Full Transcript

Hi, and welcome to Share the Word, the best way to learn your way through the New Testament one chapter at a time. So let’s listen in to today’s lesson and go a little deeper. The Christian and His Stuff. Luke chapter 12. At the height of Jesus’ Galilean ministry, he was a very controversial but also very popular celebrity, we’d say. Whether they loved what he had to say or hated what he had to say, everyone was anxious to hear what he had to say.

Luke tells us at the beginning of chapter 12 that during these heady days, huge crowds of people gathered to him whenever he was in public. I imagine a scene like a rock concert in the 70s or 80s, with people pressed together, jostling and stepping on each other for better position, you know, to get closer, to get nearer. But Jesus didn’t need pyrotechnics, no massive sound system, no warm-up acts. It was just him and what he might say and do next that intrigued and drew multitudes. In chapter 12, Luke records Jesus teaching on a wide array of topics in one such situation before a huge crowd. As usual, I can’t comment on all of it in our time, but I want to zero in on one topic that got a lot of attention here that I find personally very challenging, and you might too, and it couldn’t be more timely.

On this particular day, one fellow in the crowd had worked his way to the front. He had what to him seemed like a very important issue. He wanted Jesus to intervene and settle a family dispute. Apparently, his father had recently died, and this son wanted a bigger piece of the father’s estate than he was being given. He implored Jesus at verse 13, Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. Jesus was not a judge or magistrate.

He told this fellow he wasn’t getting involved in that. There were civil officials whose job it was to settle those kinds of disputes. But the incident did provide Jesus the opportunity to speak on something he obviously did want to address. So turning from that man who wanted a bigger piece of his family’s inheritance, Jesus told the crowd that day, Take care and be on guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. Wow. Is that a truth that my society in the U.S. needs to hear?

Maybe yours too, wherever you’re listening. Guard yourself against every form of greed, or as some translations put it, covetousness, which is wanting more and more, longing for what you see other people have. No matter how much you are able to accumulate, Jesus said, your life will never consist of your stuff. So far as we can tell, Jesus himself had precious little. He didn’t seem to put much stock, if any, in wealth or accumulation of material things. He obviously could have, had he chosen to, but he purposely did not.

In fact, many times, not just here, Jesus warned his followers not to get taken up with greed or the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself, as a life goal. And here, after this warning, he relayed a short parable in verses 16 to 21 to underscore the foolishness of doing so. He says, A certain farmer was having bumper harvests. Things were so good that he ran out of places to even store his increases. So he decided to tear down his existing barns and build bigger ones. Then he filled those up with all of his stuff until he felt he had accumulated everything he would need to retire and enjoy a cushy, carefree life.

He said to himself, I’ve got more than I need for many years to come. Now it’s time to take it easy, to eat, drink, and be merry. But just as he reached the place of having made it, God said, You fool, this very night your soul will be required of you. God decided his time was up. And here’s the really important part. When we pass from this life to stand before God, how much stuff we’ve acquired and how much others have envied us for it will mean absolutely nothing.

Someone else will have all our precious stuff then. And this is the way it will go, Jesus said, for all those whose lives are focused on enriching themselves, but who are not rich toward God. By rich toward God, he meant living in ways that God considers wise, living the kind of life that God will reward when we stand before Him after this life. Later in this chapter, he calls it storing up treasures in heaven. This parable came to my mind recently because of a construction project I’ve been watching around the corner from my house. I live in an area near the Atlantic shore, which has become something of a mecca for retirees.

So many people 65 and older are moving here from New Jersey, from Baltimore, from Pennsylvania, from New York. Ugh, don’t get me started. So anyway, I’ve been watching this major project for months, wondering what in the world it was going to be. It’s a steel structure, three stories high, with several wings coming off the main section. It’s big enough to be a high school or the main building on a college campus, but neither one of those things would be built where this is going up. Finally, as it got to the finishing stages, I realized what it was.

It’s a mega storage center. It’s a place where people rent out storage space for their excess stuff. Probably only in America people have so much stuff that when their stuff will no longer fit in their house, and the overflow won’t fit in their attic or basement, and the overflow from there won’t fit in their garage or backyard shed, then they go out and rent a storage condo from whoever is building this monstrosity. Is this a big enough purpose to live for? Accumulating more and more stuff? When I was a boy growing up, I was exposed to a lot of interesting people.

My father was a pretty well-known pastor in Bible church circles, and we had a lot of outstanding servants of God in and out of my home over the years who were friends of his. I remember one man in particular who made a very deep impression on me. His name was Florent Toyrak. My dad always just called him Toyrak. Toyrak was a Cuban who had come to the U.S. to attend Grace Seminary in Winona Lake, Indiana, where my father also went to school back in the 1940s. They were classmates in one of Grace Seminary’s first graduating classes.

Toyrak had a very interesting testimony. He was from a large upper-class family in Cuba of French descent. His family owned a prosperous farm. Incidentally, a farm near theirs was owned by the Castro family, and Florent and his brothers were boyhood friends with Raul and Fidel Castro, later the communist dictators of Cuba. One summer day, when Toyrack was a teenager, as he told the story, he was home alone. Everybody else in his family was off someplace when there was a knock at their front door.

This was odd, he said, because they lived in a rural area and you had to come back a long dirt lane to even reach their house. Toyrack remembers opening the door and seeing a neatly dressed young man there he didn’t know. There was no truck, there was no car or bicycle, no horse, just this stranger. He said the young man smiled, handed him a book, and simply said, Read this. In it you will find the words of life. Then promptly turned, went down the steps, headed back down the dirt lane.

It was a New Testament, a book young Florent had never seen before, and it was from reading that New Testament that he became a Christian. He said he asked around later if anybody else in the area had seen or knew who that young man would be, or if anyone else had been visited and given such a gift, but no one had. Toyrack remained convinced all his life that the young man he met that afternoon was an angelic messenger from God sent for him. When the communists came to power in Cuba in 1960, two of Florent’s brothers became ministers in the Castro regime. But because of the gospel, Florent’s life went a completely different way.

If I had to try and explain who Florent Toyrack became the best way I could do so, I think, is that he became, for Latin America and the Caribbean islands in the first half of the 20th century, what the Apostle Paul did for the Mediterranean world in the middle of the first century. Toyrack became a pioneer missionary throughout Latin America. He traveled by foot or on horseback to cities and jungle villages alike, carrying the good news. He lived off the land. He was in many dangerous situations where God miraculously protected him. He had a lot of hair-raising stories about spiritual contests with witch doctors in remote areas where voodoo and satanic control was very entrenched.

But he won thousands of people to Christ. He planted scores and scores of churches. Importantly, Toyrak early on understood the power of mass communication and started a radio program called El Camino de la Vida, The Way of Life, from the simple message that young man who gave him his first New Testament shared: Read this, he had said. In it you will find the way of life. Toyrak aired his broadcasts of the gospel all over Latin America for decades and gave New Testaments as well as Bible study courses away by the tens of thousands freely to anybody who wrote his mission, Spanish World Broadcasting. Share the Word, by the way, is my attempt to do with the internet a similar thing because of how much this man’s life challenges me.

I was somewhat in awe of Toyrak growing up. He was at my home many times. He spoke at our church many times. He was completely unpretentious, down to earth, engaging, sincere, passionate about sharing the gospel. Florent Toyrak is one of those people you probably never have heard of till right now. But I bet you’ll be so close to the throne of God in heaven, you’ll have to wait in line a hundred years just to have a chance to sit down with him and hear his stories of what it was like to be a pioneer missionary in the 20th century.

He embodied what Jesus meant by living a life beyond greed, a life rich toward God. Let me tell you about another man I knew growing up, a man of the same generation as Toyrak and my father and uncle of mine named Galen Wilson. Galen was married to my father’s youngest sister. He was a brilliant man. He rose quickly in the corporate world because of his inventive mind. When I knew him, he was a senior vice president of National Cash Register Corporation, NCR, which was a very large business machines manufacturer during the 1950s and 60s.

If you Google his name right now, you’ll find a number of patents that NCR holds that Galen Wilson invented, gizmos and processes that kept NCR ahead of the field in the business machines world for decades and made my uncle a pretty wealthy man. I remember get-togethers on my father’s side of our family held in Dayton, Ohio, when I was a kid, held at the Wilson’s house. Not just house, it was, to me, more like a mansion. I can still picture it pretty clearly, a large, dark brown, shingle-sided Tudor-style home surrounded by well-kept landscaping and manicured lawns. I remember behind the house there were terraces with a built-in barbecue pit and then down at another level, a beautiful swimming pool that looked so inviting in the summer, set against the backdrop of spreading trees that lined their property. He had paid servants, people to help him with cooking, housework, groundskeeping.

I remember him showing us his Mercedes convertible in the garage and also going to a farm they owned outside of town. It was a style of life that was the epitome, I think, of the American dream in the 1960s. I guess it still is. I remember thinking, man, this must be the life. I was impressed. My Uncle Galen had really made it.

When I was a young teenager, I remember thinking about these two men, Toyrack and Galen Wilson, and how utterly different their lives were. A prayer of Moses recorded in the 90th Psalm says in part, A thousand years are in your sight, O Lord, like yesterday when it is past, like a watch in the night. As for men, they are like grass that grows up. In the morning it grows up, it flourishes, but in the evening it withers and is cut down. All the days of our lives are seventy years, or if by reason of strength, maybe eighty years, but we are soon cut off and fly away. So teach us to number our days and apply our hearts to wisdom.

Psalm 90. I was sitting at a Wawa a while back munching on a sandwich when someone pulled into the parking spot right beside me. I glanced over and from the side, from the profile, I thought, I know that guy from somewhere. You know that feeling. The face, from that angle at least, looked extremely familiar to me. And as I thought on it for a moment, it suddenly came to me.

It was me. The guy looked just like me. I remember looking when I was 20 or 25 years old, and it was weird. But you know, when I looked up into my rearview mirror, that’s not who I saw at all. In fact, I don’t even see my father when I look in the mirror these days. I see my grandfather.

And I often think, where in the world has the time gone? I find myself doing the math and calculating, how many years do I have left? Fifteen years? Twenty years? Man, I remember 40 years ago when I looked like that young guy in the car parked beside me at Wawa, like yesterday. That’s no time, yet in no time, as Moses put it, I’ll fly away.

I had a conversation with my son Sam some years back when I had him captive on a couple-hour car trip. Hey, here’s a parenting tip for you. The best time to talk to your kids is when you have them one-on-one on an extended car ride. They can’t get away from you. I was asking Sam, as a young teen at that time, if he’d given any thought yet to his future, what he wanted to do with his life, what he was interested in. He told me a couple things I didn’t know before, ideas that were, I guess, rolling around in his head as a young teenager.

For one thing, he told me he was thinking about dentistry. Dentistry, I thought? Where in the world did that come from? What I said was, Sam, are you sure you really want to be inside other people’s mouths for the rest of your life? And then he reminded me that a couple years prior, I took him along to pick up a used car I bought, and I bought it from a dentist who had an estate down on the Chesapeake Bay, right on the water. Sam was apparently greatly impressed by this place.

It was pretty nice. You could practically fish from the back patio. It was down a gated private lane, probably 20 acres. The house was large and well appointed, and Sam said, That guy was a dentist, and he had all that. I mean, how hard can it be? So I launched into my story with him about Toy Rack and Galen Wilson, all the stuff I just told you a few moments ago that had been rolling around in my mind since I was his age.

And after it, I said, Sam, honestly, which of those two men would you rather be? I could see in his eyes the wheels of his mind whirring as he wrestled with, Hey, should I answer that honestly, or do I say what he wants me to say? But before he decided which way to go, I said, Let me put it to you another way. Which of those two men’s lives would you rather have lived five minutes after they died? He looked at me as if to say, Okay, Dad, I get your point. Sorry for being so autobiographical today.

It’s the best way I could think of, though, to get across the big idea Jesus was trying to get across to his listeners in chapter 12, especially to his most trusted, loved followers, about what we should be living for, about what it means to store up treasures for yourself and not be rich toward God. The pursuit of wealth and material things has become so pervasive in America, it’s generally accepted to be the point of life. It’s almost unquestioned that what you should be doing with your life is whatever makes the most money so you can buy the most stuff. This kind of wrong thinking has even polluted Christianity by so-called evangelists who push a perversion of the gospel known as the prosperity gospel, a teaching that’s absolutely contrary to Jesus’ example and his teaching here in Luke 12 and many other places. Jesus said, Be careful.

Not even if you get so wealthy that you have everything you can imagine will your life ever consist of your stuff. The day is coming at us all quicker than we can imagine when God says, as he did to the rich farmer in the story, Your time here is up. Your soul is now required of you, and what will all of that stuff be worth to you then? What will all of it amount to? What value will it have? How immeasurably better, too, when that day comes, be able to hear from Jesus, Well done, you have been a good and faithful servant.

Now enter into the joy of your rewards. The rewards for following Christ and living our lives for His purposes, to advance things He cares about, to benefit others, that is living lives rich toward God, as Jesus put it. Most of the rewards for that, by the way, will come in the next life, when we as His servants are evaluated and rewarded. That’s exactly what Luke chapter 12, verses 42 to 44 teach. I know how contrary what I’m saying is to how most of our modern Western society thinks, even to Christians who’ve been exposed to nonsense like the prosperity gospel. But Jesus left us an example of living for others, of sacrificing for others, of worrying little about material possessions and being focused on advancing the kingdom of God.

Jesus taught that God blesses us so we can be generous and bless others, not so we can build bigger and bigger barns and live a more and more extravagant lifestyle. It’s a powerful thought that God is noticing when we give a cup of cold water to a thirsty person, as well as when faithful servants dedicate their lives to sharing the gospel in places the devil has strongholds, and everything in between. There are many great truths in Luke chapter 12, but this is one big idea we need to remember for sure. Jesus emphasized the shortsightedness of a life focused on materialism. We need to remember his example and listen to his teaching on this point well. Guard yourself against every form of greed.

No matter how much stuff you accumulate, your life will never consist of your possessions. Thanks for listening. This is Paul for Share the Word. We hope you found this commentary both interesting and insightful. Visit sharetheword.org and check out all the podcasts we’ve already released, as well as other offerings available to you. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.