A man took his seat in the theater, but he was too far from the stage. He whispered to the usher, "This play is a mystery, and I like this type of play so much I really watching them close up so I can catch all of the dialogue. If you’ll get me a better seat I’ll give you a handsome tip."
So, the usher moved him into the second row, and the man quietly handed him with a quarter.
The usher looks at his tip for a second… and then leaned over and whispered in the man’s ear: "The wife did it."
APPLY: There’s something about that joke that makes us say: “alright.” The usher may have been ripped off but he got his revenge in a cunning, clever… one might even say shrewd way.
I. We live in a world that often understands and appreciates shrewdness and cunning in others. In fact, many movies and plays have clever plot twists where their heroes or heroines do some shrewd thing to thwart evil – and the audience applauds. Shrewdness is considered a valuable skill.
But here in Luke 16 we have a parable where Jesus tells us about a shrewd manager… and something inside of us seems to rebel. How can we be enthralled by a cunning, dishonest manager who basically rips off his employer AND THEN (as Jesus tells us) ends up being commended for his actions?
The story starts out with a steward mismanaging his master’s money. AND when it becomes obvious he’s going to lose his job, he cheats his employer even further by collecting outstanding debts of others… BUT only partially.
One man owes 800 gallons of olive oil. The dishonest manager tells the debtor to reduce his bill to 400 gallons. And then I suspect he quietly told the man "Make sure you remember who did this for you.”
Another man owes 1000 bushels of wheat and the steward has him reduce the bill to 800. Once again you can sense the reminder "Make sure you remember who did this for you."
He does all this to make friends so that when he loses his job, he’ll have a place to live when he gets fired by his present master.
Most preachers (including me) would rather NOT preach this text. In fact, it makes many people so uncomfortable, that they try to rework the story.
1. One commentator I read suggested that the master had been dishonest – and that this manager was simply behaving like his employer. That was somehow supposed to excuse this man’s behavior.
2. Others whom I read implied that the story of the dishonest steward was simply Jesus’ way of saying: even a bad man can be a good example. (In this case, an example of what not to do!)
II. But, I think there’s a 3rd possibility here. I believe when Jesus told the story of the dishonest steward he had somebody special in mind. At the end of His story we see that Jesus has hit his mark. “The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus.” (Luke 16:14).
Why were the Pharisees sneering? Jesus said it was because they "loved money."
I believe initially the Pharisees would have loved this story. This "dishonest manager" was their kind of man - a survivalist. He was the type of man who would do whatever was necessary to survive, to get ahead.
ILLUS: Last year there was a popular TV show called "Survivor." I personally didn’t watch it, but I recall that when the victor finally emerged there was much talk about the strategy the winner used to manipulate the other players off the island. Some were appalled at his deviousness, but others were impressed. Likewise, these Pharisees were impressed.
These Pharisees had fallen into the same mindset Paul condemned. They were: “men of corrupt mind, who have been robbed of the truth and who think that godliness is a means to financial gain” (1 Timothy 6:5).
We must remember that these Pharisees were the rule makers who had used creative bookkeeping to deprive their parents of any support in their old age by declaring anything they’d have given to their parents as “a gift to God” – which of course they kept for selves (Mark 7:10-12). So, at 1st (as they hear this story) it sounds to them like a story of a man they’d admire.
III. Jesus sets up the Pharisees with this parable... and then He reels them in.
Knowing that the Pharisees were secretly commending dishonest steward for his sound business practices Jesus twists them on the line a little: "Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much." Luke 16:10
That must have hurt - but wait – He’s not done yet.
“So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches?” Luke 16:11. In other words, God had no respect for dishonest people.
In fact, Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 “Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor THIEVES nor the GREEDY nor drunkards nor slanderers nor SWINDLERS will inherit the kingdom of God."
For the worldly minded Pharisees, that must have hit home. Apparently they’d never thought about things in that way.
BUT THEN Jesus delivers the final blow:
Luke 16:13 "No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money."
That was the remark that made them sneer. For this was the issue that lay at the heart of the Pharisees’ callousness. The Pharisees had successfully compartmentalized their lives - God was over here, and their worldly pursuit of wealth was over there. And the two never crossed paths.
You have to realize, the Pharisees hadn’t just woke up one morning and said: “HEY, I’m going to think of money as more valuable than God.” I think this mindset kind of snuck up on them.
Money is important. You’ve got to pay your bills, take care of the kids. You need to supply for your retirement, sock a little away for vacations and a little for “mad money.” There’s a lot of things in this world you can’t do without money.
BUT the Pharisees had gotten into some spiritual bad habits… and these bad habits would end up depriving them of “true riches” that only God could supply. (Luke 16:11)
What could they have done differently to receive TRUE RICHES from God? More importantly, what principles can we learn from this story that will assure that we will be trusted with God’s riches?
1st principle: our money is not our own.
Deut 8:18 declares: “ remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth…”
In other words, all of our money, is God’s money. He gave it to us.
ILLUS: When I talk with people who want to become baptized, I ask "Do you believe that Jesus is the Christ the son of the living God?"
When they say yes, I then ask if they believe that they are sinners.
"Yes," they say.
"Do you believe that only Jesus can take your sins?" I continue.
Again, they usually reply, "yes."
Then I tell them that there is only one more thing that they need to understand. Quoting Romans 10: 9-10 I explain that part of accepting Christ as our savior is confessing "Jesus is Lord." In the days of Jesus, if you called someone your Lord, it was often because you were a slave or servant.
"Did a slave own anything they could call their own?" I ask.
Of course not.
Then I pull out my wallet. "When you call Jesus your ’Lord,’ you’re saying that all that you have is now His. As a Christian, everything that’s here in my wallet, belongs to Him. (I show a picture of my family) my wife, and my children belong to God. My house, my cars, my clothes. Everything I possess, is not really mine, but belongs instead to Jesus. He is my Lord."
The dishonest manager ran into trouble because he was using the master’s money as his own. Somehow, he’d gotten the warped attitude that he owned the monies he handled. Like him, Christians can run into trouble when they fail to understand that the money they handle is not their own.
If Christians don’t understand this principle, they can fall into at least 2 bad habits.
The 1st is this: they can end up considering their offering to God as being their money. A preacher I recently talked to had read an anonymous note left in the offering plate (they’re always anonymous) which said "we won’t give any more of God’s money to this church as long as the leaders here don’t do things God’s way." Translation: "we’re going to keep our money for ourselves because you folks don’t run things the way we’d like you to."
The 2nd bad habit Christians can fall into if they forget their money isn’t their own, is that they end up spending that money frivolously… and end up in financial difficulties.
A friend of mine who’d been in debt before he was baptized, was still struggling with financial issues after his salvation. In the midst of these struggles, he shared with me that he was trading in his 3 year old Grand Am for a new model.
"But you can’t afford to do that," I told him. "Don’t you realize that God wants you to be responsible in how you use your money?"
He looked at me with a puzzled look and then said: “But, God wants me to be happy doesn’t He?”
It took awhile, but my friend finally began to be more frugal in his spending habits. But it wasn’t until he was forced to realize how frivolous he was being with the money God gave him, that he changed.
The reason the parable of the dishonest manager bothers us so much is that he was misusing funds that weren’t his. When we realize that the money we call our own is actually God, it should bother us when we misuse those funds as well.
2nd principle (for receiving true riches from God) is to realize what’s at stake.
The dishonest steward suffered from a disease I call the “fat, dumb and happy” syndrome. As long as the steward’s poor attitude towards his master’s money wasn’t discovered, he was as content as he could be. Totally unconcerned with what tomorrow would bring. He was fat, dumb & happy. And he continued to be fat, dumb and happy up until the moment when he was confronted by how short his time was.
Illus: One man once observed: “Like this crooked manager, we Christians need a sense of deadline if we are to function well as children of the light. Certainly we are called to a life of joy and peace. But we are not called to a life of leisure. The Christian life is an active life. It’s not mere activism. It’s not just motion…. It is focused and engaged. It is energetic. It is busy. It may not be frantic. But it is urgent. It’s not a secluded, passive form of existence."
Here’s how Jesus planned His whole life within the framework of very pressing time constraints:
John 9:4 - "I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work."
We need to realize that we haven’t got forever to pass on the message of the Gospel. We need to utilize all of our resources to reach the lost for Jesus - including our wallets. That’s part of the reason I believe Jesus told this Parable: we need to understand the urgency of using our resources for the Kingdom.
It’s so important to God that Jesus put it this way:
“… seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” Matthew 6:33
Or as Paul wrote (talking about the gifts of the Corinthian church for the needy in Jerusalem):
”You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God. 2 Corinthians 9:11
The 3rd principle for receiving God’s riches is this: decide which will be your God.
Jesus said in Luke 16:13 “No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money."
ILLUS: Howard Hendricks told of the time when he and wife were guests of a rich man from a blueblood Boston family. Hendricks was apparently impressed by the obvious humbleness of this man. And so Hendricks asked him, "How in the world did you grow up in the midst of such wealth and not be consumed by materialism?"
His answer: "My parents taught us that everything in our home was either an idol or a tool."
That’s what Jesus was saying: money can either be your idol… or a tool you use for God
(At this point, I had a man from the congregation share about how he had made his decision to trust God with his tithe)
CLOSE: I once heard a story about barbarian King who lived in latter days of Rome. This King’s people had grown stronger and stronger until he felt that he would be able to begin conquering the lands of the tribes around him.
He only had one problem. The lands he desired were under the protection of Rome. Because, in that day, Christianity was the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, the only army that would be allowed to attack these territories would be those of a "Christian nation." But then, Christians were pacifist by nature and would not go to war against an enemy that had not attacked them.
This barbarian King made a deal with the church of his day. He and all of his people would become Christians, but only if they would be allowed to conquer the lands around them. The church’s decision was to have the king and his people baptized… but his armies were allowed to keep their sword arms out of the water. Thus, when they went to war they could maintain that the blood that was shed was the fault of the arm that had not been baptized - not the soldiers themselves. They became known as the army of the "unbaptized sword."
(To those who read this sermon… I have not been able verify the accuracy of this story, but I’ve heard it from people that I trust).
There are many Christians who live with portions of their lives being "unbaptized." They live with "unbaptized" TV sets, "unbaptized" book collections, "unbaptized" work practices… and "unbaptized" wallets. Don’t miss out on the riches of God’s promises by allowing your finances to be "unbaptized." Give them wholly to God.
