Luke 16:22-23 “The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side.”

Heaven is not a reward for work performed. If it were, how could Lazarus have possibly made it? He was a beggar, not a philanthropist. He had no great fortune from which to contribute to medical research or famine relief. He was disabled. He couldn’t build houses for Habitat for Humanity. He didn’t volunteer at the local soup kitchen. His open sores would have disqualified him.

In life Lazarus was good for one thing. He could sit and beg. He could take gifts from others. I can hear others suggesting that he was a parasite on society, and that his death did the world a favor. But that is the blindness of unbelief talking.

Before Martin Luther went to see Jesus, the last words he said were, “We are all beggars, this is true.” Like Lazarus, we are beggars, if we want to see things clearly. Any gift, any talent, any discipline, any work-ethic I might have now, any success I might enjoy, are all gifts God has given me purely out of his goodness, not because I earned or deserved it.

The love God has shown me, the forgiveness he has extended for all my sins, the sacrifice he was willing to make when he sent Jesus to be crucified in my place for the crimes I have committed–this is all pure charity on his part. I didn’t contribute even a little to the grace he has given me. All was a gift. Like Lazarus, my place in heaven, our place in heaven, has been assured and secured by the God who is our help.

We can look forward to the day when the angels will come and carry us to be reunited with our fathers in faith. But not because we have earned it. Jesus teaches us that God gives heaven to beggars who know that they are beggars, and nothing more; not to beggars posing as rich men who think that even heaven can be bought for a price. “We are all beggars.” Thank God this is true.

Luke 16:19-21“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.”

Jesus paints a picture of two men. Can you tell which man was rich and which man was poor? Can you see which man was living in God’s blessing and which man was not? That seems easy, we might think. Doesn’t everyone want the first man’s life? Money, nice clothes, a life of luxury–that’s what sells lottery tickets, isn’t it? That’s why kids think they want to grow up to be celebrities. From all appearances, it looks like God was smiling on the first man Jesus introduces.

And notice that Jesus doesn’t say the man did anything particularly wrong. He didn’t make his millions as a mafia crime boss. He didn’t pay his workers slave-labor wages to line his own pockets. He didn’t get rich from fraudulent government contracts, charging the Pentagon a thousand dollars for a toilet seat or two hundred dollars for a hammer. He was just rich, that’s all. And he enjoyed it, just like we expect a rich person to do. It’s what we would do if we had the money.

There is just one hint of something missing in his life. At the entrance to his estate there was often a beggar sitting. The rich man hardly noticed him. The beggar was “longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table.” But the implication is that the beggar didn’t even get that from him. The beggar might have been happy to eat some of the food the rich man threw in the trash, but the rich man didn’t think to give the beggar his leftovers. The rich man didn’t abuse the beggar or mock the beggar. But his heart was empty, or we might say it was full only of himself, so he didn’t consider the beggar. The rich man lacked love. And love is the product of faith. And without faith it is impossible to please God, the book of Hebrews tells us, no matter how much it might look like God is smiling on our lives. But the rich man couldn’t see it, and neither can much of the world in which we live, because unbelief makes us blind to such things.

The rich man was just “a rich man.” The poor man had a name. He was known to God. His name was Lazarus, which means “God is my help.” One look at his life could drive us all to our knees praying that we don’t end up like this. Lazarus was a cripple. Someone had to carry him to the rich man’s gate and lay him down there. Lazarus was starving. The food the rich man threw away would have been an upgrade to his diet. Lazarus was sick and alone. The dogs came and licked his sores, and remember that for the Jews, dogs were disgusting, unclean vermin like rats or insects. Things couldn’t get much worse for Lazarus, humanly speaking, and there was no chance, short of a miracle, that it was going to get any better.

So you see why Lazarus is the more blessed of the two men in Jesus’ story? No? It is not because his poverty was a virtue any more than the rich man’s wealth was a vice. Those are just conditions by which a blind and unbelieving world draws all kinds of false conclusions. It becomes clearer in the second part of Jesus’ parable, but Lazarus was clearly the richer of the two men because, as his name suggests, God was his help. In spite of all the misery and hardship in his life, he clung to God in faith. He didn’t curse God for his condition. He didn’t abandon God when it didn’t change. He trusted him until the very end. Eternally, that makes all the difference.

Do you hear Jesus warning? Most of us find ourselves in the middle between these two men–not so rich, not so poor. On any given day our current condition may lean more towards wealth or more towards poverty, more towards success or more towards failure, more towards health or more towards sickness, more towards happiness or more towards depression and disappointment. These things are not the measures of our lives. They are certainly not the measure of where we stand with God. God is our help, too. The One who tells this parable is the great proof of that. You can trust him in the present. You can trust him for eternity.

Revelation 3:8 “I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.”

Success for Jesus is more than a matter of numbers. Many years ago I heard a missions administrator remind the pastors at a conference that when the board is interested in the numbers of people with whom we share the gospel, and the numbers of people who join our churches, they aren’t just looking for an excuse to take pride in good statistics. Behind every number there is a person, a soul. Someone is hearing about his Savior and believing in him. That is a matter of great importance and a reason for great joy.

We can’t make people listen to us. We can only offer to tell them. And we can’t make people believe. We can only share the faith-giving message. The rest is up to Jesus.

What Jesus asks us to do, with his help, is keep his word. We can preserve the content of its message among us so that it can do its faith-giving work. We can believe it for ourselves. We can conform our lives to it and let it shape the way we live. We can do this in a world that considers us strange, or worse, for fussing so much about holding on to an ancient book and its archaic teachings.

In spite of their criticism or skepticism, it is just that book and those teachings where we have met our God. There we found his forgiving love. If we hold on to it, if we keep it, then we will be a successful church in spite of the challenging times in which we live.

I still like to watch It’s A Wonderful Life at Christmas time. George Bailey so struggled to measure his life’s success. Do you remember how the movie ends? In the front cover of a copy of Tom Sawyer, Clarence the angel has written George a note: “Remember no man is a failure who has friends.”

Friends may be a better measure of success than money. But only one friend can bring us spiritual success. He is the Savior whose gospel opens heaven’s door. His strength covers our weakness. Keep holding to his word.

Revelation 3:8 “I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.”

“Little strength” doesn’t sound positive. Was Jesus commenting on the numbers of people who belonged to this congregation? I know something about churches without very many people. I pastor a little mission church of about 50 people. Another pastor described how hard it can be for a start-up church to get past the “kook” stage. Until you have more than thirty people in worship, the whole thing feels a little “kooky” to the visitors. When you’re so small, they might not be inclined to come back.

Is Jesus talking about the congregation’s finances? Were they poor? I know something about churches that can’t support themselves. When my congregation began, it received over half of its operating funds from our denomination’s mission board. We were living on a kind of church welfare.

Ten years ago my wife and I visited Rome, Italy. We walked into churches that looked rather humble on the outside. But once through the door there was gold mosaic, marble statuary, and paintings by great artists that must have been worth millions of dollars. It seemed that every street corner had a church like this on it. Compared to that, we may think we have “little strength.”

Was Jesus referring to the condition of the people in the congregation? If we are honest, we must admit that we are spiritually broken. We have made messes of our lives. They must be grave disappointments to God in many ways. We are sin-sick. We are weak. We have little strength.

But as believers, we aren’t dead. There is a little life, a little strength in us. In the letter immediately preceding this one, the letter to the church in Sardis, Jesus had John write, “I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.” “A little strength” is better than being dead. Where there is life, there is hope.

It is a matter of our Savior’s grace that he has preserved our faith and maintained a little strength among us. As long as we remember that this is our condition, it can even be a great blessing. We in our little churches aren’t the most impressive people in the world. We have nothing to boast about.

But do you remember what the Apostle Paul once said about the weakness he described as his “thorn in the flesh”? “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me…for when I am weak, then I am strong.” If we will remember our weak position and continue to rely on our Savior for strength, there is no limit to the good things he can do for us. Isn’t that why Jesus told us, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you”?  

Our faith may be so small, but the Savior we trust is so big, that even a little strength is reason for optimism in the churches we call home today.