· Howard Young · Blog · 6 min read
The Barn as god: A Stewardship Diagnosis Across Four Sermons
Four sermons, three books of Scripture, one recurring diagnosis: the Rich Fool's sin wasn't that he worked hard or planned well — it's that he talked to himself instead of to God, and staked his soul on the size of his surplus. Here's the theological thread that runs through each message and where it leads.
There is a particular kind of sermon that seems, on the surface, to be about money.
It talks about barns and tax collectors, widows and shrewd managers, rich men and the poor who sit at their gates. You walk in thinking it’s stewardship season and walk out wondering whether you’ve been worshipping your savings account.
That’s the point.
Four recent sermons from Triumphant Cross Lutheran form an unplanned series around a single diagnosis — one that runs from Ecclesiastes through Luke, lands in Colossians, and surfaces again in the smallest gift ever dropped into a temple treasury. The diagnosis isn’t “give more.” It’s this: the barn becomes your god when you trust it more than you trust the One who filled it.
The Diagnosis: Misplaced Trust
In Rich Toward God: What the Parable of the Rich Fool Teaches About True Wealth, Pastor Steve works through Luke 12:13-21 — the man who tears down his barns to build bigger ones, congratulates himself, and dies that night. The opening frame from Ecclesiastes sets the tone: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” A person labors with wisdom, knowledge, and skill, and must leave it all to someone who never worked for it.
What makes the Rich Fool foolish? Not the bumper crop. Not the expansion plans. It’s that he spoke only to himself — “I will say to myself…” — and never to God. His barns had become the thing he organized his soul around. Colossians 3:5 names that precisely: greed is idolatry. It is the substitution of material security for trust in the living God.
The sermon closes with Jesus’s summary verdict: “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:21). The opposite of the Rich Fool is not the generous person — it is the person who holds everything as a steward, knowing it was never theirs to begin with.
The Complication: You Cannot Serve Two Masters
What does faithful stewardship actually look like? Faithful in Little, Trusted With Much: The Parable of the Shrewd Steward takes the most puzzling parable in Luke — the dishonest manager who reduces his master’s debtors’ bills to secure his own future, and is then commended for it — and asks the question Jesus intends: are we as shrewd about eternal things as worldly people are about earthly ones?
The key verse is Luke 16:13: “No one can serve two masters… You cannot serve both God and money.” The sermon draws on Jeremiah’s lament — “Is there no balm in Gilead?” — to locate the deeper sickness: a people who have turned from the Healer and clung to earthly security as if it could save them.
The Lutheran resolution is not “try harder to be less materialistic.” It is 1 Timothy 2:5-6: there is one mediator, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all. Before any call to stewardship, the ultimate debt has already been settled. We give and hold lightly because the account has been paid in full.
The Reversal: Grace Changes the Direction of Money
From Self-Absorption to Spiritual Sight turns to Luke 16:19-31 — the Rich Man and Lazarus — and makes the same diagnosis from the other direction. The Rich Man has no name; Lazarus does. God knows the forgotten by name, not by balance sheet. The rich man’s problem is not wealth; it is that he had looked past Lazarus every day at his gate and never seen him.
The sermon’s call is not guilt but reorientation: move from hoarding your blessings to becoming a conduit of God’s grace. The blind spot is spiritual, not merely financial. What the Rich Fool called planning, what the Rich Man called living well — both are forms of a turned-in heart (cor incurvatum in se, as Luther called it), curved away from God and neighbor and back toward self.
The Example: When Grace Gives Everything
The clearest counter-image to the Rich Fool appears not in Luke but in Mark. Her Whole Life: The Widow’s Offering and the God Who Notices opens with Jesus sitting across from the temple treasury, watching. The rich give from surplus. The widow drops in two small coins — her bion, her livelihood, her whole life — and Jesus stops his disciples: “This poor widow has put in more than all the others.”
She is not a model of heroic generosity. She is a picture of radical trust — the same trust the Rich Fool refused, the same trust the Rich Man’s wealth anesthetized him against. The sermon connects her to the widow of Zarephath in 1 Kings 17, who gave her last meal to Elijah and found miraculous provision. God’s economy runs in this direction: toward the ones who have nothing left to trust in but Him.
And the foundation beneath all of it, from Hebrews 9:24-28: Christ offered himself once for all as the ultimate self-gift. Before the widow gave her two coins, the Son of God had already given everything. Stewardship is not the cause of grace — it is its echo.
The Resolution: Hidden in Christ
The four sermons converge on a single Colossians verse that the Rich Fool never knew: “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).
Contentment is not achieved by having enough. It is received by knowing that in Christ you already possess what cannot be taken away — not by a bad harvest, not by a market crash, not even by death. The barn burns. The barns always burn eventually. But the life hidden in Christ is secured by the One who holds all things, and it is given freely to those who hold the barn loosely.
This is the Lutheran answer to Ecclesiastes’s despair — not “accumulate less” but “your life is not in the accumulation.” It was never there to begin with.
Explore these sermons:
- Word of God
- Stewardship
- Luke
- Mark
- Idolatry
- Grace
- Ecclesiastes
