Luke 12:13-21 - Money is not that important

We are always ready to argue about money and it is one of the biggest causes of disputes and divisions. Here someone wants Jesus to sort out a financial dispute with his brother. When we get uptight about something we will often find our vision clouded. We become so focused or obsessed about the issue that we cannot see anything else, and we usually become absolutely convinced that we are in the right and the other party is in the wrong. However, when we take things to God we will often find that He has a very different perspective on things. This means we should definitely take things to God for we need our thinking to be changed, though we usually think it is the other person's thinking that needs to be changed.

Jesus replies in an interesting way, He asks "who appointed me a judge between you". Now given that Christ is going to judge the whole earth you might think that He could surely judge between these two. However, this is to misunderstand the purpose of God. God created us to be independent beings making godly decisions out of godly attitudes. Even "solving" this one problem would actually achieve very little, for they would just find something else to argue about a day or two later. Instead their heart attitude needed to change.

We get so excited about money because we think it so important. Our life does not consist of the abundance of our possessions, yet it causes us such anguish if we think we are not being treated fairly. It can also result in greed. 

Jesus then illustrates the point by a parable. A man devotes all his efforts to making money and is very pleased with the results. Then God speaks to him and calls him a fool. 

Now the problem is not with being rich, the problem is with not being rich towards God (and that includes being rich towards the poor). However, our hearts can be so corrupted that we will change this to mean "I will give to God and the poor so that I can be rich". This is such a wrong and misguided attitude for our focus is still on money. We need to guard and watch our hearts very carefully in matters of finance.