Today we continue our study in the Word of God, and we come to the next parable in the Gospel of Luke, Luke chapter 12, verses 13 to 21. In this section we have what is often known as the parable of the rich fool. This is the third of the specially Lucan parables, that is, the parables found only in Luke, that we are now studying.
One of the multitude, that is, the crowd of people who were listening to the teaching of the Lord Jesus, said to him, "Teacher, bid my brother divide the inheritance with me." But he said to him, "Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you?" That is, the Lord Jesus said to him, "I haven't been appointed as a judge or a divider over your inheritance." And the Lord Jesus said to them, that is, to this crowd of people, not only to the person who asked him the question, "Take heed and beware of all covetousness," that is, of greed for material things, "for a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions."
And he told them a parable, saying, "The land of a rich man brought forth plentifully. And he thought to himself, 'What shall I do? For I have nowhere to store my crops.' And he said, 'I will do this. I will pull 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. Take your ease, eat, drink, be merry."' But God said to him, 'Fool, this night your soul is required of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God."
Now here is a parable in which the Lord Jesus draws a picture for us of a very successful businessman, a successful farmer if you like. The world would describe him as a success. But the question is: to have success in the world is not the same as having success spiritually. What is success? Is it great success to have promotion in your job? To have a very good degree, first class honors instead of second or third? So what is success? Is it academic? Is it financial? Is it judged in terms of the number of degrees you have or how successful your business is going?
Well, for this farmer, he is very successful. And how does success come about? Success comes about through a number of ingredients. It comes about through hard work, careful planning, good use of your time, and good management of your finances. Success is very seldom an accident. It is mostly that there is talent, there is skill, there is hard work. Some people would say that talents or gifts constitute only 5% of success, and 95% is hard work. If this is the case, then what we can say concerning this man is that he is a man of all these kinds of qualities.
He is a man who is hard working. He is a man who must have trained in his particular job for quite some time. He knows his business. You try running a farm and see where you get. I think if I were running a farm, I would be bankrupt in the first year. I know nothing about farming. I don't have the slightest clue what to do with farming. I am not trained for this particular business. But here is a man who knows his job, he is trained in this work, and he is very successful. He knows how to manage his finances. He knows how to organize his time.
So what can we say is wrong with this man? In fact, when you look at it, he is simply the picture of success. Most people manage to get by, but here he has such a plentiful crop. In fact, there is more than that. One could in fact say that he is blessed by God. In fact, that is what the Jews thought, that every rich man was blessed by God. Because after all, especially in farming, the weather plays a great part in the matter. You may be very skillful in your farming, you know how to arrange your things, but you have bad weather, no rain comes down, that is disastrous. Or you have too much rain, rain at the wrong time, and that is also disastrous. In perhaps no other business as in farming is one's sole dependence upon weather, and therefore, dependent, as the Jews saw, upon the mercies of God.
So would it not seem that God was blessing this man with an abundance of crops? He had good weather on top of all his skill and his hard work. He had, as it were, God's cooperation. So it would look like that from the outside at any rate, and perhaps he was thinking the same thing, that after all, God was on his side, that everything was going fine. The weather was just nice, and look at these good crops he had year by year. And now he had such abundance that his storehouses, his silos, were not big enough anymore to store all the grain.
So he was having another planning problem. He was saying to himself, "What shall I do?" in verse 17. "What shall I do? I have nowhere to store my crops." He has so great an abundance of crops. He is such a success that his storehouses are too small. So what's he going to do? Well, he says, "I will do this." You see, he is a man immediately of ideas. He doesn't just say, "Ah, I don't know what I'm going to do." But he has ideas. "I'm going to do this." He's a decisive person as well. He knows what he's going to do. He is not completely lost. He asks a question and he gives his own answer. "I will pull down my barns." These are too small now, so that he can have economy of space. Because having these small barns and big barns takes too much space. You see, he's still thinking of farming. He's going to use more land. He's going to build more efficient, bigger barns, maybe higher up, make better use of the ground. "I'll pull down these barns and build larger ones, and I will store all my grain and my goods."
So the picture seems to be an ideal one. I mean, what is the problem? And what about from the moral point of view? Well, we can't lay any charges against him morally, because nothing has been said that he has been a sinner, that he has done bad things, that he went out to rob anybody, that he was dishonest. No such charge is brought against him. In fact, it is the case that hard working people are often morally good people. It usually is the lazy people who don't bother to do any work, who have too much time on their hands, and they become busybodies, and they loaf around on the streets, and they get into all kinds of trouble.
But hard working people are the cream of society. These are the people who stay out of trouble because they have no time for trouble. They are too busy with their work. Think of the good researcher. He sits in his lab, he is working day and night. Now where has he got time to go out and sin? Where has he got time to go and steal, or to rob, or to commit adultery, or to commit other offenses? He has no time for this. He is engaged in his work.
We think of these dedicated scientists like the Curies, who study all day in their labs, people like Newton, who are so busy that when he got married, he left his wife sitting in the carriage outside his lab. And he said to his wife, "I am going into the lab for one minute, I will be out soon." And that was the last his wife saw of him for a few hours, because as soon as he got in his lab, he was so engrossed in his work, he had forgotten he got married that day. And on another occasion, of course, you heard the famous story where he was doing this experiment, he was trying to cook his lunch, and he put his watch in to get boiled instead of his egg. His mind is so concentrated, he has no time to think of other things. These are people dedicated to their job. They are moral people. They don't go around committing gross sins.
And so here with this successful businessman, what is more, successful people like this want to guard their reputation. Their reputation is very important to them. They don't want to commit sins that are going to ruin their reputation. They want people to think of them as honest businessmen. Whether they are really so or not is another matter, but they want people to think of this, and they go a long way to safeguard their reputation. And so we find that this is the situation with this man here. He is a man who is hard working, who stays out of trouble, who has plans, who has ideas, who is very successful.
So what's the charge? What's the problem? His picture seems to be ideal. On top of that, he seems to be blessed by God, having good weather. And I mention this point because it's a very current notion among the Jews that rich people were especially in God's favor, and poor people somehow were being chastised by God.
I'm very alarmed to see that this Jewish notion is still very current among Christians. For example, every time a person is getting success, he says, "Oh, thank God, Lord, You are so good to me." He's praising God. But when his business doesn't go so well, he's just saying, "God, what did I do? Why do I have to suffer all this?" There is still the notion of a direct equation, a direct relationship, between success and God's blessing, and failure and God's curse. That's a very dangerous notion, and I should tell you that that's not a scriptural notion. That is a human idea, but not a scriptural one.
The notion that if you fail an exam it's because God wants to punish you is not necessarily the case at all. I know of people who have worked very hard and somehow mysteriously failed an exam. But that is not in any way proof that God is against you or punishing you. I have known of cases where failing the exam has been the greatest thing that ever happened to them. It was a great blessing from God that they failed an exam. And often success is the real curse. There are people who have had too much success, and they just fall away from God. And it is often the people with a great deal of success who are the ones who have the most spiritual trouble.
I had a very close friend in London. Both of us studied at the same time. He studied in another faculty. He studied in engineering. And he was most successful because he was exceedingly brilliant. He was a person who came off with first class honors with gold medals. He never knew anything below a first class. I don't think in all his academic records he ever had anything less than a first class. And as though that was not enough, when he graduated from Imperial College in the University of London, he was the first out of seven first class honors in his class, and he took the gold medal for the whole college. So much success. In fact, he studied in Montreal for his doctorate. All one success after the other. He just went on. Today he's a professor. But he is one who is a spiritual loser.
Success can be the worst thing that happens to you. I hope you really understand that. There is no direct equation between success and God's blessing. Here is a man who seems to have nothing but success. This fellow hasn't heard of failure. He has only prosperity and success, and good weather, and everything goes his way. And he is a complete failure spiritually. Rather like my friend, a failure spiritually.
I have known of others who have failed, who have been working very hard, and also strangely not very brilliant, and still fail an exam. That's strange. Don't think you are stupid when you fail an exam. There are people who are very brilliant who fail exams, and no one can quite figure this thing out. Many of you know that Albert Einstein was quite a failure in school. It was quite a disaster. I shared with some of you once that I once preached in the school in which Albert Einstein studied, that is his high school in Switzerland. And after my meeting there, one of the teachers said, "Do you know that Einstein studied in this school?" I said, "No, interesting." I said, "He must have been a brilliant student." He said, "No, no, he was a terrible student." I said, "How's that?" He said, "He was so bad that he could scarcely get into university. Hardly anybody wanted to accept him." He was eventually accepted into the University of Zurich, but only just by the skin of his teeth. He was regarded as one of the marginal cases, and they decided, "Okay, we'll let this guy in, but he's not that good." Well, you know what happened later. So the fact that he was a constant failure all the way through his school days really doesn't, is not the end of the business. It still does not prove which is success and which is a blessing from God.
Now that's important to understand, and failure to understand this point has caused all kinds of trouble. So then, if this is the case, exactly what is wrong with this man? What is his condemnation? What wrong did he ever do?
Let us look at his case. And don't you think that what he did would be regarded as the most sensible thing to do? I mean, if you have so many crops that you have nowhere to store it, then what's the sensible thing to do except to build bigger barns? That's the thing that you and I would do, probably. If we were in his position, what else would you do? So when we look at this man, it seems to us that we are struck, as I say, and it's very important to get this thing into our minds, that he is simply, by the worldly standards, every bit a most respectable person, a person that would be admired in any quarter in this world. People would admire this person. If this person came to church, you would say, "Oh yes, this is the man, you know, who is so blessed by God. He has such great crops, and you know, he's such a nice person, he's such a good man, and he never does anything bad." And I wouldn't be surprised that he was quite generous also in what he gives in his offerings.
So then, what is the problem with this? Why is he called a fool? We think he's very wise. By the standards of this world, he is very wise. What then is his problem? His problem is not any condemnation of his person as such. That's important to understand. Nowhere does the Lord say that he's a bad person. Nowhere does the Lord say he's unintelligent. The word "foolish" in the Bible does not mean unintelligent or stupid, by the way. This word is a word that is understood spiritually, not intellectually in the Bible. Very important to understand it.
So his basic problem was spiritual foolishness. And what is spiritual foolishness? Let us pause to analyze this for a moment in order to understand what is the problem with this man. This word "foolishness" basically means, in the Greek, the Greek word is made up of two parts. It's made up of the front part which is a privative, that is, it's a negative, and the other part means "mind." So it means mindless. A person without mind, without thought, or you say thoughtless. Or you might say without understanding, lacking in spiritual understanding. Now here "mind" again is understood spiritually: without spiritual understanding.
Why was he without spiritual understanding? What wrong did he do? Well, this word "foolish" is also used in 2nd Corinthians chapter 12 and verse 6. And here I would read this verse to you, that you understand the scriptural meaning of foolishness, so that we might examine ourselves to see whether we are wise or foolish. In case we get the notion that whereas other people are foolish, in fact we are very wise. Because here the Word of God has something to say to us.
2nd Corinthians chapter 12 and verse 6: "Though if I wish to boast, I shall not be a fool, for I shall be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me." Now Paul is saying here, "I don't wish to boast, but if I were boasting, I would not be a fool." Now here the word "fool" means someone who is out of touch with reality, out of touch with the facts, who has not got a grip on the facts. That means to say, Paul says, the fact of the case is this: if I wanted to boast, I would be speaking the truth. I would not be out of touch with the facts. I have reason to boast, even if I don't want to boast.
Now Paul, on the human level, would have quite a lot to boast about. I mean, we all know that in terms of this world, Paul was, or could have been, a success. He was a great scholar. He had a brilliant mind. His thinking was razor sharp. And you need only read his writings, or study Romans, which you will be doing on this coming Friday, by the way, in the New Testament training program — a very important book is Romans — you will see as you read Romans that you are dealing with a person, even on the human level, who has a razor sharp mind, who penetrates into the issues, who gets to the heart of the matter quickly.
I know a person like that. When I was in London in student days, I used to sit under the ministry of Martin Lloyd-Jones, that you may have heard me mention from time to time. He has written quite a number of books, and certainly is England's greatest preacher in this generation. I don't think there is any preacher like him in this generation, and I have heard almost every important preacher in England. Martin Lloyd-Jones, as you know, used to be a heart surgeon. He was a heart specialist before he gave up the world and the glories of the world to preach the gospel. And I remember a contemporary of his, also a very well known doctor, who was a skin specialist, who was about the same age as Martin Lloyd-Jones, who used to say to me, when Martin Lloyd-Jones gave up medicine, it shook the medical world. Because he was a rising star, going up very fast in the medical world, exceedingly brilliant. He was so brilliant that before he was past the age of 30, his name was quite well known in England as a heart specialist. But the Lord laid his hand upon Lloyd-Jones, and he turned his back upon the medical world and went out to become the pastor of a very small church in Wales that nobody had ever heard of, and there he preached the gospel. And God used him mightily.
And when you listen to him, for example, in a church meeting discussing a problem, you immediately become aware of the razor sharp mind that this person has. He gets to the heart of an issue as quick as that. It just slices into the issue. He sits back and he listens to everybody else discussing the issue, and you see that everybody is going around and around the issue and really not getting to the heart of the matter. And finally he speaks up, and in a few sentences he has analyzed the point straight to the heart. Razor sharp mind. And immediately when I think of him, I think of a person like Paul, a man that God calls, but with a razor sharp mind. And when you come to spiritual things, that is so important, to get to the heart of the matter.
But unfortunately, our successful man here, though he might have been very clever humanly speaking, it was not a sanctified wisdom. His mind simply did not get to the facts, that is, the facts of spiritual reality. Therefore he is described as a fool. He simply did not get to the heart of the matter. He did not understand the situation. He did not come to grips with the facts of life. He had come to grips only with one aspect of life, that is, material life. He had overlooked an entire area of human existence, namely the spiritual aspect of human existence.
Now I wonder whether you have got to grips with spiritual reality. If you have not, then of course you will simply miss the issue. You will be then in the category of this person: successful in this world, but utterly incapable of coming to grips with spiritual facts.
Now many people were puzzled. Why did Martin Lloyd-Jones give up medicine? Why did he, as such a rising star in the medical world, do a thing such as this, which in the eyes of the world is foolishness? I mean, surely you can be a successful surgeon, a heart specialist, and help people on the physical level and still help them spiritually too. The answer to that, of course, is yes, sure you can. He could still remain a heart specialist, and physician to the Queen, which in fact he was about to be nominated as, even at such an early age. But he had come to a penetrating understanding of the facts of life. That is, he understood the material situation, the fact. But he had also come to understand a whole new area of facts, the spiritual facts. And it is in the light of his deep understanding of spiritual facts that he had made his decision: that this is the area in which his whole energy must be concentrated, because only this, in the long term, is going to count. You see, that was the reason.
Now he came to this decision very quickly. He very quickly saw through the issue. Others take a longer time to see through the issues. They are not so fast spiritually, not so fast, maybe intellectually too. But eventually they do arrive at the point. I have another dear friend, also a physician, a very experienced doctor and surgeon, who has recently also given up his medical practice. He has served as a doctor for many years in the Far East. He is so experienced that there are so many institutions that would like just to lay their hands on him, because his experience is so wide. He has performed all kinds of surgery out of necessity. Very experienced man. But he has now, after serving the Lord for some 15 years in medicine in Southeast Asia, and even once attending to the King of Laos until it was taken over recently by the communists, as you know, he has finally, after 15 years, come to the conclusion that from now on, for the rest of his life, he is going to dedicate all his energies only to the preaching of the gospel. Because he felt that he could not do two things well. You can do two things, but it's hard to do both of them well. That is the problem. And finally you have to make a choice between your priorities. Which is it going to be?
It does not mean, of course, that only people with spiritual insights are going to become full time workers. I don't want to give you that impression by any means. It may not be your calling, that God has not drawn you out to abandon your profession and serve the Lord. It may not be due to any lack of spiritual insight on your part, and I don't want to convey that impression here by any means. But what I do say is that people who do turn their backs upon the world in this way are most often because they have attained that spiritual insight, by the grace of God, which sees through the outward and the superficial things and gets to grips with the facts.
So the first meaning of this word "fool" here is not an insult. I hope you understand. In the Bible, this is not designed as an insult. It is designed as a description, designed as a diagnosis. When the doctor says you are sick, he is not meaning to insult you. What he is trying to do is to give you a diagnosis. The word "fool" in the Bible is a diagnosis. It tells you that spiritually you have not got to grips with the facts.
Now, secondly, this word is also used in Ephesians chapter 5 and verse 17, which I shall quickly read to you. Ephesians chapter 5 and verse 17: "Therefore do not be foolish," Paul says to the Ephesians, "but understand what the will of the Lord is." Now that takes us to the second point. To be foolish is to fail to understand God's will for you. This connects with my first point. We just saw that foolishness is the lack of spiritual understanding, of understanding the spiritual facts. But that does not necessarily mean, in this case, that each person, because he understands clearly the facts, must rush out and become a full time worker. Because that depends now on the second thing: understanding the will of God for you.
Now it may be that the will of God for you is to be a full time servant of God. But because you are spiritually dull, you do not understand this. You have not understood God's will for you, and therefore you are not in the Lord's work. Or conversely, putting it the other way around, it might be that you are now a full time worker and you should not be, that you have become a full time worker, or a theologian, or whatever it is, a Christian of some sort or other, doing activities in the church which you should not be doing, and you are doing it because you have not understood what the will of the Lord for you is. So you see, it can be both ways.
Now, do you know what the will of the Lord for you is? Do you really know it? Before you congratulate yourself that you are not a fool like this man, that you are not foolish, let us ask again these two questions. Do you really understand the spiritual facts? Has it come to your mind that the things of this world are passing away? Is it clear to your mind that life does not consist in the abundance of what you have? Is the direction of your life clear to you? What are you living for? What is your goal in life? What is it that you aim to accomplish?
It is very important to get this thing right, and you are going to make your decision on the basis of your grip, or lack of grip, upon spiritual facts. Now if for you, like this man here, the world is the only thing that really matters, that material possessions is what matters, then clearly your decision is going to be based upon your grasp of these facts and your lack of grasp upon the spiritual facts. But if on the other hand you have come to see that this world is transient and passing away, it is fading away, that soon these things that you toiled so hard for will be no more, then you will go for the things which are eternal, because you realize that these are the only things that count.
That is why John Sung, like all the others, that was his own explanation why he preached the gospel. When he was asked, "Why do you preach the gospel? You are a chemist by profession." Well, he said, "Because I have seen through this world. What's the point of my striving for that which is passing away? I strive for the things which are eternal, the things which really matter." This is the reason that Paul himself gave. He says, "The things which are seen are transient, but the things which are not seen, the things which pertain to God, they are eternal."
Now once you grasp these facts, you are going to make your decision on the basis of those facts. Why do I serve the Lord? Because by the grace of God I have come to see that the things which are eternal are what matter. The other things will pass away. What's the use of my striving in this world? What's the use of my becoming general manager of some company? What's the use of my becoming a professor in some department in the university? If I strive for those things, I think that I have as good a chance as anyone of making those positions. I think I have as good a chance as anyone of becoming a professor or becoming a good business manager, if I wanted to put my mind to that kind of stuff. I have no real interest in that direction. Why? Because these things are passing away. They don't occupy my interest. I am interested in the things which are eternal, and to do the things which contribute to that eternity.
When a soul comes to the Lord, when one person is saved for eternity, then I will feel that if only one person came to the Lord through my efforts, that has been worthwhile. I have accomplished one thing that will last forever. But if I accomplish the status of being a professor of some place, what have I accomplished? I am going to accomplish maybe a mention in the history of that college, you know: "Way back in 19-something, we had a professor by the name of Eric Chang, who was the..." So there you have a little bit of notice, and somebody sort of glances at it and says, "Who is this character?" And so into a rubbish bin. I mean, what does it matter that I was a professor of anything? What does it matter?
Of course, here is the thing: what is the direction of your life? Of course, if you feel, for example, that your ministry is not one in which you have the gifts of preaching, but you will serve God in medicine, oh, praise God. In that case, the reason for your doing it is something quite different. But it is hard to be honest in that kind of profession.
I mentioned the person who had fallen, who had been such a great success academically, the person who is now a professor of engineering in Malaysia, my dear friend and roommate, the person with all the first class honors, the person with all the gold medals. What is he now? You know, in those days when he studied, he used to say to me, "I study for one reason only: to serve the Lord." And it puzzled me exactly how he was going to accomplish this. How exactly do you serve the Lord by getting first class honors in engineering? But I didn't question the point. I thought, well, maybe this can be done, and after all, who am I to say? And then he used to constantly say, "I am not interested in the first class honors, and I am not interested in the gold medals." And I think he really sincerely meant this. He really wanted to study this thing for some purpose beyond that of personal glory. But it's hard to keep the vision clear, hard to keep your eyes on the goal, and soon he faltered. He slipped, he fell. And today I hear that he doesn't so much as go to church anymore.
You see, not only must there be a direction, but you must be honest about your intentions. You must really be honest. It is a foolish person who is not honest. So getting to grips with the facts must include a certain honesty about those facts, and not kidding yourself and saying, "I am doing all this for the Lord. I am going to buy this house for the Lord. So I am going to buy a second house for the Lord, and a third house for the Lord, and soon I am going to buy half of Montreal for the Lord." Exactly what is the Lord going to do with your houses? Exactly what does He want to do with half of Montreal?
Or I have heard another person say, "I am going to earn a lot of money to give to the Lord." Well, that is okay. Most of the money will be for himself anyway, but certainly some of it will be for the Lord, if he is going to keep his conscience clear. But you see, is this really the motive? Let's really come down to the honesty of this business. Is it that God wants your money, or does He want you? Well, you say, "Well, the church can't operate without money." Okay, we grant you that. The church needs a little bit of money. But that you should make it your aim in life to earn money for the Lord is very, very questionable. It is not understanding the will of the Lord for you.
Now this is the second thing that I really would like you to grasp for. Do you understand what God's will for you is? If not, then like this rich man, you are going to end up being a fool. You may be a very good person, a very respectable person, and so forth, as we noticed already. No charge is laid against this person's character, his moral character. No charge is laid against him at all. But he has failed on these things. He has failed to get to grips with the facts, and he has failed to understand what God's will is for man in this world. Now this is so essential for us to perceive, and so this is the heart of this message.
# The Parable of the Rich Fool (Part 2) — Luke 12:13-21
...will, because you've not yet understood what God's will is towards material possession. Read the scriptural teaching, and you will see that throughout Scripture, riches is regarded as a very great hazard to one's spiritual life. Don't think of it in the New Testament as a spiritual blessing. It is not a spiritual blessing; it is a hazard. It is a very dangerous thing to handle. The love of money, the Scripture tells us, is the root of all evil. But today, riches is again honored in the church. People say there's nothing wrong with riches. Sure, no one says there's anything wrong with riches. But riches has a way of causing you to endear it to your own heart. And that's where the trouble begins.
And so we read these things in 1 Timothy chapter 6 and verse 9, and 1 Timothy chapter 6 and verse 17. Beware of the riches. In Mark chapter 10 verse 25 and Luke chapter 18 verse 25, we find these strong words that the Lord Jesus uses and says, a rich man shall hardly enter the kingdom. Now, a rich man is a success in this world, is he not? He's the person who joins the Rotary Club. He's the guy who arrives at your door in a Rolls Royce or a Mercedes or whatever. But although the world looks up to the rich man, the Lord Jesus says, he shall hardly enter the kingdom. How hard it is for him to enter. You see, in order to get into the kingdom, those riches are going to be a great hindrance. Let us understand this point. You want to understand what the will of the Lord is? Let's get this thing very clear in our minds.
The servant of God James says, in James chapter 2 and verse 5, "God has chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom of God." God has chosen. You want to know what the will of God is? You want to be wise? Then listen to this: God has chosen the poor in this world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom. When you study the Bible, and especially the New Testament, it is strange to discover that Scripture has almost nothing good to say about the rich. Nothing at all. All you need to read is James chapter 5, verses 1 to 6, for example — the condemnation of the rich. And so we look through the Scriptures and find this thing all the time coming forth.
Yet today, when I listen to the programs in North America, the Christian programs that come over on television and radio, whether it be a PTL club or whatever, and I don't want to say anything bad against these people, what I want to say is, there has come a general notion in the church that somehow riches is very good. Don't we ever bother to read the Bible anymore? I shared with you at communion how our preconceived notions or traditions have squeezed out the Word of God from our life. We distort the Word of God to suit our ideas and traditions. And on this matter of riches, we have done the same thing. You take a concordance and study the word "riches" in the Bible, and especially in the New Testament, and you simply don't see anything good being said about it. That is truly striking.
And so, in regard to the rich young ruler that we read of in the Scriptures, who is very much a parallel to this rich man, we find the same situation developing. It is very hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom. Why? Not because the riches is bad, but because his accumulation of riches shows his lack of spiritual understanding. It makes one very, very self-centered.
Look at the saying here, back in Luke chapter 12. And look at the attitude of this person's mind to see his spiritual foolishness. Notice that he is very preoccupied with himself. The words "I" and "my" will be constantly coming up. Look at the words "I" and "my." "I this" and "my that." "What shall I do? For I have nowhere to store my crops. I will do this. I will pull down my barns and build larger ones. And there I will store all my grain and my goods." And "I" and so on, and "my" and so it goes on and on. "I" and "my" and "me" and "my" and so it goes on through the whole passage. This fellow is simply preoccupied with himself.
Now check your own thinking. Let me check my own thinking. How much of our thinking is "I" and "me" and "my" — my future, my studies, my tasks, my jobs, my welfare, my soul — everything is "my" and "me" and "I" and all this. Your whole thinking revolves around yourself, the whole way you think of yourself. We are fools, are we not? Because our thinking — and this is the other part about this — we have not understood the will of God because our thinking centers upon ourselves.
What is the will of God? The will of God is that we shall love Him with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind. Now if you love anybody that much, you would be thinking about that person, not about you. If you have been in love, you will also see what I mean. So important. When you are in love, what do you do? You think about the other person all day long. You forgot to eat, you forgot to drink, you forgot everything, you forgot to sleep, you forgot to get up, you forgot everything. You forgot your studies, you forgot you had work to hand in. Why? Because it is always the other person. My beloved. It is not the emphasis now on "my" but on the "beloved." Your whole mind goes out to that person. You are thinking, "I wonder what he is doing, what she is doing now. Where is she at this moment? What is she going to do today?" You are rushing to get to the phone, you ring there and nobody picks up the phone, and you say, "Come on, come on, what is wrong with this phone? Where is she now? What has happened to her? Why didn't she ring me?" Your whole thinking is occupied with the other person.
"You shall love the Lord your God" in this way, with all your heart. How many of us are wise? Before we congratulate ourselves, how many of us are preoccupied with Him and with the welfare of our brothers and sisters? Oh no, let's be honest with ourselves. We are really not much better than this fellow. Because all day we have been thinking, "What shall I do today? What am I going to eat for lunch? Ah, today is Sunday. I am going to go down to Chinatown. I am going to have a nice bowl of wonton or some nice bao and some..." You see, our mind is thinking, "What shall I do with my time?" And then, "Who shall I see today? Who shall I enjoy? What shall I enjoy doing?" My thinking is about me and my and this and that. Oh, the Scripture exposes our hearts, doesn't it? It shows us what we really are. And just when we thought we were going to congratulate ourselves, you know, even full time workers, let's be honest, ah, what are we occupied with? For a great part of the time it is still "me" and "my" — my family, my this, my house, my job, and my work, and my success. Here we see the trouble with this man: his preoccupation with himself. There is the symptom of his disease.
Note another thing. He is constantly talking to himself. "What shall I say to myself? What shall I do?" He asks the question, he answers himself. He has a great time of dialogue with himself. You see why? Because he enjoys nobody so much as himself. He really loves himself. And after all, you talk to the person you love, and if you love yourself most, you talk to yourself all day long. And he says to himself, even to the extent he says, "And I will say to my soul," verse 19. He has already decided what he is going to say to his soul. He is not only engrossed with the present conversation; he has already decided about the future conversation. He is going to enjoy this conversation in the future. "I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have ample goods.' Oh, you have a great time, you know. We are going to have a great time together, my soul and me. We are going to enjoy our fellowship together, and we are going to really live it up."
Now before we start congratulating ourselves, exactly what about us? We have been talking to ourselves. Have we ever learned to turn all thought process into a conversation with God? Do we really love Him that much that we talk with Him, saying, "Lord, what will You have me do today? Oh Lord, I just want to spend today praising You. It's so good to praise You and to thank You. You have been so good to me, and I know You are going to continue to make my cup overflow, so I am going to start praising You in advance. I will say to You, Lord, I have decided what I am going to say to You in the future too." That's something different. So we see that we have to learn to change the center of our life from self to God. You see, we still have a lot of the fool in us, haven't we? We find that this parable after all does speak to us.
But notice his great mistake here: "I will say to my soul." You mean he still has some interest in his soul? This fellow still is thinking about his soul. You see, he is not completely without concern for the non-material things. He is thinking about his soul. But his mistake is to think that the soul is satisfied with material goods. Now that's a mistake very common in the churches, is it not? To think that the soul is satisfied with material well-being. That's why we work so hard, so that our bank account gets bigger, and then we can say, "Now we can take our rest." After all, you think he is doing what we all intend to do, isn't it? That if we can get a nice big bank account, then why should we work so hard? We can sit back and take our ease. I mean, what is the point of working if you don't want to enjoy yourself at the end of it? No, so he still thinks that the soul is going to be satisfied with material well-being.
And at the moment he has talked about his soul, look at the beauty of this parable. The moment he has spoken about his soul, in the next verse, "God said to him, 'Your soul this night is required of you.'" Did you say something about the soul? Well, tonight your soul is required of you. You see, this man has not understood the spiritual principle in Matthew 16:26, for example: "What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?" What's the use of having the world and losing one's soul?
And this is not the only mistake he has made. He has failed to understand — you see, this is the first point about being the fool — that he has not got to the spiritual facts. The facts: what's the use of having the whole world and losing your soul? But the second thing: he has not understood the will of God. How do you save your soul? In John chapter 12 verse 25, the Lord Jesus says, and here you see the will of God: "He that loves his soul" — his life, the word "soul" and "life" in the Greek are the same thing, of course — "He that loves his soul or his life in this world shall lose it, but he that loses his life, who hates his life in this world, shall gain it unto eternal life." That's the way of salvation. You try to save your soul in this world, that is, by worldly means, by getting for yourself material possessions, and you will lose it. But you are prepared to hate your soul in the sense of this world — hating your soul, that is to say, losing what you have now. You could say Martin Lloyd-Jones hated his soul. He hated his life in the eyes of the world, he did, by turning his back upon what was going to be a most successful and brilliant career. He gained it unto eternal life.
That's the scriptural principle. That is why the Lord Jesus says, "If any man would be my disciple, let him take up his cross and follow me." Turn your back upon the world, then you will have eternal life. In other words, then we are finally faced with a choice. How much we would like to stand somewhere in between. We would like to have the best of both worlds. We would like to have, say, "Okay, I don't want to be filthy rich, just moderately rich will do. This will be enough, and at the same time I will have a grip in the kingdom of God." It's not going to work. It's not going to work. Don't think that you will fool God with a compromise. All you will do is to fool yourself. You've got to make a decision as to what your direction in life is going to be.
Don't think that the compromise is the best solution, that the middle way will solve it, that we will have a bit of the world and we will have a bit of the church and we've got everything. I tell you, you end up with nothing. And I have said to you before, if that's what you want to do, then be sensible: go all the way into the world and enjoy the world while you've still got it. Just go all the way there and soak yourself in the world. Eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow you die. Or else go all the way with God, totally committed to Him. This doesn't mean that you'll be starving to death all the time, no. But it means that the direction of your life will be fully committed to Him. Whatever He ever will entrust to you will be His. You will be only a steward of that. You will not say, "What will I do with my money? What will I do with my goods and my this and my that?" I have nothing. If I have anything, it is the Lord's, and I am only His steward. When He tells me, "Give that away," I give that away. He says, "What about this jacket of yours? That person needs it." That jacket goes to that person. It is not my jacket. That person needs it; he's got it. If I can live in this attitude — if the Lord provides me with somewhere to live, I thank Him for it. We have to live somewhere. When the Lord says "You leave," you go, then you go. It is not my house. It is not my anything. I have nothing. I have simply the Lord, and that's more than enough for me.
These other things, one has no interest in. As Paul says, using the world but not abusing it, not being absorbed with it. We have to eat, sure, but then food is not my primary interest. We have to have somewhere to live, sure, but where we live is not precious to me. It doesn't matter. When the Lord says "Go," we go. Leave the whole thing behind because everything is His and my life is His too. Get the direction of your life clear. Make sure that you make a right decision. But I remind you again, any compromise is doomed to failure. No one has ever succeeded in the spiritual life through compromise. The road of compromise is littered with the bodies of those who have fallen in spiritual disaster. Make up your mind which way you will go, whether you will serve God or you will serve mammon. The Lord Jesus says you cannot serve God and mammon. Mammon is money. You cannot serve God and money. You have got to make your decision which way you are going to go, honestly and truthfully.
And so finally we find what happened to this rich fool. He lost his soul. And then the Lord asked the question: "And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?" Whose is it going to be? How many times in England I have looked through the newspaper and I have seen the death list, and I have shared this point also with some of you. "So and so left behind 40,000 pounds. So and so left behind 65,000 pounds," and so on and so on. Whose shall it be? You stored all that money up, and whose is it going to be? The tax collector will have a hefty chunk of it, and what will the rest be for?
And so the concluding sentence here is, "So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God." Now if you want to be rich, the way to be really rich, and the right way of being rich, is to be rich toward God. How to be rich toward God is to be poor toward the world. That is to say, as the Lord Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, give what you have to those in need, and then you will have riches with God. That's where it counts. There you will never lose it. You put your money in the bank here, you're going to lose it one of these days, either through inflation or deflation or whatever "flation" comes along, and then through war and other kinds of losses. But there you are rich with God. That riches abides for eternity. May God give us eternal wisdom. Let us be quiet before God in prayer.