Rich Toward God

I want to read from Luke chapter 12, starting at verse 13. One of the multitude 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? And he said to them, Take heed and beware of all covetousness, 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 all 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.

For God, we're not living in the Garden of Eden, where the temperature is just right. And any time you get hungry, you just walk up to a tree and pluck some delicious fruit. And everything is there in abundance for your enjoyment.

We're living in a world where the weather turns cold, people get sick, food becomes scarce, you pay for what you get, even when you steal it, and where sometimes you can't even find a job. In a world such as this, there are only two ways we're going to live. We're going to live by covetousness, or we're going to live by faith.

Now our natural inclination is to live by covetousness, to grab everything we can and then pile it up and store it up against the uncertain future. But our call, since we have begun to respond to Jesus Christ and are seeking to follow him, is that we should live by faith. The proof that you're saved is not that you raise your right hand and walk down to the front of the church and shed a few tears and said, Jesus, come into my life, and I'm not knocking any of that.

That's fine, that's good, but that doesn't prove you're saved. Nor does it prove you're saved because you say you love everybody, or because you say you have faith. The proof that you are saved is that you have now begun to handle money, success and failure, uncertainty, to deal and get along and relate to people in such a way that you are not corrupted by covetousness or lust, which actually merge and become the same thing, and also that you don't mooch off other people and call it faith.

It's possible to have profound insight into the mysteries of God, to be able to express them well, and to develop a ministry which appears to be quite impressive, but if you fail to conquer covetousness in your own heart, then your ministry, no matter how successful it appears, will be sterile in this world, and in the next you might be shocked to find yourself looking up at Lazarus and Abram's bosom while you're licked by the flames. Take heed and beware of all covetousness. Covetousness for Mammon and his money and things, to be sure, but also covetousness for a reputation among the brothers and sisters.

An image, covetousness to develop a great work for the Lord. Now covetousness obviously begins with Mammon, money and things. Money and things being Mammon.

And just about all of us here, no doubt, are struggling to find the right way to handle money and things. Some of us are prospering, and we want to know from God what to do with this prosperity so that it does not destroy us as it has destroyed so many. Others among us are living on fixed incomes, and we're finding it really tight going and looking for some little bit of financial leeway.

As a congregation, we're trying to be very careful that the offerings which pour in from people's hearts as offerings to God are never, never, never used to build our own little religious empire. Then of course there's covetousness, which has almost nothing to do with Mammon. The covetousness for a name.

Some of us aren't really too excited about fancy clothes or sumptuous meals or pretty cars, but we're after a reputation. We want to be looked upon as totally committed saints, and that lust for a reputation of total commitment is just as compromising, perhaps even worse, than the lust for money. In our struggle to be able to handle this in some way under God, the temptation is to set up external standards.

So, if you give 10 percent, you're okay. 20 percent, 50 percent, 100 percent, whatever that means. And for those of us who are having our problems with our egos and are coveting to have some kind of recognition, we likewise are striving to keep our names out of the free press, if that is a problem, or the news, so we're fair.

Church bulletin, you know, we want to maintain a low profile. See, but these external standards will never do it. And we can give our bodies to be burned, give away all we have to feed the poor.

And we can bury our names 50 miles beneath the ocean's floor and still be covetous. Covetousness is the disposition of the heart. And if it is to be cured, it has to be replaced by another disposition.

So when Jesus says, so is everyone who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich for God, he's talking about two dispositions, the disposition of covetousness and the disposition of being rich toward God. Covetousness is the disposition that forever tries to gather to itself, whether it's gathering money or influence or people or things or postage stamps or antiques or whatever, to be rich toward God, is the disposition that now gathers not to itself but to God, always to God. He said also to the man who had invited him, when you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or your rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid.

But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. Now this doesn't mean that you can't have your family over for Thanksgiving dinner.

But what this does mean, Jesus is putting his finger on our tendency to even use our dinners as a means of getting something for ourselves. Invite him over because he might be able to do me some good some day. I'd like to get to know them better, which may often mean I'd like to get something out of them later on.

See, but the tendency is eliminated when from our hearts we begin to see the importance of inviting the poor and the maimed and the halt and the blind, which may be, by the way, your own cousin or your mother-in-law that you can't stand, you know, or some other relative you find very distasteful, and mixing them in with the rest of the crowd. But see, when we do this, when we're inviting and gathering to ourselves people who can in no way give us something in return, now we're beginning to gather to God. We're not really gathering them to us, we're gathering them to God.

And it is this that Jesus purchased for us, this disposition on the cross. And when he pours out the Holy Spirit, it's this disposition which comes to us as a gift. But that gift has to be entered.

You don't just get zapped when you get filled with the Holy Ghost, and now you're just full of, you know, desires to gather everybody to God. This is something you have to develop. That is, you have to live, you have to practice.

We enter into the disposition of being rich toward God by gathering, by disciplining ourselves, you know, by an active decision, constantly making ourselves learn to gather to God instead of ourselves in specific ways. For instance, we gather people to God through intercession. The foundation stone of a life which is rich toward God is a life that prays for other people, constantly.

Then he said to his disciples, The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Pray at all times in the Spirit with all prayer and supplication.

To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, also for me, and many other passages are in Scripture. Not only praying for believers, but unbelievers and kings and everybody. The purest and most effective gathering of people to God that we can ever engage in is prayer, intercession.

Because this is something which goes on only before God's eye. Nobody sees what you're doing when you're alone in that room with the door shut praying for people. And in doing so, you are gathering people, not to yourself, but to God.

And every other form of gathering to God that you may engage in will be valid and effective only to the extent that your prayers are real. So day by day, by name, we lift up people before God's throne. As we lift those names up before God, we know that He is thereby able to open up streams in the deserts of their hearts and sends angels, literally, to attend to their needs and drives the demons out of their minds and breaks the chains over their bodies and causes the blood of His Lamb to be effective in them.

We also gather people to God by practicing mercy, doing mercy. Luke 6. If you love those who love you, what credit is it to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is it to you? For even sinners do the same.

And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners and receive as much again. But love your enemies and do good and lend, expecting nothing in return. And your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for He is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish.

Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. Mercy, loving kindness, done to people. These things are always a sign of God's presence to them, whether we're giving them food or clothing or money or a listening ear or a letter to cheer them up or a card when they're sick or a visit or a word of encouragement or a little hospitality.

These happy surprises are signs of God's goodness and mercy to them. And they touch them redemptively. See, now when we're all tangled up in religious covetousness, busy trying to get people to join our church and come over to our point of view, then we can't see people that way.

Then everybody's a prospect, you know, and some way I have to get something out of them, get them in. And then we hit times when it's really wearisome and tiresome and we run, you know, low on prospects. We can't just seem to find any prospects anymore.

See, but when our hearts are set, they simply gather people to God. And all we want to do is touch them with His grace. You never run out.

You know, there's always somebody who can be touched, or somebody with whom we can share something. There's no end to it. When our motives are right, see, then we will know when to say no to the freeloader on his third time back, you know, or to rebuke somebody who's trying to load up five pieces of chicken on his plate when the people at the end of the line haven't even got one yet.

And it won't get us upset if people are ungrateful because we're not trying to make ourselves have a society of admirers, but we're drawing them to God. Thirdly, we gather people to God by means of redemptive suffering. Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's sufferings for the sake of His body, that is, the Church.

The apostles understood very clearly that whenever they suffered in any way for the name of Jesus, this was redemptive. It caused life to flow out. Somebody got blessed.

It was an extension of the cross. Watchman Nee spent the last 25 years of his life in a prison in China, hungry, sick, cold, cut off from his wife and friends. One day we will see that his suffering, along with the suffering of countless brothers and sisters whom nobody knows about but God, will be the sacramental means by which the Word of God will have birthed forth in the midst of that very regime that imprisoned him.

Then there's also a suffering which goes on beneath the surface that nobody sees. Here's somebody walking along. They've washed their face and combed their hair and they've got a smile, and it appears that everything's going fine for them, and the only one who knows the hell they may be going through inside is God.

And God uses that redemptively. So we may not at this moment be going through anything heavy, it seems, and some here may be, but when we compare what we're going through with people who are in prisons right now and other parts of the earth and perhaps even here, it seems that we have a fairly light weight to carry. But we leave that with God, knowing that whatever kind of suffering we may be going through now or whenever, God will use redemptively, and people will by this be drawn to the cross in a mystery.

Finally, we gather people to God by means of binding and loosing. Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.

A great temptation among many believers is to skip all the other forms of gathering people to God and jump on this one. You know, without engaging in the labor of intercession or the discipline, down to earth discipline, of showing mercy or the pain of redemptive suffering, they want to immediately become healers and exorcists. Binding and loosing, the power to bring, you know, the healing and freeing power of God down into earthbound lives is very, very necessary.

But it is safe only in hands of people who are gathering to God. That it's essential, we don't deny, it needs to be done. But it needs to be done by people who are, you know, involved in everything and not trying to be magicians.

But what a need there is. How are people who are so earthbound going to be free to come up into God's fellowship and into the fellowship of the saints unless somebody sets them free? And who of us here hasn't known what it is to be bound by mental oppression or alcohol or drugs or the middle class success syndrome? Doesn't make any difference. So we've been set free.

And now we're sent forth to set others free. Take heed and beware of all covetousness, for a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. There are two ways, and only two, that we will live in this world, covetousness or faith.

May God help us to deliver ourselves, to worm out whatever we have to do, to shake loose and get clear of every form of covetousness so that, in fact, with our very hearts, we are engaged in gathering to God, only to God, and not... May the Spirit help us to live lives in this uncertain world which are rich. Fear not, little flock. It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Sell what you have and give on. Provide yourself with purses which do not grow old, a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and where no mall destroyed. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be.

Father, we just ask that, again here, especially in the area of covetousness, you would help us to see how it applies in our own personal life. Deliver us from the deception of thinking that we can figure it out for our brother or our sister, for the danger of passing judgment on anyone else's life. Enable us to just entrust to your perfect keeping our brothers and sisters, regardless of how we feel they may be living, and get down to the business of our own need in this area.

Help us to be delivered from the disposition which is gathering always to itself and lifted into the disposition coming from you, Father, that gathers only to you. Help us, Lord, this very day and in the days to come to live this way and to experience this glorious freedom. We ask it, Father, in Jesus' name.