Lutheran Brethren Church of Nampa

What we’ve just read is one of those rare parables that aren’t about the kingdom of God. Or, at least, the people and ideas of the parable don’t speak about the kingdom of God, but rather are contrasted with the kingdom of God. And that’s important to recognize if we’re going to understand this parable correctly. Otherwise, we’re going to take away from it the idea that if we want to live with God after we die, then we need to do some wheeling and dealing to make people happy. Of course, that’s not the message of the Gospel. Instead, this parable is saying that wholly unrighteous people handling unrighteous wealth know how to be shrewd and how to make sure that others, as well as themselves, are taken care of. The point being, how much more do we, as people made righteous by Christ handling the righteous wealth of the kingdom of God, how much more can we act shrewdly in handling that wealth in our own lives?

Loving Money

So, in the parable itself, you’ve got a guy who obviously loves money. He’s in a position where he would undoubtedly be a very wealthy man. Even if he hadn’t been stealing from his employer, he would have been wealthy. See, his employer runs a very large business. Given the quantities of goods owed to his employer, the business was obviously a type of wholesaler. Perhaps a shipping firm or a distributer of goods. And in this large company, this man had worked his way up to being basically second in command. He was in charge of these large accounts and reported directly to the big boss. So you can conclude that even without stealing, this man would have been doing very well for himself.

But, because he loves money, that’s not enough. If it’s one thing that love wants, it’s more. And so, the manager is found to have been squandering his employer’s possessions. How exactly he’s squandering them isn’t told to us, but we can imagine that maybe he’s cooking the books to pay himself extra, skimming some off the top. Or making budgets for himself that include funds that have nothing to do with running the business, but that go directly into his pocket. But whatever it is he’s doing, he’s immediately fired when his employer finds out about it. He’s to immediately go, get the books in order, and present a report of all his accounting to his boss.

And this puts the man in dire straits. He’s not a laborer. He’s a manager. He’s not fit to do things like dig, or farm, or haul stones, or cut trees. And he certainly can’t go back into a management position after having been found to be someone who fleeces his employer. Then, to top it all off, he’s too proud to beg. Then he realizes that there is something that he can do in order to survive. If he makes people happy – if he wins friends and influences people – those people will welcome him into their homes. He won’t have to labor or beg in order to support himself. Other people will do it for him. And he’s in the perfect position to make people happy. He deals with his bosses debtors all the time, so all he’s got to do is put one over on his boss one more time, and just write off a portion of what each person owes. These debtors are going to be extremely happy about this. And by means of example, he goes to one of the debtors and cuts their bill in half. He goes to another and takes twenty percent off. Doing this for all the debtors he deals with, he can be assured that he’s got people who are just thrilled with him and will take care of him after he’s fired.

And this actually results in praise from the CEO. He was shrewd. The CEO admires that. He fired him all the same, I’m sure, but he’s at least impressed at what this guy did to make sure he was taking care of himself. And with that, Jesus moves on to the admonition He has for His disciples: “The sons of this age are more shrewd in relation to their own kind than the sons of light.”

Divorcing Money

Now, let’s pause for a second and consider the context here. This parable follows right after the ones we heard last week. Those ones were the parables talking about the lost sheep and the lost coin. They concerned themselves with Jesus seeking, finding, and rejoicing in lost sinners who are saved. In that, those parables were for everybody to hear. This parable, on the other hand, is directed toward the disciples only, as verse 1 says. This is important to point out because otherwise we might get to thinking that Jesus is simply teaching people to handle their money better and to stop being gullible. Instead, when Jesus compares the sons of this age with the sons of light, that is the turning point where he takes his focus off of the world and how it operates and focuses on his disciples and how they should operate.

With that, what Jesus says next is maybe a little troubling. He says, “make friends for yourselves by means of the wealth of unrighteousness, so that when it fails, they will receive you into the eternal dwellings.” Let me restate that for you if that didn’t trouble you enough: “Make yourself lots of friends using the money you have so that when you’re broke, you’ll be taken into heaven.” That’s a troubling teaching. Spread your money around and make people happy so that you’ll gain heaven? What’s that about? Well, it makes a lot more sense if you go just a little further into verse 13: “No servant can serve two masters…you cannot serve God and wealth.”

So, instead of Jesus teaching that we’ll win heaven by being generous with our money, what he’s teaching here is to divorce ourselves from our love of money so that we would have a genuine love for God instead. That’s the message we all need to hear, isn’t it? How many of us here can honestly say we either aren’t lovers of money, or that we have never been lovers of money? The love of money is a temptation for all of us. It’s why scripture has so much to say on the subject. But what’s the problem with money anyways. You’ve got to have it to survive. I’m not much use to God if I’m destitute and die of hunger because I can’t afford food. Is money really so bad? Well, like so many other things in this world, money itself is morally neutral. It’s neither good nor bad in and of itself. It’s what we do with money, and it’s our attitude toward money that makes it bad. And to the point of this passage, the single worst thing we can do with money is to love it. To love it over and above God. To make it an idol. To use money as a replacement for God, thinking that money is going to do a better job at providing what I need than God will. And so, as an idol, we turn to money in order to provide us with safety and security, with peace, joy, and comfort. That money and possessions are where such things are found, not God. See the problem with loving money? The encouragement, then, is to divorce money and turn your love to God instead. After all, money will fail you. It fails everybody. Even the richest people in the world, money fails. The reason being, we all die. And guess what, there are no banks in heaven. There are no money changers. And when Jesus comes to judge you, he won’t be asking you how much money you made in your lifetime. He won’t be asking you how shrewdly you handled your money. He’ll be asking you if you love Him – if by faith your heart is turned to him and trusts in His sacrifice. That’s the only concern in the end: if you believe that His death and resurrection had paid for all the sins that would keep you out of heaven, including the sins of loving money and being foolish with it.

Loving God

This being the case, Jesus then turns to teaching about righteous wealth. If unrighteous wealth refers to earthly money, then what’s this righteous wealth. Well, of course it has to be the wealth bestowed upon you as inheritors of the kingdom of God. It’s wealth that cannot be spent in the trading of goods and services. Rather, it’s wealth that is spent in the investment of love towards your neighbor. And this wealth takes many forms: it’s the particular talents you have that can be used to love your neighbor. It’s the spare time given to you to exercise those talents. It’s the passion you have for serving those who need your help. It’s the passion you have for serving a particular type of person. It’s your love for Christ and the salvation He has won for you and your desire for your neighbor to share in that salvation. It’s the unique love, peace, joy, and hope that can only come from God that is just overpouring in you and wants to be poured out into your neighbor. In short, righteous wealth is the fountain of living waters that is springing forth from you and out into the world around you.

But we need help in figuring out how exactly to spend this righteous wealth, don’t we? I mean, it’s a foreign thing to us. In and of ourselves, we’re sinful to the core and haven’t the faintest clue or desire how to love and serve our neighbor. It’s only because Jesus has come to us and produced in us the fountain of living water that we even have it. So, we need to be told how to use it. And it’s really interesting that Jesus sets that against the use of unrighteous wealth. He first goes back to the idea of ordinary, worldly money as an example. Overlapping myself a little bit, He starts with, “the sons of this age are more shrewd in relation to their own kind than the sons of light.”

Now, that’s probably true, isn’t it. At least as a general rule. If we’re comparing Christians to worldly lovers of money, they probably are more shrewd than us. We can be, if I’m going to be honest, a little naïve and gullible. Those who are lovers of money are probably going to take advantage of us from time to time. So Jesus says, “Start there. Take a good hard look on how you use your unrighteous wealth and do better.” Also saying, “He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much.” Worldly riches are this “very little thing.” But because worldly money is something that we are very familiar with, Jesus encourages us to look at our own money and see how righteous we are being with it. Are you being foolish with it? Are you harming others with it? Are you being greedy and hoarding it to ourselves? Are you spending it just on your own pleasures? If you are, practice doing the opposite. Start being shrewd with your own money. Start using it to help others instead of hurting them. Be generous with it. Don’t think only of yourself and your own pleasures, but how you can please others with it.

But understand this: being good with worldly money isn’t the endgame here. Rather, it’s a training exercise that is meant to help you be good with the righteous wealth you have. That’s the important thing in this whole parable: to examine how shrewd you are in spending the currency of your heavenly blessings. Because we can treat that righteous wealth in the same way as money. We can take these heavenly gifts I’ve already talk about and be foolish with them. Squandering them by not using them where they really need to be used. We can use them to actually harm others, for example, by proclaiming the law to someone who is already crushed by their sins, or proclaiming the gospel to someone who is secure in their sins. Or by claiming our own righteous deeds as our own and thinking more of ourselves than we ought to. We can be greedy and hoard our gifts to ourselves by not being willing to share our talents or our time with those who could really benefit from God’s gifts to us. Or, we can just sit and please ourselves with our God-given gifts. Sharing them only with ourselves and our church family.

Instead, the blessed calling on our lives is to take that righteous wealth and use it to “make friends”. And if you couldn’t see my “air quotes” just then, making friends is just a metaphor for the desired result of spending our heavenly currency. Not friends for the sake of companionship, but friends who, as Jesus says in Matthew 5:16, “see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” Or making friends in the same way Paul tells Timothy to teach his congregation, “Instruct them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share.” That’s a good way to spend heavenly currency and make friends. We can even make friends with enemies in such a way that, as 1st Peter 2:12 says, “in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation.” After all, they will glorify God eventually, either in seeing His judgment or in seeing His approval through Christ.

So be shrewd in the use of your heavenly gifts. Put to use the currency that cannot be weighed or put in a bank. Because I can guarantee you that it is a currency that will never run out. It’s money that will never fail you, because it flows out of the springs of living water Christ has given you. Let’s pray…