Money Talks - Future Hope
Ryan Scott Carrell - October 19, 2025
So, last week, we began a conversation about money by reading this verse:
Luke 16:13
13 “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
Now, since we all need money to live, this verse creates an immediate tension within us. We need money to pay our bills, to keep a roof over our heads, and to stay fed. And Jesus knew that. All of his followers knew that. Jesus wasn’t saying we don’t need to have money; he was saying we can’t let money have control over us. The way Jesus was talking about money shifted the conversation from being about money as a tool that can pay our bills to something that has the ability to rob us of our peace, our hope, and our shared mission. And this matters, because three things are true about every person sitting in this room or listening to this sermon.
1. We all want to feel peace in our present financial circumstances.
2. We all want to feel financially secure with our future hopes and dreams.
3. We all want to give, to the best of our ability, to support our church.
Last week, we focused on the idea of present peace. We discovered that being honest with ourselves and having clarity about our expenses allows us to see where we are, so we can tell our money where we want it to go. What we value instead of what we want can become our priority.
This week, as we continue this conversation, we shift to the second yearning that we all have, and that is that we all want to feel financially secure with our future hopes. We want to know that when we get older, we'll be okay. We want to have something put away for unexpected challenges. And, we want the freedom to be generous when opportunities arise to help others. To summarize it, we want tomorrow to feel a lot less terrifying and a lot more hopeful. So how do we get there? The first step is implementing the things that we talked about in week one.
Week one was all about tracking our expenses, so we have to get clarity about where our money is going so we can better tell it where to go. Then, once we do that, we can begin to make some adjustments that allow us to focus on our future. We can begin to dream about the hope, security, and generosity that we all want for our future selves. But if we do all of this in a haphazard way, without following wisdom or direction, we might find ourselves in an even worse predicament. Which brings us to a story that Jesus told.
This story Jesus told was of a man whose plan for the future might have looked good on paper, and might make sense to a lot of us at first glance, but reveals some things that we can learn about ourselves, our money, and how we can secure future hope.
Luke 12:16-19 (NRSVUE)
16 Then [Jesus] told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 17 And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ 18 Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’
You’re probably thinking, "I wish I had that problem.” Wouldn’t it be awesome to have too much and have to build bigger barns? But we learned last week that most of us don’t live like that. Currently, statistics say that 50%, to as many as 75%, of us are living paycheck to paycheck. Now, we learned last week that there is a very real reality that says that as our incomes go up, our spending typically goes up right along with it. It’s not hard to see it. I thought I was loaded when I got my first job. I look back now and can’t figure out how we survived. So, there is likely room for a lot of us to make some adjustments that could impact our situations. But that doesn’t mean that this story doesn’t apply to us today. You see, we do have the same problem that this rich man has; we just have very different barns. This rich man had to keep building physical barns to store all the grain that he kept harvesting. We can build barns for what we haven’t even harvested yet, and all it takes is a swipe, tap, or click that connects our desires to this little piece of plastic called a credit card.
Now, the people listening to Jesus knew nothing about credit cards. Their debt was survival debt: you borrowed because you had no choice. Your crops failed, someone got sick, you couldn't pay your taxes. Debt in the ancient world meant you might lose your land, your animals, and potentially the freedom of you and your family. The sad reality is that we still have some of those problems today.
The medical debt inflicted on people because of our healthcare system is crushing. Student loan debt has become unmanageable as the cost of education has skyrocketed. And some predatory practices still exist that give us more roof than we can actually afford. We can’t take a deep dive today into all the Bible passages that call these practices immoral. I wish more politicians who quote the Bible on all kinds of other things would read THESE passages and take up the call for economic justice that runs throughout the scripture. Fixing those things would go a long way to correcting the injustices we all face. But, while we still share the reality of these predatory practices with the people of the ancient world, there is a practice that is just as predatory, and it’s the way we inflict pain on ourselves as our desires become just as much a predator of our future hopes and dreams. And that guy has preyed on me too.
Not that long ago, Jill and I had a lot of debt. We had student loan debt, car debt, credit card debt, and stupid debt that doesn’t even seem to have a category. We wanted things we couldn't afford, and misusing our credit made it possible to get them. It put us in a huge hole where our past decisions stole our present peace and kept robbing us of any plans for the future. If we had continued to live like that, we would not be here today.
I don’t tell you this as a story of our perfection. I tell you it as a story of our redemption. Instead of feeling ashamed or afraid of our debt, we addressed it. We got honest with our habits, the reality of what we owed, and made some hard choices to get on a path toward freedom. Now, this isn’t easy. The temptation we still have to fill our barns with what we want instead of what we need is still a daily struggle. I’m impatient. I’m a spender. I’ve had to lean on Jill to tell me no. And we’ve had to remind each other of what we’re trying to accomplish. But I can say with absolute certainty that it is worth sacrificing some of today's desires to have real hope for tomorrow, but it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes discernment, wisdom, and a plan. But it also takes knowing why. Why am I saving? Why am I planning? What impact will this really have on my life? Let’s go back to the closing line of the story Jesus told to answer these questions.
After building his barns and saving all that he had, this interaction took place:
Luke 12:19-21
19 And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ 20 But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 21 So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
If our priority is about saving or becoming someone who can save, so we can simply feel secure and comfortable while ignoring the frailty of our own lives, we just become like this rich fool. But if our priority becomes about creating an ability for our future selves to become lavishly generous to the Kingdom of God, to our loved ones, and even to our future selves, that’s wisdom.
See, this isn’t about guilt, shame, or even about debt; it’s about our interest. Now, I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek because compound interest works for us or against us. But that knowledge is the kind of thing that keeps us on track and remembering how our money has this incredible ability to work for us and the values that we say we hold, or against us and rob us of our future.
Our money can’t work for the good of our future choices if all of that money is tied up in the decisions of our past. We have to stop our current selves from preying on our future, and we have to address the debts we have incurred if we’re going to create a solid plan for where we want to go.
We have to make a shift and start to see that our income, investments, and indebtedness impact us well beyond our bank accounts, which brings us to another parable that Jesus told.
Luke 14:28-30 (NIV)
28 “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? 29 For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, 30 saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’
Now, to be very clear. This was not Jesus teaching a financial planning seminar, but what he was talking about makes this even more powerful an illustration. You see, Jesus was talking about counting the cost of being a follower of his. The reality is that we can claim radical commitments to being followers of the way of Jesus while, at the same time, being completely reckless with our money, allowing it to have control over our lives and the decisions we make. How can we commit anything to Jesus if money and the debts we keep racking up, are really the ones in control of our lives?
We have to address the debts we have incurred if we’re going to create a solid plan for where we want to go. We’ve created a tool on to help you gain clarity in your present financial circumstances and onto a path of peace. You’ll find this tool, and additional resources, at the link below.
