Luke 12:13-21
Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. 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 my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain 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 whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”
Introduction
This week, we’re starting a new, short series on some of the parables of Jesus. Jesus was such a good storyteller. He was able to take a short little story, just like the one that we just read together here and use it to illustrate a deep point about faith. Now, how many of y’all have ever used a story to teach? I know I have. In fact, being a Southerner, most of us have used a story or two to teach others about life in general.
Jesus, like I said, was a master storyteller. My Dad told stories often. In fact, his last ‘job’, for lack of a better word, was as a storyteller. He actually taught classes on storytelling both at the John C. Campbell Folk School and the University of North Georgia. To be able to tell stories in a way that engages the audience is something that is a bit of a natural thing. But it can be taught as well! Jesus was taking the time in his earthly ministry to teach his disciples, and us in turn, how to tell the story of how to live our lives for God in a way that every single person that we meet could understand it. That’s the importance of storytelling, and Jesus knew that his audience would understand the big ideas of the faith if he could communicate it in a way that they would understand!
Let’s look at this story in Luke 12 today. I want to start by looking at the very beginning of this chapter. I won’t go verse by verse, but I think that it's interesting to see that this is the part of Jesus’ ministry where he is already attracting large crowds, but also the attention of the Pharisees. He tells the disciples to be on guard against “the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy,” which we see in verse 1. Jesus knew already that the Pharisees were trying to trap him into some sort of heresy against the Law, but Jesus also knew that the people must know that he had come to fulfill the Law! Jesus is teaching, reminding the people that God is the ultimate authority over all things, and that God is to be feared and worshipped. And he also tells the people that whoever publicly acknowledges Jesus before others will be therefore acknowledged before the angels of God. And he reminds us that when we are to defend our faith, the Holy Spirit will guide us and teach us on what we should say.
Suddenly, there is a shout from the crowd. We can’t be certain if this was a plant from the Pharisees, since we know that Jesus has warned the disciples that there would be people trying to trip them up, I think that Jesus had foreshadowed this in the previous verses. The man cries out “teacher, tell my brother to divide his inheritance with me.” In that day and time, it was the Rabbis that would solve problems of inheritance. This man, be he a plant or not, was acknowledging that Jesus was a great teacher. It is likely that the person who yelled out was a younger brother who was upset because his eldest bother had received twice the inheritance than he did. Jesus flatly refused to be pulled into that controversy, because he knew that there was a problem in that man’s life, and it was greed and jealousy. Well, Jesus certainly could have just straightforward told this man what to do, but Jesus saw a teaching moment, and he seized it. He tells a story.
There was a rich man in the land, and his investments of farms had a HUGE harvest. He thought to himself, ‘what should I do? I don’t have any more space in the barn or silos to put this extra!” Then he though, sort of smart as he was it seemed, “I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones! I’ll put all the extra crops in there, and then I’ll say to myself, boy you done well. You’ve got grain for years and years. It’s easy street now, I don’t have to really do any more work for a while! Take life easy! Eat, drink, and be merry!” And he takes it to his own soul to do that.
But God said to him, “You fool! This very night, I’m taking your life from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?!” And Jesus finished saying in verse 21 “this is how it will be with whoever stores up things for himself but is not rich in towards God.”
Prepared, but unprepared
Wow, what a story, right? Jesus knew that the man was not right with God, be it if he was part of the Pharisees, or even if he was just wanting some resolution to a situation that he thought was unfair to him. One commentary I read this week said this: “Jesus cannot be a party to the amassing of wealth since he considers the pursuit of it to be a prostitution of man’s energies and talents. The story illustrates how man can give too much value to material possessions. The maxim of Jesus is the antithesis of secularism. Possessions do not equal life.”
This man, in his eagerness to do well for himself, forgot about the spiritual part of life. I think, personally, that to amass wealth is not a bad thing in general. It can show the blessings of God to a person, and can truly show a great testimony of how God has worked in their lives. But if you reread the story, what is the major thing that this man is saying? MY crops, MY barns, MY grain, MY goods, and finally, what was worst, MY soul. Have you ever met someone like that? They thought everything that they had was just theirs, including their soul? It’s a symptom of a sin-sick soul.
This man was prepared for life physically. He was on easy street, wasn’t he? He had food galore, he had security, and he had means. But he was unprepared for life spiritually. One writer stated that the soul is not an embodied spirit. It means life! It is God’s creation and gift to mankind, and is under His domain. Mankind is on earth as a steward to that soul, and is responsible to God for the life he has been given. This man had spent his whole life building up his own personal empire. He had taken control over it, wrestled it into being, and prospered for it. But he had taken it a step too far - the possessions that he owned had come to own him, and he neglected the spiritual side of life because of them. He began to worship the things that he had rather than the one who made him. This story is a criticism of our blind worship of whatever seems to please and interest us in this world. The things of this world, the things that are physically here, attack our acceptance of the voice of power, which is the voice of God.
This man was ready in his numbers, even! He had enough money to tear down his barns and build larger ones. Jesus doesn’t implicitly say this, but you could guess that this man had the funds to store his abundant harvest in other locations until this work was done. He was rich! But in his richness, he had overlooked the essential. I have been reading a book to help with this series of lessons over the next few weeks. That line, that we overlook the essential in our lives comes from that book. In it, he talks about how things are big and large in most men’s lives. Buildings, cars, books, even! I was reminded that Adolph Hitler, the worst man, deranged and dangerous, looked for the grandeur in life, especially when it glorified himself! Even when his generals and politicians begged him to stop these giant projects, both in buildings and in wasteful military projects, he refused, stating these giant projects would be the glorious beginning of the Third Reicht. In the end, though, it bankrupted Germany. Hitler put his faith in himself, in his own financial status, and in the thought that things could save him, but in the end, perhaps the greatest atheist of the last 100 years, one of the most evil men this planet has ever seen, could not be saved by the things around him.
I saw another example of this financial aspect this week, too. Universities are often measured by their student enrollment. Kennesaw State sent me a mailer this week that stated that they have 41000 students now. When I was there in the late aughts, they were running around 25000, which is a great number. Interestingly enough, at that time when I was there, around 2800 students, or just over 10% of the student population, had scholarships and grants. The number of students that receive those scholarships and grants is the exact same as it was 12 years ago. But they consider themselves to be a great success because they have 41000 students now! But instead of 10% of the students being debt free, they have raised their tuition and lowered the amount of students that can get aid. And realistically, there are small Christian institutions that are producing even greater leaders than the universities that are leading the charge for things like Critical Race Theory, or the God’s Dead movement that is still alive and well, unfortunately, in America. They place their faith in numbers and in financial security.
But isn’t it even the same about churches? We look at churches that are large, and are growing, and we try to imitate them. But when you look closely at some of those churches, you realize that they are not really growing like they should. Sure, they have numbers. They have loads of people coming. But many are treading water. They have people for a season, when it is convenient for them to attend. They don’t ever get any deeper than that spiritual milk that they come into faith on. They never get into the true MEAT of the scriptures, of discipleship, of creating the relationships within the community of Christ that creates other disciples for Christ. It’s not a bad thing to have a large church, or even to be growing. But numbers help us overlook the essential. As one author put it, when size becomes the standard of measurement, the Church has begun its period of decline.
Just like the rich fool, we find it easy to ignore the unseen things. This man found pleasure and his passion in the things that he had. The emptiness and despair so characteristic of our time comes because we forget that the seen is temporal and the unseen is essential. We get things but gain no satisfaction in our personal relationships. We learn how to sell but we are low on character. We have our strongboxes, our full barns, even building bigger barns, but we have no faith to live by. And so we are poor in spirit.
This man in the story was ready to reap his earthly reward. He had worked hard, had he not? I mean, if anyone was worthy of an early retirement, it was this guy. He had even said to himself, “you have plenty of grain laid up for years!” But that was not something that he could promise to himself, was it? God is the only one who knows exactly when our life begins and when it will end. The amount of goods that he had was not a guarantee of more life, nor was the lack of it a guarantee of less life! Certainly, people around him would have called him a good man, a smart man. But what does God call him? A fool! But why? A fool is a man whose decisions about the present do not take into consideration the possibilities of the future. This man’s life had been one of futility. We know of so many people that we say “Oh, it’s so bad that he died when he did. He had so much to live for! There was so much more that he could have contributed!” This man, surely, was mourned in such a way. He had spent his whole life amassing things. And what was left of it? It gets passed onto the next generation, perhaps just as wrapped up in the selfishness that this man was wrapped up in. When we center our attention on our possessions rather than on doing what Christ commands us to do, we are truly being foolish ourselves!
When Jesus told his story, he was reminding us that the crisis of life always demands spiritual qualities. If we are not prepared for it, we are like the man within this story, making plans, making sure things are stored up, but for naught. But there is hope, and Jesus himself gives it to us in the last verse of this passage. He says “this is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich towards God.” Now, what Jesus means in that is truly the opposite. How are we to live our lives? For others. We can amass great wealth. Truthfully, compared to the rest of the world, we are completely and utterly rich. It’s one of the reasons why so much of the world hates America. We don’t truthfully understand how blessed we are, and how truly wealthy we are. But we have an opportunity to do more with what we have. How do we become rich towards God? By taking a direction that is opposite to the man in this story: we become sensitive to humanity’s needs and hurts, and we minister to those.
My grandfather retired as a Colonel in the United States Army. He believed with all his heart that there was no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole! He said that in the heat of battle, and he was in many battles in Vietnam, that people who had professed to be atheist, deists, or any other -ists other than Christian, would call out to God for help! And truly mean it! The crisis of life demands spiritual qualities. We can come to a place where our possessions can come to control us, to dominate our lives, or we can use our wealth, our possessions, and our spiritual lives to use for the kingdom of God. But it is our choice to do so, just like it is our choice to follow Jesus. Jesus could have made it where we would always be forced to live a life that was in poverty. Yes, he would take care of our needs, but as for our wants, he could show ourselves to be poor. But we have the choice that when God blesses us that we either hoard those things for ourselves only, or we choose to share them and make them available for Christ to use.
Conclusion
I’ll finish with this. Jesus told a great many stories about being ready. When a crisis is upon us, we likely will have no time to prepare. The occasion demands a response right then, according to our immediate condition, and to postpone that decision, one that comes from God, is completely out of our control. During the outbreak of World War One, a group of British sailors were on the way to Antarctica for a scientific expedition. As they sailed, the British had declared war on Germany. The head of the party, Ernest Shackleton, wired back to the admiralty that they were willing to forego the scientific expedition, turn back to England, and to serve their country. A few moments went by, and a wire came back with two words - “Proceed - Churchill.” For you see, at that time, the Lord of the Admiralty was Winston Churchill.
It’s easy for us to turn away from the essential in our lives. It’s so easy to turn in the direction of the bright lights and the action. It would have been simple for this crew to have just turned and not gone onto do their work. But we can be saved from the poor state of the rich fool in Jesus’ story, if we only choose to truly follow Christ. And you can do that today, right now, even in your car. If you have drifted away from what is the most essential thing in your life, a true relationship with Jesus Christ, you still have time to turn back! It is the grace of God that allows us that time to do so. And we can do it today! If you have been drifting in your life, if you don’t know what God wants you to do, or even if you know that the things in your life have taken over, take a moment right now to pray that God will release you from that. If you haven’t ever made a commitment to Jesus Christ as your personal savior, today is the day. Don’t be like the foolish man. Store up your treasures in heaven, and remember that Christ wants you to live life in a way that always honors Him. Let’s pray.
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