What can you take with you when you die?

What would you grab if your house were on fire and you had only moments to escape? This question reveals what we truly value. But let's ask a more subtle, and perhaps more telling, question: How do you schedule your days?

Do you try to "fit prayer into your schedule" as if God is a line-item you squeeze in where you have a spare moment?

Or do you build the rest of your schedule around your spiritual life, making time with God the solid core from which everything else flows? I

In a culture where success is often measured by financial portfolios and material acquisitions, Jesus' Parable of the Rich Fool strikes at the heart of our assumptions. It invites us to examine not just our relationship with possessions, but the deeper question of what we are truly accumulating for eternity.

Luke 12:13-21: The Parable of the Rich Fool

"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?'" (Luke 12:13-14)

The petitioner approaches Jesus using a term of respect, "Teacher," yet seeks to use Jesus' authority for personal financial gain. Jesus' response, "Man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?" immediately distances himself from this material dispute.

He refuses to be reduced to a mere adjudicator of earthly claims.

This exchange reminds us how easily we attempt to conscript divine authority into serving our material interests. We pray fervently for raises and promotions, yet how often do we petition with equal passion for spiritual growth or opportunities to serve?

Jesus' redirection challenges us to examine whether we approach God primarily as the provider of material comforts or as the Lord of our entire existence. Jesus has something far better for this man--but will he listen?

"And 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.'" (Luke 12:15)

Jesus expands his audience, addressing the entire crowd. The warning against "covetousness" is a call to active vigilance against an advancing enemy. Covetousness manifests not just as naked avarice, but also as subtle discontent, comparison, and the endless pursuit of "more."

Jesus declares that "life does not consist in the abundance of possessions," using the term zoē, which refers not to mere biological existence but to the essence and quality of life itself.

Here Jesus makes an ontological claim: material possessions cannot constitute the substance of authentic human existence. This challenges our culture's defining narrative that accumulation leads to fulfillment. Jesus' teaching anticipated this psychological reality by two millennia, offering instead a radical redefinition of life's true content.

"And 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.'"'" (Luke 12:16-19)

The parable begins with a recognition of divine provision: "The land...produced plentifully." The man did not create his wealth; he merely received it. What follows is a soliloquy of profound self-isolation. The text contains an overwhelming preponderance of first-person pronouns and verbs: "my crops," "my barns," "I will tear down," "I will build," "I will store, "I will say.'

I, I, I. Me, Me, Me. We, We, We. (and the fifth little piggy goes all the way home!)

This grammatical self-centeredness reflects the man's spiritual condition—he has become curved inward upon himself, incapable of seeing beyond his own desires. Most revealing is his command to his soul: "relax, eat, drink, be merry."

The man has reduced his entire being to consumption and pleasure. He seeks security through accumulation and control, a timeless human tendency that blinds us to our own mortality.

Notice, he's placed all his focus and efforts on worldly things, while he's treated his "soul," his eternal being with frivolity. It's as though he's said, "I'm good in my religion, so I'm glad that box is checked so I can go back to focusing on my career, my bank account, my success, my ego..."

I know a lot of us hear things like this and we already know we don't want to be materialists. But how many of us have this kind of attitude about our spiritual lives? Tell me, what would change if the same effort you put toward your worldly security were given to your spiritual wellbeing instead? What if we pursued God in our daily lives with the same effort that we put toward earning a paycheck, or building a social life (even if it's digital!) .

I think most of us would be pressed not to say that we tend to behave more like the rich fool that we'd care to admit. Often, we think we've got it "good enough" with the state of our soul, so that so far as our spiritual life is concerned, we might as well say, "eat, drink, and be merry." It's another way of saying, "Chill out, don't worry, I'm good."

But are we really good? Is just "getting saved" really all that God wants for us? OR... does He truly want us to live with Him, to follow Him, to flourish as the creatures He made us to be?

"But God said to him, 'Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God." (Luke 12:20-21)

The divine interruption is jarring. The term "fool" (aphrōn) denotes not intellectual deficiency but moral and spiritual blindness. The rich man is foolish not because he plans for the future, but because he plans without reference to God. The passive verb "is required" carries theological weight, suggesting God's claim on the man's life. The soul the man commanded to "relax" is now being "demanded back" by its true owner. The final rhetorical question—"the things you have prepared, whose will they be?"—exposes the emptiness of his earthly foresight. The rich man's fundamental error is not planning for his future but failing to recognize whose future he was planning for.

 

A Matter of Schedule, A Matter of Heart

The parable confronts us with a profound truth: we cannot take material possessions beyond the grave, yet we often live as if we could.

It’s a common misconception that we can take nothing with us when we die. 

The truth is, we can take our heavenly treasures—our spiritual wealth—with us. It's our earthly possessions that wither away and don't last.

Yet, this is how most of us schedule our days. We fill our calendars with all manner of busyness, and then we say, "How can I find time to pray and read the Scripture?" We prioritize activities related to "treasures on earth" above spiritual treasures.

What if we did the opposite? 

What if we started our day by setting aside a "holy hour," or two, or whatever time we find most fruitful? We make that hour holy, meaning it is set apart for God.

Then, we force all the "necessary" tasks into whatever time remains.

If the schedule is too tight, the prayer and Scripture time isn't what we remove. It's Netflix. It's mindless scrolling. We find ways to delegate or combine other activities to save time. We can eliminate anything, apart from our most holy vocations—our necessary duties as a mother, father, sibling, and the like—but we cannot remove the time set apart for God.

Think of your life as a giant tree. 

The trunk is your spiritual life, and its roots are deeply planted in the fertile soil of prayer and Scripture.

This is non-negotiable.

The "branches" then are the necessary tasks, the work, the errands, the hobbies that we add on to that spiritually grounded trunk.

When we reverse this, when we sink our roots and grow our trunk on "worldly" concerns, our branches aren't fed properly, because worldly riches don't provide spiritual nourishment.

We must return to God's design for our lives! 

If you just can't seem to make spiritual progress, if you struggle to find peace and contentment, this is most likely why. We've mistaken the branches for the trunk and the roots.

The spiritual life must be the trunk, our roots must be in the fertile soil of God's Word and deep, meditative prayer.

The True Treasure

The rich fool's error was not in having wealth, but in making his wealth the source of his identity and security. He had his roots in the wrong soil, so the "trunk" of his life was about to be blown over.

He treated his life as a self-contained project, a fortress of earthly goods designed to fend off the future. But the future came in a way he could not foresee, and his fortress crumbled in a single night.

This parable is a call to a radical reorientation of our lives. It challenges us to look beyond the temporary and to build a treasure that will last.

But this is about more than scolding you about having your priorities out of whack. That's not the point at all.

It's about showing you, helping you diagnose, why you feel so insecure, why you struggle to genuinely flourish, and why you're consumed with stress, anxiety, and feel like you just can't make any progress with your spiritual life. It's because we've built our schedules in reverse. We've turned our spiritual life into mere "branches" that can be lobbed off and pruned when we run out of time. Make your spiritual life the core, sink your roots deep into prayer and the Scriptures. If you need practical advice, we can talk about that. I can write more about how to develop a deeper prayer/devotional life. There is no "one way" to do it, but we have to do it.

That's what today's message is about. It's about showing you, like Jesus showed the rich fool, that if you're struggling to find peace, if you are consumed with worldly worry, if you just don't have time on your schedule... maybe it's time to chop down that old tree, and let a new one grow that becomes the center, the trunk, of your life. Let everything else hang on it like branches, and find their nourishment from the center, from a God-grounded life.

If you truly do that, without compromise, you will find peace. That's not to say storms won't come. It's not to say you won't face troubles. But you'll have the root-system to endure. And funny enough, all those other "stresses" in life will start to feel a whole lot easier to get through. They won't be so weighty. After all, a "trunk" that's built on "worldly" priorities is always going to feel the weight of all its branches. But a strong trunk can support everything else, and can even endure the storms that rage against it.

The ultimate irony is that the life we are so carefully building on earth—our schedules, our bank accounts, our possessions—is the very life we cannot take with us. The one thing we can take, our relationship with God and the spiritual fruits of that relationship, is often the very thing we neglect.

Therefore, let us be wise, not foolish. Let us seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, knowing that all these other things will be added to us (Matthew 6:33). Let us be "rich toward God," investing in the things that truly matter: love, generosity, humility, and faith. For in the end, when our souls are required of us, the only things that will follow are the treasures we have stored not in earthly barns, but in the heart of our Heavenly Father.

 

In Jesus' name,

JUDAH