Luke 12:13-21
Please turn in your copy of the
scriptures to Luke’s gospel. Our reading is Luke chapter 12,
verses 13 to 21. We continue in our study as we
make our way through the gospel. Jesus is making his way slowly,
but surely to Jerusalem to suffer and to die for the sins of his
people. And on the way he encounters
all kinds of people saying all kinds of things. But he continues
to march towards Jerusalem to do the work of atonement, but
to teach his disciples and those willing to hear along the way. And so keep in mind this place
in the whole of the story, the whole of the gospel account,
as we look at just a few verses. Here now, God’s word, Luke chapter
12, beginning at verse 13. Someone in the crowd said to
Jesus, Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with
me. But Jesus said to him, man, who made me a judge or arbitrator
over you? And he said to them, take care
and be on your guard against all covetousness. For one’s life
does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. And he told
them a parable saying, the land of a rich man produced plentifully. And he thought to himself, what
shall I do? For I have nowhere to store my
crops. And he said, I will do this.
I will tear down my barns and build larger ones. And there
I will store all my grain and all my goods. And I will say
to my soul, soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years.
Relax, eat, drink and be merry. But God said to him, fool, this
night your soul is required of you and the things you have prepared,
whose will they be? So is the one who lays up treasure
for himself and is not rich toward God. Let us pray together. Lord, you know right where each
of us lives and dwells in our minds, our thoughts, our hearts,
desires, our even our spending, and so we pray now that by your
word, by your spirit, your truth would lift our eyes towards heaven,
that the things of earth would grow strangely dim in the light
of your glory and grace. Help us this hour to remember
what the great missionary Jim Elliot once said, he is no fool
who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he can never lose.
Or give us eyes that see, ears that hear, hearts that understand,
the great value of living for the king and his kingdom and
not building for ourselves a kingdom and setting ourselves up as ruler
over our little territory. Hear us and help us. In the name
of Jesus, we pray. Amen. I think once, maybe twice,
once in my most recent memory, can I remember someone interrupting
me during a sermon You know, a sermon is typically the preacher
preaching, the people sitting and listen. We’re the only religion
in the world that really does this. Wherefore, depending on
the type church you go to for seven or eight minutes or in
some places up to an hour, the people sit and listen to the
preacher preaching. But I remember one time in maybe
the not so distant past preaching through one of the imprecatory
psalms, one of those psalms where the psalmist says something like
this, God, you know, my enemies hurt them really bad because
they have hurt me really bad. The imprecatory psalms are those
that pray for imprecation or God to do justice. There’s even
one of those dark Psalms where God says or where the Psalmist
says to God, dash their babies against rocks. That’s some pretty
serious, pretty strong prayer to God to get back at our enemies. And I remember preaching through
this and thinking, well, everybody’s read the Psalms. I mean, this
was a Sunday night crowd after all. Everybody’s read the Psalms.
Nobody, nobody’s not heard this before. And so in the middle
of preaching, somebody said, I don’t believe a God that would
do that. I’m thinking you’re not supposed
to interrupt preaching, but. He’s also the God who does that,
and it’s gonna be far worse at the last day, at the last judgment. But when someone talks to you
during the sermon, when they speak out loud, it’s something
that shouldn’t be done. You know the rule, rhetorical
questions are what? They’re rhetorical questions,
not to be answered out loud. You’re to ponder it, you’re to
think about it. We’re to listen during preaching. But here is
Jesus preaching. He’s preaching God’s word, A
lot of people are listening and he gets interrupted by this man
who wants his estate settled. Apparently, big brother, who
would have been in charge of their father’s estate, is not
giving him his fair share of his inheritance. And so little
brother says to Jesus, make my brother over here, give me what’s
coming. I want my inheritance now. Now, this might seem a little
strange to you. Why would someone ask Jesus for
that? Would they ask him because he’s Jesus? No, they typically
revered rabbis or teachers in that day as one who could make
a sound judgment over a matter of dispute. And so this may not
have been an uncommon request. It just came at an uncommon time. But what does Jesus do when someone
says something to him? What does Jesus say when someone
says something to him that’s out of accord with the kingdom?
Well, he’ll rebuke it or he’ll call it for what it is. And then
he’ll look around to see who is listening and give them a
kingdom principle or kingdom value out of this. So here Jesus
is teaching. He’s preaching away and someone
interrupts, but he’s been teaching them about how to pray the Lord’s
prayer. He teaches them about Blessed or happy or full of God’s
love and kindness are those who keep his word. He’s preached
to them. He’s talked to them about those who have healthy
eyes, see the light, their bodies are filled with good things.
He’s pronounced woes on the Pharisees. He’s taught them to fear God
and not man. Man can only kill, but God can both kill and send
to hell. And then he’s encouraged them
to acknowledge Christ. And then Christ will acknowledge
them in the last day. So it’s it’s in the midst of
this teaching. It’s in the midst of what we have been considering
over the last couple of months. And Luke, this is what gets interrupted. This is what the man stops Jesus
from saying in order to say, tell my big brother, I want my
inheritance now. What does this reveal about the
man? Well, Jesus is going to show us that he’s a man of a
covetous heart. He’s going to show us that this
is a man of greed. And then he’s going to give us
a little punch at the end that we should be careful lest we
don’t have an eternal perspective, but we only have an earthly one. So here this man interrupts Jesus,
tell my brother to give me my inheritance. Well, he’s come
to the right place. Jesus is a judge, isn’t he? Yes,
he is a judge, but he is not an arbitrator of our little bitty
farms and little bitty amounts of money. He is the judge of
the earth. He is the judge of the kingdom.
He is the king of kings and the lord of lords. He is going to
judge greater matters on that great day. And so Jesus takes
the opportunity not to settle a small earthly dispute between
two brothers about their father’s estate, but he’s going to take
opportunity to point out what can be in our hearts that can
hinder us from entering or serving in the kingdom of Almighty God.
This man is greedy. He wants. This man is covetous.
He wants to enlarge his borders, as it were. He wants everything. He is greedy. He is covetous. He’s not after justice for the
settling of his father’s estate. No, he’s after gathering for
himself. You know, modern day religion.
Modern day religion is no different than this man’s religion. It’s
the religion of stuff. It’s the religion, which ironically
is entitled in a wildly popular religious book of the day, Your
Best Life Now. We know our best life is yet
to come. Our best life is in the riches
of heaven and not the piddly wealth of this earth. But the
religion of the day is one of stuff. It is a earthly religion. It is a worldly religion. It
is an unspiritual religion. It is idolatrous religion. And Jesus diagnoses in verse
15 of our story today exactly what’s going on in this man’s
heart. And so in verse 15, he says to
the crowd, but he’s intending for this man to hear it, take
care and be on your guard against all covetousness. For one’s life
does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. Years ago,
our kids did what most American kids do, they watch VeggieTales.
And there’s an episode of VeggieTales called Madam Blueberry. And Madam
Blueberry loves to go to the stuff mart. And as you can imagine,
in VeggieTales style, there’s the little song and All these
years later, it’s stuck in my head. I won’t be able to take
a nap today. It’ll be in there. But Madame Blueberry goes to
Stuff Mart over and over and over again. And she gets so much
stuff at Stuff Mart, she takes it all back to her treehouse.
And one day her tree house just topples right over and all the
stuff from Stuff Mart just spills right out onto the ground. And
it shows the ridiculousness of greed. It shows the foolishness
of covetousness. You know, there’s only so much
that we can buy, so much that we can have, so much that we
can own, and so much that we can maintain. And our lives are
much like Madam Blueberry’s. If we’re not careful with covetousness
and greed, we can have so much that our houses literally topple
over. And maybe they don’t topple over
physically, but they sure do spiritually because our God is
our belly. And we worship our pocketbook
and our power to buy and to acquire. One of the little knacks I have
sometimes is to look at real estate and I’ll flip through
a magazine I’ll pick up when I’m around town and look through
it. There’s one particular magazine
I pick up that’s from the Winston-Salem area and it has a realtor that
advertises Let’s just call them spectacular homes. I call them
NASCAR homes. You’ve got to have NASCAR money
to live in one of these houses. And you flip through and look,
and then you go to the internet website, and you look, and they have enough
garage space for like 15 cars. They have a wine cellar that
can hold thousands of bottles of wine. They have more flat
screen TVs than Best Buy has in their stock on Black Friday.
And it goes on and on and on. And you look at these houses
ad nauseum. When can one ever live in all
those spaces? I mean, the thing I think about
is how am I gonna paint it? How am I gonna heat it? How am
I gonna cool it? How am I gonna pay the taxes on it? How am I
gonna insure it? And you know, one has the dream to build one
of these houses. And one thinks they need this
space and that space and that space and this space. And so
they build their dream house and let’s just say they spend
$10 million on this thing. And then after about five years,
maybe four, maybe three, it loses its luster. And they somehow
become wise and want to downsize. And they’ve spent $10 million
on this house, but they can hardly get 1.5 for it. Doesn’t that show us the foolishness
of vanity, the foolishness of acquiring so much that even foolish
people in this world have enough common sense to know that’s just
too much? Dear friends, you see where our
hearts can take us, where our hearts can lead us. We’ve got to remember that the
Old Testament, as well as the New, condemns covetousness. It condemns greed. In the Ten Commandments, the
tenth one, thou shalt not covet. We shouldn’t covet our neighbor’s
wife, our neighbor’s house, our neighbor’s oxen, our neighbor’s
sheep, our neighbor’s manservants or his maidservants. We shouldn’t
covet anything he has, whether physical or spiritual. I would
imagine that in our thought life, some of us have thought, I would
like to a la carte from the buffet of my friends. I would like their
house. I would like his or her spouse. They’ve got some great children.
I wish my children were like them. Their bank account looks
attractive, I’ll take that. And so we pick and we choose
and we a la carte, but what are we doing in God’s sight? We’re
saying to God who has tailor made our lot in life, in his
wisdom, in his love and in his sovereignty, God, you may be
wise, you may be loving, you may be smarter than me, wiser
than me and have more just and holy ends than me, but I don’t
like it. I want something different. And
where do our hearts go? We become greedy. We become sick in our hearts.
We become dissatisfied. We become ungrateful. And we will grasp and we will
grasp and we will grasp. And it’s one thing, isn’t it,
dear friends, to be a non-Christian who is unthankful. It’s one thing,
isn’t it, to be a non-Christian who’s ungrateful? It’s one thing
to be a non-Christian, a pagan who is greedy and covetousness. But when it gets hold of a Christian,
isn’t it such a paradox? Isn’t it such an irony that we
who have been bought at a price, who have been revealed to by
the Holy Spirit and through the word, eternal and kingdom values. That we lose our perspective.
We’re supposed to be content and thankful and satisfied and
even generous with what God has given us. But instead of being
content, we lose perspective and we want more. Instead of
being thankful and recognizing and acknowledging God’s goodness,
we just are grumpy because we hadn’t gotten more. And instead
of being satisfied with God’s lot in life, we wish for everybody
else’s lot in life. And instead of being generous
and rich towards God, we hoard it. We’re stingy with it. I don’t know if you took notice
of this, but let me point it out to you. The man in this passage,
this man who wants Jesus to settle his father’s estate with his
brother, he says to Jesus, teacher, do this for me. And Jesus says
two things only to him. One, I’m not a judge. And two,
you’re a fool. But notice Jesus directs the
rest of his teaching to his disciples. The parable is directed to the
disciples. Now, does this man hear it? We hope so. Does he
really hear it? Probably not. But Jesus tells
to them a parable. And in this parable that’s in
verses 16 through 19, notice how many times the word I or
me is used. Let’s hear it together. Verse
16, Jesus told them a parable and he says, the land of a rich
man produced plentifully. And he thought to himself, what
shall I do? For I have nowhere to store my
crops. And he said, I will do this.
I will tear down my barns and build larger ones. And there
I will store all my grain and all my goods. And I will say
to my soul, soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years.
Relax, eat, drink and be merry. You hear how this man is self-absorbed. Do you hear how this man is narcissistic? He’s he’s looking at himself
in the mirror. He’s admiring his accounts. He,
you know, he gets out his app and he looks up what’s under
management. Of course, if you look last Friday
or last Tuesday or last Monday and we don’t want to look tomorrow,
do we? It goes down, down, down sometimes. God has a sense of
humor. But this man is constantly checking his assets. He’s constantly
looking at himself. He’s wanting his best life now. He ignores the providence of
God. This man is a farmer and he’s done some wise things. He’s
planted. Rain has come. God has smiled on the just and
the unjust as he sends rain and sun. And the agriculture is being
blessed by God’s common grace. This man is blessed. His crops
are bumper crops. He does not have enough space.
And so he does what a good farmer would do, build more space for
more storage. But that’s where the wisdom stops.
It’s all for himself. This is a me, myself and I proposition. He stores all his grain. He doesn’t
give to the poor. He stores all his grain. He doesn’t
sell to those who are in need. He makes some wise choices as
a farmer. but some poor choices as a steward
of God’s good gifts. And this is basically what this
man has said. I got enough money. It’s my time. And what do we
do in America when it’s my time? We move to Florida. John Piper,
the famous pastor from Minneapolis who is retired from pulpit ministry
now, but you’ve probably read his books. You’ve heard him speak
possibly. He wrote a book called Don’t
Waste Your Life. And he wrote this book after
a personal bout with cancer. And so he began to think about
this eternal perspective that God was giving him while he was
laid up with cancer. And he began to Give the practical
application of living eternally by saying, don’t waste your life.
I wrote a book, I think, for young people. Don’t waste your
cancer. He wrote a life for those suffering
with hardships. He wrote a life, a book called
Don’t Waste Your Retirement. And in that book, he says the
exact opposite of what this man in the parable says. He says,
don’t retire and spend the end of your years picking up seashells
and just examining them and collecting them day after day until God
calls you home. Use that next season of your
life where maybe you have the resources to live independently
of needing to work and use it for the glory of Almighty God. Several years back, I was serving
in a different church, not this one. And one of my chief tasks
was to help ensure that that church would survive institutionally. It was in deep debt. It was in
deep financial strain. People were leaving the back
door faster than they were coming in. in the front door. And so
one of my tasks was to put my shoulder to the plow and help
that church do everything possible to survive. And we had a number
of people who were our right hand men and women who were serving,
serving, serving. They were, they were doing everything
alongside us to make sure this happened. And one man about midway
through the process, he got the urge to head to Florida. And
he said to the elders one night at a meeting, it was probably
one of the saddest things I’ve heard a person say. He said,
it’s my time. And I thought to myself, what
about the rest of us who are desperately trying to serve the
Lord? And I understand we have goals
in life. We have things we want to do.
And there are not there. Retirement is not sinful. Don’t
hear me say that. But we can never retire from
the service of the living God. And it broke my heart to hear
this man basically say what was being said in this parable. I’ve
got enough, I’m gonna eat, and I’m gonna drink, and I’m going
to be merry, and I have ample goods laid up, so I will relax. But what does God say to the
man in the parable? What does he say to the one whose eyes
only see the kingdom of this world and not the kingdom of
our Lord Jesus Christ? He says, fool. He says to him,
fool, you have laid up for yourselves things you have prepared. Whose
will they be? But God this night requires of
you your soul. And so he says, so is the one
who lays up treasure for himself and who is not rich towards God.
I got to thinking, I got to thinking this week about how I have personally
been blessed by those who did not live by the earthly kingdom
values of this passage. I have a largely Christian education. I went to private Christian school
through fifth grade. I went to a private Christian
college, and then I went to a private Presbyterian divinity school
for my education. It took my parents’ sacrifice
to go. But it also took those who gave
to scholarship funds. It took my wife working to help
us get through seminary for me to have the degree necessary
to be ordained in our denomination. But it took people who said there
is something greater than just this life. and 13 car garages
and multiple thousands of bottle holding wine cellars and all
the flat screen TVs one could never look at. It took people
who sacrificed and said there’s something greater than this and
valued education or they valued scholarships. They valued building
a building in the name of the honor at a Christian school so
that the kingdom of God and its values could be advanced. It’s amazing to me. I think back
to seminary. Every year I was given a name.
This is the man who’s provided your scholarship. Wrote him a
letter. He would write me back. Thank
you. This is important. I wouldn’t be where I am today
if it weren’t for kingdom minded people. But let me get a little
more specific. I get to devote my full time
life. Getting close to 20 years now
to full time ministry. Because you give to the church
and say it’s important to have a minister. It’s important to
have a witness for the word of God, to have our church led and
administrated, to have someone study and pray and preach and
visit and shepherd and lead the session in these things. We wouldn’t
have what we have if we did not have kingdom eyes. You know what
I could do with my tithes and offerings? I could pay down my
house early. I could vacation at splendid
places. I could have the boat I’ve always dreamed of. There
are things that I could do with the money I put into the kingdom.
And you could say the same. But remember the great words
of the missionary Jim Elliott. He is no fool who gives up what
he cannot keep to gain what can never be lost. One of Jim Elliott’s
companions, one of the five men who were killed by the Aka Indians
in Ecuador in the 1950s. He wanted with all his heart
to be a pilot for the American military, but because of his
eyesight, I believe it was, or some impediment, he couldn’t
make the grade. He couldn’t make the cut. And
he realized these men are signing up for the military. They are
going on missions from which they may not return. And he said
their lives are expendable for the United States of America.
What if for the sake of the gospel, I can learn to fly an airplane
into the jungle? And so Nate Saint, the great
jungle pilot, was a pioneer of missionary aviation. He learned
how to fly in tight circles and with an instrument he invented,
he could lower supplies down where a plane could not be landed
and where it would take days of hiking to enter these remote
places. And you might get killed by wild people or wild animals
along the way. But they could communicate and
they could deliver goods through his pioneering work in jungle
aviation. So in God’s providence, He didn’t
make it as an ace fighter pilot with medals on his coat, but
in the eternal perspective of things. He was rich towards God. He used his mind, his heart,
and his skills to let the gospel go into the far reaches of the
jungles of Ecuador. And we hear often now of the
efforts that missionaries can make because of these jungle
pilots. And that’s because one man, he didn’t get what he wanted.
But he got way better. And dear friends, that’s what
Jesus is teaching us today. Be rich towards God. Be rich
towards God. Do not be the fool whose life
will be required of him. And he will only have amassed
goods for himself. Let us look to God in prayer.
Lord, help us and hear us. Our eyes. Our eyes love this
world. We love the car lots. We love
the shopping malls. We love the Apple stores. We
love the the twinkling and bright lights that this earth offers.
And yes, some of these things are helpful to us. They make
life better. They’re to our advantage and
living a life to your glory. But when they become the idols,
when they become the thing we worship, the thing we must have,
the thing that makes life worth living. We have lost our minds. We have lost our souls. We have
lost our hearts. So Lord, let today be for us
an eye examination. Help us to see clearly. Lord,
let today be a heart checkup. Show us where and for what our
hearts are beating. Let today be a lifestyle checkup. Lord, show us how we use our
time, what we seek after, and how we live our lives. May, by
your word, by your grace, and by your spirit, we be people
of the everlasting kingdom, and not people of this kingdom. For
one will fade, one will pass away, but one will last forever. Help us, give us your blessing
and your grace, we pray in Christ’s name, amen. We want to prepare
for the Lord’s table by singing hymn number 462, Behold the Amazing gift of love will stand and sing
together.