Rich Toward God

Thank you for reading this sermon from Christ Fellowship. I hope and pray that this sermon will be a blessing of grace and truth to you. With that said, let me encourage you not to use this sermon as a replacement for your local church. Christ Jesus did not establish his Church simply for us to consume content. Instead, He calls us to be part of a real, covenant family. 

I want to start this morning with a Mother’s Day illustration to introduce our text. Imagine a mother surrounded by her many children, all of them giving her gifts and cards for Mother’s Day. One by one, the children tell their mother how grateful they are for her love and care.

But then one of the children says, in front of the whole family, “Actually, I don’t feel loved and cared for. I don’t feel like I’m being treated fairly. I feel like you show favoritism to my siblings. And, in fact, I don’t even want to be a part of this family anymore.”

Ladies, I’m sure that as a mother, that would crush you – to know that one of your children felt this way, whether it’s true or not.

When you read the Bible, you discover that most humans don’t see God for who He really is. We don’t see Him as a loving Father. Most people secretly think God is a cruel or absent father. One of the ways we could rightfully describe sin is by calling it rebellion. We are rebellious children – all of us. And it crushes God’s heart.

As we have studied the Gospel of Luke together, we have been looking for the heart of God. And very often, Jesus has shown us the heart of God by exposing the human heart and pointing us in a different direction. He shows us that we have it all wrong. We see the world upside down. The problem is not with God, but with us. This is one of those stories.

13 Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”

This is a very awkward, loaded request. We don’t know the details, but probably this is a younger brother locked in a legal battle with an older brother over their father’s estate.

No doubt, the younger brother feels he is being treated unfairly and he wants justice. And so, he asks Jesus to put spiritual pressure on the older brother.

14 But he said to him, “Man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?”

Jesus refuses to get involved. Ironically, Jesus is the Judge with a capital J over all of us! And I’m sure Jesus knew exactly what would have been fair and right, but He doesn’t use His authority to solve the problem. Instead, He uses His authority to expose the man’s heart.

15 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.”

Notice Jesus isn’t speaking directly to the man, but to the whole crowd. He tells them to guard their heart against covetousness.

Coveting is the subject of the 10th commandment, and it is the opposite of contentment. Instead of being grateful for what we already have, we want what someone else has.

But it’s more than just wanting something we see. We become frustrated by not having it. It becomes a runaway desire. We long for it. We feel entitled to it. We begin to resent the ones who have it. Much of our conflicts start here, which is explained in James 4:

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.

This is the real issue at the heart of most relationship problems – desires that are out of control, something we feel entitled to have. Jesus confronts this tendency and reminds us that life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions, which is a lesson we can never hear enough as Americans.

I don’t think there has ever been a time or place in history when people have faced so much temptation to covet. Much of the marketing that we consume every day is begging us to covet!

We are being tracked constantly. Companies know exactly what we want before we do! Our devices are now listening for hints, tracking our daily routines… they know us better than we do!

The world is changing, getting better at feeding our desires. But nothing has changed about the human heart. Listen to what Jesus says next.

16 And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully,

17 and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’

18 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 my goods.

19 And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”’

20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’

21 So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

This is a simple parable. It reminds me of that song from the 90s by Alanis Morrisette – Ironic. “An old man turned 98. He won the lottery and died the next day.”

This parable is like that song. It’s not difficult to understand. It’s a story about a rich man hoarding his wealth for the future, not realizing he had no future.

It sounds like bad luck, but Jesus calls it foolish. And that’s the part that makes this parable more difficult to understand than we first realize. What exactly is Jesus asking us to do? None of us knows when we will die! God doesn’t give us that information.

On the surface, it sounds like Jesus is telling us not to save money! But that is also foolish when you consider the Bible’s teaching on money as a whole.

The Proverbs are full of instruction to save for the future and leave an inheritance for your children.

Joseph is promoted by Pharoah in Genesis to preserve God’s people through a famine by building storehouses like the ones in this parable.

And later in this very chapter, Luke 12, Jesus will tell a parable about a servant who was a bad steward of his master’s resources.

And so, I don’t think the problem with the rich man was THAT he saved. His problem was WHY he saved… He is clearly focused only on himself. He’s putting his faith in money and possessions instead of God.

Listen again to all the personal pronouns in this parable:

17 and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’

18 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 my goods.

19 And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”’

The true correction here is that none of this really belongs to the man – not even his own life. That’s the irony. Listen again to the response of God in verse 20:

20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’

That question at the end drives the point home. Whose will they be? Answer: not yours.

You think all of this belongs to you? Your house? Your land? Your money?
Your soul doesn’t even belong to you…

Think back to the start of the sermon – to the brother asking Jesus to settle his inheritance. What is Jesus saying to that man?

It’s possible that money had become more important to the man than his own family. And nothing will destroy a family quicker than money problems. Maybe that was the issue.

But I think Jesus is simply encouraging us to dig deeper and evaluate our motives. Are there desires in my life that are running wild? Even destroying relationships? Are we frustrated by what we don’t have? Are we afraid of what we might lose? And underneath it all, is there an assumption that we are entitled to more than we have?

Jesus exposes all of this. And part of the correction is that we start to recognize what verse 20 says about us – that nothing really belongs to us, not even our own soul. Certainly not our worldly possessions. We came into this world with nothing, and we will leave it with nothing.

Who am I to feel entitled to anything? I didn’t create myself. I’m not keeping myself alive. I didn’t get to choose my parents or my ethnicity or my gender or my personality. I have no control over my future. This is part of the correction here – to let go of the illusion of entitlement and control. To accept reality. To lean into it and be content.

And yet, that’s not the only lesson here. Look again at what Jesus says in verse 21.

21 So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

The alternative is to be rich toward God. But how does someone become rich toward God? In context, I think it means this: stop treating your soul as if it was made for yourself. Your soul not only belongs to God… it was made for God!

In other words, we are meant to find our treasure in Him! We are meant to value God above everything else. As Paul says in Philippians 3:8,

I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.

Gaining Christ frees us from the love of money and the desire for every new thing the world puts in front of us… We become more and more content with what God promises in Christ.

And all of it made possible because of what Jesus already accomplished for us. He laid aside His rights and became human. He suffered and died to share His inheritance with us, as a perfect and gracious older brother – holding nothing back. Because of Jesus, these words are true – applied to us by grace through faith. And I’ll end with these words, from Romans 8:

16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,

17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.