What You Tell Your Soul

"But God said to him, You fool! This night your soul is required of you." (Luke 12:20)

The man in the parable does nothing wrong. Say that clearly, because we assume he must have cheated someone, and he did not. His land produced. That is all. The ground was good, the rain came, the harvest was enormous, and he had a genuine problem: he had nowhere to put it. So he made a plan, a sensible plan. Tear down the small barns, build bigger ones, store it all, secure the future. Any of us would have done it. Most of us are doing it.

Then listen to what he says to himself, because the whole tragedy of the man is in one sentence. Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease. Eat, drink, be merry. He is talking to his own soul. And he is telling it that it is safe now, that the barns will hold it, that grain is enough to keep a soul alive.

That is the fool of it. Not the wealth. Not the barns. The moment a man looks at a warehouse and tells his own soul that it can finally rest there. A soul cannot live on grain, and it cannot be secured by anything you can lock inside a building. And God says, tonight. Not eventually. Tonight your soul is required of you, and all you have prepared, whose will it be?

The barns stood for years. Someone else ate the grain. So hear the question the parable is actually asking, the one underneath the money. What have you been telling your soul is enough to rest on? Because if it is anything you can store, the night will prove it could never hold a soul.