Perhaps you're sitting here tonight, receiving fresh teaching in the word of God; but your mind is somewhere else? It’s a failure to be here.
Jesus says: the worries of this life will keep the word of God from taking root in your life. It's something that chokes your life out. The other one is the deceitfulness of wealth, the deceitfulness of wealth.
The ‘worries of this life’ is: I'm worshipping; but my mind's on my money. I'm here, but I'm actually in four different other places - I'm split apart.
The deceitfulness of wealth is a lie that's future-oriented. It says this: if I could just get to some place, then I would be really living. It's pushing for something that never quite shows up.
Has anybody besides me, when you get pay raises, you think: phew, I've arrived; but then it doesn't take long, and you haven't?
I remember my first ministry job: I was making $500 a month. I was like: yeah, I could afford a new car! I was living real cheap; but then my first full time ministry job out of college, they paid me $23,000 a year (maybe $400 a week or something?), and I was like: man, I have arrived!
Then of course, after that, it's like: man, I need to make $40,000. It wasn't until like 2004 that I ever made $40,000 in a year; and then when I got that pay raise I was like: whoa! Oh man!
Then you enjoy that for a while, and then you think: what could I do with $60,000? Then you make $60,000 and then it's: what could I do with $80,000. Then you make $80,000 and then: what could I do with $100,000? Then you - what could I do with $200,000, and what could I do with a quarter million? Oh, what if I made $500,000 and then oh…
The deceitfulness of wealth: you have people in this world who are worth $60 billion dollars, and they still go to work every day to make more!
The deceitfulness of wealth: it's a lie that says: if I had this, I would be happy. Has anybody besides me ever been convinced that you ‘had to have’ something; and then you bought it, and six months later you saw it hanging in your closet, and you wondered why you bought it? Maybe the tag was still on it?
Hmm, there are people in this world with nothing to wear, and we have clothes in our closets with tags still on them - the deceitfulness of wealth.
It's deceitfulness - and essentially, the ‘worries of this life’ is: a failure to be here. The ‘deceitfulness of wealth’ is: a failure to be now. It's a failure to be content. It's always pushing for something else, that doesn't happen.
If you've ever made $40,000 and pushed for $60,000; then you find that $60,000 didn't do what you thought it would do. If you've ever made $60,000 and pushed for $100,000, you found it didn't do what you thought it would do. If you ever had $100,000, and pushed for $200,000, and you made it - it didn't do what you thought it would do.
Now let me say this: “money can't buy happiness”. But in a sense, people who really believe that - don't know where to shop! Let me explain what I mean by that. If you're going to struggle – with money, or without money - go with the ‘with money’ side of it, okay.
But what Jesus is saying is: there's contentment. Jesus wants to make us wealthy stewards - He does! He wants us to be wealthy stewards; not rich men, but wealthy stewards - two totally different things.
The Rich Man and Lazarus is the only time in Jesus' whole ministry that he used the word Hades, in terms of somebody going there, and we need to deal with that.