It’s Never Enough

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Transcript:

Well, turn with me this morning to Luke chapter 12. Luke chapter 12. As I read this passage this week, I thought about happiness and thought about this man’s search for happiness and thought about how much time and money and energy is invested for us in the pursuit of happiness.

And we do it as second nature. I mean, it’s guaranteed right there in the Declaration of Independence that, I mean, that’s what we’re supposed to do. And we’ve been led to believe in, well, I want to say Western society, but it’s probably all around the world.

We’ve been led to believe that happiness is our reason for existing. And we live to be happy. We think that’s the ultimate pursuit of our lives is to be happy.

And it ends up leaving us empty. And I thought about all the things that people seek after to make them happy. And I thought, you know, I’m not exempt from this.

I’m not immune to this either. And it’s easy to look at everybody else and say, well, these are the things that they chase after to make them happy and how far short they fall. But then I had to think about myself too and the amount of time I spend trying to be happy.

And what I’m not telling you this morning just right off the bat is that we need to walk around and be sour and be miserable. There’s a difference between joy and happiness. As Christians, as believers, we should be joyful.

But we forget about that and we spend all of our time trying to be happy. And I thought about some of the things that made me happy, and I made a bag of some of them, just because I want you to think, too, about the things that make you happy, the little things. And for me, you know, for my defense, in my defense, It is usually the smaller things that make me happy.

But I thought I’d bring some at the expense of sounding like an Oprah favorite things episode. And by the way, I didn’t tape any of these to the bottom of your seats, so you’re out of luck this morning. I thought about some things that make me happy.

This bag is from Ikea, if you’ve never been there. It’s a massive furniture and home furnishing store. They have them up north and they have them in Dallas.

Love Ikea. I can go in there. I’m like a kid in a candy store.

I love Ikea. It makes me happy wandering around there shopping, looking at all the different stuff. But that happiness is fleeting because eventually comes the checkout counter.

And they start ringing up the totals and suddenly I’m not so happy anymore. The happiness is fleeting. I love tools and gadgets.

They make me happy. Somebody got me, these were in my Christmas stocking from my mother. Made me happy to open them.

But I know at some point I’m going to need to use these and the car is going to be broken down or we’re going to have blown a fuse or something. And it’s not going to be a happy occasion and I’m not going to be happy to be dealing with these. See, the happiness there is fleeting too.

The cord is not one of my favorite things. I’m not sure why it’s up here. I love old books.

They make me happy. But eventually I’ve read them. Eventually I’ve read them several times and they can’t really do anything else for me.

They just sit on the shelf. I love technology and gadgets. I’m going to use this in a minute for my preaching notes.

Technology, electronics, they make me happy, but then eventually those of you who have some know that they don’t always work as advertised. They’re frustrating and then we’re really not happy. Those of you who’ve ever tried to hook up satellite TV or work a laptop or use Facebook or get email know what I’m talking about.

You know, the happiness quickly subsides I love tea, but eventually. . .

I’d rather have tea than coffee, but eventually you’ve drunk the tea, it’s gone, and you’re empty again. The happiness is short-lived. I don’t remember what all I put in here.

Cleanliness. Cleanliness makes me happy. It reminds me of the.

. . Well, I won’t go into that story.

Cleanliness makes me happy. I love being clean. I love my house to be clean and in order.

And then I had children, and, you know, the happiness was fleeting. I love hot sauce. I didn’t realize I put this in here.

This may have been for later, actually. Hot sauce makes me happy, but, you know, you can eat too much of it sometimes and get sick. My family makes me happy.

Not always, but they make me happy. This is a four-generation picture. And no, Christian’s not the fourth generation.

This was, I don’t know, one of our first three, it was Jordan or Joseph, maybe Benjamin, and we were so excited about the prospect of a four-generation picture, we went ahead and took the four-generation picture, while the fourth generation was still inside Christian. So family makes me happy. But as you all well know, you raise children, you have grandchildren, you marry that spouse that you love, but you put imperfect people together and there’s friction and there’s not always happiness there.

Is there? And I know these are silly little things that make me happy, maybe kind of childlike, I don’t know. But these things make me happy in small ways.

And we spend a lot of our lives pursuing things that make us happy, in small ways and in large ways. And maybe it’s money, maybe it’s relationships, maybe it’s job. I’m trying to put all these in here without having them fall out.

It could be any number of things, but the things we pursue to make us happy, folks, we put a huge amount of emphasis on this in our lives, and whether it’s the big things we chase after or whether it’s the little things, they always end up falling short because they were never intended to make us happy. And whether we think, I’m going to put all of my emphasis on this job, and this job is going to make me happy, well, ladies and gentlemen, that job can go away quickly, as we know probably better today than we’ve known in a generation. That job can go away tomorrow.

We put our happiness in a well-run, well-decorated house. Well, that house can go away. There can be a fire.

There can be a foreclosure. That can go away. We can put all of our happiness, we can put all of our effort into finding happiness in our family.

And out of all the pursuits that I’ve mentioned, that may be the most worthwhile. But we can put all of our effort into finding happiness in our family and have a spouse die or a child turn their back on us or siblings stop speaking to us. We can put all of our hopes for happiness in relationships.

Folks, any number of things. The world has decided that it’s its birthright to be happy. Look at the commercials that we watch.

Look at the things on television. Everything’s about how to be happy, how to be fulfilled, how to find fulfillment in the things of this world. and it always falls short because it was never meant to make us happy.

We were not designed that way. Now, I don’t want to be unhappy any more than the rest of you do. And I’m not telling you that we need to be unhappy or we’re unspiritual. That if you’re happy, you’re not spiritual. That’s not what I’m saying.

What I’m saying is it has this idea that everything in life is about us being happy and accumulating the things and people that make us happy, that that’s what life is about. Folks, it only leads to more unhappiness because we strive harder and harder and harder to get those things and then we get them and we’re still unhappy and so we work to get more and we work to find more and we’re still unhappy and it’s this never-ending striving and then we’re unhappy about being unhappy. And folks, people have tried for millennia to answer this problem.

This is not new to our modern Western consumer culture where we just buy things and see things on TV and have to have them. It’s not brand new. Thousands of years ago, they had the problem.

The Bible talks about this. Before the New Testament was written, Buddha was talking about it in India and telling people that, yes, the pursuit of happiness is the cause of all suffering. And the way you deal with it is just to get rid of the desire to be happy.

You get rid of the desire for anything. Food, folks, it’s not realistic. To say, we’re just going to purge ourselves of all desires, and then, you know, we won’t be unhappy.

We won’t suffer anymore. Folks, that’s not realistic. The Bible gives us, I think, a better idea of the pursuit on which we spend our life.

Not in the pursuit of happiness. Not in the pursuit of trying to turn ourselves into robots where we just think if we don’t desire anything at all, that we’ll be fine. The Bible gives us a better way to look at that.

Luke chapter 12, starting in verse 13. And one of the company said unto him, Master, speak to my brother that he divide the inheritance with me. So one of this crowd that’s following Jesus around, one of the men speaks up and says to Jesus, calls him Master, speak to my brother that he divide the inheritance with me.

Now we don’t know much about this man other than what we see in this verse right here. Apparently there was a dispute between them. Somebody had left them an inheritance, and the brother had it all to himself, and he wasn’t going to share.

That sounds about right. We hear about that stuff going on today, don’t we? Doesn’t matter what mom and dad’s will says.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law. I’ve got the stuff. I’m not moving.

Na-na-na-na-na-na. He says, speak to my brother. He goes and tattles to Jesus.

Jesus, get him to share the stuff with me. He’s not sharing. This man wanted his stuff, and I’m not saying he was wrong in wanting it.

Odds are he was probably owed part of this. So he goes to Jesus and says, Would you speak to my brother and get him to divide this inheritance with me? Get him to give me what he owes me.

Verse 14, Jesus said unto him, Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you? He’s asking the man, who put me in that position? The word judge means judge.

The word divider means something like an administrator. Basically, who made me the probate judge of this town? Who put me in this kind of authority here to make these kinds of decisions over you?

And the reason He asked the question isn’t because He didn’t have the authority. I mean, folks, He’s Jesus. All authority is given to Him.

But the reason he asks this is that in terms of being a civil authority, if he had just come in and said, okay, you know, it’s right here, the law says this, that you need to have this much and that you need to have this much, and so the law says that you need to do it, then you know the Pharisees and Sadducees would have been on him like white on rice, as we used to say at home. I don’t know if you all say that here. The Pharisees and Sadducees would have just jumped on him for that, would have found fault in him for that.

not that what he said would have been wrong, but who gave you the authority? So instead of answering his question, he throws out the question that the Pharisees and Sadducees, who no doubt were in earshot, would have asked, who gave me the authority to be the divider over you? And he doesn’t answer the question that the man asks, but he answers the question that’s at the heart of his question.

He doesn’t deal with the legal aspects of who owes, who what. He deals with the question of the man’s heart. He asks him, ÒWho made me a judge or a divider over you?

Ó And then he said unto them, verse 15, ÒTake heed,Ó notice it says, ÒAnd he said unto them,Ó by the way. He’s now not just speaking to the one man, he’s speaking to everybody who can hear. Jesus never wasted a teachable moment.

ÒAnd he said unto them, ÔTake heed, and beware of covetousness; for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. ‘Ó idea of covetousness, and I’m still not sure that I have a perfect working definition for it, but I think of covetousness as being the overwhelming desire for things. And really it doesn’t even have to be things.

When you read the 10th commandment in Exodus 20, it talks about not coveting anything that belongs to your neighbor. It talks about not coveting his wife or his servants. Okay, obviously those are not things.

But to me, covetousness is the overwhelming desire to possess something that’s not yours. To look at what somebody else has and think, I have got to have that. And I know we all look at things and think, oh, I’d like to have one of those.

I’d like to have one of those. That’s not necessarily the same thing as coveting. This covetousness is the overwhelming desire.

I have to have that. And I’m formulating, I’m plotting, I’m figuring out how I’m going to get it. And so he tells them to beware of covetousness.

because at the root of covetousness, there’s this love of things. There’s this desire that things or what we want is going to fulfill us. There’s this idea that what we want, if I could just have that thing over there, that would fulfill me.

If I could just have that nice tie that Brother Alfred is wearing, boy, I’d be in business then. Everything in my life would go swimmingly. If I could have that nice car that so-and-so has out in the parking lot, Man, everything would just be wonderful then.

And we know that’s not the case. As soon as we got that, we’d be wanting something else. Well, God, if you could just let me get married, I know everything would be.

. . And there are young people who think that.

I’ve heard that. I’ve probably even said that in my younger days. If I could just get married, everything would be fine.

But I heard that a lot, working with teenagers and college students. Everything would be fine if I just had that relationship. Well, no, because then other things present themselves.

And covetousness is, at the root of it, is this idea. It’s an overwhelming desire to get something we don’t have, and at the root of it is this idea that we can find fulfillment in someone or something other than God. And it’s just not true.

That’s why this pursuit of happiness that we have is so empty, if that’s the entire goal of our lives. And so Jesus, wanting to explain this to them a little better, wanting to put this in terms that they would understand. Because here he’s talking about covetousness.

He’s talking about the nature of the heart. He may be talking over the heads of some of them in his crowd. And he wants to put it in terms that they would have understood.

And so he starts speaking in a parable. Starts telling them a story that illustrates what he’s talking about. Verse 16, And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully.

And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do? Because I have no room where to bestow my fruits. We’ll stop there for just a second.

This word ground, it sounds like the man had a little farm. It was a nice little farm. He grew some good things, grew well, and he ran out of room to put it.

Folks, it wasn’t just some nice little farm. The word there for ground actually describes. .

. They also use that word sometimes for a country. This man had massive, massive land.

So when it says the ground he grew on, it’s probably kind of an understatement. It’s like saying Texas is ground. The man had some land.

He had plenty of land. And on this land he grew crops and the crops he grew, grew plentifully. There was more than enough.

To the point where in verse 17, it says he thought within himself saying, what shall I do because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? There’s a good problem to have. I mean, oh, woe is me.

I’ve got so much food and produce, I don’t have anything to do with it. He had real problems, didn’t he? He had too much.

In verse 18, and he said, this will I do. So after he thought within himself for a minute, this will I do. I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there will I bestow all my fruits and goods.

And so he comes up with the brilliant plan, hey, I’m going to put up some bigger barns to put my stuff in, which makes sense. until you think about it a little more and think, really, he wasn’t all that good of a businessman when you think about it, because what was the use in tearing down the barns he’s already got? Just build some more barns.

That sounds wasteful to me now that I think about it. But this I will do. I’ll pull down my barns and build greater, and there will I bestow all my fruits and goods.

So he’s bemoaning the fact that he has too much stuff, so what will I do? I’ll waste what I’ve already got and build bigger and better, So I’ll have more room to put the stuff that I get. And I will say to my soul, Soul, when you talk to yourself, do you address yourself?

Or do you just talk? He addressed himself. He said to his soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years.

Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. And God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee. Then whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?

So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God. And this morning and tonight we’re going to talk about this passage and the passage that follows it where he talks about worry. And I want to make clear that what I’m saying and what I believe the passage is saying is not talking about how we shouldn’t work and profit and try to better ourselves.

What it’s talking about is making that the whole pursuit of our lives. When we begin to measure our lives and the value of our lives in the stuff we accumulate, in all the things that make us happy, if we begin to look at our lives simply in terms of the pursuit of those things, then we’ve missed the mark. Because there’s a whole different set of concerns that we need to have that are far more pressing and far more important than that.

But we see, first of all, from the story of this man, some things that we can learn and apply to our own lives. Because we do, whether we think about it or not, we do pursue happiness. It may not be all we ever think about, but we make decisions by and large on what’s going to make us happy.

We make decisions by and large on, well, what’s going to get me the most money? What’s going to benefit my family the most? What’s going to, you name it, you fill in the blanks.

Ladies and gentlemen, each of you probably could have brought your own bag of things in here. And in my bag of things, I didn’t have everything that makes me happy. One of the things for me is and has always been family.

And I told Christian early on, and I think she thought it was a joke, but it’s sort of a joke tinged with truth. That we weren’t just starting a family, we were building a dynasty. I have high hopes for my children.

Now, I don’t want to pressure them in any direction and have them do what I want them to do. I want them to do what the Lord wants them to do. But I have high hopes for my children and high expectations that whatever God calls them to do, that they do it well and that they excel and quite honestly, that they be the best. Because I was always driven as a kid and as a young man that if I couldn’t be the best at it, I didn’t want to do it.

That’s why I never did sports at all because I knew I had no hope of being the best. But I want my children to excel at whatever they’re called to do. I’ve always wanted us to have a big family. and we still pray that we might one day.

But whatever it was, I wanted our children to excel. I want them to be educated. I want them to be committed.

Folks, the things that we want for all of our children, except I think I just go a little extreme at it. And so I sometimes can make decisions and especially in the future can see myself making decisions on, okay, what’s going to give my children the best chance? What’s going to make my children look the best?

What’s going to. . .

I don’t know. I guess I figure if I have successful children, I’ll rule the world or something like that. But that would make me very happy if my children, whatever field God called them into, they were at the top of their respective fields.

But ultimately, that can’t be what makes all the decisions in my life or in theirs. We all like to have a little money in our pockets. All of our decisions can’t be driven by what gives us the best bottom line.

If it did, we’d make decisions all day long that are contrary to God’s Word. Folks, you know the things that make you happy, the things that we make our decisions based off of, as well as I know mine. This man had what made him happy, and that was his stuff, his barns full of produce.

That was what made him happy, or so he thought. And so he was always involved in the pursuit of more. And so the lessons that we learn from Him, we can apply to our lives.

That instead of making decisions based on our happiness and on what’s going to make us happiest, whether it’s bringing in money, whether it’s the success of our children, whether it’s whatever it is, that there’s a higher standard and there are more pressing concerns that we need to be concerned with. First thing that we need to know this morning is that happiness on earth is never enough to satisfy us. If you’re following along with the notes in the bulletin, that’s the first blank is to satisfy us.

Happiness is never enough to satisfy us. I mean, look at what we’ve seen about this man already. We’ve seen he had a massive farm.

Just the English translation doesn’t do it justice. It sounds like he’s got a little plot somewhere. The man had massive amounts of land.

And those massive amounts of land brought forth massive produce. So much so that he was running out of places to put it. And yet he never thought, oh, that’s good enough.

Now he said, he did say at some point, then at some point in the future I’ll put my feet up and say that’s been enough. But at the time being he said, that’s not quite enough yet. And I’m sure years before he probably thought, if I just got a little more to the point where he was now, then that’ll be enough and I’ll kick my feet up.

But you know what, he got to this point where his barns were overflowing and that wasn’t even enough for him. See, he coveted more stuff. And we can get to the point where we think we’re happy.

We’re happy with that job. We’re happy with that house, with that money. We’re happy with that relationship.

We’re happy with whatever it is. And eventually we’re going to realize if we’re putting all of our stock in that, it’s not going to be enough to make us happy. It’s not going to be enough to satisfy us.

The problem with the covetousness and the pursuit of happiness is that it always leaves us craving more. It’s like drinking lemonade. I’ve been told if you make it right that it should make you thirstier.

And I’ve had lemonade before that you drink it and it makes you thirstier. It’s supposed to quench your thirst and it makes. .

. What crazy person came up with that? A drink that’s supposed to quench your thirst and just makes you thirstier.

But pursuing happiness is like drinking that lemonade. You just want more. Or maybe a better example would be happiness is like a drug.

You take it and you build up a tolerance and you crave more. Folks, we can pursue happiness. If you want to, you can find some happiness in this life.

You can orient all your decisions around being happy, but it’s never going to be enough to satisfy you. Secondly, this morning, happiness is never enough to improve us. Happiness is never enough to improve us.

You’ll notice the man’s wealth, the great mountains of produce that he was collecting, didn’t make him a better person. They didn’t make him a godlier person. They didn’t make him a more generous person.

He didn’t say, okay, now I’ve got plenty for me. My barns are full. I’ll put up some more barns so I can gather in more produce.

And I know I’ll give that to the temple or I’ll give that to the poor or whatever. All he thought about was gathering more for himself. And the very real question that we sometimes need to ask ourselves is, how often do we get to the point where we say, God, if you’ll just give me a little more, then I’ll give back to you.

And I’m not just talking about money either. But I’ve thought that before in the past. God, if I could just make a little bit more money, I’d give more to the church. No.

No, that’s not how it works. Because you always get to the point of thinking, okay, God, thank you for that, but now this need came up just a little more. But we always think if we get to a little further point down the road in our happiness, then we’ll be better at handling things.

God, if I could just be a little happier, if I could just get this one problem squared away, then I’d be a nicer person. God, if I could just land that job, then I could take care of my parents. God, if I could just..

. Folks, you fill in the blanks. We always think we’ll do better things.

we’ll take care of other people, we’ll help other people, we’ll give to God’s work. We’ll focus on God if we just get that one little next thing that we want. And you’ll notice getting more of what he wanted didn’t increase his thoughts toward God or anybody but himself.

Folks, it’s not wrong to get things, it’s not wrong to want things. But it’s wrong to deceive ourselves by saying, if I just got that one next thing, then I would. It’s not going to work that way.

because we’re never going to be satisfied in the first place to where we can say, okay, that’s enough. Now I can give to God. Now I can help so-and-so out.

So happiness, despite all the promises that our world gives us about all the things that are going to make us happy and we’ll just be so fulfilled, we won’t be able to stand it. Folks, happiness is never enough to satisfy us. Happiness is never enough to improve us.

And folks, most importantly, happiness, any of the stuff we get, happiness, is never enough, is never enough to make us right with God. It’s never enough to make us right with God. This man had everything that he wanted.

And he had good prospects of obtaining more. But you know what? It didn’t change his standing before God, did it?

It didn’t change the fact that he was to die. It didn’t change the fact that as God said that his soul would be required of him. And folks, we can be happy.

We can live successful lives. We can gather up all the money, all the riches. we can raise a successful family, we can do all of these things, and it still won’t impress God even a little bit in terms of our standing before Him.

You see, we all have an appointment with death. We all have an appointment with judgment before God. And in that day, you notice He wasn’t able to take those things with Him.

It’s cliche for a reason that you can’t take it with you. It’s cliche because it’s true, because they’ve said it so long. You can’t take it with you.

It asks him, then who will those things belong to that you’ve worked so hard to lay up? See, he had spent all of his life devoted to the collection of the things that were going to make him happy, and he had completely ignored the things of God. That’s where the problem lies.

Folks, not in being happy. I want to be happy, and I love you all. I want you to be happy too.

But folks, that can’t be our ultimate goal. We can’t treat that as though that’s the only thing that matters in life. As I was reading this again last night, I thought of a short story that I read in high school by Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian writer. And I won’t go into all the details of it, but he talks about a wealthy peasant farmer named Pahom.

And the man Pahom wanted more land. And he thought, kind of like this guy, that’s what made me think of him. If I could just get more land, then I’d be happy.

And the title of the story was, How Much Land Does a Man Need? If I could just get more land, I’d be happier. And he got more land and he still wasn’t happy.

If I could just get more land, I could raise more crops, I could be wealthier. If I could get enough land, he said, I wouldn’t fear even the devil himself. And he hears of this group of people.

This man was greedy. Throughout the story, he goes through several steps of obtaining more land, and it’s never quite enough. And he hears about this group of people called the Bashkirs, which are a group of Turks that lived out on the Russian steppe, out on the plains there.

And they had massive amounts of land. And it was said that they were a little simple-minded, or at least the city people thought they were kind of simple-minded. It was said that they’d make a deal with you for a thousand rubles, you could go out and you could mark off land and they would sell it to you and you could just have it forever.

And he went out and talked to the chief of them and wanted to know how much land he’d get for a thousand rubles and was told we sell our land here not by the foot or the mile, but we sell our land by the day. He said, you mark the spot here where you start, and you go around marking the land off with a shovel, and however much land you can mark off in one day is yours as long as you’re back in this one spot by the end of the day. You’re here, whatever you’ve marked off, you get to keep.

If you’re not back, you lose the land and the money. He said, I can move pretty fast, that sounds like a good deal. So he gets there early in the morning. he takes off with his shovel and he just goes until he can’t see them any longer.

And he cuts across and he keeps going and he notices it’s getting dark. The sun’s starting to go down and he’s not even back within sight distance of them. And so he begins working feverishly.

He began to work as he had never worked before. He poured every ounce of blood and sweat and strength he had into marking out that land and getting back to the spot of the Bashkirs by the time the sun went down. And when he got to the Bashkir chief, he got back to the spot just as the sun went down and the chief said, I’m impressed at how much land you marked off.

But because he’d overworked himself, he’d gotten all that land, he fell dead at the chief’s feet. And the man’s servant dug him out a plot in his land, and the end of the story says, six feet from heel to head is all the land a man needs. I read that story when I was in the 10th grade and it’s never left me because it parallels so well what the Bible talks about.

We all have that date with death and we all have that date with judgment. Ultimately, all the land, all the money, all the wealth, all the happiness we can acquire doesn’t make any difference, doesn’t change that fact. Ultimately, there’s onl