In the sermon titled 'Proper Priorities' by Peter Allison, the focus is on understanding the correct stance towards material possessions and spiritual wealth. The discussion begins with a passage from Luke 12, where Jesus addresses a request to divide an inheritance, highlighting the folly of commanding God. Jesus uses a parable about a rich man who plans to build bigger barns to store his abundant harvest, illustrating the danger of valuing material wealth over spiritual well-being. The sermon emphasizes that life does not consist of possessions and warns against the accumulation of wealth as an end in itself. Instead, it advocates for seeking the kingdom of God and placing trust in His provision, as demonstrated by the ravens and lilies that God sustains. The sermon challenges believers to have the right priorities, steward resources responsibly, and live free from anxiety by trusting in God's goodness.

Luke chapter 12 for our scripture reading this morning. It's beginning at verse 13. It's beginning at verse 13. Then one of the crowds 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 an arbitrator over you?

And he said to them, Take heed and beware of covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of things he possesses. Then he spoke a parable to them, saying the ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. And he thought within himself saying, What shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops And so he said I will do this I will pull down my barns and build bigger And build greater and there I will store all my crops and my goods And I will say to my soul, soul you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink and be merry. But God said to him, fool, This night your soul will be required of you, and then whose will those things be which you have provided?

So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God." Then he said to his disciples, Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, nor about the body, what you will put on. Life is more than food and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, which have neither storehouse nor barn, and God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds? And which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?

And if you then are not able to do the least, why are you anxious for the rest? Consider the lilies how they grow. They neither toil nor spin, and yet I say to you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If then God so closed the grass, which today is in the field and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith. And do not seek that which you should eat or what you should drink, nor have an anxious mind for all these things the nations of the world seek after.

And your Father knows that you need these things, but seek the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added to you. Do not fear little flock for it is your father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell what you have and give alms. Provide yourself money bags which do not grow old. A treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches nor moth destroys.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. These testimonies are our heritage forever. They are the rejoicing of our hearts. Father in heaven, your words are clear and we ask, Lord, that you would give us a clear mind to hear them. Your words are spiritual and we ask that you would give to us your spirit that we may rightly understand and discern them.

And I ask that you would sanctify my sinful lips this morning, that from a vessel of clay the riches of of your gospel might be brought to us through Jesus Christ amen please be seated Please be seated. Jesus had gone to a house to eat, a house of Pharisee, and while there he took that opportunity to pronounce a series of woes upon them for their, say, idolatry, for the errors of their ways and of their teaching and of their leading of the church. And That, of course, did not make them happy with Jesus. But the people did flock to hear Jesus, and they had gathered together so much that there was a crowd outside trampling one another, because Jesus taught differently than they'd ever heard anyone teach before. He taught with authority and they were drawn to that.

And Jesus taught some and then out of this crowd, somebody says to him, teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. It had nothing to do with anything that apparently Jesus was talking about and but there are a number of other problems with this with this request. The first is that it commands Jesus to do something. It's an imperative. Imperative is a command.

Now, when we give a command in English, we use the same words. We just usually don't put a subject in front of it. We simply say, do this. We don't say, you do this. If we say, you do this, then we're making a statement.

If we say, do this then we're giving a command well in the Greek it's they have a different form of The verb so it's very clear that This is a command Now that ought to strike you as somewhat foolish, somewhat rash, and not good. We are not those who can command God to do anything. Isaiah 45 describes this, describes who God is. I am the Lord, and there is no other. There is no God besides me.

I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and calamity. I, the Lord, do all these things. Woe to him who strives with his Maker. Let the potsherds strive with the potsherds of the earth.

Shall the clay say to him who forms it, What are you making? Or shall your handiwork say, He has no hands? Thus says the Holy One, the Lord of Israel, and his Maker, Ask me of things to come concerning my sons and concerning the work of my hands, you command me. I have made earth and created man on it. I, my hands, stretched out to heavens and all their hosts I have commanded.

Look to me, all the ends of the earth, and be saved. For I am God and there is none other. To whom will you liken me and make me equal and compare me that we should be alike? For I am God and there is no other. I am God and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning.

And from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying my counsel shall stand and I will do all my holy pleasure. That's God. That's our God, our creator, our maker. There is none like Him. It is the height of audacity and folly to think that we can command this God to do anything.

Calvin says of this passage where Jesus says ask of me things to come concerning my sons and concerning the work of my hands you command me. Calvin says this must not be understood as denoting authority, for it does not belong to us to command God or to press upon Him unseasonably. And it will not be possible for any to profit by the word of God who does not bring a humble heart. I consider that God is robbed of his father's right. He's our Father.

He has a right or he has authority. He says, I consider it that God has robbed of a Father's right if he does not retain the absolute and uncontrolled government of his church. Thus in the clause, Calvin says, ask me of things to come, the word ask is taken in a bad sense when men forgetting modesty do not hesitate to summon God to the bar and to demand a reason for anything that he has done. This is still more evident from the word command. As if he had said, it will belong to you forsooth to describe what shape I ought to give to my work." So Calvin goes on to say that it is Isaiah's purpose here, designed to exhort us to moderation and to patience.

For as soon as we begin to dispute with God And to question him Let alone command him to do anything as soon as we begin to dispute with him. We endeavor to drag him from his throne. It is here as if God, wishing to maintain his right, refutes the slanders of the whole world, saying, in essence, how far shall your insolence carry its excess that you will not allow me to be master in my own workshop as or to govern my family as I think fit it's the end of the quote that this is this is foolishness this command tell me or tell my brother to give me my inheritance. To do that, like Calvin said, when we even begin to reason with God and to demand some accounting for why he's done something, we begin to pull God from his throne. And so to do this would have been implicitly to accept the authority of this person to ask such a question.

Even though you might say, well didn't God come to bring justice? And let's assume in the best of cases that this brother was being unjust and not dividing the inheritance the way it should have been divided or was intended to be divided. But you see to do that would be to implicitly accept this authority. Now, not only is this outrageous the wrong, but it's also irrational. It's really an irrational request or command.

It's the kind of irrationality that untrained little children sometimes engage in. When they tell mommy or daddy to command one of their siblings to give them something because they want it, and their sibling won't give it to them. When they asked, You ever have your children ask that? Why don't you tell someone so to do this? It's irrational because if I'm being asked to tell somebody something and if I have authority over that person that you want me to command and you have authority to tell me to command that person then you have the authority over that person yourself so you don't need me to ask Why don't you simply enforce the command yourself?

At least that's what I told my children. And they got the point. If you need me to tell someone else, because you don't have authority over that person, but I do, then you don't have authority to ask that. You don't have authority over me either. And think about that, it logically follows.

You need me because you don't have authority over that person, but I do, then you don't have authority over me either. But also Jesus doesn't do this because it wasn't what he came to do. It would confuse his office with that of a king. He didn't come to judge. He came to seek and to save those who were lost.

He came to teach, came to bring light. And so it could also have been very confusing to the Jews, to those Jews who were looking for a Messiah like Solomon who would usher in a political kingdom on this earth and establish reign like many of the Jews were looking for Jesus to do. To establish a kingdom like Solomon, to make Israel the apex, politically, of all the nations of the earth, like they were under Solomon's day, when people came from all over the earth to witness Solomon's wisdom and his wealth. So Jesus didn't want to do the work of a king here in that sense. It wasn't his mission And he stuck very carefully to his mission.

In fact, even when people asked him properly if he would stay in their city and preach to them, Jesus said, no, my mission is to preach to everybody. I need to go. And so he's certainly not going to do what this person asks him, even if it may have been just what he was asking. This person essentially may have been complaining against an injustice that he was experiencing, but Jesus would not address it in the way that this person wanted it addressed. So Jesus answers him, Here's him.

Man who made me a judge or an arbitrator over you. Wasn't his calling. It wasn't his office at that point. But he also recognized that this man's heart was set here on earth, and that this man's problem was common to many people. So after answering the man who gave this command, Jesus then addresses the rest of the crowd about the proper meaning of life.

Now by meaning of life, we mean what is the purpose of our life. Why are we here? What does it mean to have a life well lived? What does it mean to have fulfilled our purpose and calling in life? Jesus realized that this man didn't understand any of these things.

Some would say that the purpose of life is to get a good job, so you can make a good income, so you can enjoy the luxuries of life, so that you can then send your children to a good college, so they can do the same. And so you can then live out the remainder of your life, you work so that you can live the end of your life in ease, and do what you want to do. And that's why we see this, you know, ridiculous state today, condition, I mean, where people are going to all sorts of crazy extreme lengths to get their children into the right college. And it gets far out in extreme what people are doing to get their children into college. There's a big case in California going on of people that actually ended up breaking the law.

But Jesus says that our life does not consist in the abundance of things that we have. That's a profound statement because most of our life is spent getting things. At least that's what it looks like. But Jesus says just the opposite. Our life does not consist in the abundance of things that we have.

And Jesus warns then, goes on to warn this crowd against two errors. Accumulating the wrong treasure and accumulating treasure in the wrong place. Accumulating the wrong treasure and accumulating our treasure in the wrong place. Now accumulating the wrong treasure, that doesn't refer to having the wrong possessions. It refers to valuing the wrong priorities, to valuing the wrong things and in the wrong order.

For example, it's not a matter of what we have versus what we don't have. The treasure of two people, one who has the right priorities and one who has the wrong priorities, is very likely very similar in some ways. We probably all have trash cans, for example. They are needed to keep our houses clean, right? We need a place where we can accumulate trash until we can dispose of it in some way, whether that's taking it out to the curb for somebody to pick it up or taking it out to burn it or what have you, however we dispose of it.

But while we all have trash cans, I doubt that there are many of us that actually treasure them. You know, we don't shop for a trash can in a color that matches the color of our house, or we don't feel great loss if it gets a few scratches, gets tipped over, and so on. In other words, we don't treasure it. We have it because we need it and we use it for its purpose and when it's broken, we want to take care of it so that it lasts, has a long life, but we don't treasure it. It just serves a necessary purpose, but it's not our goal.

So Jesus is warning us, so it's not the difference in things that people have, oftentimes. It is in the value, the priority that we put on these things. Jesus warns us to beware of covetousness, that is, treasuring the wrong things. Not being content with our condition. That is probably the first sign of covetousness.

Not being content with our condition. It's Contentment is resting, it's a resting or it's a satisfaction of our mind with what we have. A discontented person feels that they're missing out on life. They're missing out on things. They may feel that God isn't treating them right, either because God doesn't love them or because God doesn't care about them, or maybe even because God isn't willing or able to provide what they think they need to be happy.

It's really, this contentment is really unbelief in the goodness and the love of God. So Jesus told a parable to illustrate the accumulation of the wrong treasure. This productive farmer had great wealth. And he found one year because of his, probably his productive labor and the blessing of the Lord, that his harvest was bigger than what his barns could store. And so he decided to build bigger barns.

Now, there's nothing wrong with being wealthy. There's nothing wrong with being productive. There's nothing wrong with having a great harvest, and there's nothing wrong with building bigger barns. In fact, those are all good things. The Bible, in some places, commands us to do these things, to work diligently.

It says that these kinds of great harvests are a blessing of the Lord. Isaac, you know, talks about him sewed one year and he reaped a hundred percent increase. As a good steward of what God has given to us, we want to be able to use it. If that means we need to store it, then we need bigger barns to store what God has given us. The problem was this man's priorities.

And those come out when in this parable Jesus brings out the thinking of this man. Why is he doing this? What is his purpose in building bigger barns? He had the wrong purpose for all the goods of this world that God had so graciously given to him. He believed that happiness came from having the goods of this world.

And so the more goods that one has, the greater the happiness he had. He would have, that's what he thought. He thought that his current happiness came from the goods that he had and that if he had more of them then he would have more happiness. And so he was building bigger barns so that he could be happier than what he was at the present. Notice he says, soul, you have many goods laid up for many years.

Take your ease. Eat, drink, and be merry. That was the purpose of his life. That was what he saw as the meaning of his life. That was, and so His priority in building bigger barns was so that he could have more happiness, more ease.

He could eat, drink, and be merry longer if he had more in his barn. But Jesus said, our life does not consist in the abundance of things that we possess. And Jesus in this parable relates that that very night, God says to him, fool, you fool. This night your soul will be required of you. You see, Jesus is illustrating with this parable that the present life is short and transitory.

It's not true that the longer the bigger the barn we have the longer we can live a life of ease and eat, drink and be merry. Yes, it is true. If we are living, we can eat. But who knows how long we're going to live? Only God does.

This present life is short and transitory. Think of all the people that have spent their life pursuing goals for their own pleasure. Maybe it's power, conquering the world, and they die before they can enjoy what they have gathered. This life is short and transitory. Secondly, riches cannot prolong our life.

And thirdly, Jesus says it's foolish. It's foolish to prioritize our life by the riches of this world. That's folly. The purpose of goods of this world should be to provide for our family. It should be to leave an inheritance for our children.

It should be to be able to give to those who are in need. It should be to support the work of the kingdom in all the various aspects of that work. And so we want to take care of our goods that we have, not because they are the source of happiness, not because they will give us pleasure, but because we want to be good stewards of everything that God has given to us. We want to use things to their fullest potential. We want to be diligent so to take good care of what we have so that we'll have a long and useful life doing the purpose for which God has given it to us.

You see, this man had the wrong relationship to treasure. Our Relationship to the treasure of this earth ought to be as a stewards of God's wealth as what God has given to us So that we can use it for his glory not our own ease See communism directly challenges Christianity on this point. Communism says that Christianity is the opium of the people. And by that Marx meant that religion was constructed by people to calm their uncertainty over their role in the universe and in society. That religion was the opium of the people, was a drug to make people, that makes people unwilling or unable to aspire to do more.

It's a drug that numbs them so that if they're no matter what condition they're in they're content to stay there. And in the world of Marx, they wanted people to be discontent, to foment revolution and rebellion, to demand more, to get To demand that the rich who they think have more should give it to the poor who have less. But that is, that's directly contrary to what Christ is teaching. Our life does not consist in the abundance of things that we have. It's actually just the opposite.

It is people who are driven by their desire to serve the Lord. By their desire to see His Gospel go throughout all the world. It's people that are driven by more than themselves, that do, that are very industrious and do great things. The difference between contentment and discontentment is best evidenced when we don't get what we were working for. We set a goal and we've tried to get something and it doesn't happen.

What's our response? Contentment recognizes that we are happy with what we have currently, and that it was not the Lord's goodness, will, to give us what we were working for. And we're content with that, even if we work very hard for it. We recognize that he's closing that door, and that is we're okay with that. This contentment becomes sad and or angry or pouts like Naboth.

He didn't get what he wanted so he went home, turned his face to the wall and pouted like a little child. He wasn't content with what he had. It really probably wasn't wrong of him to ask for a sale. You were allowed to sell property not permanently. It would come back in the year of Jubilee.

Generally that was if there was a need, if you were poor and you were forced to sell. But what that passage shows is the limitation on the authority of the civil magistrate. Jesus also talks about accumulating treasure in the wrong place. So accumulating the wrong treasure, putting the wrong priority on things, but also accumulating treasure in the wrong place. Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, nor about the body, what you will put on.

Life is more than food and the body is more than clothing. Now these are things we easily worry about, easily become anxious about. But Jesus' answer is really very simple. Look at the ravens. They don't sow or reap.

They don't plant fields and then tend to them and then get a harvest. They don't have storehouses or barns at all. And yet God feeds them. He says, how much more value are you than the birds? He's reasoning from the lesser to the greater.

If God cares for these animals, which he's saying are insignificant compared to us, then how much more will God not provide for us? But also he's saying worry is useless. It doesn't accomplish anything. We can't change anything by worrying about it. You can't make yourself thinner by worrying about how fat you are and you can't make yourself fat by worrying about how thin you are.

He talks about other aspects of the animals like the spots of a leopard and other places. So he says if God closed the grass which is in the field today and tomorrow is thrown away, how much more will he clothe you or you of little faith? And do you not seek what you should, and do not seek what you should eat or what you should drink, nor have an anxious mind for all these things that nations of the world seek after. And your Father knows that you need these things. He knows.

He knows our needs before we ask. But rather, Jesus says, seek the kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you. See, there's the priority. It's not the actual things that we have or don't have, it's the priority. When we seek the kingdom of God first, then we are accumulating the right treasure and we are accumulating treasure in the right place, which is heaven.

This week, or last week I guess it would be, since it's the first day of the week, I got some news from work that I'd been anticipating for quite some time. I'll have been with this company 25 years in a couple weeks and I've always gone into work every day with the attitude that they may not need my services today, and on the other hand, I may not need them after this day. So I've always had that attitude, but when that reality, when that thought becomes a reality, it's a little different. And so I wouldn't have thought that I was anxious thinking about that. I didn't think that I was.

But my heart said otherwise, physically. I'm talking about physically. My physical heart said otherwise. So I've been blessed with a weak heart as a result of chemo a number of years ago. And so those kind of anxieties I've found actually can I can sense that physically in my heart?

And so when I sense that I realized you know I don't think I'm anxious but actually I guess I am. I guess I am been worrying about this because remember the Lord says that the anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to the Lord and the Lord will guard your heart your heart. So I've learned over that learned that those are connected So I had to go and pray and ask the Lord to relieve that anxiety and he did and takes that physical burden off of my physical heart. He is faithful. He will provide.

Don't seek what you should eat or what you should drink or have an anxious mind. That doesn't mean we shouldn't go work, we shouldn't plan diligently, but it does mean that in doing these things, we are doing them because we are desiring to serve the Lord in them. We're not doing them for our own ease. We're not doing them because that's what we think our life consists of. We're doing it because that's what the Lord has called us to do.

And we want to be faithful servants. When the Lord returns, we'll say, well done, our good and faithful servant. You've been faithful in a few things, and I'll give you rule over greater things. So may that be so in our lives, Let's pray. Almighty Heavenly Father, we thank you for your Word that divides between soul and spirit, between joints and marrow?

And is it a surer of the thoughts and intents of our heart? Thank you, Lord, that your word is life-giving, That you have preserved it, written down for us. We thank you for your Holy Spirit, who is our guide to us, who comes alongside to comfort us, to strengthen us, to enlighten our minds, to open our eyes, to testify to us of the things that Christ has said. Father, we ask that this, that you have taught us that life does not consist of the abundance of things that we have. We ask, Lord, that you would give us faithfulness in applying this.

That we may be able to live out this reality and live free from anxiety and worry. Oh Lord, how easy it is for us to fall into these things and to doubt your goodness or to doubt your power to supply our needs, though we know academically in our mind that you can. Lord, we ask for your strength to be victorious in this. We ask that you would equip us for every good work, and that wherever you have called us, we might be faithful in that calling. We ask these things in Jesus' name, Amen.