Scripture: Luke 16:19-31
Several people from our church just got back last night from “Behold,” our South Carolina Annual Conference. Our very own Carol Strasser helped to lead worship, and several members sang in the choir. I encourage all of you could go to the “Behold” conference… You would be blessed to know, for instance, that other Methodist pastors preach longer sermons than I do. And there’s nothing wrong with that!
More importantly, you would be inspired to see our church’s “connection” with other churches across the world… and the good work that we’re doing for God’s kingdom around the world.
One time, many years ago, at a previous church, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I was racing across the church parking lot to my car. I’ve never been one to check the weather—I’m not a fan of weather; I find it boring; I haven’t spent more than five minutes total in my life, for instance, watching The Weather Channel. So I never carry an umbrella. Therefore I’m often unprepared for rainstorms. And there was a rainstorm on this particular day… As I’m running quickly through the parking lot, I passed a young woman who worked in our church’s children’s department. She also failed to carry an umbrella… yet unlike me, she was walking casually in the rain. And I’m like, “What are you doing? Why aren’t you in a hurry… like me?”
She said, “Running in the rain causes you to get drenched more than walking. Because you’re just running into more raindrops as you run. So it makes more sense to walk.”
Well… I ignored her and kept on running. But I thought, “Is that true?” Turns out lots of people think so… Many people believe that running in the rain is worse than walking. So much so that this idea was put to the test on that old Discovery Channel show Mythbusters. So here’s the possible “myth” that they put to the test: “Walking in the rain keeps you drier than running.”
Is it true or false? What do you think?
It’s false. Our intuition is correct: running in the rain keeps you drier than walking.
In today’s sermon, I want to use the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus to put to the test some popular beliefs that many people hold and expose them as myths.
Myth Number One: The Rich Man in today’s parable was living “the good life.”
Look at verse 19: “There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.” He was clothed in purple. This is the color of royalty. Why? Was this man a king? No… but purple dye was incredibly expensive back in the first century. You had to harvest it—literally—from a certain kind of snail living in the Mediterranean. And it took a lot of snails to produce even a small amount of dye. So purple became the color of royalty because only the very wealthiest people could afford the purple dye!
Oddly enough, this isn’t the only place in the New Testament refers to purple dye. In Acts 16, after the apostle Paul is told in a vision to go on a missionary journey to Macedonia… in Europe… the first place that he and his fellow missionaries land is the Macedonian city of Philippi. And nearly the first person they meet there is a Gentile woman named Lydia who worships the God of Israel. And we’re also told that Lydia is a “dealer in purple cloth”—which implies that her customers are very wealthy… and that she is wealthy too. In fact, after she becomes Paul’s first convert on the continent of Europe, she allows her house to be the place where the church at Philippi meets.
So Lydia is wealthy—like the Rich Man of the Parable—yet we see her using the resources God gave her to love and serve Jesus!
See, the problem with the Rich Man isn’t simply that he’s wealthy. There are plenty of godly people in scripture who are also wealthy—Father Abraham himself—who features prominently in this parable—is chief among them!
And yet… The Bible—not to mention Jesus himself—also warns repeatedly that wealth can be a potentially deadly serious problem.
In fact, this parable takes place in a context of Jesus’ famous warning about wealth in verse 13 of this same chapter: “No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”[1]
See, the problem with money and wealth, as Jesus warns again and again, is that it makes a deceptive promise: It says, “Trust in me. Give your life to me. And I’ll give you life. I’ll satisfy you. I’ll give you happiness and joy. I’ll give you meaning and purpose.” And although it can never fulfill these promises, we continue to be tempted to believe that it can!
Every day, after all, God tested the Rich Man every time he walked through his gate and saw Lazarus sitting on the other side. God tested him! And the test was this: “Are you going to prove to Me that you treasure me more than your money, your material possessions, your worldly treasures?” And every day the Rich Man failed the test.
Now let’s notice verses 20 and 2a: “[A]t his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table.” So Lazarus was not only desperately poor; he was sick… perhaps even paralyzed. Someone had to lay him at the gate of the Rich Man.
With that in mind, is it ironic that Lazarus’s name means, “God is my help.”
“Is this a joke?” we might think. “Of all people, God clearly hasn’t been much help to poor Lazarus! God helped the Rich Man, sure… The Rich Man didn’t appreciate God’s help. But God was hardly any help to poor Lazarus!”
That’s what we’re tempted to think.
But who are we kidding? Of course God helped Lazarus! Compare the two men at the very moment they died: In verse 22, when Lazarus dies, he gets “carried by the angels to Abraham’s side.” But when the Rich Man dies, all he gets is “buried”… along with an eternity in hell, of course!
In his life in the world, it’s true that Lazarus knew much affliction; he knew much sickness; he knew much misery… but he also knew God—and for all we know, he knew more and more of God every day; he learned to treasure God more and more every day!
Listen to these difficult words from the apostle Paul: “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, for we know that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. And hope does not put us to shame because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
Jesus isn’t the consolation prize for people who don’t happen to have material blessings in this world. Having great wealth… and a tiny bit of Jesus… actually isn’t nearly as good as having a lot of Jesus.
The psalmist believed it, when he said, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
Do we believe it? Do I? Because personally speaking, I’m tempted to wonder why God won’t give me both the worldly treasure I so often covet… and the treasure I have in Christ?
Would it be the worst thing?
God knows it might be… A man named Asaph, who wrote Proverbs 30, certainly thought so. He said, “Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is needful for me. Let I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’”[2]
Besides, the moment he died, do you suppose Lazarus thought, “I wish God had given me all that he gave to that Rich Man at whose gate I used to beg!” Of course not! More than likely he thought, “If it took these desperate circumstanceson earth to enable me to trust in God alone for consolation and joy, to draw me closer and closer to God, to enable me to treasure Christ above all, then it was completely worth it! I wouldn’t trade a moment of my life on earth for that rich man’s life!”
The nineteenth century British preacher Charles Spurgeon famously said, “Don’t envy a rich man who doesn’t know Christ. Don’t be jealous. Pity him… This world is all the heaven he’ll ever know. Meanwhile, for a poor man who knows Christ… this world is all the hell that he’ll ever know!”
Now let me tell you about a hero of mine named Ole Anthony, who died in 2021 at age 82. He was the pastor of a church of about 50 members who lived together in community in a slum in East Dallas. His obituary in the New York Times said that he was a lapsed Lutheran before having what he called his “Road to Damascus” moment on January 17, 1972—after a British missionary talked to him about self-denial—“death to self”— as the only way to God. “I was an atheist one day and a sold-out believer the next,” he said in a 2013 interview.[3] He immediately gave up a highly lucrative career as a hard-nosed political consultant. He started a church—which was a combination soup kitchen, homeless shelter, halfway house, rehab center, and monastery.
Oddly enough, his church even kept a few private investigators on the payroll, too.
You see, another part of the church’s ministry was to investigate and expose greedy and corrupt televangelism ministries, many of which, back in the ’80s, were based out of Dallas. In fact, Anthony’s ministry was responsible for bringing down the $80 million empire of Robert Tilton, among others. Of course, at least a few of them crawled back up out of the slime… But at least they’re not what they once were.
But the televangelism thing was only a small part of Ole Anthony’s ministry… He was mostly all about Jesus!
I first heard of Anthony when the New Yorker magazine profiled him back in 2004… and something he told the magazine back then has stuck with me: “I own nothing, I have nothing, and I make fifty-five dollars a week. I’m sixty-six years old, and I have no privacy and no retirement plan. I am a blithering idiot by my own definition… The mystery is, this place satisfies every desire of my heart.”[4]
“I’m a blithering idiot by own definition… The mystery is, this place satisfies every desire of my heart.”
All of us want to find something or someone to “satisfy every desire of our hearts”—and it’s practically my life’s work—as your pastor—to convince you that only Jesus can do this for you.
Ole Anthony lived “the good life.” Which he would never have done unless he let go of the worldly treasures that tempted him to think that “the good life” was found in them!
So that’s Myth Number One… This Rich man was not living the good life.
Myth Number Two: People in hell experience a change of heart.
One reason we often struggle to accept the doctrine of hell, despite overwhelming biblical evidence, is because we worry that the moment someone finds themselves in hell they realize their mistake and become penitent… They’re sorry for their sins… They see the error of their ways… And now they want nothing more than to repent of their sins and believe in Jesus… if only God would let them!
Today’s scripture speaks against this idea… After all, where’s the evidence of the Rich Man’s repentance? Maybe verse 24?“And he [the Rich Man] called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me…” Well, that sounds a little like repentance. But first, notice the Rich Man isn’t asking God for mercy because of his sins; rather, he’s asking Abraham to do something merciful for him: to fetch him some water to “cool his tongue.”
Only, he’s not even doing that. The Rich Man would never ask “father Abraham” to do that. Abraham is too importantand powerful. The Rich Man knows his place in the pecking order; he has too much respect for “father Abraham” to ask him to do something so menial. But the Rich Man does recognize that man at Abraham’s side—Lazarus. Lazarus is that nobody who used to sit at the entrance of his gate and beg. Lazarus doesn’t matter. He’s no better than a slave anyway, so, “Father Abraham, would you please send him to fetch water and cool my tongue.”
Similarly in verse 27, he asks Abraham to to make Lazarus go warn his brothers: Because the Rich Man’s attitude toward Lazarus in death is exactly the same as it was when he was alive. Lazarus is beneath the Rich Man. The Rich Man still feels superior to Lazarus.
So… Where’s the repentance?
And you might say, “Yes, but surely the Rich Man softens his heart in verse 27… After all, he has genuine compassion for his five brothers… because he doesn’t want them to suffer.”
But not so fast… Maybe he has a little compassion for his brothers, but let’s not get carried away… As more than a few preachers and commentators have pointed out, the main reason the Rich Man wants Lazarus to go warn his brothers is not so much because of his compassion as his anger: he believes that what’s happened to him is unjust! He’s basically saying, “Nobody told me about this place! I didn’t have enough information! No one gave me adequate warning about hell! And I don’t want this same injustice to be done to my brothers.”
In other words, it’s as if the Rich Man were saying, “It’s not fair what God has done to me. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen to my brothers!”
But why isn’t God being fair? If you spend your lifetime rebelling against God, refusing to submit to God’s will, refusing to obey him, refusing to repent and put yourself—by God’s grace—into a right relationship with him, aren’t you telling God, through your thoughts, words, and deeds, “I don’t want you, God.”
Bishop Lindsey Davis is now a retired bishop in the UMC, and he was my bishop when I first went into ministry. At a meeting, he told us new pastors, “Last week, 80 percent of United Methodists in my episcopal area, the North Georgia Conference, stayed home from church. Eighty percent.”
He then asked, “Are they saved?”
While I’m sure Bishop Davis wouldn’t deny that some of those eighty percent were… you’ve gotta admit it’s a question worth asking. How did professing Christians, not to mention Methodists, become so indifferent to their Creator and Savior… the One who is giving them life at every moment? Talk about gratitude… Where did these Methodists get the idea that that was okay?
At least many of those 80 percent were telling God, “I don’t love you, and I don’t want you in my life.”
Inasmuch as that’s the case, the doctrine of hell means that, in the end—like it or not—God will respect their wishes… God will give them what they’ve “told” God they most want most of all: to be left alone by God!
As C.S. Lewis said, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’”
So that’s Myth Number Two, “People in hell experience a change of heart.”
Myth Number Three: “Miracles can create saving faith.”
Earlier this summer, Ian and I saw the Steven Spielberg movie Disclosure Day. The premise of the movie is that the conspiracy theories about aliens crash-landing in Roswell, New Mexico, are true—and the government has been covering up the truth for decades. And if only the movie’s heroes can get the truth out about the reality of aliens—if only they can give the world indisputable evidence that this spectacular event really happened—then people will suddenly… what? Realize that they aren’t alone in the universe… and will suddenly set aside their selfish, self-centered, petty, ethnic, religious, and nationalistic concerns that so often divide us as people and become united and loving and peaceful people.
The movie believes, in other words, that humanity’s biggest problem is a lack of information about the universe. And if only we had this information, if only we knew the truth, then humanity would be rescued… saved.
Listen… I have nothing but respect for Spielberg, but no… I find this worldview incredibly naive. Why?
Because our biggest problem isn’t something outside of us that’s making us behave the way we do; and if only that can be solved, we’ll be okay. No, our biggest problem is in here… in our hearts. As long as our hearts remain unchanged, true and lasting peace can never come.
Now… think of how this applies to today’s parable. See verses 27 and 28: “Then I beg you, father, to send [Lazarus] to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.” And then in verse 30, he says, “if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.”
The Rich Man believes that a big, dramatic miracle will save his brothers. Abraham disagrees…
And given the evidence from God’s Word, how can we doubt Abraham? Consider the resurrection of Jesus: when the soldiers sent to guard the tomb reported that the tomb was miraculously empty, the chief priests didn’t suddenly become Christians—they bribed the soldiers to report that the disciples had stolen the body! Whether the miracle happened or not was beside the point!
Our main problem isn’t a lack of information from outside of us. Our problem is in here—in our hearts.
Some big, dramatic miracle outside of us isn’t going to touch this problem.
We need a miracle in here [point to heart].
And that’s where our Global Methodist Church comes in…
Listen, I was inspired by what I witnessed at “Behold” the last few days… And it got me thinking about the GMC’s mission statement: “The Global Methodist Church exists to make disciples of Jesus Christ and spread scriptural holiness across the globe.”
Every authentic Christian denomination would agree with that first part: make disciples. Of course… Great Commission: Matthew 28:19-20.
It’s that second part that makes our denomination distinctive: to “spread scriptural holiness.”
What on earth does that mean? It means sanctification. It means our mission isn’t only to invite people to know Jesus in the first place—which is necessary, of course. I’m not saying we Methodists couldn’t stand to emphasize that more.
But “spreading scriptural holiness” means preaching, teaching, exemplifying, expecting, and living out the truth that “knowing Jesus” means far more than “securing” our eternal destiny with Christ in heaven and resurrection in the world to come…
It means that Christ is actually solving our main problem—he is changing our hearts… sanctifying us… yes, making us holy. Does that mean “holier than thou”? Self-righteous? Sanctimonious? Perish the thought! It means bearing the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It means becoming like Jesus… It means loving like Jesus!
If we hear those words and think, “That’s impossible. I can never love like Jesus,” then we’re on the right track. With human beings it is impossible; with God all things are possible!
And that’s the point… The mission statement of the Global Methodist Church requires a miracle to fulfill—believes in miracles, expects miracles… Because if someone like Brent White can become holy and love like Jesus—that seems like at least as big a miracle to me as God raising Lazarus from the dead!
And our denomination is bold enough to believe that that miracle isn’t just for the chosen few—the super-saintly among us—but for every single one of us Christians!
And who knows… If the Holy Spirit makes us holy, that might just be the kind of miracle that will make people believe in Jesus!
Scriptural holiness produces love within us. And people are dying to be loved. Yes, they look for it in the wrong places, but when they find real love… they want it. They want to be where they find it. They want to be around people who give it to them!
Let our church’s evangelism start there… with love.
Perhaps you remember what our critics in the former denomination were saying a few years ago about Methodists like us… They said, “Yes, you believe the Bible… Fine, fine… but you’re problem is, you don’t love people enough.”
Remember?
So here’s my question… Were they right?
Because we Methodists—I mean, the ones who disaffiliated from the UMC—we’re supposed to believe what Jesus refers to in today’s scripture: that every human being will stand before God in Final Judgment and give an accounting for their life. And unless our sins are forgiven through faith in Christ and his atoning death and resurrection, we will be separated from God for eternity… which is the meaning of hell.
We believe that… Right?
And we believe this difficult truth applies to people we know and love right now… friends, classmates, co-workers, family members… strangers in our community we haven’t met yet… and people around the world within reach of the Global Methodist Church.
Since that’s the case, what’s the most loving thing that we can do?
If we love people… if we truly love them… won’t we love them enough to do all that we can to rescue them from hell? Surely that will be our most urgent, overriding passion… as a church… as individuals.
So let’s prove our critics wrong… Let’s “bust that myth” which says that we in the Global Methodist Church don’t love our neighbors enough to do all we can to rescue them from hell… to offer them eternal life… and the treasure they find in Christ alone… as he sanctifies them and makes them holy.
Amen.
[1] Luke 16:13 ESV
[2] Proverbs 30:8-9 ESV
[3] Clay Risen, “Ole Anthony, Scourge of Televangelists, Dies at 82,” nytimes.com, 27 April 2021. Accessed 12 November 2021.
[4] Burkhard Bilger, “God Doesn’t Need Ole Anthony,” New Yorker, 28 November 2004.