“True Treasure”
Luke 12:13-21
August 5, 2007
Several days ago I was again reminded how my life is
so often wrapped up in my possessions. This time it was when my
computer failed me. In the past my car or my finances have failed
me. And when they fail I realize just how much I have trusted in
them. My life becomes chaotic and unstable, and I am pulled out
of my comfort zone. When things are going well for me, when the
computer, the car, the finances, and all my things are in order and are
functioning as they should, I feel secure and at peace. But when
something is damaged, broken, or stolen, my security and peace are
lost, and that’s when I realize that I haven’t been
trusting in God as I should. I’ve put my possessions before
Him and made them my gods instead. I’ve done just what
Jesus says here not to do and have not guarded against greed and
instead have found my life consisting in the abundance of my
possessions. And guess what... I’m not the only one;
you’ve done it too!
Now, I want to make something very clear right from
the beginning. Having stuff is not sin. It’s not the
possessions themselves that are the problem. Possessions, things,
stuff are all gifts to you from God, who gives them to you out of His
fatherly divine goodness and mercy. In the parable here that
Jesus tells, it’s God who blessed the rich man with his abundant
crop. The rich man’s riches were a gift to him from
God. Being rich is not a sin. There are many righteous
people in the Scriptures who were rich - Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses,
David, Solomon, Esther, and Joanna just to name a few. The
problem comes in our attitude towards our riches. It’s when
we make our stuff our gods, when we fear, love, trust and find our
peace and security in our possessions that we then have a
problem. That’s when we sin against both God and our
neighbor. It’s a sin against God, because we have broken
the first commandment and have set up for ourselves idols, and
it’s a sin against our neighbor, because we don’t want to
part with our things and use them to help our neighbor when he’s
in need. We become stingy and greedy just like the rich man in
this parable, and all we want to do is hoard more and more stuff,
because the more stuff we have, the more secure we feel.
But Jesus says that such an attitude towards stuff
actually makes you poor towards God, and it isolates you both from Him
and from others. Look at the rich man in the story. He is
blessed by God with a bumper crop, but he forgets that it’s a
gift to him from God. So, instead of giving thanks to God and
trusting in Him for his security, the man finds his security in his
stuff. And instead of using his wealth to help others in need, he
hoards it all to himself. The fact that he wants to build larger
barns to hold it all isn’t the problem. The problem lies in
his attitude towards his riches. Notice how he speaks:
“I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I
will store all my grain and 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.” The man has an “I” problem; he
uses the pronouns “I” and “my” eleven
times. There’s no mention of God or his neighbor. In
fact, he has completely cut himself off from both, to the point where
he has no one to talk to but himself. And that’s where love
of possessions leads us. Though we may be blessed by God with
many things in this life, we make ourselves poor towards Him when we
turn our possessions into our gods. And as a result we isolate
ourselves both from God and our neighbor.
If you want to be rich towards God, you must start
by confessing that you are poor, that you have made God’s gifts
into idols and have not used them to help your neighbors in need.
You and I have been just like the rich man in this story. We all
have an “I” problem. And the fact is, we can’t
help ourselves out of this predicament. We can’t make
ourselves rich before God. God’s riches are bestowed,
they’re given. His temporal blessings are given even to the
wicked, as they were given to this rich man. But His eternal
blessings are only given to those who confess themselves to be poor in
spirit and look to Jesus for true treasure. Jesus says,
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven.” To confess yourself poor in spirit is to say what
God’s Word says of you, that though you may have many temporal
goods, you are lacking the true treasure that makes you rich towards
God. And what makes you rich towards God is Jesus Christ and His
gifts.
Now, you may say, “Well, I have Jesus!
I’ve been baptized. I come to church. I read His
Word. I pray. I’m not poor.” These things
may be so, and yet there is still a lot of stuff in both your life and
mine that we put before Him, and when we trust in our possessions and
find our security in them, we are effectively making ourselves poor
before God by not trusting in Jesus alone. And so we have to
confess that we Christians, in and of ourselves, are poor before
God. We come into this world not fearing, loving, and trusting in
God above all things, and even after we’re baptized we still
struggle with this sin.
But the good news is that God, who is rich in mercy,
freely gives you the treasure that makes you rich towards Him. He
gives you Jesus, who gives you all the riches, treasures, gifts, and
blessings that He earned for you through His life, death, and
resurrection. He didn’t hoard His riches and keep them to
Himself, but as the Scripture says, “Though He was rich, yet for
your sake He became poor, that through His poverty you might become
rich.” And, “Although He existed in the form of God,
He did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied
Himself, taking the form of a bondservant, being made in the likeness
of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled
Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a
cross.” God the Father has given Jesus to you; Jesus gave
Himself for you on the cross. Now look at all the riches you have
in Him! They’re too numerous to count, but they include
righteousness and holiness, forgiveness of sins (including the sin of
making gods out of your possessions), eternal life, the Triune God
Himself - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the inheritance of the
world to come. The Apostle Paul writes, “All things belong
to you, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death
or things present or things to come; all things belong to you, and you
belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.”
In Jesus, you who are poor in spirit have been
richly blessed. To you belongs the kingdom of heaven. In
comparison with the riches that Jesus gives you, what are the riches of
this world? First, they’re temporary; they’re not
going to last. When you die, you can’t take them with
you. In the story here God calls this rich man a fool for
trusting in his possessions and says, “This night your soul is
required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they
be?” It’s a false sense of security to trust in your
possessions. They can’t save you. Second, even before
you die they can easily be taken away from you. Look at
Job! Though he was richly blessed by God, all of his earthly
wealth along with his children and his health were taken away from him
in one day. But what was his attitude towards all this?
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall
return there. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away.
Blessed be the Name of the LORD.” Though he had many
temporal goods, Job had not made them his gods. He trusted in the
Lord, Job’s true treasure, which could not be taken away from
him. And that treasure cannot be taken away from you either, even
when you die. As the Apostle Paul writes, nothing, not even death
itself, can separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus
our Lord.
Knowing all this, then, what should our attitude be
towards our earthly treasures? First, we should give God thanks
for them. When Luther instructs us on asking our heavenly Father
to give us our daily bread, he writes that “God gives daily
bread, indeed, without our prayer, also to all the wicked; but we pray
in this petition that He would lead us to know this, and to receive our
daily bread with thanksgiving.” To give thanks to God for
all His gifts towards us is a way of confessing that the gifts are not
our gods, but that the one and only God, the true God, the triune God
has given them all to us out of His fatherly divine goodness and
mercy. Giving God thanks for all our temporal gifts can then be a
springboard for thanking Him for all the eternal gifts that He gives us
in Jesus.
Second, we can now use the gifts that God has given
us to help our neighbor in need. Jesus tells His disciples,
“Freely you have received; freely give.” Since you
don’t need trust in your possessions for your security or your
salvation, and since you are freely and daily given all that you need
in Jesus, you can freely give away your possessions to help others,
especially your brothers and sisters in Christ, when they are in
need. This is what the early Christian Church did in the book of
Acts. They didn’t claim that anything belonging to them was
their own. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t have
private property; it just means that when they saw their fellow
believers in need, they didn’t hesitate to use or sell the stuff
that God had given them in order to help their brothers and sisters out.
Not only can we freely give of the temporal gifts
God has given us in order to help people out, but even more importantly
we can also freely give of the eternal gifts God has given us in
Jesus. And this costs us nothing. We have freely received
the forgiveness of our sins in Jesus; we can freely speak that
forgiveness to others, so that they too might receive this gift and be
made rich towards God in Christ.
We don’t impoverish ourselves by giving away
what God has given us. Our inheritance in Christ is infinite;
it’s sure, and it can’t be diminished or taken away.
And so St. Paul writes, “God is able to make all grace abound to
you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may
abound in every good work.” So, “sell your
possessions, and give to the needy,” says Jesus.
“Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a
treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches
and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your
heart be also.” Jesus is your true treasure, and you are
His. He treasures you with His whole heart, so that you might
treasure Him with yours. Jesus has given you Himself and all the
gifts He won for you through His life, death, and resurrection;
He’s made you extremely rich towards God, so that you are lacking
nothing as far as He is concerned. You may be poor in this world
and poor in spirit, but in Jesus, your priceless treasure, you’re
truly rich before God, and the kingdom of heaven belongs to you.
Amen.