Episode Transcript
Or if you turn to Proverbs chapter 15, verse 6, please, Proverbs chapter 15, verse 6, the title of the message tonight is A Wealthy House.
A wealthy house.
Our proverb tonight, of course, deals with the topic of wealth, which is a topic I very much enjoy teaching on.
And people get the wrong idea about wealth, perhaps partly because they misunderstand some of the things Jesus said in the New Testament about rich men going to heaven. or partly because of the covetous preachers that have been exposed over the years on television networks.
But I want to remind you that wealth is encouraged in the Bible, Old and New Testament.
In fact, God wants everyone to be wealthy.
But the poorest people of all, we have to understand, are not those with a small bank account.
The poorest people are those who don't know what true wealth is.
In tonight's proverb, I want you to see that true wealth is found Look at the first three words, in the house.
In the house.
If you have a family who loves the Lord, And who loves you, you are a wealthy person.
That's all there is to it.
If you have a family who loves the Lord, And loves you, then you are a wealthy person, assuming you love the Lord, right?
You can put all the wealth in the bank you want to, but if you don't have wealth in the house, then you're not a wealthy person.
The most miserable people of all are those with trouble in the home.
I was speaking to a man last week who had trouble in his house.
And he said, he said, I should be able to come home and escape the cares of the world.
But instead he comes home to trouble and he's frustrated.
There are people in this world who are rich.
And they'd give all the money they have if they could just fix their family.
They would.
I remember when I was an investigator, I was hunting a fugitive.
He'd cut his ankle monitor off and fled.
And I tracked him down.
He was living in a mansion.
When I say a mansion, I mean a mansion, a begging.
And I drove by and I thought, wow, what a house!
Huge.
And I got somebody to get me in on the inside.
And they rode in there with me.
We pulled up to that gate house way back on an estate. winding curvy road.
We pulled up there and I hit the button on that gate and to come on the speaker.
I just laid it laid back in my truck and Let that person speak and say, It's me, you know.
Oh, that gate opens up like that.
And I walked inside that house.
To arrest this guy.
And while I was in there, I could hear the owner of the home.
The owner didn't know I was there.
He was somewhere else in that house, but I could hear him.
You know what he was saying?
He was complaining about the family.
Oh, every time I see y'all, y'all want money.
Oh, you want money.
There's trouble in that home.
Kid's taking his money, and then I took his kid.
And before you know it, they're having to sell that house.
He's having to move out of it.
Wealth starts in the home.
And this is why we should focus on storing the majority of our wealth, not in a bank, but in the house we live in.
Many people make the mistake of chasing something else in life.
A lot of women do.
They make the mistake of chasing something else in life, and they should be chasing their kids around the house.
Should be taking care of their kids, investing in them, instead of investing in a career.
Many people make the mistake of making money when they should be making memories with their family.
And listen, making money is important.
But we must remember who we're making it for.
And that's why true wealth is found in the house, and it's found in the house.
Look back in your text, of the righteous.
Of the righteous.
Righteous people, meaning people who accumulate the right kind of wealth.
The right way.
They accumulate the right righteous, the right kind of wealth the right way.
There's a direct correlation.
Between righteousness and treasure.
You see that here.
In the house of the righteous, you'll see is much treasure.
So there's a direct correlation between righteousness and treasure And the Hebrew word for treasure here means to hoard up, if you're taking notes.
To hoard up.
Y'all ever watched the episode of Hoarders?
Do they have that on anymore?
I don't know.
My goodness, some of these people can really hoard up.
But the treasure here means to hoard up.
In other words, it means wealth.
That is hoarded up.
Literally, literally, the word means compact.
Like if you have a trash compactor. or you're pushing stuff together.
That's the idea of wealth here, that you're taking wealth and you're stacking it.
Shoving it and compressing it together to make as much room as possible because you got so much of it.
That's the kind of treasure in the house of the righteous says here, is much.
Treasure.
So if treasure is hoarded up, then what does that tell us?
It tells us this type of treasure is not something is spent.
It's not something you consume.
It's something you hoard up.
This is not A consumable item.
It's something you hoard up, or as Jesus put it, it's something you lay up.
Right?
Luke chapter 12, verses 15 through 21.
And he said unto them, Take heed and beware of covetousness, for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.
And you think, well, I thought it was hoarded up.
Remember, the right kind of treasure the right way.
Watch what happens here.
And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain Rich man.
Now watch that.
The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully.
And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do?
Excuse me, because I'm so sorry, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits.
And he said, This will I do.
I will pour down my barns and build greater, and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods.
And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years.
Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.
But God said unto him, Thou fool!
This night thy soul shall be required of thee.
Then whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?
Jesus said, so is he that layeth up treasure for himself and is, watch these two words, not rich.
Not rich toward God.
In Luke 12:16, Jesus called him a rich man.
And then in verse 21, he says that man is not rich.
Which is true.
They're both true.
In verse 18, Jesus explained that the man was rich in earthly fruits and goods.
So he was rich in fruits and goods.
But you know what happens to fruits and goods?
They perish.
They're perishable.
So he's rich in fruits and goods, but he's not rich in those spiritual things of God.
So in the earthly aspect, he's rich.
In the spiritual aspect, he's not rich.
In the temporary aspect, he's rich, like Esau.
In the eternal aspect, he's not rich, like Jacob.
So this rich man laid up his earthly treasure, but he couldn't keep it because he lost it when he died.
The house of the righteous, on the other hand, is a sure house.
You see, every man's house here on earth, when he dies, Physically speaking, earthly speaking, he in his house, that is his offspring, his physical offspring, they will die.
They'll perish out of the land.
Because everything begotten of Adam perishes.
So an earthly house passes away, no matter whose house it is.
You can be the most wealthy, most powerful man on earth, and that house passes away.
It makes me think of the Kennedy clan.
Remember the Kennedys?
He had Kennedys in the White House, Kennedys in the People's House.
He had Kennedys everywhere.
They were ruling.
And guess what?
They all start dying off.
Yet dynasties throughout the centuries, they've all died off.
But the house of the righteous is a sure house, which means the progenitor.
And his offspring never die out.
The house, the seed, never dies off.
And that's what the house of the righteous is.
So Our house as believers in Jesus Christ and our offspring, those who believe on Christ on account of our testimony.
That's our offspring.
If you'll read back in the scripture, the Apostle Paul speaks of those whom he has begotten in the gospel.
And so that's Paul's spiritual house.
We have a spiritual house.
When we work together as a church to witness to the lost, and we've been praying for this.
This Jew to come to faith, and we hear how God's brought him to faith in Christ, his testimony of his faith in Jesus, that's part of our offspring.
And you know what?
That's a sure house.
It never dies.
The house of Jesus Christ is our house.
We are children in his house.
The Apostle Paul talks about servants in the house.
He talks about sons in the house.
And he says that we are sons in God's house.
So our house is a sure house.
Listen to what Abigail, not this Abigail, but listen to what the biblical Abigail told.
David, who ended up being King David in 1 Samuel 25, 28.
1 Samuel 25, 28.
She said, I pray thee, forgive the trespass of thine handmaid, for the Lord will certainly make my Lord, talking about David, a sure house.
A sure house.
Now, why is she saying a sure house?
Because every other house is not sure.
If there's a sure house, that means you got a bunch of unsure houses.
He says, Well, make my Lord a surehouse, because my Lord fighteth the battles of the Lord.
And evil hath not been found in thee all thy days.
David's house.
Is a sure house because those who belong to his house shall endure forever.
And we know David's house is the house of Christ, who was a descendant of David.
Who came before David, right?
And the Bible says in Psalm 89, 29, speaking of David's house.
Which is Jesus' house, 89, 29.
His seed also will I make to endure forever.
In his throne as the days of heaven.
We are Jesus' seed.
Jesus was David's seed.
According to the flesh, David was Jesus' seed according to the Spirit, and we are Jesus' seed according to the Spirit.
And he says, That seed endures forever.
We're a sure house.
So, the conclusion is: the treasure that you need is wealth that you cannot lose.
The treasure True treasure is wealth that you cannot lose.
Jesus said in Matthew 6:19 through 20, Lay not, there's that laying up, that hoarding up, lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth. where moth and rust and dust corrupt and where thieves break through and steal.
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not, and for that matter cannot, break through nor steal.
So, in the house of the righteous, there's much treasure.
We've been heaping up treasure The church has been heaping up treasure in the house of God for years and years and years.
And you know what?
In our house, as Christian families, let me tell you something.
There's nothing more peaceful.
Nothing more beautiful, nothing more wonderful for me to have a wife that loves the Lord as much as I do.
It is absolutely wonderful.
It's a piece of heaven on earth.
And it's peace in the home.
And it's joy in the home.
It's treasure in the home.
And we need to focus.
On our families and getting them to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Unfortunately, that's a choice that only they can make.
We're helpless in some aspect, but we're not hopeless because we have the gospel.
And the gospel is powerful.
And the gospel can wait.
And God can be patient unto the right time.
Oh, Matthew was sitting at the receipt of custom.
And you know what?
I don't know how long he worked there doing that as some crooked. tax collector.
But you know what?
There was a day when Matthew found Jesus.
Ozacchaeus was crooked.
But Jesus found him at the appointed time.
There was a time when Jesus called me, a time when Jesus called you, and what we need to do as parents as grandparents is for our physical house is to pray that our physical seed will ultimately become spiritual seed.
They'll belong to a sure house.
But what we need to do as individuals is recognize that we belong to two houses.
We belong to our domestic house here on earth.
That's surely going to pass away.
We belong to our spiritual house in Jesus.
That's surely going to endure forever.
And so, what we have to do is make sure.
That we are laying up the right treasures for the right reasons in the right house.
There are only two types of wealth.
The type you must lose and the type that you cannot lose.
And if you have treasure.
You must lose, then it's really not treasure at all, right?
Notice the word much treasure before we move on from this.
Not just treasure, but much treasure.
God wants us, since it's much treasure, it means you can keep adding to it.
It's not just your allotment of treasure.
You can have a superabundance of it.
And that means that God wants you to have an abundance of Eternal wealth.
He wants you to continue laying up treasures for yourself as long as you're here on earth.
Listen, we can serve Jesus and we should serve Jesus and store up wealth. until the day we die.
It doesn't matter how old you are.
It doesn't matter what your physical condition is.
I love how Brother Neal loves to witness to people at that nursing home.
It's such a witness to me.
Ms.
Hensley, what a witness she was to me.
Every nurse that waited on Miss Hensley.
Had the testimony that she loved the Lord.
And they'd go in there and find her reading her Bible and she'd be asking me to bring her more tracks so she could pass out of those people.
That woman died in the saddle for Jesus.
She laid up treasure until the very end.
And when she looked the poorest, that was when she was the richest.
And that's the way we need to be.
Much treasure is in the house of the righteous now as we close this last part of the proverb, but in the revenues of the wicked is trouble.
You notice the difference here?
The righteous has treasure, the wicked has revenues.
We know all about wicked revenues.
Have you ever heard of the Internal Revenue Service?
Man, all kinds of wicked money goes in there, right?
I mean, money from casinos go in there.
Money from right now marijuana cells go in there now.
Tax you for anything.
They don't care.
And all kinds.
Liquor stores send their revenue in there, all kinds of wicked revenue goes in there, but it's revenue.
See, revenue is different than treasure.
Treasure, as we just learned, it's something we hoard up.
But you know the Hebrew word for revenue, do you know what it literally means when you look at it in a Hebrew dictionary?
It means two things: it means to come and to go.
Isn't that something?
To come and go.
And that's exactly what earthly money does.
It comes and it goes.
And we can all testify to that.
We can also say it has a way of going quicker than it does Coming, doesn't it?
We have income, but then that income goes out, we pay the bills, or even if we have it in the bank when we die, it surely goes away from us.
Wicked people can make a lot of money, some of them do.
But they cannot store up true wealth because they're not righteous.
They don't know true wealth.
They can have a lot of income.
But as we've learned before, they aren't earning the right kind of wealth.
And now getting away from the spiritual and the carnal wealth, the temporary and the eternal.
Let's just look at temporary wealth for a moment.
Because we all have to have it, right?
So this applies as well.
We all have to have it.
It applies to people who don't Earn earthly wealth the right way.
Unrighteous gain, such as through fraud or foolishness.
Boy, I tell you, you've seen the headlines lately?
Was it, I think, over a billion dollars they found in fraud.
They cut off.
I think it was Medicaid fraud, Brother Shepherd, is that right?
Some of it was Medicaid.
Some of it, I think, was Social Security. where they've been sending out millions to dead people, and they found that and they cut that off.
Fraud.
Good money.
Earned the wrong way, earned a bad way.
And that happens all the time.
And then the revenues of wicked is trouble.
You know, wicked people, they have trouble and they have stress when it comes to money.
They do.
They have trouble and stress making money.
They have trouble and stress trying to keep money.
You think of all those mobsters back in the day, they'd make all this money, then they'd have to shoot somebody who was competing with them, then they'd be getting shot at.
In the revenues of the wicked, there's trouble.
Proverbs 13, 11 says, Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished.
But he that gathereth by labor shall increase.
We'll read that again.
Wealth gotten by vanity, that means by an unrighteous means.
Vanity meaning you serve no moral purpose.
You gave no moral good or service in order to get that money in return.
Wealth gotten by vanity.
It says, here shall be diminished, but he that gathereth by labor shall increase.
You may put that in a good modern-day term.
I'll give you the Fulton translation: easy come, easy go.
That's it.
And that's why a lot of people who get a mailbox check who don't work for it, the reason Communism and socialism is so popular right now is because we have raised a generation of lazy, good-for-nothing people.
Lazy.
My wife and I were talking this morning.
When I was a kid, I remember being in school, and as old, as soon as you were old enough. to get a job, fifteen, sixteen years old.
As soon as a boy was old enough to get a job, it was a sign of manhood in my high school.
Wonder if you, Brother Shepherd, you got a job.
What was your first job?
Target in local text.
Target?
All right.
And I worked for my dad growing up.
Boys were hauling hay.
They were pitching melons, moving furniture.
One of the guys I went to school with, he went and worked at a feed store during the summer.
But boy, we was. .
We weren't complaining.
We were bragging about our jobs.
And we're grown men.
Look at us.
We're working.
And then when you get paid for that work, The dollar, then, that you earned, it means something.
You know what it means?
It represents the labor that you performed.
It represents the service that you performed.
It represents the product that you provided.
Now, if somebody just gives me money, it doesn't represent anything.
It's vanity.
When you look at a group of people and you say, you know what?
They don't have money, so we need to take money from all the people who do, and let's just give it to them.
Suddenly, the money has lost its value.
It's lost its meaning.
And wealth gotten by value, by vanity, is diminished.
Easy come, easy go.
If you I remember when I was a little boy.
I had worked so hard to scrape together change.
I had a little pocketbook, like a little old woman would have.
I was a little boy.
And it was a little pocketbook and you twisted it like that and it opened up.
And I had managed, from whatever means, to save up a whole dollar.
It was in pennies, dimes, nickels, and I may have had a quarter in there.
I don't know if I had a quarter.
And when I got a whole dollar in there, and it was just a bag of coins.
I was so proud of myself.
And I didn't have a bill fold, but I'd take that bag and I'd stick it in my pocket and I'd walk around with that.
Hear it do that as I walked, ching, ching.
And one day, I was in the mall in Tyler back when that was a thing.
And again, I was a little boy, and there was a young woman in there, and she was selling helium balloons on a string.
She had a big stack of them, she's talking to her boyfriend in there.
And I'd never had a helium balloon before.
All my balloons We're carbon dioxide.
You let go of them, they just fall down.
And I saw that helium bloom just like on television.
I thought, look at that.
I've got to have a helium balloon.
So I went up there and I asked her how much the helium balloons were, and I think it was 50 cents, if I remember right.
Boy, I pulled that, pulled it, and I counted it and I counted and I counted and I scraped it together.
And I gave her 50 cents for that.
She gave me the balloon.
I walked away.
I got about halfway down the mall.
And it dawned on me, I don't have a dollar anymore.
And then I started thinking about all the time it took me to save that dollar.
And how I just quickly gave it away for this thing on the string.
So I marched myself all the way back over there and I said, Here, I want my 50 cents back.
I don't have a dollar anymore.
And you know what?
She wouldn't take it.
She kept my fifty cents and I was stuck with that balloon.
But you know what?
Old Richard walked away with a a balloon and a very good lesson.
Because that money meant something to me for what it took to store it up.
Wealth gotten by vanity is diminished.
And so in the house of the wicked, there's trouble.
Because they didn't earn it righteously.
They got to look over the shoulder.
You think of all the people right now that's ripped the government off.
Through fraud, now knowing the government is investigating them.
Now, knowing that they could be required to get that back.
And you know what?
That wealth gotten by vanity is causing turmoil in their hearts.
You know what I can do?
Do you know what y'all can probably do?
I'm sure.
I can go lay my head on the bed tonight.
And I can show where I earned every penny that I've got in that bank.
I work for it.
The good Lord provided it, yes.
But I didn't get it by fraud.
I didn't get it by deceit.
I didn't get it by any kind of dishonest or disrespectful means.
Wealth gathered by labor, it increases over time because you cherish the work you put into it and you know what it takes to earn it.
And because you worked so hard for it, you're going to hang on to it and you're going to be wiser.
If it just flopped in your lap, easy come, easy go.
Either the law is going to take it from you, or someone else is going to take it from you as soon as somebody knows you run into a bunch of money, everybody wants a little piece of it.
Or their own mismanagement will take it from them.
There were two rich men I was thinking of when I was writing these sermon notes: Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
And both of these men with all that wealth are continually inundated with lawsuits. continually.
Everybody wants a little piece of what they got.
And they're going to find some angle to try to get a piece of it.
And so here are the wealthy who've hoarded up all this earthly wealth.
And they're constantly fighting in court, trying to keep people from getting what they've sell-toard up.
That's trouble I don't want.
I don't need that kind of trouble.
Business Insider said Elon Musk spends a lot of time and money on lawsuits.
One news source I read said he was a magnet for personal lawsuits.
Donald Trump, he's fought so many lawsuits in court, but when you have money, you have greedy little hands.
This brings trouble to the man who possesses that wealth.
And the good thing is.
People may sue and get my earthly treasure, but no one can take my heavenly treasure.
Father, we thank you so much.
For counting us as part of the house of the righteous, being born again by faith in Jesus Christ as sons in your house.
Thank you, Lord, that in your house there is much treasure.
Thank you that you've laid up for us, Lord, a wonderful inheritance.
And you've taught us to lay up for ourselves treasure, Lord, as well.
That we, Father God, will be busy serving the Lord Jesus Christ, earning eternal rewards.
And Father, rewards that we don't have to fret over.
We don't have to worry about someone taking them away.
We don't have to worry about losing them.
Father, they're stored up for us forever.
We thank you so much.
In Jesus' precious name, help us to lay up the right treasure.
And as far as earthly treasure is concerned, help us to lay it up the right way.
In Jesus' precious name, amen.
