Living Like an Atheist: A Practical Key to Wise Decisions

The man sat down to think through his options.

It had been a good year — an unexpectedly good year. His fields had produced more than he had planned for, more than his current storage could hold. So he did what any reasonable person would do. He ran the numbers. He laid out his choices. And he came to a perfectly sensible decision: tear down the old barns, build bigger ones, and then, take it easy.

It was a practical decision. There is no obvious moral failure in financial growth, or in making the most of a good harvest. In fact, this is the same kind of decision that gets made at kitchen tables and in financial planning offices today. He had worked hard, and he was planning for the future.

But God called him a fool.

Not a sinner. A fool. Here’s the story.

“The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” ’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.” (Luke 12:16–21, ESV).

I’ve been teaching a series on the Stories Jesus Told. And I admit, I had to read this parable again slowly — because at first I couldn’t spot what the man did wrong.

But there was a problem. Jesus was pointing directly at it. And it’s a problem that may be more familiar to you than it looks.

WHAT THE STORY REVEALS

I don’t always point to the original Greek language when writing about a passage, but this word is worth a moment. The Greek word is aphron — which is not the common word for foolishness or moral failure, but a more precise one. It describes a person who has lost the capacity for God-fearing judgment — someone whose reasoning works fine, but whose reasoning no longer includes God as a factor. It is a person who makes decisions as if God is not present.

When I read the story, it stood out to me that the man never speaks to anyone but himself. Every word of his deliberation is self-addressed. He consults no one — not a neighbor, not a trusted advisor. And he certainly never consults God. It wasn’t that God was the last person he thought to ask. God never came up.

And Jesus calls him a fool.

He believed in God — the story never suggests otherwise. But for all practical purposes, God is absent when he makes major decisions.

That stopped me. Is it possible to genuinely believe in God — to say you believe, and to mean it — yet still live, in practice, the way an atheist does?

The thought bothered me.

And it raises a more uncomfortable question: what if this man’s mindset wasn’t a new condition?

WHAT THE BARNS REVEAL

The parable moves fast — almost uncomfortably fast. The structure of this story is different than other parables. Scholars have noted that there is no description of a gradual moral decline.

The plot points land in rapid fire. A man has a great harvest. He makes a plan. He imagines his retirement. God calls him a fool. Then he dies.

There is no middle act. No gradual turning away. And the compressed structure is deliberate. Jesus was pointing to the fact that the condition was already present in the man.

In the Ancient Near East, full harvests and bulging barns are considered to be blessings of approval from God. Jesus leaves no room for the conclusion that it was the wealth that corrupted him.

The wealth revealed him.

I have often said nobody knows when they cross the line into drunkenness. You don’t know which drink will be the one that moves you from sober to intoxicated. But it is also true that no one ever gets drunk accidentally. When there is a failure to guard against it, a pattern of reaching for the bottle when something better is available, drunkenness is not an accident. It is an internal condition being revealed.

The rich man’s internal monologue — every word self-addressed, none of it directed toward God — was not a new habit that formed under pressure. It was what was already there. It just became visible when his fields produced wealth.

The bigger barns were not the problem. They were the evidence of his condition.

WHAT YOUR LIFE REVEALS

So let me make plain what I’m warning about. The rich man’s barns were the disclosure of what was in his heart. Though he believed in God, he lived and made his decisions as if there was no God.

That same Greek word shows up in the Greek translation of Psalm 14:1: “the fool (aphron) has said in his heart there is no God.”

Think about the decisions you make that shape your life. Career choices. Relationships. Family. Money. The direction of your time and your energy. If God is practically absent from your decision-making process, the question is not whether you believe in God — it is whether that belief makes a difference when it matters.

The mind may acknowledge God is real, but the heart reveals whether He is present in your daily life. For many people who genuinely believe in God, who attend church, who would affirm every line of the Apostles’ Creed without hesitation — there are whole categories of decision-making where God is simply not consulted. The internal monologue runs its course. Decisions get made. And God is missing.

Does the way you make decisions reflect that you believe in God? When the harvest comes — when the opportunity arrives, when the relationship shifts, when the career decision lands on the table — is God a factor in your thinking?

You would likely say you believe in God. But if He is never included when you make weighty decisions in life, you are living as a functioning atheist.