Building Wealth

Wealth can make us defensive, jealous, proud, or anxious, sometimes all in the same week. We want a clean answer: is money the root of all evil, or the proof that we’re finally secure? Proverbs and Jesus give a better story, one that honors wisdom and also exposes the heart. We work through Proverbs 21:20 and Proverbs 13:22, then sit under Jesus’ words in Luke 12, where He warns that life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.

We start with restraint: the wise person does not devour everything that comes in, which means wealth is built more by consistent self-control than by one dramatic win. We get practical about budgeting, saving, investing, and giving with a simple 10-10-80 framework, and we name the two pressure points most households feel: income that needs to grow and appetites that need brakes. Christian contentment is not laziness. It’s gratitude that breaks the spell of endless consumption.

Then we zoom out to responsibility and reverence. A biblical inheritance aims at children’s children, not to create fragile heirs, but to invite the next generation into a long obedience and a shared project. Finally, Jesus’ parable of the rich fool lands the deepest punch: the danger is not wealth itself, but forgetting God. Covetousness is the desire to possess anything apart from God, and the call is to be rich toward Him as faithful stewards whose lives are on loan. If this helped you, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find these biblical economics conversations.

Transcript

Scripture Readings On Wealth

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This morning we have two selections from Proverbs and then a selection from the Gospel of Luke. But beginning in Proverbs 1322, the Word of God reads this way a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children, but the sinner's wealth is laid up for the righteous. Proverbs 21 20. Precious treasure and oil are in a wise man's dwelling, but a foolish man devours it. And Luke 12, 13 through 21. 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? 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. 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. 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. This is God's word. Thanks be to God. You may be seated, and may God bless this reading and preaching of his word. Earlier this week we had a cow delivered to our house. Don't worry, it was not alive. It didn't even look like a cow anymore. It was cut up into different pieces and packaged for our consumption. And this is the fourth cow that we've bought from Lyle, our farmer. Lyle is an interesting man. He is he's a little bit older, uh, he's obviously wealthy. He lives in Indian Hill, and he owns a medium-sized cattle farm up in Michigan that is just kind of a passion project that he picked up later in life. And uh we buy cows from him. And this year our cow was delivered by his friend and his neighbor, Dave. Dave, also an older man, he's he said he was 80 years old, another obviously wealthy man. Um he's his neighbor up in Indian Hill. And while I was unloading the beef into my freezer, I asked him a question that I always find fascinating. I basically asked, Dave, how is it that you made your money? How did you come into your wealth? And he told me that when he was 31 years old, he had an opportunity, this was back in the 70s, to purchase 30 old ATM machines, and he bought them for like$800 apiece, and he just cleaned them up a little bit. He didn't really even refurbish them, and then he turned around and he sold them for$8,500 each. And in today's money, that would be investing roughly$150,000 and then turning it into well over a million in just that one uh that one deal. And then he took that and he just kept going. But the older I get, the more fascinated I am by stories like this because I wonder how it is that people figured out to how to make money, especially in this economy. Just these opportunities that people find, because whether we admit it or not, wealth fascinates us. Some people, some of us resent it, some of us idolize it. I think most of us tend to misunderstand it. Our culture tends to think about wealth in overly simplistic ways. Some say that wealth is evil, and that rich people, if they have wealth, they must have cheated and exploited or inherited their way to the top, and that they should be punished in order to restore balance. Um about accumulation and luxury and financial independence, and that our value is measured by our net worth. Well, which side does the Bible take? Uh, we have been in a series on biblical economics, and today we come to the subject of wealth, and we want to know does Jesus want to tax the rich or does he want to promise prosperity and health to all of us and make us all wealthy? Those are the two categories, Jesus. Which do you fit into? And wouldn't you know it? Jesus does not neatly fit into either of the categories that we have conveniently made for him. So as we have seen from our selections this morning, Scripture both praises wisdom that builds wealth, and also warns us about the soul-destroying danger of covetousness and greed. So this morning, as we look at Proverbs and as we look at this parable of Jesus from Luke, we'll see this main idea that the Scriptures exhort us to build wealth wisely, but also to hold wealth loosely before God. To build it wisely, but to hold it loosely before God. And so we'll look at three angles of that. That wealth requires restraint, wealth requires responsibility, and then finally, wealth requires reverence. Restraint, responsibility, and reverence. So first, wealth requires restraint. To build wealth, we must live with restraint. So let's start by looking at Proverbs 21-20. It says, precious treasure and oil are in a wise man's dwelling, but a foolish man devours it. The house of the wise is full of good things. It's full of oil. Oil in the ancient world was a daily necessity. It was used for food, for medicine, for the lighting of lamps. The daily necessities are well stocked in the house of the wise, but it is also full of precious treasure. Over time, the wise man accumulates things of value, resources, reserves, things that are useful and beautiful and lasting. I'm reminded of Bag End, which I've never personally visited, but a humble hobbit hole, but full, full of books, full of good furniture, full of fine food, old treasures gathered over many years. Treasure is stored up in the house of the wise, is what Proverbs 2120 is saying. But the foolish man, by contrast, devours all that he has. In Hebrew, the image is vivid. It is literally the fool gulps it down, he swallows it whole. And the idea is consumption without restraint. So the foolish person never tells himself no. He's ruled by his appetite, he does not govern his desires. So this proverb is really about more than money, it's about self-government and self-discipline. The fool's problem is not that he earns too little, but his problem is that his appetites are too large and he consumes everything that passes through his hands. And as a consequence, he never builds. No matter how much passes through his hands, he never stores, he never creates margin. The wise man, by contrast, learns restraint and masters consumption and lives below his means. He acquires, but he does not devour. And over time, because he governs himself wisely under God, his house fills with treasure. And this gets at an important distinction. It's the distinction between income and wealth. Those are different things. Income is what passes through your hands in a given year, and wealth is what remains over time. Wealth is what you retain over time. So you can have a very high income and be flat broke, not be wealthy at all because you consume 100% or even more of what passes through your hands. And likewise you can have a modest income and you can still slowly build wealth if you live with restraint, because you retain over time and you do not consume all that passes through your hands. So Proverbs celebrates the wise man who does not consume everything that he has, who learns simplicity, who learns to say enough, who lives below his means, and in doing so builds wealth over time. Because wealth is often built less by dramatic gain or by one felt swoop, but more by daily restraint and by consistent consistent patterns. Recently we bought a piece of furniture off of Facebook Marketplace, and I went to pick it up from this little house in Covedale over on the west side. And while I was moving it out of their basement, something caught my eye. In the basement was a room. It was a treasury of sorts. It was full of bottles of bourbon. And I mean full. Like it there were it was lined with shelves. It was like a library of bourbon. It was like the mercantile library of bourbon. And I love bourbon, but I've never possessed more than one or two bottles at a time. I've never been able to retain such a collection. This man had enough bottles to last several lifetimes. And he noticed that it caught my interest, so he gave me a little tour. He showed me the cheap stuff and the expensive stuff, the common stuff and the rare stuff. He must have had thousands and tens of thousands of dollars of bourbon stored in that room. And he was generous with it too. He gave me a few fine bottles to take home, which in my custody were quickly consumed and now are long gone. But what struck me was this is that how does a man accumulate such a treasury? Well, it was not built all at once. He did not go out and just buy all of these bottles at one time. That room did not exist because he consumed everything that he bought, but it existed because over time he acquired more than he consumed. Bit by bit, little by little, year by year, his treasury grew. Now, hear me out. This does not mean that wisdom is having a basement full of bourbon. Although it might. It might. It's something to think about. But it does illustrate a principle. Wealth grows only where there is self-control and restraint. Wealth grows only where there is self-control and restraint. And Proverbs teaches us that the wise man builds wealth over time because he restrains himself and he consumes less than he acquires, and because of that, his house fills with treasure. So what does that mean for us? Well, in reality, most people, probably many of us in this room, myself included, are living with very little restraint. We spend 100%, or perhaps even more, of what comes in, and we consume almost everything that passes through our hands. We don't save as we ought to, we do not invest as we ought to, which we're going to look at investing here in a few weeks as well. And perhaps we do not even give as we ought to. And most of us know that this is not wise and not sustainable. We already know that. But the question is, what do we do about it? How do we get better with that and to grow in that? Well, I'll introduce just a simple principle and then uh give a few applications based on that. But one of my mentors long ago introduced me to something you've probably heard of, which is the 101080 principle. It's not scripture necessarily, but it is a good place to start. So if you look at your household income, a good basic goal is that you would live on 80% of your household income, that you would save or invest 10%, and that you would give 10%. So 10-1080. So in other words, you're building your life, your lifestyle around less than you make, around 80% of what you make. And you learn from that to create margin and to learn restraint. And if you can, that's just a good place to start. If you can do better than that, that's wonderful. Uh Henry, my 14-year-old, is working his first job right now, and we are forcing him to save 50% and to give 10% and then to live off of 40%. So he only gets to live off of 40% of what he makes. And of course, he has far fewer responsibilities, and by living, I mostly mean buying PS2 games. He only gets to devote 40% of his income to that. But the point still stands that if you do not learn restraint early, that it only becomes harder later. So if you are nowhere near that kind of margin, there's probably two major issues. Number one is either your income is too low, or your lifestyle is too expensive, or both. And so the solution is often twofold, to, of course, increase income and to increase contentment. We have to do both of those things, to increase income and increase contentment. And for some of us, the honest reality is that we just need to make more money. And this may mean becoming more productive, it may mean learning a valuable skill or pursuing further education or even negotiating a pay raise, asking for a raise, taking on side work, starting a business, starting something new. There is nothing inherently unspiritual about seeking greater productivity and seeking to make more money and to bring in more income. Proverbs often praises that. But for all of us, whether our income is large or small, we also have to confront something deeper within ourselves, and that is our contentment problem. Not only do we need to make more, but we need to be more content with the life that God has given to us wherever it is we are, because sometimes the issue is uh is not that we lack enough, but the issue is that our appetites just have no breaks. The theologian John Frame, commenting on the tenth commandment, which is uh the commandment not to covet, puts it simply. He said, We need to recognize that what God has provided is enough and to be thankful for it. And that's wisdom. That wherever you're at in life, whatever it is that God has given you through your upbringing, through your education, in your career right now, in your family right now, whatever it is that God has provided right now is enough and to be thankful for it. I think we deeply struggle with that. Contentment does not mean being passive. It doesn't mean that we cannot work hard or build or grow or pursue greater opportunities. It means that whatever God gives us, that we receive it with gratitude. And we stop acting as though joy is only one purchase away, or we stop acting as though peace is always on the other side of a bigger paycheck, that when I have this or when I'm making that, then uh then I will be at peace and content. We can recognize that God's provision today is not an accident, it's what God has given us, and we thank Him for that. So, yes, pursue greater skill, pursue diligence, pursue wise earnings, but above all, pursue contentment in Christ, because the more content we are in God, the less enslaved we are to consumption. And the more grateful we are, the more restraint becomes possible. So the wise man does not merely earn more, he also desires less. He learns to say, Because I have Jesus, I have all that I need. I have enough. So it requires restraint, but wealth also requires responsibility. And this is point two. To build wealth, we must take responsibility for future generations. Look at Proverbs 13, 22. It says, A good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children, but the sinner's wealth is laid up for the righteous. So a good man, it says, desires to build wealth. We should all desire to build wealth. Why? Well, it's not so much for our own benefit, it's not so much to inflate our own lifestyle, but he or she desires to build wealth in order to benefit future generations, to leave an inheritance not only for your children, but for your children's children, to benefit generations that you may never meet, to plant trees under whose shade we may never sit. The goal is not to establish a trust fund in order to insulate future generations from responsibility. This may be one of the most harmful things that we could do for our children is to take responsibility away from them, to make it so that they never have to work or never have to struggle. That's not the goal. The goal is to be part of a multi-generational project where we are building upon the accomplishments of previous generations, and future generations build upon our accomplishments and take the legacy further than we ever could. That's the goal. A righteous inheritance does not take responsibility away from our children or our grandchildren. Quite the opposite. It gives them more responsibility than ever because they are now part of a multi-generational project. Look at the juxtaposition of this proverb. It does not say a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children, but the sinner leaves them nothing at all. It doesn't say that. We might expect it to say that, but it says this a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children, but the sinner's wealth is laid up for the righteous. So the sinner in this proverb also builds up wealth and also may pass it on, but he never raises up children in the fear of the Lord, and he never invites them into the multi-generational project, and while they may inherit his wealth, they certainly will not retain it. So his wealth is laid up just to be distributed to the righteous in the fullness of time. So to truly build wealth that continues to last, we have to be thinking about the multi-generational project in inviting our children into that project and casting that vision for them. Because a biblical inheritance is never just about assets, but also about leaving behind a testimony of God's goodness, leaving behind wisdom and encouragement and an example to follow. That is also part of their inheritance. We can take encouragement from this as well. I know many men who were never financially successful. They tried, they struggled, but they did not build much material wealth. But they loved the Lord, they loved their wives, they loved their children, and they left behind a kingly inheritance of God's righteousness and grace for their children and for their children's children. So it's not just about material wealth. The most important inheritance that we can give is to bring up our children in the knowledge of the Lord. But it still stands that some projects are so big and so ambitious that they can never be completed in one lifetime, but can only be accomplished by multiple generations. The famous Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris took 180 years to complete. Construction began in the 1100s, and the stonemasons that laid the foundation knew that they would never worship under its finished roof. They would never see it completed, but their children would, and their grandchildren would. They weren't building it for themselves. They weren't building it for their generation. They were building it for the glory of God, and they were building it for their children and their grandchildren and many generations to come. It was completed in 1345, which means that it was a project that took six generations of laborers to complete. It took six generations buying in to one long-term vision to build one of history's greatest architectural accomplishments that still stands today and testifies to the glory of God. We live in a disposable culture that has no interest in multi-generational projects. We do not appreciate all the hard work that came before us oftentimes, and we have little concern for what will happen after we're gone. In our mind, everything resets with each new generation, but we need to wake up to the multi-generational vision of God's kingdom. Because if you're a Christian, you are already part of a massive project that spans the world across hundreds of generations. The Bible says, for example, that if you are in Christ, that Abraham is your father, that you're Abraham's offspring, that this goes back hundreds of generations. Likewise, this promise from Isaiah 60 22 is for us. It says, The least one, the least one of you shall become a clan, and the smallest one a mighty nation. I am the Lord in its time. I will hasten it. Our inheritance is the treasury of the saints. So as Christians, it's our responsibility to appreciate what came before, to build on what came before, to teach our children to call upon our God, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God of many generations prior, to build up kingdom wealth throughout our lives and to invite future generations to continue where we left off. All Christians are called into this great work, even those who never have children of their own. Even you who may never have children of your own are called to make disciples and to invest in young people, telling the marvelous works of the Lord to the next generation. So in order to build true wealth, we have to think beyond our own lifetimes. We have to think multi-generationally. That is why it is important to build wealth, not just materially, but spiritually as well. So wealth requires responsibility. And finally, wealth requires reverence. To build wealth, we must be rich toward God. Let's now consider Jesus' parable, the parable of the rich farmer or the rich fool. It's a very surprising parable because, from an earthly perspective, this is about a hard-working and wise farmer. You might even think that this was a children's story and it was all about the virtues of hard work. He works hard and his crops have a bountiful yield. So he dis he does something smart, at least from our perspective. He decides to store away his wealth for the future. And his plan is to enjoy his days in ease and in luxury. The farmer has achieved the American dream. He has achieved everything that you and I want to achieve. Unless Jesus had told us otherwise, we would call him the wise farmer. But God calls him a fool. Verse 20, God said to him, Fool, this night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be? So what is the point of the parable? Is Jesus saying that wealth is bad? Why is the rich farmer a fool? Well, the first clue is the occasion of the parable. A man comes to Jesus who is involved in a dispute with his brother, and it's a dispute over an inheritance, the very thing that we've been talking about. He wants Jesus to take a side on this dispute, but Jesus refuses to take sides, and then he turns to everyone and he gives these sober words in verse 15. He says, Take care and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. Now that's a surprising word to read here. Covetousness. Is Jesus saying that the rich farmer is guilty of coveting? Because this is then the story that he gives. How so? His gains are earned honestly. He has not coveted his neighbor's wealth, he hasn't taken anything from anyone else, he has made wealth of his own. How is he guilty of covetousness? And this forces us to carefully consider what it means to covet. What does covetousness mean if this honest, hardworking farmer is guilty of it? Well, covetousness is not just desiring something that we don't have. To desire to gain something that we don't have, even if we are inspired by our neighbor, is not necessarily sinful. If I see that my neighbor has six-pack abs, and I think, dang, maybe I should get six-pack abs too, and that inspires me to do more sit-ups and to cut out sweet treats. There's nothing sinful about that. That's not covetousness. Covetousness is the desire to possess something apart from God. The desire to possess anything apart from God, to want something so bad that I'm willing to do anything to get it, and I'm even willing to disobey God or to disregard God in order to get it. In that sense, the rich fool is certainly covetous. The rich fool is not a fool because he's rich, but because he has forgotten God. He has this great yield, and what does he do? He does not thank God or acknowledge God. He doesn't say, Thank you, God, for this huge yield. He doesn't say, Wow, God, thank you. What are we going to do with all of this wealth that you've given me, God? It's you have given me this wealth. What are we going to do with it? Instead, he consults himself. Be careful about this. If you are seeking counsel and you're just talking to yourself, you're probably going to get some bad advice, even if it sounds good to you. But he consults with himself and he says, What am I going to do with all of my wealth that I have made? And that is covetousness. It is possession apart from God. To imagine that we own anything, independently of God. That's covetousness. Desiring to possess apart from God, desiring to cut God out of the pitcher. But this is not only covetous, it is also foolish, because our life is on loan from God. The harvest came at God's blessing. There is nothing that we possess apart from God. And in the midst of making his plans for the future, his time has run out, and his life is demanded. Verse 20 again it says, But God said to him, Fool, this night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be? The rich fool is not guilty because he is rich, he is guilty because he is not rich toward God. He does not acknowledge that his life and his wealth belongs to God. So as Christians, our responsibility is to build wealth, both materially and spiritually. We want to take what God has given us, what previous generations have passed on to us. We want to build upon it, and we want to pass it on to the next generation so that they can benefit. That's our responsibility. But at the same time, we must be alert and on guard against all covetousness. We must never imagine that anything that we own, that we own it independent independently from God. All of the wealth that we build comes from Him and must be stewarded in partnership with Him. Ye shall not covet is the tenth and it's the final commandment. And it really brings us back to the first, because to covet is to desire to live independently from God, to seize life on our own without God, to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and to become like God. Our Lord Jesus was also tempted to seize life without God. In the wilderness, Satan came to him and showed him something that he greatly desired, something that he came from heaven to earth to receive. All of the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, from Rome to the United States of America to whatever's coming in the future, all of it was shown to him in a moment of time, and Satan said to him, seize them. You can have them all if you will only worship me and deny your father. But Jesus refused to seize anything apart from the Father. He would only receive what his father chose to give him at the time that God would give it to him. And he trusted his father's plan, even though his father's plan had a cross in it. And through submission to the Father, he received ultimately all power and authority in heaven and on earth. Jesus trusted God and went to the cross for your sake, and now we can trust him with everything. We can trust him with whatever it is that he would choose to give to us. So let's be people who do seek to build wealth, who stand on the treasury of the saints that has come before, who leave our contribution, and who set up the next generation to honor and to glorify our crucified King. To these ends, let us pray. Our Father, we thank you for these words of wisdom from Proverbs, and we thank you for the teaching of Jesus. The teaching of Jesus often is so surprising to us and so counterintuitive and yet so full of life and wisdom. We thank you, Lord, that He shows us what it means to covet and He exposes our hearts. And we pray that you would help us this morning to be convicted of that, to see where it is in life that we seek to seize life for ourselves, that we seek to possess anything apart from God and independently of God. Help us to recognize that and to turn and repent of that and to recognize that we are not independent, that we are completely dependent upon God. And while we may be stewards of the things that He gives to us, that none of them belong to us, but they must be returned to Him in the fullness of time. So with that in mind, Lord, help us to steward these things well. Help us to strive to build upon the previous generations and to stand on where we benefit from them, and yet to build upon them, both materially and spiritually, and pass these things on to our children and our grandchildren and to all young people that you would allow us to influence and have an impact on. Lord, help us to be concerned not only about ourselves, but about future generations and about your kingdom, to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, knowing all these things will be added to us as well. And we thank you for our Lord Jesus, who shows us the way, who trusted the Father, even though it cost him everything, and yet in the end he gained everything because of his faithfulness to the Father and for our sake. And we pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Let's stand and worship.