Thankful at harvest time

HELLO and welcome to Thought for the Week. Around this time of year, many people think about harvest, with churches and schools holding “harvest festivals”.

It’s good to thank God for our food.

Thoughts of harvest remind me of Jesus’s parable about a man who had such a bumper crop that his barns weren’t big enough to store it.

“What can I do?” he wondered to himself. Suddenly he thought, “I know! I’ll demolish my barns and build bigger ones instead. Then I will have room to store all my crops.”

Now, if that was all we knew about the man, we might think that was just common sense.

But Jesus tells us what the man’s next thought was: “When I’ve stored this wonderful crop, I’ll say to myself, ‘I have enough there to last me for years. Now I can take it easy!’” We see that there was no harvest festival, no thanking God, in his thoughts. His mind was full of his possessions. But there was trouble ahead, for Jesus tells us what God said to the man:

“Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?” (Luke chapter 12, verse 20)

Yes, the man would die that very night, and his enormous crops did him no good at all.

A nice story, but what does it all mean? Well, we are told exactly why Jesus told it:

“And He said to them, ‘Take heed and beware of covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses.’” (Luke chapter 12, verse 15)

Covetousness is greedy materialism. Jesus ends the parable by saying that we are like the man building bigger barns if we store up treasures for ourselves but are not rich toward God, or as He put it elsewhere, if our treasure is not in heaven.

May God help us to trust Him and His great riches.

David Lamb is a South Devon-based lay Baptist preacher.