Message Info:
- Text: Luke 12:13-21, NASB
- Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 43
- Date: Sunday morning, December 14, 2025
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Audio File: Open/Download
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⟦Transcript⟧ Well, we had to go to the city yesterday for a Christmas get-together with Charles’ family and for me to check on my grandmother who’s in the hospital, and I feel like I spent about three days on the road yesterday, which is not my favorite thing, but as I was driving around, the thought occurred to me at how easy it is to get anywhere these days. And we kind of take it for granted. It hasn’t always been that way. The reason why we have the interstate system is because Eisenhower took months to get across the country with troops. Back in the 1850s, it was the same way.
If you wanted to get from California to New York or vice versa, you could either spend months slogging it out on trails across the country before the railroad was built or you could get on a ship and there’s a story of a group of people who got on a ship because that was actually the easier way to get from one side of the country to the other and this group of people got on a ship called the SS Central America and they were coming through the Atlantic Ocean headed up toward New York and just about the worst thing imaginable happened to them in this little wooden steamship they were hit by a hurricane off the coast of North Carolina and as they’re taking on water from this storm the ship began to sink the good news is that a lot of people were rescued from this a lot of people survived there were quite a few who did not survive and the survivors tell the story about what happened to those who didn’t survive and why they didn’t survive you see some of these were people who had gone to california because of the gold rush and people who had struck it rich and now after many years, they were coming back from California back to the East Coast with their treasure that they had unearthed in California. And some of these people, as the ship is going down, could not bear the thought of losing this treasure that they had fought so hard to acquire, and they began to fill their pockets with gold, which is about the worst decision you could make if you’re going to go into the water and try to swim. And all of those who filled their pockets with gold ended up drowning. And I couldn’t tell you when, but I read that people have discovered the shipwreck more recently and have gone back and still at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of North Carolina have found pockets. The bodies are long gone, but they found pockets full of gold still there on the seafloor.
That for some of these people, that was more important to them than their lives, was that gold that they had gone to California to find. This morning, we’re going to look at a story that Jesus tells in Luke chapter 12 that deals with the same kind of thing, and Jesus’ warnings for us not to do the same kind of thing, for us not to be foolish in this regard, for us not to get things in the wrong priority, not to prioritize things wrong, but to realize there are things on earth and they don’t matter as much as the part of us that lives forever. We’re going to look at that this morning. We are still in our study through Luke, Luke chapter 12, talking about his ministry here on earth. We’ll probably focus more specifically on his coming next week as we get to the Sunday before Christmas.
That has gotten here fast, hasn’t it? But for today, we’re in Luke chapter 12, and we’re going to start in verse 13 where we left off last week.
If you’ll turn there with me if you haven’t already. And once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. And if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find Luke 12, it’ll be on the screen in front of you.
But starting in verse 13, here’s what Luke says. Someone in the crowd said to him, that’s Jesus. Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.
But he said to him, Man, who appointed me a judge or arbitrator over you? Then he said to them, Beware and be on your guard against every form of greed, For not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions. And he told them a parable, saying, The land of a rich man was very productive. And he began reasoning to himself, saying, What shall I do, since I have no place to store my crops?
Then he said, This is what I will do. I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all of my grain and all my goods. 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.
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?
So is the man who stores up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God. You may be seated.
So in Luke’s account here, somebody, as Jesus is teaching, He has just, in the passage we looked at last week, He has just laid out what the Pharisees were doing wrong and reminded them that this hypocrisy of knowing that He’s the Messiah but acting like we don’t have to acknowledge it and it won’t be true, it wasn’t going to get them anywhere. And someone in this crowd thinks this is a great time to come to Jesus to settle a family dispute. And maybe this is timely because a lot of us are about to spend time with our families, and sometimes that makes people a little crazy. Sometimes there are family disputes. It was normal for people to come to rabbis to settle questions like this.
It was normal if you had a dispute over something like inheritance with a family member, where it was something that God’s law addressed in the Old Testament. There were some rules about these kinds of things. You would go to a rabbi to get a ruling and get the right answer.
So it was normal for people to come and ask questions like this. And I think if you wanted a wise answer to this question, Jesus is exactly the right person to go to. Right? I can’t imagine anybody having more wisdom than Jesus on this topic or any other.
So he’s right there in front of you. It makes complete sense from the man’s perspective to go to Jesus.
But Jesus didn’t give him an answer. You look at verse 14, Jesus didn’t give him an answer. And it’s not because Jesus doesn’t know the right thing to do. there’s a few reasons possibly why he would look at this man and just say who made me a ruler over you who made me your judge which by the way we know the answer to that question he did he made himself the judge over all of us but this is a question for them to consider how they viewed Jesus because here you’ve got Pharisees in the crowd saying, oh, he must do these things by the power of Satan. You’ve got others in the crowd that recognize him as the Messiah, but they’re never, ever going to admit it.
And so for Jesus to pose this question, who made me a judge, is to force them to confront what it is they think about him and what they know about him. Sort of like when one of them comes to him and says, good teacher, what must I do? And he asked the question and Jesus says, why do you call me good? There’s no one good but God. And people today like to take that out of context and say, well, see, he’s saying he’s not God.
That’s not what he’s doing. In context there, he’s saying God is the only one good, and yet you’re coming and calling me good. You need to think about who I really am. You need to think about what you really know about me.
This is confronting their willingness to kind of sit on the fence as far as Jesus is concerned. So when He asked them, who made me an authority here? That’s a good question for them because they don’t recognize His authority anyway. Why would you go to Him for an answer to this question?
But I think there’s another reason in addition to this, and I think the text bears this out, That it’s not just Jesus pointing out that they need to do some serious thinking about who they believe him to be. But there’s also a heart issue here.
And we see this over and over to the point that you may get sick of me bringing up some variation of this point. But I have to as long as it continues to be there in what we’re studying in Luke. That while we focus on earthly things, Jesus is more concerned with our hearts. And this is something that we’ve already seen repeated over and over and over throughout the gospel of Luke and buckle up because it’ll be there more. And God doesn’t repeat himself by accident.
When things like this are repeated over and over and over in there, it’s because it’s there because it’s a hard lesson for us to learn. And even once we know it intellectually, sometimes we still have to come back and struggle with this disconnect between the mind and the heart, what we know to be true and what’s inside.
Jesus is more concerned with our hearts. He’s asking Jesus a legal question that Jesus could easily answer. These brothers are fighting over an inheritance.
This is unfortunately not even that unusual a situation. Money makes people do crazy things. At our last church, we were friends with a lady that had several siblings, and she said none of them had spoken to each other for about 15 years. I said, well, why?
Because she would tell stories about how they used to be close. Oh, mother died and the inheritance. Money makes people crazy. Inheritance makes people crazy. This was not an unusual situation.
And Jesus was the right person to go to about this question. But when the man approaches Jesus, Jesus doesn’t answer the question. He moves immediately into a critique of the man’s heart condition. The debate about the inheritance is just a symptom of the deeper problem for this man and probably for his brother as well.
Jesus says, beware and be on guard against every form of greed. And the reason Jesus would give that warning is because both of these parties, the man and his brother, their hearts are such a mess that neither a yes nor a no from Jesus is going to fix the problem.
If Jesus looked at the man and said, in all his wisdom, no, the inheritance rightly belongs to your brother. Is the man going to accept that or is he going to flip out? I think we know what the answer is. This man is not going to listen to what Jesus says and say, oh, you know I hadn’t thought about it that way, you’re right. No, he’s going to lose his mind and start arguing with Jesus.
Which, by the way, we all have the ability to do. When we want something some way and we ask Jesus about it and we ask in prayer and we’re searching God’s word, and the answer’s right there in front of us, we have a tendency in our flesh to not accept that answer, but to continue telling Jesus what answer we want him to give us. And I think if it had been the other way around, if Jesus had said, absolutely, your brother has given you a wrong deal, do you think the brother is going to accept that answer? We can’t know that for sure, but the fact that Jesus goes immediately to the greed in their hearts tells me that’s likely the case. A yes and a no, that wasn’t going to, or I side with you or I side with your brother, That wasn’t going to fix anything because there was a deeper problem here in the heart.
He said, beware of every form of greed. Their hearts then were plagued by greed to the point that it’s causing separation in their family. This can happen with money. It can happen with stuff. It can happen with attention.
It can happen with anything. I want this. You want that.
And we’re not willing to, our hearts are greedy toward that one thing, and it leads to separation. And Jesus warns against this. That’s why he says in verse 15, not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions. That does tend to be how we measure our lives, how we measure our success in life, is by the stuff we have. And it can be physical stuff like, oh, he’s got a really cool boat.
Or look at that truck he’s got. It can be monetary stuff. Do you know what’s in his bank account?
It can be stuff in terms of a job. It can be stuff in terms of prestige. Anything earthly can be this stuff that we’re greedy for.
But Jesus says even when you have an abundance, even when you’re overflowing with those things, that’s not what determines who you are. In other words, that’s a really poor way to measure your life.
Because there is no amount of possessions that will be enough to give your life meaning. Whether it’s physical possessions, whether it’s intangible things that we possess, there’s nothing that we can possess that we can ever possess enough of that it’s going to be enough to give our lives meaning. And Jesus gives the following example. He goes on to verse 16, and he tells them this parable that we read just a moment ago about the land of this rich man that was very productive. And in this story, he’s pointing out to us that the issue for us in dealing with these things and the attachment that our hearts have toward these things, the issue is not how much or how little we have, but what it reveals about us.
The most important thing is not what we have or what we don’t have. It’s what that possession or that lack of possession Reveals about who we are And the idea that we can That we are defined That we can focus on Material things It is ingrained in us In our sin nature And it has been the basis of of major events through world history, up to when Karl Marx taught that it was the only thing that mattered about us was our class and what we possessed versus what other people did, up to our current day when that becomes the focus of politicians and social media, that that’s the only thing that matters is what we have or don’t have.
But Jesus tells in this story that it wasn’t what he had, it was how he reacted to it and what that showed about him. So he tells this story of a man whose land is very productive, and so he doesn’t have much to worry about. In that day and time, if you had the ability to grow your own food and you had the ability to grow surplus that you could sell, you were in good shape. It was a good problem to have land that was too productive. Any of you ever tried to grow things and you’ve been too productive?
Larry, does that happen very often? Tammy’s going to say no. Not yet. I’m not a farmer. I mean, not, well, I like to play one, but my garden and my chickens, They’ve never produced too much, more than we could use to where we’re just rich.
This man had a great problem to have, that his land was too productive. In fact, he’s kind of preoccupied with the idea that I’m just too wealthy.
This is a problem. I have too much stuff.
So he says in verse 17, what shall I do since I have no place to store my crops? at this point, a wise person might start looking around for other ways to use this wealth. He could use this wealth to start other businesses. He could use this wealth to help people. He could feed the poor.
He could do all sorts of productive things, but he’s just worried that, you know, I’m just too rich. And I think most of us sitting in here say, what kind of life is that? What does that even look like I have too much.
If he was wise, he might have looked for ways to put this to use, but instead he decides to hoard it. Verse 18, he says, I’m just going to tear down my barns, I’m going to build bigger ones, and I’m going to store it all up, and then I can just sit around and feast on that till whenever. And it demonstrated his greed. The fact that he plans to use it solely for his own comfort, to be idle for years. He’s talking about telling his soul, you know what, come on, eat, drink, and be merry.
Demonstrates his greed. The problem is not that he had so much. It does not make us unspiritual and unchristian if we have things. the problem is what does it reveal about us when we have these things our problem is also not you know what i don’t have enough things i don’t have as many things as the person sitting down the pew from me or across the aisle from me the problem is what it reveals about us do we become greedy about the things we have do we become greedy about the things that we don’t have do we let that us. I recently heard somebody preaching on a different passage that said it’s fine to have things.
It’s not fine when things have you. And that’s what Jesus is dealing with here. This man’s things had him. This man was in a position that is enviable, that he had enough to last him for years, and yet he’s still looking at it like it’s a problem. I’ll just build bigger barns so I can fill those up too.
It’s the nature of our humanity, it’s the nature of this problem, the heart always wants more. Unless we discipline that heart according to the Word of God and with the help of the Holy Spirit, unless we discipline that heart, that heart always wants more and is going to always pursue more, whether it’s needed or not. It’s not a matter of what we have or what we don’t have. I know some wonderful, faithful Christians who have almost nothing and are incredibly generous with what little they have. I also know some wonderful faithful Christians who have a lot more zeros in their bank account.
And I mean at the end of the number, not the front. They have a lot more zeros in their bank account than I do, and they are incredibly generous and giving and focused on the kingdom. I also know that it’s possible to have a full bank account and still be greedy for more. And it’s possible to have an empty bank account and be greedy for more. The stuff is just a mirror that we hold up that shows us the condition of our hearts.
And this man, in the story, in the parable, was never going to be satisfied. He always was going to need and want more. And Jesus tells this story because the man that he’s talking to was the same way. And the story is recorded for us because of our human nature. It leads us to have the same tendency as well.
But when we get to verse 20, there’s a twist in the story, something the man wasn’t expecting, either the man in the parable or the man Jesus is telling the parable to. Neither one of them expect what’s about to come. This man says, I’m going to build bigger barns and I’m going to fill those up too and I’m just going to enjoy life when we get to verse 20, but God said to him, you fool. This very night, your soul is required of you.
By the way, it sounds harsh to say you fool. We’ll talk tonight about what God means by that phrasing, but just know at this point, God is pointing out that he has behaved foolishly. You fool this night, this very night, your soul is required of you, and now who will own what you have prepared? This man had spent his entire life focused on earthly things, and while he was focused on how to get more and how to keep more and how to enjoy it, he was blissfully unaware that something serious was coming. He was about to forfeit his life, And this is not a punishment for having things.
I don’t think it’s even a punishment for his greed. It’s just an acknowledgement that the appointed time had come for him to die. And it wasn’t even on his radar.
But while he’s busy making plans about how he’s going to enjoy this stuff, God is looking at it from a perspective that this man doesn’t see and saying, all your wealth is about to be lost. You’ve worked so hard and you’ve focused all this time on your stuff, and now you’re about to die. He says you’re about to lose your soul. You’re going to lose everything. You’re not going to have even your wealth there to comfort you, and everything you’ve worked so hard for is just going to belong to somebody else.
when he died all that stuff wasn’t going to matter anymore there was a joke i heard when i was a kid that i still remember part of about a man making a deal with peter and that you you know that’s not how it works right just want to be clear the jokes are funny sometimes but we’re not making deals with peter about getting into heaven. We’re not having to answer questions at the gates. Peter’s not in charge of that. There’s one way to heaven, and his name is Jesus.
But in this joke, I think it reveals some truth. He’s made this deal with Peter that he’s able to take one suitcase with him when he goes to heaven. I forget how he manages to make that deal, but he’s able to take one suitcase with him, and he fills his suitcase up with gold, because we’re always told you can’t take it with you. He fills his suitcase up with gold and he’s so excited he’s going to be rich in heaven too. And he gets up there and Peter asks him to open the case and he says, why did you bring a case full of pavement?
Now, obviously a made up story. But it illustrates a point. Our wealth, our stuff that we work so hard for and that we emphasize so much here in this life means nothing in the presence of God. the things that we strive over eventually end up belonging to somebody else a phrase i remember frequently is that on some level we’re all interim pastors every pastor is an interim pastor because if if the lord tarries or delays long enough eventually you’re going to die or retire or move on, and somebody else will be in that chair.
And we define ourselves by, well, this is my ministry. One day you’re going to be gone, and it’s going to belong to somebody else. It’s true of everybody. That job you work so hard at, and it works so hard to get and to keep, and you define yourself by it, Someday somebody else will be sitting in that chair. That money that we worked so hard to amass in our bank accounts, one day we’ll be dead and we may have relatives fighting over it.
Every rusted out old truck you’ve ever seen in a junk heap was somebody’s pride and joy at one point. if we focus just on these earthly things eventually they’re gone and if that’s been the focus of our lives it’s been wasted because those things are not going to be enough to give us meaning and there’s a reminder in here verse 21 and this sounds like such a a negative message doesn’t have to be, but it is sobering in the fact that Jesus needed to wake this man up to the spiritual reality, that each of us has an appointment with God, and we need to be prepared.
When we get to verse 21, he says, so is the man who stores up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God. As he’s telling this parable, he’s telling the man that for each of us, if we’re just focused up on storing up earthly, if we’re just focused on storing up earthly treasure, and we’re not rich toward God, we’re not investing in that relationship with God, we’re not investing in that walk with Him, we’re not investing our time, talent, and treasure in spiritual things, we are going to be like this man who has wasted his life.
It can be a sobering message if we hear this and we sit here and think, that’s me. Everything I focus on, everything I attach great importance to is going to be gone one day and it’s not going to matter. That is a sobering thought.
But the good news is that you are hearing it, I am hearing it, we’re alive to hear it, and as long as there’s breath in our bodies, there’s still time to change course. There’s still time to recognize that we can spend our time on things that matter. and we can’t go back and undo the years that we’ve spent just focused on earthly things but from here on out we can focus on that walk with god and again having things doesn’t stop you from doing that not having things doesn’t stop you from doing that it’s a matter of where the focus lies it’s a matter of what am i going to do with what God has entrusted to me.
But our perspective has to be focused on the fact that we each have an appointment with God. The scriptures say that it is appointed unto man once to die and after that the judgment. Each of us will stand before a holy God. And if we come with titles and we come with pockets full of gold or a suitcase full of pavement. We come with any of that before God.
He’s not impressed by any of that. None of that is enough to get us a relationship with God. The way we prepare now in recognition for this appointment we have where we all will stand before Him is to recognize that we’ll stand before Him guilty. We are all guilty of sin. It doesn’t mean we’ve sinned as much as we possibly could have, but we’re all guilty.
And we’ll stand condemned because God is a just judge, but God is also a merciful judge. And Jesus Christ, God the Son, came and took responsibility for every crime you and I have committed against a holy God.
Jesus came and paid for everything we did wrong. So that when God the Father looks at us, He doesn’t have to see that sin. I’m not suggesting God is confused. He knows the truth.
But He doesn’t see that sin because it’s already been paid for and we’ve been clothed in the righteousness of Christ instead. Jesus suffered, bled, and died on the cross so that you and I could be forgiven. He rose again three days later to prove that he had the power to forgive sins. And to us today, he offers that forgiveness freely, not something we have to work for, not something we have to earn or deserve. We could never do enough.
But he offers it to us because he paid for it in full. It’s free to us, but it came at an incredibly high cost. And all you and I have to do is believe that He is our Savior and ask for that forgiveness.
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