Building Barns

“Then he said to them, ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.’ And he told them this parable: ‘The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, “What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.” Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do, I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ “This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.” Luke 12:15-21

I have seen this passage play out in real life over and over again. I know a woman who has spent her life building bigger and bigger barns to store all of her material possessions. Nothing was ever enough and no item was too expensive. She spent the entire focus of her days determining what she would purchase next and the space for which she could place the item in her home. Her husband had an abundance of resources along with his blessing for her spending. Her gods were her possessions and her faith was in her spending. Then all of a sudden her husband was struck down with a disease and her life changed. No amount of spending could bring the relief needed to comfort her. Her barns did not possess the materials required for that season in her life. Her barns only stored material possessions and were void of faith.

We must build barns of kindness, compassion and forgiveness. Our barns must be constructed with the foundation of Christ and His mercy towards others. We should be able to enter our storehouses and pull off of the shelves our time, resources and prayers for the needs of others. We cannot store up the things of this world for the time will come where those things are not enough. My commentary states, ‘He decided to pull down his barns and build bigger ones. He could have saved himself the expense and bother of his tremendous construction project if he had just looked on the needy world about him, and used these possessions to satisfy hunger, both spiritual and physical. The bosoms of the poor, the houses of widows, the mouths of children are the barns which last forever. But when he began to think of time as his, he crashed into God to his eternal ruin…he would lose ownership of all his material possessions. They would fall to someone else. Someone has defined a fool as one whose plans end at a grave.’ Believer’s Bible Comm. p. 1419.

When building our barns we must ask ourselves, ‘Are we storing things of eternal significance or are we storing things that end at the grave?’