How to be really rich

Read Luke 12:13-21 / Listen to MP3

Well I was killing some time in a Dymocks bookstore in the city the other day. Just had half an hour to kill, thought I'd wander around, see what's for sale. I found myself in the financial section which is not somewhere I go very often, but given that I was going to be talking on this topic some time soon I thought I'd have a look at what was there.

I was struck by one title in particular - it was a book called "Billionaire in Training: Because Millionaire Just Isn't Rich Enough". Now it was by a bloke called Brad J. Sugar. You notice when you write a book you gotta put the middle initial in because it makes you sound like you actually know more than you do. You can call me Tim D. Bowden. But, Brad J. Sugar has written this book called Billionaire in Training: Because Millionaire Just Isn't Rich Enough. And the reason why it caught my attention is there's nothing hidden about that - there's no trying to disguise the fact that this guy wants more money. His naked greed is kind of out there for all of us to see.

And it also caught my attention because it's a theme that's coming up a lot at the moment. Channel 7 have a new show, you might have seen it, called Deal Or No Deal. They've been advertising on the side of buses - I spend a lot of time in traffic - but on the side of buses are a couple of ads in particular. One of them was "Deal Or No Deal, because a million dollars is not enough." And obviously they're having a go at Eddie McGuire there. Not that you can blame 'em for that. There's also another ad I've seen - "Millionaire Schmillionaire - watch Deal Or No Deal".

And it's the same sort of idea that's actually come up with the lotteries. There was an article in the Herald a few weeks ago which said that the lotteries are finding that million dollar prizes just don't bring the punters in anymore. They need to offer multi-million dollar prizes, because a million dollars just isn't enough.

Now I reckon most of us would probably cringe a little bit at that sort of statement - a million dollars just isn't enough - but, most of us would probably also agree that if you've got the choice between being rich and being poor, you'd go for rich. I mean, that's just commonsense. ING had an ad, again on the side of a bus - and I'm beginning to realise just how much time I spend in traffic. ING had an ad where Billy Connolly was standing there on the side of the bus and the caption above his head said "I've been rich and I've been poor. Rich wins." And I reckon - yeah - most of us would go with that.

If it weren't for the interviews that we read time and time again in magazines where rich people are interviewed - people who seem to have it all, and they tell us it's not what it's all about. The money really isn't the thing. I remember reading in an interview with Brad Pitt in Rolling Stone. Now I think if most of us thought "Well, you can have your life or you can have Brad Pitt's life" - yeah, maybe you're Billy Connolly - I've been Brad Pitt and I've been Tim Bowden - at the bottom it'd say Brad wins. There's a guy who seems to have it all - he's got the face, he's got the body, he's got the lifestyle - some people think that having Jennifer Aniston would be a good thing too - there's all sorts of things he's got, but anyway, in this interview in Rolling Stone he said "I'm the guy who's got everything. But I'm telling you - once you've got everything, you're just left with yourself. I've said it before and I'll say it again, It doesn't help you sleep any better and you don't wake up any better because of it."

If you can make sense of that quote I think he's basically saying money isn't the answer. And I agree with him - in fact I think most of us would agree with him. And so what we're going to do today is take a look at what Jesus says. On pretty much any criteria you'd have to think that Jesus has more credibility when it comes to life and the big issues of life than Brad J. Sugar or even Brad - whatever his initial is - Pitt. You'd have to think Jesus has got something useful to say. So that's where we're at today.

This story gets underway with a bloke trying to drag Jesus into a family fight over the inheritance. Have a look at the first couple of sentences.

Someone in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me." But he said to him, "Man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?"

It wasn't uncommon for religious leaders to be asked to adjudicate in this sort of situation. To say what the law required in terms of who got what. But Jesus in the section immediately before this has been talking about eternity. He's been talking about heaven and hell. He's on his way to Jerusalem - the capital city of Israel - where he will complete the great mission that God has sent him on. It's a mission that will involve his rejection, his suffering, his execution on a Roman cross. And on the third day, his resurrection from the dead. It's a mission that God has sent him on to bring all the people of the world back into a relationship with God. That is what he's there to do, and this bloke wants him to adjudicate over who gets the cutlery. And so Jesus brushes him off. But, now that the topic's come up he's got a few things to say. And as he goes on to say here, there are three mistakes that he points out, and they're there on the outline for you.

The first mistake - the first mistake is to think that life is about money.

He said to them, "Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions."

Jesus tells the people around him, "watch out for greed." That's what covetousness means - kind of an old word for greed. Watch out for greed because it is built on a lie. It's built on a lie that says "you need more." You need more money, you need more wealth, you need more lifestyle, you need more toys, you need more real estate, you need more, and Jesus says that is a lie. That is a lie - you do not need more. You do not need more - your life does not consist in the abundance of your possessions.

There was a bumper sticker I saw - again in traffic, this is becoming a theme - a bumper sticker I saw in traffic, and the bumper sticker was "He who dies with the most toys wins." Now it's kind of one of those "look at my car, I've got a Porsche and you don't" kind of bumper stickers, but that's the kind of lie that Jesus is saying, "Don't believe it. Your life is not about money." And you know that, I know that, we all know that. We all know that money isn't what it's all about, we know money doesn't really satisfy. We know money can buy you a degree, it can't necessarily buy you an education; we know that money can buy you a bed, it can't buy you rest; we know that money can buy you sex, it can't buy you love; we know money can buy a house but not a home; we know money can buy medicine but not health; we know money can buy amusements, but it can't buy joy or happiness.

We know money doesn't work - we know money is not the answer to the big ones but, actually even Brad Sugar knows that. I was reading through the introduction to Brad J. Sugar's book, and he was having a go at the stupidity of chasing "stuff." By stuff he meant the holidays, the clothes, the cars. He said don't spend your life chasing stuff. And you just kind of picture this guy, you know with - I was going to say with a radio mike on, but that's me - a radio mike on kind of striding the stage during a seminar. Anthony Robbins whipping the crowd up into a frenzy and saying, "You know what happens when you spend your life chasing stuff? You end up with stuff-all." It's like, boom boom.

Bring it on Brad. Anyway Brad then sets out, he says "Don't chase stuff - these are the priorities that you should guide your life on. Number 1, people. Number 2, wealth. Number 3, stuff."

And you know from that sentence on, not once in the rest of the book does he mention people. The rest of the book - despite the kind of little disclaimer, the lip service in the introduction - the rest of the book is given over to "get rich." Now I don't want to be particularly hard on Brad J. Sugar - actually I probably do want to be hard on him because I think he's got it wrong - but I actually think that we're a lot like him.

That is, we often give lip service to the idea. Every one of us would say "It's not all about money" - we all say that, but sometimes when you look at what we actually do, when you look at the things that drive out lives, when you look at the things we value, our priorities, the things that matter to us, the things we watch on TV, you gotta wonder. Maybe, maybe we're just saying it. I mean we all know that people are more important than money, but how many people do you see give their very best to their careers and leave their family with pitiful leftovers. We'd all say that it's important to be fulfilled in your job but how many of us, I wonder, have chosen our area of study and our careers to follow based on the sort of remuneration that's going to come.

You know, the lottery advertisers saying things like "Make your dreams come true," and then what do the dreams look like when they show us the dreams which come true? Well they involve spending the rest of you're life. They involve big houses and flash holidays and good cars, they involve stuff. And that's the sort of dream that we're meant to aspire to. Stuff.

You gotta wonder whether we don't actually fool ourselves that we haven't fallen into this trap. Jesus says, "Beware of greed, life is not about money." And then he moves into the second point with a story about a bloke who does well for himself. Have a look at that one, number 16 there.

He told them a parable, saying, "The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, 'What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?'"

Not a bad problem to have. Here's a rich guy who gets richer. There's no hint that he's done it through corruption or dishonesty, he just - it seems actually in a society like Jesus' - that he would have been considered to have God blessing him. God is being good to him by giving him his prosperity. But he is left with a problem. What's he going to do? Well, next sentence.

"And he said, 'I will do this: 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, be merry.'"

Well he seems to do the sensible thing. He does what you'd expect a financial adviser to say, you know, "Consolidate your wealth. Bring it together. Get the lump sum together for your retirement." He event gets into property development. He could live in our city. Here is a guy who follows wise financial advice. He's getting ready for retirement. He's got his eye on the house down the coast, on membership at the golf club, on the overseas travel. This guy is setting himself up well. But at the very time that he seems to be financially wise he's actually making the second mistake. I'll read it again - see if you can pick what the mistake was.

He told them a parable, saying, "The land of a rich man produced 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 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, be merry.'"

Do you get the mistake? He lives and acts and thinks as though God is not there. He leaves God totally out of the picture - God does not enter into his horizon in any way, shape or form.

Now there's no sense here that he's agro towards God. We don't get the impression this guy is a convinced philosophical atheist. We don't get the impression he's someone who's weighed up the arguments for and against the existence of God and has concluded that on the balance of the evidence that God is not there. We don't get the impression that he's angry at God because of life circumstances. He just leaves God out. He's not a philosophical atheist, he's a practical atheist.

And you know, in my job I talk to hundreds, probably thousands of people about God, and I have met very very few people who are convinced philosophically of the truth of atheism. But nearly everyone I talk to about this is a practical atheist. That is, God does not cross their horizon. The practical atheist does not thank God, does not listen to God, does not talk to God, does not obey God, does not respect God. Just gets on with life as though God is not there. That's the practical atheist and in many ways that's what our society encourages us to be. When we're at school we're told to live your dreams, fulfil your potential, be everything that you can be.

You might remember when Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, was executed he quoted as his last words a famous poem by G.A. Henty a couple of centuries ago, the last stanza of the poem goes like this:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

It seems to me there you've got the agro, convinced philosophically, atheist.

It seems to me that we follow the voice of our generation - one Bart Simpson. Bart was asked to say grace in one episode, and as he put his hands together to say thanks, this is what he said. "Dear God, We paid for all this ourselves. Thanks for nothing." Is that not a picture of us? Except we'd probably even leave the pretense of saying grace out.

Jesus says here, that to be a practical atheist is to be a fool. To be a practical atheist is to be a fool, because the practical atheist fails to recognise reality, and reality is that the practical atheist lives on borrowed time. The practical atheist lives on borrowed time. His life has been temporarily leant to him by God, and God is gonna call it back again. God is gonna ask for it back. And we need to feel the weight of that. You live on borrowed time. God gave you life in the first place. God has sustained your life to this point, and your only hope of seeing the next minute is if God should choose to extend the loan. But he will call it back, which is exactly what God does in this story.

"God said to him, 'Fool! This night your soul is required of you.'"

You know if you doubt that at all, if you think that you have some measure of control over these things, then do this. When the time comes, when your hour is up, just say to God, "Thanks, but I'll take another hour." Doesn't work that way. When your time is up, it's up. And so the practical atheist is a fool, because he fails to recognise that God is there. And that brings us into the third mistake.

The third mistake that this guy makes is to think that the end is not coming.

"God said to him, 'Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?'"

Bizarre isn't it - this guy spends all his effort getting ready for life's many possibilities, and seems to put no effort into getting ready for life's one certainty. He gets himself ready for retirement, he doesn't get himself ready for death. And there are two things we want to note about this guy's death. The first one is, it's unexpected. He's planning for years to come - the years stretch out before him with their luxury and their retirement, they're all there for him. And then it all comes crashing down on the very night he makes his plans.

I came across a web site just the other day called www.deathclock.com. Don't know if you've ever come to the death clock - I can certainly recommend it. You log into this site, and it asks you to fill in some questions like your date of birth, your sex, weather or not you're a smoker and your body mass index. And it also asks weather you're an optimist or a pessimist. You fill in that information, it sends it off and it processes it, and it comes back telling you the date you will die. I struggled greatly with the news that on the 8th January, 2045, I will depart and not be here any longer. The really spooky thing about it though is it immediately calculates how many seconds you've got left. And starts counting down. So you kind of look at the death clock watching the life tick away. I made myself a 90-year old greatly obese smoker who's pessimistic, just to see what that did, and apparently I would have died in 1983. Again, the thing that spun me out was the little thing that came up that said "Your time has expired. Have a nice day." It's weird, but you wouldn't want to place a whole heap of confidence in the death clock.

It's here I imagine that Andrew Rimmer could have consulted the death clock on Sunday morning. Did you read about Andrew Rimmer? He's the man who in St. Ives turned the wrong way when he was looking for a soccer match on Sunday. Discovered that he'd gone the wrong way, and looked at the map, and a tree fell onto his car. And killed him. And I reckon that if he'd looked at the death clock that morning he wouldn't have expected it to tell him that tonight would be the night. Death comes unexpectedly.

But the second thing to notice about this guy's death is the futility of his life. He's put all of his effort into amassing his fortune, into bringing his riches together, and with the simple inevitable fact of his death, it becomes useless to him. It's no good to him at that point.

A mate of mine who was taking a funeral in the eastern suburbs of a wealthy man, he overheard a conversation amongst the mourners. The mourner wanted to ask the question "How much was the guy worth?" But he phrased the question "How much did he leave behind?" And the answer is, all of it. He left it all behind. He didn't take it with him. See money has a use-by date and with that use-by date the effort we put into amassing money is wasted.

Shelley wrote a poem a couple of centuries ago called Ozymandius. It tells a story of a traveller in a vast desert who comes to a giant statue - think Statue of Liberty size statue - it's broken at the waist, and the torso has fallen onto the ground, and the head has snapped off and rolled a little further and it stands in the middle of this desert. And he reads the inscription on the base, and the inscription goes like this:

My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Feel the power - this statue must have stood in the middle of this man's mighty city where he'd struck terror into the hearts of all his enemies. The poet goes on to say:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Power that we cannot begin to dream of, wealth beyond our imaginings, becomes dust with time.

Howard Hughes was a modern-day Ozymandius, I guess you could say. At his death he was the richest man in the United States. Just a couple of generations ago. He had wealth that we can't begin to come to grips with. He had the ear of American presidents, he had power, he had lots and lots of cars, lots and lots of planes, he owned hotels and casinos, all sorts of things, and then he died. Time magazine says this:

Howard Hughes' death was commemorated in Las Vegas by a minute of silence. Casinos fell silent. Housewives stood uncomfortable clutching their paper cups full of coins at the slot machines, the blackjack games paused and at the crap tables the stickmen cradled the dice in the crook of their wooden wands. Then a pit boss looked at his watch, leaned forward and whispered, "Ok, roll the dice, he's had his minute."

Think about that. I don't know what you study, I don't know what your lifetime dreams are, it might be that you'll become a millionaire. You might get more than that. You might have power like that of Howard Hughes.

You will die. You will die, and all of it will be futile. And that is the foolishness of Brad J. Sugar. You see Brad J. Sugar states that his goal in life is to become a billionaire. That's his goal in life. I don't know - he might become a billionaire. He will become food for worms. And if he spends his life getting ready to be a billionaire, and gives no thought to what happens at his death then it is all futile. It is all foolish. God is not impressed by our stock market portfolio. God does not think that it's a great thing to have a harbour view. God is not impressed by our net worth. Money has a use-by date and that makes our wealth futile.

How do you avoid those three traps? Three traps - to think life is about money, to think that God is not there, to think that the end is not coming. How do you avoid it? Well Jesus gives the answer in the final sentence. He says:

So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.

How do you avoid these things? You make sure you're rich towards God. Don't focus on storing up treasure for yourself, instead focus on being rich towards God.

What does that look like? I mean God doesn't recognise the Australian dollar, the Euro, the US dollar. What's the currency of God's kingdom? The currency of God's kingdom is trust and obedience. The currency of God's kingdom is trust and obedience. Jesus immediately goes on to talk about how important it is to make God's kingdom our top priority. To pursue it first, and let all those other things go. To be on about God's kingdom. That means, trust and obedience in God's king. This man Jesus who tells this story is God's appointed agent to rule this world. And the way to be rich towards God is to trust and to obey him. It's to trust him when he promises that he will bring you into God's family. It's to trust him when he promises that you will be kept safe in the great judgement at end of time. It would be to trust him when he promises that your sin might be forgiven. And it would be to trust him when he says "This is how to live your life." And you will show your trust by obeying. And when Jesus speaks you will listen. When he promises, you will believe. And when he commands, you will obey. That is what it looks like to be rich towards God.

Well, so what? Well I'm hoping - I really am hoping that you can see that the wise thing to do, the sensible thing to do, is to be rich towards god. There is no future in being rich towards yourself and not rich towards God. In fact, it's the act of a fool to do that. The thing is, quite often there's a gap between what we know is the sensible thing to do, and what we actually do. And there is something inside each one of us that does not want to be rich towards God. And maybe you're familiar with that little something, maybe you're sitting there going "Yeah, I can see this makes sense, but I don't want to do it." You know, there's a little voice in your ear saying "Think about this later. There's plenty of time for this later on."

This is all a bit radical isn't it? be warned. Just in the way that the little decisions we make about wealth shape the long-term pattern of our lives, so too the little decisions we make about God shape out attitude to God for the rest of our lives. If you choose to close your ears to God now it'll be much easier to close your ears to him next time.

On June the 24th in 1982, a British Airways Boeing 747 was over the Indian ocean and was heading to Australia from Indonesia. At about 11,000 metres - stop and think about that - about 11 kilometres up in the sky, things started to go wrong. The main thing that went wrong was all four engines stopped unexpectedly. Captain Eric Moody made this announcement: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damndest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress." For the next 12 minutes the plane plummeted 7 and a half kilometres down. Now I said before, most of us don't get a warning when our time is up. These guys had a warning. I'm thinking there are very few circumstances in life that would more clearly signal to you that your time is up than to be in an aeroplane 11 kilometres up falling. OK, these guys know they're on their way out. This would be, you'd think, a good time to think about what happens next. A good time maybe, to get sorted out with God.

What did they think about? Well, John Crumpleman wished that he'd taken out more life insurance. Stewardess Lorraine Stuart worried that she had two outstanding bills at home that would not get paid. Yeah. Stewardess Fiona Wright was concerned about how her parents would find her car in the car park at Heathrow airport. Bronwen - that's B-r-o-n-w-e-n - Williams wondered if the papers would spell her name correctly. And Doris Hanken... - and you gotta love Doris - Doris Hankensen dwelt obsessively on the t-shirt she had bought in Bali. "All I could think about was, 'Oh my god, all my t-shirts are going to float away.'"

As it turned out her t-shirts didn't float away. The plane had flown into this big cloud of volcanic gas that cut the engines. As they fell, they fell out the bottom of the cloud and they were able to restart the engines. They continued and landed safely at Jakarta. But think about this - think about this - faced with the knowledge of their own imminent death, they continued in the pattern of a lifetime. They did not suddenly become someone else, they did not suddenly think "this'd be a good time to get right with God" - they kept on going. Just as they always had.

You see, that's how it'll be for you, as you make the decision to ignore God. Each time you make that decision, it'll be easier to do it again. And so I guess I want to say to you today, if you know that God is talking to you today, if you know that Jesus is speaking about you with these three mistakes, if you know that you need to become rich towards God, don't put off the decision. Do something about it now. While you've got the chance.

What do you need to do? Well it starts with a decision. And it's a decision that you make internally, between you and God. And that decision then flows on for the rest of your life, but it begins with that decision. How are you going to make that decision, or how are you going to express it? Have a look at the prayer at the bottom of the outline there - a prayer of response.

Just have a quick read of that. There's nothing kind of magical or special-formula about these words, they just kind of pick up the sort of things that we've seen Jesus talking about today. Just have a quick look. If that prayer expresses things that you need to be saying to God, if that's business you need to do with God today, then what I'll get us all to do is maybe if we all just bow our heads and look down at the bit of paper, I'll read through the prayer aloud, and if you need to talk to god about this, you read it in your head. You say it to God in your head, and God will hear you. And God will answer your prayer. Let's pray.

Dear God,
I am sorry for ignoring you and living my way. Please forgive me. Help me to be rich towards you, by trusting and obeying Jesus.
Amen.

You might be sitting there thinking "Well, is that it?" You know, shouldn't there be - I don't know - lights flashing from the sky or something like that? Let me tell you, if you've made that decision today, then today is the most significant event of your life. And over time you'll come to see that.

Speaker: Tim Bowden

If you have further questions about Christianity, or what has been said in any of our public meetings, please get in touch with us at questions@isjesusdead.com.

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