Mistakes of a Successful Man
Text: Luke 12:13-21
Series: Restoration Sermons
Date:
Speaker: Ed Rangel
Location: Waupaca Church of Christ
Bible Version: NASB 1995
Sermon Type: Expository
Learning Objectives
By the close of this lesson the hearer should be able to:
- Identify what made this man successful in external terms and explain why that external success did not constitute true success.
- Name the five mistakes of the rich fool and explain how each one reveals a fundamental distortion of his relationship to God, to other people, and to himself.
- Explain what it means to "disregard one's partner" in life and why leaving God out of the accounting is not merely a religious failure but a practical one.
- Analyze the grammar of the rich man's speech — counting the "I"s and "my"s — and explain what the count reveals about the shape of his thinking.
- Articulate why planning to be happy with only temporal things is not merely disappointing but fatal.
Thesis
The rich fool was successful by every external measure. He was a failure at the only measure that counts. His five mistakes — disregarding God, selfishness, equating himself with a beast, planning to live without work, and expecting a soul to thrive on temporal things — are not ancient errors. They are the default program of every life not consciously redirected.
Burden
This sermon opens with a sentence about biography: "Biography, rich in encouragement, instruction, and warning. No better study for young people. The Bible gives us the most accurate biography." The parable of the rich fool is biography — not invented narrative but the true story of a recognizable human type. He is not unusual. He is successful, which is to say he is what everyone around him is trying to become. His tragedy is that success did not protect him and did not satisfy him, because he built it in the wrong direction.
Introduction
Someone in the crowd called out: "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me" (Luke 12:13). Jesus declined to be an arbitrator in the dispute and used it as the occasion to say something about the nature of life: "Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions" (Luke 12:15). Life does not consist of possessions. Then came the parable of a man who lived as if it did.
"The land of a rich man was very productive" (Luke 12:16). He did not steal; he did not exploit (at least, not in the story's telling); his land simply produced — more than he had room to store. His problem was abundance. The response to abundance, he decided, was bigger barns. That decision — its reasoning and its cost — is what the sermon examines.
I. This Man
External success is real but insufficient. He was rich, prosperous. His grounds brought forth plentifully. These are genuine achievements — the result of planning, labor, and the blessing of fertile land. The parable does not suggest that his wealth was ill-gotten or that prosperity is inherently suspect.
But external prosperity is not a sign of true success. A person can be successful in one dimension and be a failure in another, or successful in many things and a failure in the one that ultimately matters. The rich man of the parable is exactly this. He is a complete success by the measures his culture — and ours — uses to evaluate a life. He would be profiled in a business publication and admired at his civic association. And he is, by the measure that matters, a fool.
Jesus calls him that: "You fool! This very night your soul is required of you" (Luke 12:20). The word is not an insult; it is a diagnosis. A fool in the biblical sense is not a person of low intelligence — he is a person who has left God out of his calculations and arranged his life accordingly (Ps. 14:1: "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God'").
II. His Mistakes
Five mistakes, each one a diagnostic window into how a life goes wrong when God is left out of it.
First mistake: He disregarded his partner. "And he began reasoning to himself, saying, 'What shall I do, since I have no place to store my crops?'" (Luke 12:17). The "I" who appears here — who plans, deliberates, and decides entirely in his own counsel — has left out a partner. It is a mistake to disregard one's partner; this man put all the gain on his side of the ledger and gave God credit for nothing. The fertile land that produced the abundance was not his creation. The rain that watered it was not his provision. The sun that ripened the harvest was not his to command. He received from a partner and credited himself. In any human business relationship, this would be recognized as a fundamental dishonesty. In relation to God, it is the same.
Second mistake: Selfishness. Count the pronouns: "And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry'" (Luke 12:19). In the rich man's recorded speech: "I" six times, "my" five times. Not once does another person appear in his deliberations. He took no account of anyone but himself — not the poor who were present in every ancient community, not the servants who worked his land, not the God who gave the harvest. Selfishness is a serious blunder in life, not merely a moral failure but a practical one: a life organized entirely around self has no larger frame to give it meaning.
Third mistake: He put himself on the level of a beast. He planned to revel in his wealth — purposed just to "eat, drink, and be merry." That is all the animal cares to do. The animal has no soul to tend, no neighbor to serve, no God to honor, no eternity to prepare for. The animal eats, reproduces, and dies. The rich man, in reducing his life plan to "eat, drink, and be merry," adopted the animal's program and degraded himself to the animal's level. It is not an ignoble purpose for a beast. It is entirely ignoble for a man made in the image of God.
Fourth mistake: He planned to live without work. "Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease." He had accumulated enough to stop. But "it is a fatal mistake to plan to get along without hard work." The plan to stop working was not a practical error — it was a moral one. Work is not merely the means of production; it is the discipline through which the human person engages with the world in a way that reflects the image of the working God (Gen. 2:15: "to cultivate it and keep it"). The man who plans to stop working has planned to stop being the kind of person work makes him. Ease is not a destination; it is a disposition that corrupts.
Fifth mistake: He expected his soul to be happy with only temporal things. "Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come." He spoke to his soul as if his soul's needs were identical to his body's needs — storable goods, secured against future hunger. He left God out of his program. He ignored the future destiny of his soul. The soul was not made for barns and grain; it was made for God and eternity. "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you" (Augustine, Confessions I.1) — this is not sentiment; it is the structure of the soul. What the rich man stored could not nourish what he was.
Application
Three examinations the parable requires:
Who are your partners in success? Take the accounting honestly. Every ability you have was given; every opportunity you received was prepared; every harvest is the product of conditions you did not create. To take the account and put all the gain on your side is to repeat the rich fool's first and most fundamental error.
Count your pronouns. In the account of your plans, how often does "I" appear, and how often does anyone else? The grammar of selfishness is not hard to read. The person who can plan the whole of his life without God or neighbor appearing in the sentence structure has the rich fool's grammar.
What are you doing about your soul? Not your retirement account, not your health plan, not your property — your soul. The same night God required it, every plan the rich man had made became the property of someone else (v.20). The soul will not be satisfied with barns.
Conclusion
"So is the man who stores up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God" (Luke 12:21). The parable ends with a contrast the rich man never considered: treasure for self versus richness toward God. He excelled at the first. He was bankrupt in the second.
The Bible gives us the most accurate biography — because it tells the truth about what succeeds and what fails. This man succeeded by every measure that doesn't matter. He failed at the only one that does. The question the parable leaves is not whether he was a good farmer. It is whether his biography resembles yours.
Invitation
"For what is a man profited if he gains the whole world, and loses or forfeits himself?" (Luke 9:25). The soul is the one thing that neither abundance nor poverty can purchase. It is the one thing God himself paid for.
Believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God — the one who called those who have been working only for the bread that perishes to work for the bread that endures (John 6:27). Repent of the life that has been organized around accumulation at the expense of the soul. Confess his name. Be baptized for the remission of your sins (Acts 2:38). And become rich toward God — the only kind of richness that survives the night when the soul is required.
Word Study
| English Term | Greek Term | Basic Meaning | Usage in This Sermon | Sermon Significance | Key Texts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fool | aphrōn | without understanding, mindless with respect to what matters most | without understanding, mindless with respect to what matters most | not unintelligent but morally and spiritually blind; the LXX uses aphrosunē for the folly of Ps. 14:1 ("the fool has said in his heart there is no God"); this man did not deny God's existence — he simply acted as if God were not a relevant factor. | Luke 12:20 |
| Soul | psychē | the self, the life | the self, the life | the rich man addresses his own psychē as if it could be satisfied with grain; God addresses it as something he is "requiring back" (apaitousin); the word for requirement is the word used for demanding repayment of a loan — the soul was not his to keep. | Luke 12:19, 20 |
| Rich toward God | eis theon ploutōn | enriching oneself with respect to God, accumulating what God values | enriching oneself with respect to God, accumulating what God values | the contrast with "storing up treasure for himself" is complete; what can be stored in barns is not what God values; what God values cannot be stored in barns. | Luke 12:21 |
| Reasoning within himself | dielogizeto en heautō | deliberating with himself | deliberating with himself | the preposition en heautō (within himself) marks the closed loop; his counsel was entirely internal; no voice outside himself entered the deliberation; that is the structural definition of the fool. | Luke 12:17 |
Scripture Interlock Table
| Theme | Boles' Outline | Supporting Scripture |
|---|---|---|
| "Beware and be on guard against greed; life not in possessions" | Intro | Luke 12:15 |
| "You fool! This very night your soul is required of you" | I | Luke 12:20 |
| "The fool has said in his heart, There is no God" | I | Ps. 14:1 |
| "I" six times; "my" five times — the grammar of selfishness | II.2 | Luke 12:17-19 |
| "Eat, drink, and be merry" — the animal's program applied to a soul | II.3 | Luke 12:19 |
| "To cultivate and keep" — man's calling to work | II.4 | Gen. 2:15 |
| "Soul, you have many goods" — temporal things offered to an eternal soul | II.5 | Luke 12:19 |
| "Rich toward God" — the contrast the rich man never considered | Concl. | Luke 12:21 |
| "What is a man profited if he gains the whole world" | Invit. | Luke 9:25 |
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Converted from H. Leo Boles, Outline 102. Primary text: Luke 12:13-21 (stated by Boles). OCR corrections: "luke r 2: r 3-2 r" → "Luke 12:13-21"; ",,ou11g" → "young"; "biograjJhy" → "biography"; "THJS l'vIAN" → "THIS MAN"; "Jt is a mistake" → "It is a mistake"; ".erious blunder" → "serious blunder." Doctrinal audit: the five-mistake analysis retained and developed from the text; "selfishness is a serious blunder" retained as Boles's verdict; "useless church members" implication carried forward from Outline 97 — here the specific application is the rich fool as the type of the person who lives for himself at the expense of God; invitation retains full obedient response (Acts 2:38).
