Four o’clock in the morning. You know the hour. The
house is quiet. Everyone else is fast asleep. And your
body can’t rest because your mind is racing.
The diagnosis. The bills. The conversation you have
been avoiding. The decision you must make. The child
who isn’t calling you back. The parent who is failing
fast. The career that is coming to an end. The news you
can’t stop checking even though it never makes you
feel better.
At 4 AM, every fear comes alive. At 4 AM, the shadows
lengthen, and the unease that you push back all day
finally finds its voice. It asks questions you cannot
answer: What happens if it all falls apart? What if it’s
never enough? What if I’m getting it all wrong?
The shadow of worry. It sits on your chest. It flashes
from your phone. It wakes you before dawn and follows
you through the day. And it builds.
The man in Jesus’ parable thought he had the answer.
He thought he could overcome worry by accumulation.
And so, he built. He acquired. He prepared. The barns
expanding with his growing fortune.
Someone once asked John D. Rockefeller how much
money is enough. He smiled and said, “Just a little
more.” Mo barns, mo problems. You see, there is never
enough to conquer our worry. The barns will never be
big enough. The future will never be secure enough.
And just when we think we’ve finally done it, life slips
through our fingers.
Listen again to how Jesus tells it. The man in the parable
is giving a soliloquy. That soliloquy lasts sixty words,
and twelve of them are “I” or “my.” I will say to myself.
My crops. My barns. My grain. My goods. The man has
lost the capacity to see any other person. This is not just
greed that Jesus is warning us against. This is a man
whose barns have finally blocked out every person in
his life. The barns get bigger, but the circle of his life
contracts with time. He has everything and loves no
one. And God says, “You fool.”
You fool. All that worrying. You fool. All that planning. All
those barns torn down, making space to level up. None
of it could buy you a single hour of life. You fool.
As the story settles on the ears of his listeners, Jesus
turns to his disciples. He speaks to them directly. He
flips the page with a single word: therefore.
My New Testament professor Charlie Cousar used to
say whenever you see a “therefore” in the Bible, you
must ask yourself, what’s it there for?
Therefore, because those barns will never save you.
Therefore, because your future is held not in human
hands, but in divine hands. Therefore, you are free
to stop pretending you control the future. Therefore,
stop worrying.
Jesus says worry is a kind of worship offered to the
wrong god. Every single hour spent rehearsing worst-
case scenarios. Every white-knuckled attempt to hold
it all in place. That is not just anxiety. It is a liturgy,
praying to a god who can never answer.
Notice the man in the parable does not speak to God.
He speaks to himself. “I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, take
thine ease.’” I have my crops. I have my barn. I have my
future stored away.
Jesus says, “Look at the birds. They have no barns. They
do no sowing or reaping, and God feeds them.”
Jesus says, “Look at the lilies. No needle. No thread. God
clothes them in astounding beauty.”
And I don’t want you to miss this, because it’s not a
Hallmark card. Jesus is asking us to open our eyes to
the truth that if God runs the universe and cares for
the birds and the flowers, then what exactly are you so
worried about?
And then there’s this turn, where it gets harder. Stop
striving for those things. Jesus says, “That’s what the
nations do. Their systems are built on accumulation and
anxiety. But you, you Children of God, don’t have to live
that way.”
I think Jesus is drawing a line. On one side: the kingdom
of built barns. On the other: the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of barn-building says: you are what you
make. Your worth is measured by what you’ve secured.
Your safety depends on what you control.
The kingdom of God says: open your hands. Prepare to
receive a gift.
We know which kingdom we belong to. That’s why
we’re here. But we also have to be honest about how
we live. We have to be honest about what we reach for
first thing in the morning and what keeps us up at night.
We have to be honest about what we are teaching our
children to chase.
We live like barn-builders. I know I do. And it’s not just
us. Look around. We are a nation of barn-builders.
We build our barns out of portfolios and property. We
build our barns out of influence and access. We build
our barns out of our children’s achievements, as if
their résumés could secure our legacy. And now we’re
building all kinds of new barns. Virtual barns where
we can store our identities, where we can house our
outrage, where we can carefully curate our lists of
friends and enemies. Barns to secure our certainty and
ensure our power.
The Christ-less Christianity that wraps the cross around
liturgies of scarcity is barn-building religion. It says:
God helps those who help themselves. It says: you
must protect what you have and destroy the other. It
says: tear down faster, build back bigger, take all you
can get.
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: none of the phrases I just
rehearsed appear in scripture. Not one place.
On the contrary, Jesus is clear. The barn-builder is a
fool. And his religion—no matter how loudly it invokes
the name of Jesus—is just a liturgy of scarcity, endlessly
mistaking fortresses we build for the faith we are given.
I know those fortresses. I know those barns. I’ve built
some. I’m still building them. Usually at 4 o’clock in the
morning. I think David Foster Wallace put it best when
he wrote, “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks
in it.”
What Jesus offers us is not another management
strategy. It is trust. Trust is belief’s courageous cousin.
There is a crucial difference. Believing is about what you
think is true. Trusting is about what you lean on when it
matters most. Belief lives in the mind, but trust takes on
a body.
I might believe in my head that the net will catch me,
but trust is when I leap toward it. I can believe that God
provides. I can give my intellectual assent to the idea
that God will care for me. I can speak those words in
church or in bed at 4 AM But to trust is to put that idea
into action in a way that releases my control.
That’s what Jesus is asking. Not that we believe that
God provides. But that we live as if it’s true.
Friends, the powers of this age want you anxious.
Anxious people are easy to control. Anxious people will
buy more, scroll more, comply more, and never quite get
around to asking whether or not the whole arrangement
is just. Worry is not just a personal struggle. It is a
political tool. And Jesus knew it.
The kingdom of God runs on trust. On abundance. On
the confidence that the one who feeds the ravens has
not forgotten you.
A few years ago, I stood at the edge of the Rio Grande
Gorge in New Mexico on a steel bridge 565 feet above
the canyon floor. I had walked out onto it but then made
the mistake of looking down. That’s when my old fear of
heights came rushing in.
I absolutely froze in place. My knees locked up, and my
heart began to race. The ground far below (565 feet
below) felt like it was pulling me down. Sara was beside
me. She noticed that I had stopped walking. She didn’t
give me a list of the bridge’s safety features. She didn’t
describe the engineering that went into its construction.
She didn’t even explain that there were dozens of
people just ahead of us whose very presence in that
spot proved the bridge would hold. She knew this wasn’t
a question of believing the laws of physics. The issue
was trust.
So, here’s what she did. She kept walking, but as she
did, she reached back for my hand. And I found that if I
focused on her hand and the next step, I could move.
So, one step at a time. Hand in hand. That’s how we
crossed. And that’s why I’m here this morning and not
on a bridge in New Mexico.
I think that’s how trust works. I don’t think we’ve ever
been asked to conquer our worries all at once or all by
ourselves. I think you take the next step. I think you let
go of one anxious thought. I think you walk with wise
ones who know the way.
The next time 4 AM finds you staring at the ceiling,
remember, you don’t have to hold it all. Open your hands.
Jesus ends this teaching with a phrase that I think
is meant to unsettle us. He says to his disciples, “Do
not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good
pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
And maybe you’re thinking, “Finally! The kingdom!”
Finally—we hear that word, and we know what
we want it to mean. It is the ultimate barn. The
permanent security. Forever, finally, enough…and
more. The 4 AM voice silenced for good. The math
finally works in our favor.
That’s the kingdom we’ve been building. That’s the
kingdom we think he’s offering. But, friends, I must
remind you: this is Jesus. He will not give you what you
expect. He only gives you what you need. The kingdom
of God will never be achieved. It can only be received.
I know this because a few chapters later, Jesus sits
down by the temple treasury, and he watches the crowd.
The barn-builders are all there in their finest clothes—
the ones with the portfolios and the safety nets and the
biggest barns of all.
Their offerings are significant and carefully calculated.
The math will still work out in their favor when they
leave. And then comes this widow. She has no barn. No
portfolio. What she has are two copper coins, and she
drops them in. And Jesus stops everything. He says to
his disciples, “If you want to see the kingdom of God,
watch her. Look at that. That is the kingdom of God.”
She was declaring her independence from the kingdom
of worry. That rich fool would stay awake every night
calculating. She went to sleep trusting. She looked at
those two coins, and she opened her hands because
she had something the barn-builder could never find.
Friends, the kingdom of God doesn’t look like more. It
looks like freedom.
You don’t have to tighten your grip. Just open your
hands. Because the kingdom being given to you is
not something you build. It holds your anxious heart.
Trust me. Amen.