The Bill With No Invoice

"Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions." (Luke 12:15)

We are used to thinking of wealth as a blessing, and here especially, and we rarely notice how much of that we absorbed from our country rather than from our Bible. God is not saying wealth is evil. Abraham had great wealth and is our father in faith. David was a king and a man after God's own heart. Money is not the enemy. What God says is, beware. Beware, because it is a dangerous thing to want more.

And the danger does not arrive looking like a warning. It arrives looking like a promotion. More from the work also means more responsibility. More responsibility means more hours. More hours means more time away from the very people you were working for in the first place. The raise comes with a bill attached, and no one itemizes it, and you pay it in a currency you do not think of as money, which is the only reason you are willing to spend so much of it.

That is exactly how the carrot works. You get it. You actually get it. And getting it quietly costs you the thing you wanted it for, and you do not notice for years, because no one ever sends the invoice. The loss is real, but it is never billed.

So this is not a sermon against money, which is not evil, and which you would not believe anyway. It is one question, and it is worth sitting still with. What did your last raise cost you? Not what did it pay. What did it cost, and did anyone ever send you the bill, or are you only now beginning to add it up?

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.

Friend, First

"But he said to him, Friend, who appointed me a judge or arbitrator over you?" (Luke 12:14)

Notice one word, because it is easy to miss. Before Jesus warns this man, before he says a single thing about greed, before the parable of the soul demanded in the night, he calls him something. Friend.

Look at the situation. The man has interrupted Jesus in the middle of teaching to ask him to referee a family fight about money. He is not there to learn. He is there to win. He wants Jesus to be a hammer he can swing at his brother, and Jesus sees the whole tangled, grasping heart of it in a single glance. And the first word out of his mouth is friend. Then, and only then, watch out.

That is the order, and the order is no accident. The warning comes wrapped in the address. He does not say fool, though he will use that word in a moment, and when he does he will use it of a man in a story rather than the man in front of him, which is its own kind of mercy. He tells him the truth. But he tells it to him as a friend.

This is worth carrying into every hard conversation you owe someone. Truth without friendship wounds and does not heal; it is only being right out loud. Truth inside friendship can be received, because the other can feel that you are for him even as you say the hard thing. So before you say the true thing to someone who needs to hear it, ask what your first word will be. Are you saying it as a friend, or are you only right?

Just a Little More

"One's life is not in the abundance of his possessions." (Luke 12:15)

Ask anyone what it means to be rich, and however they dress it up, you will get the same answer. Rich is more than I have now. No one has ever said rich is having less. No one has ever said rich is exactly what I hold at this moment. Rich is always a little further out than where you are standing, which means rich is not an amount at all. It is a moving target, and it moves at precisely your speed.

A younger man is certain that if he could just cross one particular line of income, that would be enough. Then the raise comes, and he crosses it, and it is not enough, because the line has already moved. And it moves again. Every time he gets more, the line slides further out, and he needs more, and he would tell you with a straight face that this time is different. So how much do you need to be happy? Just a little more. It is always just a little more.

That is exactly what the man in Luke 12 was asking for. Tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. He wanted his share, what he was owed. And Jesus refuses to settle the estate, because Jesus is not interested in the estate. He looks past the request and names the thing sitting in the man's blind spot. Greed.

The man did not need more. He needed a friend who loved him enough to tell him what was in the mirror. And so do you, because the target will never stop moving, and no sum you reach will ever be the sum. Ask instead where your life actually is, since Jesus says it was never in the abundance at all.

The Blind Spot

"Watch out and be on guard against all greed, for one's life is not in the abundance of his possessions." (Luke 12:15)

Every car has a blind spot. There is a place just beside you where a whole automobile can sit completely unseen, and unless you turn your head and look back over your shoulder you will never know it is there. So you move to merge, and the horn blares, and you mouth an apology through the glass, because you truly did not see them. Some cars now light a small triangle in the mirror and beep when the lane is not clear. Left to ourselves, we have no such warning.

There are blind spots in the soul as well, places where we are deceived and do not know it. And here is the hard thing said plainly: there may be a blind spot deceiving you at this very moment, and you cannot see it, and only other people can. That is what a blind spot is. It is not a sin you are ignoring. It is a thing you are structurally unable to see from where you sit.

Which means you cannot fix this one alone. You cannot introspect your way out of a blindness, because the blindness covers the very place you would need to look. You need someone in the car with you, close enough and honest enough to turn the radio down and say, there is something beside you that you cannot see.

So the question is not whether you have blind spots. You do. The question is whether you have let anyone near enough to name them. Do you have that person? Or have you slowly arranged your life so that no one is close enough to beep?

The Problem Is the Pronoun

"She said, I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink." (Hosea 2:5)

Listen to how Gomer talks. My wool. My oil. My bread. Say it a few times and you will hear the whole problem, and the problem is not in the nouns. It is in the pronoun. She did not spin the wool or press the oil. Every one of those things was given to her. She has stood in the middle of another's provision, called it hers, and walked out the door to find people who might give her more of what she already had.

That is not a story about a woman in the eighth century before Christ. That is most of us, on an ordinary Tuesday. We forget who is really providing, and we run after the next thing, the next relationship, the next signal of status, while the faithful love that stocked the shelves stands quietly in the house we are leaving.

The forgetting is rarely dramatic. No one wakes up and decides to be ungrateful. It happens the way a house gets cluttered, one thing at a time, none of them decisive, until one day you look around at a life that was entirely handed to you and find that every item in it has your name on it. My health. My family. My gifts. My work. My church.

This is the quiet blasphemy of the settled heart, to hold a gift and call it a possession. So take the inventory honestly. Go down the list of what you call mine, and over each one name who actually gave it. A gift received keeps you near the Giver. A gift renamed sends you out the door to look for him in all the wrong houses.

Nobody Repents of Dessert

"Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins." (Hosea 3:1)

Raisin cakes. It is a strange thing to find in a verse about spiritual adultery, and the first time you notice it, it almost sounds like a joke. But in that world the raisin cake was the imported thing, the expensive thing, the delicacy you set out so the neighbors would know you were doing well. It was the newest thing on the table, turned so it could be seen. And God places it in the same breath as turning to other gods, and he does it on purpose.

We want our idols to be dramatic, a carved thing on a shelf, something plainly wicked we would never touch. God says no. The thing that pulls a heart away from him is very often not evil at all. It is nice. It is a small luxury, a signal, a raisin cake. And that is exactly what makes it dangerous, because nobody repents of dessert.

The idol is almost never the object itself. It is the story the object tells you about yourself, the quiet sentence about the kind of person who can afford it. That sentence does not feel like worship. That is precisely how you know it is. The worship you can name, you can resist. The worship you have mistaken for taste runs your life unopposed.

And here is the terrible mercy in the verse. Knowing exactly what she left him for, knowing it was raisin cakes, God says go again, and love her. He does not wait for the idol to look impressive enough to forgive. So do not wait either. Name the nice thing you would never have called an idol, and bring it to him before it quietly finishes taking your heart.