Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This spring, we’re looking at the parables of Jesus in the New Testament book of Luke.

How much is enough? In our world of abundance, it is easy to get distracted by the constant drive for self-improvement and life-optimization. Our restless inability to be content is deeper than a dopamine addiction or a lifestyle fad. It's a soul issue, something that the Church calls by a few different names— gluttony, greed, avarice, and the word Jesus uses here in Luke—covetousness.

In this parable, Jesus wants to show us the futility and foolishness of hoarding all the fading feels of this present life. He tells this story, not to just shame us, or to scold us, but to warn us and persuade us to invest in what truly lasts. He wants us to rest in Him (not just in his benefits) and receive what the Apostle Paul calls "the life that is truly life" (1 Tim 6:19).

Quotes:

 “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” -Jim Elliot

“Jesus warned, "Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions" (Luke 12:15). To live a life that consists in the abundance of possessions is inconsistent with abundant life. Perhaps the most sinister aspect of covetousness is the way that it keeps our eyes fixed on the horizontal plane.”- Jen Wilkin

“I have held many things in my hands and I have lost them all. But whatever I have placed in God's hands, that I still possess.” -Martin Luther

"Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise [...] If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. ...

Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same." - C. S. Lewis

Q. 147. What are the duties required in the tenth commandment?

A. The duties required in the tenth commandment are such a full contentment with our own condition and such a charitable orientation of our whole soul toward our neighbors, so that all of our inward motions and desires relating to them tend to, and work for, the support of everything of theirs which is good.

Q. 148. What are the sins forbidden in the tenth commandment?

A. The sins forbidden in the tenth commandment are discontent with our own state and envy and grief at the good state of our neighbors, together with all excessive feelings and desires for anything that is theirs.

- Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 147 & 148