right? There is also a Mediterranean resort called ‘Hedonism’ where a portion of the resort is “clothing optional”. I know what you are thinking, ‘how did a pastor know that!’ When we lived in Michigan, a co-worker went there on her honeymoon. Apparently this Hedonism resort is so popular that now they have Hedonism 2 and Hedonism 3!! “Be on guard against all kinds of greed.”

There is a great deception in this man’s thinking, and like all deception, it is subtle and hidden. The NASB brings it out more clearly. 19 ‘And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry.” ’ (NASB)    You see, the man was actually talking to his soul—the eternal part of his inner man. He wasn’t merely stating that he was happy, he was making the audacious claim the inner most parts of his life were satisfied by materialism and hedonism. This is the part of our life we try to fill with created things. When you are greedy for things you are trying to satisfy your soul. When you look for sex it is because your soul is asking for it. When you have this driving need to be liked, your soul is longing to be filled. Your soul is constantly looking for satisfaction and when it gets filled with created things, it leaves no room for the Creator.

There truly is a level of satisfaction in earthly attempts to satisfy the soul. If money did not bring happiness but instead gave a person an incurable disease, how many greedy people would there be in the world? We pursue sin because sin satisfies the soul—at least for a season. If this were not true then everyone on the planet would be beating down the doors of every church begging them to give them the answer to their soul’s longing. If created things did not satisfy then every non-Christian would be miserable and every believer happy. I wish it were that simple. It would be a lot easier to share your faith, wouldn’t it? Created things do satisfy, but it’s a terrible lie and a hideous deception, because enjoyment of created things masks the True Source.

The NASB also illuminates the next verse. 20 “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your soul is required of you; and now who will own what you have prepared?’ (NASB)  Do you see it? From the man’s perspective his soul was fine, but from God’s perspective his soul was in sad shape. In fact, he was about to lose his soul forever. By calling him a fool, Jesus was indicating where this man’s soul was going to spend eternity. This is where the deception ends. It makes more sense that an unbeliever would cling to created things, but if you are a Christian, you have already tasted the joy of knowing the Creator. So then why do we settle for the created things when we can have the Creator? I think it is because we foolishly think we can have both. We think we can have all that God has to offer and still taste what the world has to offer. Not every Christian dives head first into worldly pleasure. Some of us just stand around the edges of the world and nibble every once in a while. It feels good to nibble, doesn’t it? We can fool ourselves into thinking that we are following God because we haven’t done anything really bad or because we have not become addicted to the thing we desire.

I am going to end this message in the same way Jesus ended the parable. “This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.” Do you want to follow the way of the fool?

Rich Maurer

November 27, 2005