This week we're going through Luke chapter 16,
the portion where Jesus tells a story about a rich man and Lazarus.
And for the rich man, life was good as long as he was rich.
That's how he defined his life.
It's not wrong to be rich.
It's not wrong to have wealth, even a lot of it.
The Bible doesn't say that money is the root of all evil.
It says that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.
And it's possible to love money,
whether you have a lot of it or whether you have a very little bit of it.
And it's not just money that we can love more than we love God.
There are so many things in this world that we can love more than God.
Really, a good question for us to ask ourselves is, you know,
"What is it in this world that has the biggest impact on our joy,
on our mood,
on our emotions?"
Is it God?
Or is it something else?
This past football season there was one night when I was having trouble sleeping at night.
It may have had something to do with the soda, and the chips,
and the chicken nuggets that I had right before I went to bed.
But every time I closed my eyes,
my head started spinning with thoughts
of my favorite football team losing to their arch rival.
Every time I closed my eyes, that just kept replaying
these scenes in my mind over and over, again and again.
And I could not get over it.
When I finally prayed to God,
"Please God, take these thoughts out of my mind so I can get some sleep."
And then right after that,
I fell immediately into a very deep sleep.
And I had a very vivid dream
in which my wife was shot.
And then it wasn't difficult at all for me to not think about the football game anymore.
My perspective changed.
And there was, there was a moment for that,
there was a moment like that in the lives of the rich man and Lazarus.
And we pick it up and Luke 16 at verse 22 where he says,
The one thing that the rich man and Lazarus had in common
is that they both died.
There was an end date to their life on earth.
But what happened after they died was incredibly different
because the rich man loved his wealth more than he loved God.
He was in torment.
He was in agony.
He was in hell.
For Lazarus, he experienced something entirely different.
Lazarus received
comfort.
The same comfort that the book of Colossians promises you
when it talks about the comfort that we receive from Jesus' love.
Jesus, who was willing to suffer,
even more than Lazarus did during his time on earth,
to comfort you with forgiveness.
He gives us, God gives us an eternal perspective,
the reminder that your comfort
is coming.
Are you in need of some additional comfort as you walk through life?
Go to our website, yourtimeofgrace.org,
where you will find all sorts of videos and devotionals
designed to give you just that.
We'll see you tomorrow.
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