Situational Signs of Greed

I closed yesterday with this statement, “Greed happens when money is too important—too central to you. Where do we draw the line—when does it become too important? You will always draw the line too far from us. Jesus gives us six signs that we have crossed the line. He gives those signs in pairs, let’s look at them.”




Gloating and Worry, neon sign
Jesus gave two situational signs for greed. The first of which is Gloating. Listen to his words in Luke 12:19,

“I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat drink and be merry.”

You may sit back and think—what is wrong with that? I mean that is the American Dream isn’t it? That is why we work so hard so we can get enough to enjoy life isn’t it? If you are thinking that I want you to understand you have money sickness. You have it and may not even be aware of it. Don’t shut down on me—keep listening, Jesus will show you how to fix it.

The second situational sign is Worry. Right after Jesus teaches us this parable he said to His disciples, “do not be anxious (or worry) about your life…” (Lk 12:22) It isn’t by accident that Jesus teaches on worry right after he teaches about greed. You find the same thing in Matthew 6, Jesus teaches about storing up treasures and says, “You cannot serve both God and money,” and then turns around and says, “Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life…” Some of you are worrying yourself into an early grave about stuff. We are killing ourselves over stuff. The person who gloated had the money and he had the disease, but notice something else—here is the person who is worried about it, he didn’t have money and yet he has the disease. If you worry about money and all of that stuff you have set your heart on material things just as much as the gloating person.

We will look at two more signs tomorrow, but let me encourage you to work through this and if there are steps you need to take.

* illustrations from Tim Keller sermon