So what does the big picture look like?

Chets Creek Church 

40 Days with Jesus – October 3^rd – Luke 12:13-21

A few years back I saw this guy wearing a T-Shirt that I had never seen before. It caught my eye, and I haven’t been able to forget it. This shirt wasn’t flashy. It didn’t have large, catchy graphics. It wasn’t brightly colored and it didn’t have some crazy font. It was simple, but it hit me right between the eyes. It was a “No Fear” shirt, and it simply said “He who dies with the most toys still dies.”

As time passed, I couldn’t get that phrase out of my head. “He who dies with the most toys still dies.” The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had heard this thought before. This is what I love about Scripture. The “No Fear” brand didn’t come up with this thought, it was a Scripture Original. We find it in Luke 12, where Jesus is talking to the Rich Fool mentioned in verses 13-21.

So let’s be honest for a second. Materialism really isn’t an issue in our culture, right?  Yeah, whatever.  Apparently it was a problem back in the day of Jesus, too. So there is this guy, and he is pretty loaded. When he realized he was running out of storage space, he decided to tear down everything and rebuild. What he didn’t realize was that in all of this stuff, he had lost himself. See, he had misplaced worth. He found his worth in all of his stuff. Quoting the Father, Jesus said “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.”

I tend to get so caught up in the details that I forget the big picture. I stress about school (which by the way I just started my last class of my Master’s Degree!), finances, my kids, and tons of other things. While I’m stressing about these things, I am missing out on opportunities to trust God. Just like the Rich Fool who was focused on his stuff, I just get lost in me, my life, my circumstances. Do you? How different would our families be, our relationships, our careers, our prayers lives and our relationship with God be if we just let go of all of the stuff?

I guess it all comes back to this; “He who dies with the most toys still dies.” I don’t want to be the one who is collecting all this “stuff” when it really doesn’t make a difference. Do you?

Jon Moody