"And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: and he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull 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? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God." I count with confidence on your interest in this sermon. You will be interested, in the first place, because the picture that our Lord has given us in this wonderful story is the picture of a real man. This farmer is no wax figure. He is no bloodless nonentity. He is altogether human stuff. And we are interested in real folks. Then we are interested in this man, in the second place, because he is successful. We are naturally interested in the people who make good. If you go out on the street to-morrow and start to tell your friends how you failed, the chances are that they will turn their backs upon you to listen to the man, with triumph in his face and victory in his voice, who is telling how he succeeded. We are great success worshippers. And the man who wins the prizes of life interests us very keenly. But there is a shock for us in the story. The Master calls our shrewd hero a fool. "Thou fool." That is a harsh and jarring word. It insults us. It shakes its fist in our faces. It cuts us like a whip. It offends us. We do not like the ugly name in the least. "Thou fool." Our Master frowns upon our using such language at all. He will not trust us with such a sharp sword. He will not suffer us to hurl such a thunderbolt. He forbids us, under a terrible penalty, to call our brother a fool. And yet He calls this keen and successful farmer a fool. And He doesn't do so lightly and flippantly, but there seems to ring through it scorn and indignation--positive anger, anger that is all the more terrible because it is the anger of love. Why did the Master call this man a fool? He did not get the idea from the man himself. This well-to-do farmer would never have spoken of himself in that way. He regarded himself as altogether fit and mentally well furnished. Nor did the Master get His idea from the man's neighbors. They looked upon this man with admiration. There may have been a bit of envy mingled with their admiration, but they certainly did not regard him as a fool. They no more did so than we regard the man that is like him as a fool to-day.