You Can't Take It With You - Luke 12:15-21

"Beware! Guard against every kind of greed. Life is not measured by how much you own" (vs. 15). A man from the crowd of people who constantly gathered around Jesus called out for Him to tell his older brother to divide up the estate of their father so he could receive his inheritance. Jesus replied that He was not a judge who makes decisions about legal matters. Recognizing that greed rather than spiritual development was the man's focus, Jesus made the statement in vs. 15 and then proceeded to tell an alarming parable. I characterize it as alarming because the financial plan of the prudent protagonist of the story is frightenly similar to that of most of us. In the parable Jesus described a rich man who was a successful farmer and so he kept building bigger and bigger barns to store his crops. His plan was that once he had enough stored up then he would retire, relax, and enjoy life. (Of course, the implication is that enough is never enough.) Then God confronted the man and said that He required his life that very day and asked who would get everything he worked so hard to accumulate. Jesus concluded the parable with this observation: "Yes, a person is a fool to store up earthly wealth but not have a rich relationship with God" (vs. 21). If we're not careful, we can spend our lives working for a bigger house, a bigger car, a better vacation, a bigger savings account, or a comfortable retirement. Accumulating "earthly wealth" or even saving for the future is not necessarily evil or sinful. However, spending your life saving and accumulating to the detriment of building a "rich relationship with God" is foolish because it has no eternal significance. The meaning of the parable is that your focus in life should be on God's Kingdom and fulfilling His plans and purposes rather than being obsessed with accumulating possessions and saving for the future because in the end you can't take it with you and somebody else gets it all.