Today on Summit Life with J.D.
Greer. When you think about the future, what gives you a feeling of security? Is it the amount of money that you have or is it that you're right with God? If it's money, you'll be very tight-fisted with it. If it's God, you'll be free with that money.
You'll be open-handed. You'll be ready to be generous whenever God directs and that's because you're not worried about it because God is your security, not money. If greed is a sickness that we can have without even realizing it, how do we recognize it and what's the cure? Well, today on Summit Life, Pastor J.D. Greer shows us what Jesus has to say about guarding against the sin of greed. Part of being a disciple of Jesus is learning how to rethink contentment and wake up to the brevity of life. It's another thought-provoking message from our brand-new teaching series called In Step. Did you know that you can revisit previous broadcasts online or download the unedited message transcripts for free?
They're always available at jdgreer.com. Now here's Pastor J.D. with a message from Luke chapter 12 that he's titled, Be On Guard Against Greed. Greedy people often will give out of a sense of duty, but they have no joy in being generous. It hurts them.
They might tithe, but it hurts, so they only give what they feel obligated to give and then they go back to their life of bigger barn building. Symptom number five, overspending. Overspending. When you got money sickness, money becomes the medication for whatever negative emotion you feel. When you're sad, you think, I'll buy something. When you're bored, I'll get something new.
I need a bigger barn. That's why debt becomes such a problem. Your savior is your credit card. It's your bottle of pills.
You medicate life strains with stuff. An excessive amount of things is a sure sign of money sickness. I know some of you men right now are thinking about your wife's closet, but don't do that. Think about whatever it is you collect.
Symptom number six, can't turn it off. You got this incessant desire to pile up more and more. It just never seems to be enough. I'm sure when the guy in this story was a young man, I'm sure he thought, man, if I could just have enough money to buy some nice clothes, man, that would be the life. Maybe get a nice chariot to be able to cruise around Jerusalem, man, that'd be awesome. Then he got that and he thought, man, what would it be like one day to own my own farm, have my own workers? Then he gets that and he makes, well, I could just build a barn and have some excess crops I could sell. Then he gets that.
Now here he is needing a bigger barn. A symptom of money sickness is never being satisfied. Enough is always right around the corner. It's just never quite where you are. It's just a little bit ahead of you. Money sickness is like that.
It's always out there just beyond you. It never lets up. It reminds me of that CEO that was interviewed in Forbes Magazine that I often quote, who said, I spent my entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find out it was leaning against the wrong building.
Symptom number six is can't turn it off. Symptom number seven, stockpiling. Money sickness drives you to save excessive amounts like this man. We're not talking about a wise investment plan.
That's biblical. We're talking about saving excessively or failing to be radically generous along the way. You feel like you can't do that because money is the entire basis of your security for the future. People who have money sickness can't be truly generous because money is their security and so they can't give it away. You see verse 33 where Jesus tells them to give away their possessions. Keep in mind that back then all they had were possessions.
They didn't do savings accounts or stock portfolios. All they had was possessions. Possessions were your retirement. Possessions were what you left to your children. So when Jesus says give away your possessions, Jesus is not telling you to get rid of some things. He is telling this group to reduce their savings and cut into their net worth.
And a lot of them are like, I can't do that. My identity is tied up in that and my security is tied up in that and Jesus says that's because your money's sick. Seven symptoms of money sickness, boasting, worry, money comfort, stinginess, overspending, can't turn it off, and stockpiling. You got any of these?
You have any of these? Point to your spouse if you think they have some of these. No, don't do that. I'm just kidding.
Okay. Thankfully, Jesus in this passage points us to the cure. I count four things in this passage that he gives us a cure. Number one, number one he tells you to wake up to the brevity of life.
This is a strangely effective cure. Verse 20, wake up to the brevity of life. This man's security gets brought down by one sentence from God. One sentence that God will say to every single one of us at some point in our lives.
Verse 20, tonight your soul is required of you and then all these things that you work for and you store it up, whose will they be? This man went to sleep that night totally confident about tomorrow. He was getting up early to play golf.
That night about two o'clock in the morning, unexpectedly, his heart stopped. Psalm 90 verse 12 says, thinking often on the brevity of life is the beginning of wisdom. Lord, Moses said in the Psalm 90, teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to learn wisdom.
It's only by firmly embracing the brevity of your life that you're going to begin to order your life in the right way. You all remember learning this lesson as a kid by playing my favorite board game with my mom. We used to play almost every afternoon, Monopoly.
I love the game. My mom and I played all the time and I love getting boardwalk and park place and Pacific and Pennsylvania Avenue. I got that whole side of the board, that last little section of the board. I loved watching her face wince when she would round the corner with her little car and know that she was going to have to land on one of my squares coming along that side because I had a Monopoly there.
There's just no way that she could get through without landing up on one of my squares. It was loaded up with hotels and basically bankrupt her in one move. I remember my mom smiling with approval, telling me I was getting the point of the game. After I'd taken all her money and trounced her, she probably taught me the biggest lesson of all of Monopoly and that is when she took the board and she scooped all of it up at the end, put it back in the box and said, son, you won. You made all this money, but it makes no difference because it all goes back in the box.
Now go clean your room. All that money you had didn't make any difference. You understand that at death, it all goes back in the box.
It is literally as worthless as all my accrued power in part place and boardwalk in a game that lasted for an hour and a half. And then after it all goes back in the box, then whose will all those things be? Only one life to live will soon be past.
Only what's done for Christ will last. If what the Bible says about eternity is true, it is insanity for you to think that the point of your possessions is to complexify and adorn your life here. Imagine you saw me walking around in Target and I've got shopping carts full of stuff and I'm carrying in my arms. You're like, wow, you're buying all this stuff? You're buying all this nice stuff? And I'm like, no, I don't have any money. I just liked it and thought I'd carry it around with me in the store.
You're like, that would be insane. Friends, you can't take any of your possessions with you after death. You're not going to leave the store with them. It all goes back in the box. Stop living as if this life lasts forever and eternity is not real.
It is. You understand it's all going back in the box. So start to live that way. Number two, after you embrace the brevity of life too, you should be rich toward God. Choose to be rich toward God. Verse 21. Verse 21, Jesus says, if you're going to seek to be rich somewhere and seek to be rich toward God, in verse 33, he continues, sell those possessions and give to the poor.
Make money bags for yourselves that won't grow old. An inexhaustible treasure in heaven where it's not going to go back in the box, where no thief comes near, no malt destroys. A wasted life is a life that focuses all of its effort on the 70 or 80 years here, lives richly here, and takes little to nothing into eternity. Last week I told you about a new book that I have that just came out called What Are You Going to Do With Your Life? What I do in that book is try to explore the difference between a wasted life and a wisely lived one. I opened the book with a story about hearing a sermon by John Piper years ago that is one of those ones I would say really changed my life.
I feel like we threw that phrase around a lot. It changed my life, but this one actually did, and I can see that now from the vantage point of about 20 years. Passion Conference, the year was 2000. It was not a great setting for a sermon, by the way. It was outdoors. It was rainy, and it was muddy.
It was January. The wind was really boisterous, and it blew half of Dr. Piper's notes off of the lectern out into the crowd. There was about 40,000 college students there, and remember John Piper told this story. He recounted, he said, three weeks ago we got word at our church that Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards had both been killed in Cameroon on a mission trip. Ruby was over 80, single all of her life. She poured it out for one great thing to make Jesus Christ known among the unreached, the poor, and the sick. Laura was a widow, a medical doctor, pushing 80 years old and serving at Ruby's side in Cameroon. The brakes failed, the car went over the cliff, and they were both killed instantly. John Piper said, I looked out at my people at Bethlehem Baptist Church, and I asked them, their lives, was that a tragedy?
I'm smattering to students throughout there, kind of yelled back, no. No, that's right, Piper responded. That's not a tragedy. I'll tell you what is a tragedy. He then pulled out a page from a Reader's Digest, and he read from this little page in Reader's Digest, Bob and Penny took an early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30-foot trawler, play softball, and collect shells. Piper continued, the American dream, come to the end of your life, your one and only life, and let the last great work before you give an account to your Creator be. I collected shells.
Lord, here, see my shells. That I submit to you, he said, is a tragedy. People today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream.
Today, I am here to plead with you. Don't buy it. Don't waste your life. As a young man in my early 20s, I will tell you, I never got over those words, don't waste your life.
Don't die rich in the world and poor toward God. Some of you need to think about this. Tonight, it could all be over. Would God look at you and say, you fool. You'd live clean. Nobody's got anything to say against you and you were at church every week, but tonight your soul is required of you and then all those things that you worked so hard for.
Whose are they going to be now? Only one life to live will soon be passed. Only what's done for Christ will last. Number three, Jesus says you need to rethink contentment.
Rethink contentment. Verse 22, Jesus goes right to the heart of money sickness. Then Jesus said to his disciples, I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear, for life is more than food and the body is more than clothes. He says, your problem is you think money is the essence of the good life. Jesus then uses two analogies that correspond to money sickness, really in two different personality types.
First, verse 24, he says, consider the ravens. They neither have storehouse or barn yet God feeds them. How much more value are you than the birds?
There's some of you that when you get extra money, you like to save it because you worry about a rainy day. Jesus said, well, think about the birds. Birds don't take care of saving.
God takes care of them. Surely you're more valuable to God than birds are. You're made in God's image and birds aren't. Verse 27, he says, consider the lilies, how they grow.
They neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all of his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the field today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you?
You of little faith. I mean, you last forever. Grass changes every season. You're more valuable to God than grass is. He died to save you. He didn't die for grass.
You're way better than grass. His point with these analogies is not that we should never save or spend money on clothes. His point is simply that God is a more reliable source for both security for the future and for beauty, significance, and fulfillment in the present than money is. When you think about the future, what gives you a feeling of security? Is it the amount of money that you have, or is it that you're right with God? If it's money, you'll be very tight-fisted with it. If it's God, you'll be free with that money.
You'll be open-handed. You'll be ready to be generous whenever God directs, and that's because you're not worried about it, because God is your security, not money. Stop thinking that contentment and happiness are found just around the corner at the next income level. Stop thinking security is at the next benchmark in your portfolio. Both significance and security, Jesus said.
Think about the ravens and the lilies. Both of those are best found in the present by being obedient to God. You see, verse 31, you should seek his kingdom, and if you do, all these things will be added to you.
What are all these things? In context, security and fulfillment and happiness. If you put God first, he'll give you security. He'll give you fulfillment and happiness. If you stop thinking they're out there somewhere, they have nothing to do with what you're going to obtain in the future, those things are things that you should be able to experience wherever you are. So let me just ask, are you happy right now?
Do you feel secure right now? If not, that's not a money problem. That's a relationship with God problem.
Contentment is a present posture issue, not a future acquisition one. Number four, last one, have a radical experience of grace. Verse 32. Verse 32 has become one of my favorite verses. Don't be afraid, little flock, because your father delights to give you the kingdom. I was always taught by my English professor that you should not mix metaphors, but here Jesus wonderfully mixes three.
I call them the trifecta of assurance. God is A, the watchful shepherd, intimately aware of where we are and what we're doing. He is B, the almighty king, controlling everything according to his good purposes for our lives.
And C, he's a tender father who delights to see us thrive. Can't you trust that if you obey him, he'll take care for you? I mean, didn't he die for you? It is your father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. How much did it cost him to give you the kingdom?
It wasn't free. Jesus had to purchase it with his blood. And if he provided that for you when you were his enemy, don't you think he'll supply you abundantly now that you were his child?
And that'll take your hands off of clinging so tightly furthermore. Shouldn't an experience with the generosity of Jesus produce generosity in you? What did Jesus do with his stuff? He gave it away to save you. Where would you be had he not?
You'd be lost. Shouldn't you also do that for others? To see the cure for money sickness is to wake up to the brevity of life. It's to be rich toward God, to choose to be rich toward God. It is to rethink contentment and have a radical experience of grace. That's the cure for a heart of greed.
Before I close this, let me say a really practical way that you can apply this. There's something we call FIRST here. FIRST was an initiative that we began at our church in 2018. It was a two-year journey in which we approached God with one question. Is Jesus first in our hearts?
Is he first in our time, our talent, and our treasure? We challenged you to give, to make a two-year commitment of radical generosity that put Christ first. Let's say he was a pastor.
It was a very moving time to see members that made some of the boldest and most radical commitments we had ever seen. I know of newlyweds, for example, that built generosity into their initial budget with money they didn't really even have. One did it before getting a job and then told me, he said, I saw the Lord provide the exact salary increase so that I could meet this faith commitment that I've made. I know of a family who had young kids who determined they were going to make giving to the kingdom of God their largest expense every month, more than their mortgage, more than their retirement savings, more than they spent on Christmas. They watched God provide for them and, even more importantly, watched God train their kids in why life was about serving Jesus, not about collecting stuff.
I think of a couple of retirees in Briar Creek, our Briar Creek campus, Ken and Joanne, who shared that through first they've given more in two years than in the past decade. The guy said the greatest thing was not that God multiplied our money and gave it back to us. He said God gave us something we'd never had in our lives and that was contentment. Contentment and a level of joy that we'd never experienced. Ken shared that he feels like he's just as rich as Jeff Bezos because there's nothing in the world that he desires, that he cannot afford because the level of contentment God has given him with what he has.
It was that and so many others. That generosity has enabled us to do some amazing things. In the last two years, we launched a campus in Garner and the Capitol Hills campus. We bought land for the Alamance County campus.
We've moved ahead with plans for building the North Durham campus facility. We sent out four U.S. church planters with teams to get churches started in different cities around the United States. We got five more in residency this year.
We've given out 7,000 copies of Groundworks Disciple Making Study out of Summit members and people here in the Triangle and all kinds of people going through that. Over a hundred baptisms here since August during COVID. A hundred people that have been baptized. We've heard of 66 who prayed to receive Christ in October alone from dozens of countries around the globe. Several hundred home gatherings meeting every week. Yeah, we've had to adapt like never before here in 2021. We're going to continue to ask how to put Christ first and how to make the gospel above all in everything we do in this new wacky crazy normal that we're in.
Everything has got to be on the table, especially our yes. I saw this recently. Let me end on it. I want to read you a list. Listen to this. I want you to imagine how much you think all this would cost.
Okay. Sponsor a million new indigenous full-time missionaries in poor nations around the world. Completely fund the fight against global malaria. Quadruple the global missions budget of all missions agencies engaged in reaching an evangelized nation.
Quadruple it. Provide food, clothing, and shelter to all 6.5 million refugees across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Triple the global bible translation budget. Fund 150,000 seminary scholarships for promising students in emerging economies. Double the operating budget of compassion that's caring for orphans. Establish eight new Christian universities around the world. Hire 25,000 additional American missionaries to work on our college campuses. That sounds like quite a list, doesn't it?
What do you think the price tag on that would be? Listen to this. I'm not making this up. You can do the math. It would all be accomplished if the Christian community in America gave just 0.4 percent more of its income. One more dollar out of every 250 to work in the kingdom of God. By God's grace we're the richest faith community in history.
American Christians have a combined annual income of five trillion dollars. What could we do right here in the triangle? If you got a group of people 12,000 strong that call this church their home that just say, God is going to be first, this kingdom is going to be first. Can you imagine the impact that we can make on the triangle?
It would never be the same. All I want you to do in this season is to put your yes on the table and say, God, I want you to be first. I don't want money to be my God. I want you to be my God. And I want you to obey the voice of the Holy Spirit. Why don't you bow your heads if you would and let's pray together.
Father is the, I guess you'd call it, leader of this church. God, I'm first and foremost a follower. And God, I want to lead right now in simply saying, I don't want to trust in money.
I don't want to trust my bank account. I want to trust in my earning potential. I just want to obey you. So God, all that I have, whether it's income or things that I own, I just want to put it again on the altar in front of you. I just want to say, what do you want? Show me in these days to come, what it looks like to refine, what it looks like for you to be first, and what you want me to do in the days to come. As I think about giving and next year and how I'm going to make you first, and all that I do. I pray, God, I ask for that. I ask for clarity for our church in this too.
May I say, God, in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.
We've had to adapt like never before over the past couple of years. And as we launch into another year of unknowns, we'll continue to ask and hopefully answer how to put Christ and the gospel first in everything that we do. You're listening to Summit Life with pastor, author, and theologian J.D.
Greer. We're in a brand new, never before aired teaching series called In Step. And if you happen to join us late today, or if you'd like to catch up on previous messages in this study, visit us at jdgreer.com. There you can listen to all of our previously aired broadcasts free of charge, as well as the entire preaching catalog. We are committed to equipping you for great commission work and sharing the gospel. And the most important training tool that we have is the Word of God.
That's why our latest resource is designed specifically to help you know the Bible better. So if you want to carry God's promises in your heart, our new Summit Life memory verse cards make it easy to memorize Scripture. We'd like to send you a set of 50 Scripture memory cards as a thank you when you support the ministry of Summit Life today. The cards are made small.
Think in size two playing cards for quick reference and easy placement. You can put them on the fridge or even stick them in your wallet, pin them to a bulletin board or a mirror for extra encouragement. Scripture cards remind us of God's steadfastness and His unchanging promises now and in the days to come. Going back over the ones that you've learned and adding to the number weekly or even monthly will ensure that God's Word is being stored both in your mind and your heart. Something we say a lot at the Summit Church is when life cuts us, we want to bleed God's Word. And that comes from a desire that we want to be saturated in Scripture so much that we can't help but to talk about it, share it, and apply it. The Word of God is light.
It's life and it's salvation. And the Word alone prepares us to stand up to every challenge that we face with courage. So let's prioritize memorizing it this year together. We're so grateful for you and your partnership with us as we begin a new year of ministry together. Ask for the Rejoice Always scripture memory cards when you become a gospel partner or when you give a single gift of $35 or more. Call 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or you can give online at jdgreer.com. And if you weren't signed up for our email list, be sure to do that today. It is the best way to stay up to date with Pastor JD's latest blog posts and to make sure that you never miss a new resource or a series.
It's quick and easy to sign up at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Bidevich inviting you to join us tomorrow when Pastor JD teaches what it means to live ready for Jesus's return. Are we awake to the task that Jesus left for his church?
Or are we asleep at the wheel? Join us Friday for Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.
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