Rich Toward God, and What It Means

Stuart got caught out by his own daughter in a car park, which is where most men get caught out, and he has been thinking about it ever since.

She is seventeen and doing something at school where they have to interview a family member, and she had a list of questions on her phone, and one of them was: what does rich toward God mean?

He said: well. It means being rich toward God.

She waited.

He said: it means putting God first, really.

She wrote something down. She did not say anything unkind. She is a kind girl and she moved on to the next question, and Stuart drove them both home and could not stop hearing himself say it means being rich toward God.

Because he has heard that phrase his entire life. He could tell you which parable it comes at the end of. He has said it himself, out loud, probably a dozen times, in the specific tone people use for a phrase they have not examined.

And a seventeen year old asked him what it meant and he had nothing. Not because he does not believe it. Because in forty-six years nobody has ever put it into words he could hand to somebody else.

What got him was later that week. He was sitting in the front room, and his wife was on the phone in the hall to her sister, and he could hear one half of it, and the half he could hear was almost entirely about other people. Her sister's knee. Somebody's exam. A woman at work whose mother is not well.

And he sat there and thought: there is nobody in my head. When I plan, when I lie awake, when I run the numbers, there is one person in there and it is me.

Not selfishly. He would tell you that himself and he would be mostly right. He plans for his family constantly. But in the sentence, in the actual grammar of the thoughts, it is I and my and mine, and it always has been.

Stuart sat in his own front room listening to half of somebody else's phone call and could not have explained to a single person at work what had just happened to him.

And the sentence that arrived, sitting there, had nothing to do with the interview.

He thought: I could not define it because I have never been in the picture it describes, and it turns out the definition is about who else is in the sentence.

Let me say the word properly first

Before anything else I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a man sitting in his own front room.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a total, not a level of security. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something startling with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here.

And I need to say something specific about the passage this article is built on, before we get to it, because it is one of the most misused paragraphs in the Bible. It ends with a man being told he is going to die that night. I am not aiming that sentence at you, and this article is not going to use the fear of ruin or the fear of anything else to move you. Nothing here predicts a single thing about your life or your money. Your plans are fine. Building a barn is not a sin, and neither is having a good year.

What I want is the definition, which is sitting right there in the last line and which almost nobody reads, and I would rather the word of God gave it to you, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

You are the person that sentence was written for. That is what the word says, and His Spirit is the one who delivers it.

Count the pronouns

Here is the end of it, and the last eight words are the whole reason this category exists, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping those eight words for men who could not define them.

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.Luke 12:20-21

Now go back and read the man's own speech, which comes just before this, and count how many times he says I and my.

He says it eleven times in three sentences. My crops. My barns. My grain. My goods. My soul. He holds an entire conversation about his whole future and there is not one other person in it. Not a wife, not a worker, not a neighbor, not God, not anybody at all.

That is the diagnosis, and it is a grammatical one before it is a moral one. The last line does not say he was rich and that was the problem. It says he laid up treasure for himself and was not rich toward God, and toward is a direction word.

Rich toward God means your wealth has a direction, and the direction is a Person, and the test of it is whether anybody other than you is in the sentence when you are alone with your own plans.

You are not a fool for not being able to define it. You are somebody who was handed a phrase without a picture, and nobody in forty-six years put one beside it. The written word does not scold anybody for that, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns a definition into something a man can actually stand inside.

And here is what is already true of you this evening, before you change one line of the plan. You are rich in the place that holds. His word says a life can be rich toward God, present tense, which means it is a direction available tonight and not a grade awarded at the end, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a man rather than a phrase he repeats.

What you heard in the hallway

Think about what got you in that front room. It wasn't the phone call. You have heard a thousand phone calls.

It was that her half of it was almost entirely other people. It was hearing, from ten feet away, what a sentence sounds like when somebody else is in it. You were starving to know what the phrase looks like when it is being done rather than said, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as ignorance, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a man and not merely about him.

That is the honest thing under the car park. It was not that you failed a test. It is that a phrase you have carried since you were a boy has never had a picture attached, and the moment somebody asked for the picture you found you had been standing outside of it.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. There is a direction available right now and it does not require you to become a different man first. Jesus said the whole law hangs on two commands, and both of them are about somebody who is not you, and He was in that car park before your daughter asked the question.