Foolish Riches - Luke 12:13-21

We can all hold our breath, but of course we can't hold onto it for very long or we will die. To breathe properly we have to let the air out before we can take the next breath. People who live by faith for finances/possessions discover this principle: God often seems to let them get to rock bottom before the next phase of finance appears.

Jesus uses an interruption to lift the imagination of the crowd to Kingdom life. But note the problem with the rich farmer in the story is not that he was rich, or that he had a bumper harvest. In fact it wasn't even really that he upgraded his barns to properly store the bounty.

The problem was that the farmer wasn't breathing!

Verse 20 is interesting: 'your life will be demanded from you'. We know our lives are a gift from God, but are they also in some sense 'on loan' from God? Given for a purpose, they can receive God's goodness but also are to give it on to others. One day Jesus will call each of us to account for how we have used our lives.

To swim under water we have to hold our breath of course. Yet many of us seem to spend our whole lives 'holding our breath' when it comes to wealth and possessions, as if we were in some kind of toxic atmosphere, desperately trying to hold onto what we have got. We need to learn to breath! Surely as Christians we exist in the atmosphere of God's grace, able to receive God's abundant blessing, and so also able to pass it on freely to others.

Hence the key question this week:

[IN] Are you able to put God's abundance in you at His disposal?

Or to put it another way: Are you able to breathe God's goodness in and out?

This doesn't mean we can't be prudent with money or wealth, or we can't have savings or pension provision. But it does mean not allowing these to control our lives, instead having faith in God as our baseline principle and sitting light with all the rest.

Jesus didn't say it would be easy, but your life is a gift from God with a purpose. In His purposes you can discover the abundant riches of His Kingdom, and share them with those around you ... IF you learn to breathe!