August 13, 2006
Stewardship
Luke 16:1-15
This
summer I have chose a number of topics for our Sunday morning messages which I
think are crucial for people wanting to live as followers of Jesus Christ in
today’s world. Last week we looked at the power of materialism, and considered
ways we can oppose the allure of materialism. This week we’re going to take a
step backward to consider the broader topic of “stewardship”.
What
does it mean to live as stewards of all God has given us for life? Let us pray..
Luke 16:1-15
1Jesus told his disciples: "There was a rich man whose
manager was accused of wasting his possessions. 2So he
called him in and asked him, 'What is this I hear about you? Give an account of
your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.'
3"The manager said to himself, 'What shall I do now? My
master is taking away my job. I'm not strong enough to dig, and I'm ashamed to
beg— 4I know what I'll do so that, when I lose my job
here, people will welcome me into their houses.'
5"So he called in each one of his master's debtors. He
asked the first, 'How much do you owe my master?' 6" 'Eight hundred gallons of olive oil,' he replied.
"The manager told him, 'Take your
bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred.'
7"Then he asked the second, 'And how much do you owe?'
" 'A thousand bushels of wheat,' he
replied.
"He told him, 'Take your bill and make
it eight hundred.'
8"The master commended the dishonest manager because he
had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing
with their own kind than are the people of the light.
9I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for
yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal
dwellings.
10"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. 11So if you have not been
trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? 12And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else's
property, who will give you property of your own?
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."
14The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were
sneering at Jesus. 15He said to them, "You are the
ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of men, but God knows your hearts. What
is highly valued among men is detestable in God's sight.
If I were to condense the meaning of Jesus’ parable into one
sentence, it would probably be:
“Use
the resources given you by God wisely and generously.”
Today’s Word offers us important lessons about being stewards of
God’s things in this world.
And the first one is not new to anyone who has
been around CCC for any length of time:
1. We
are managers/stewards not owners of God’s resources.
I highlight this point whenever it comes up in
scripture because this biblical understanding of our resources for life obviously
runs counter to world belief systems.
-
Whether it is the belief that what we have earned is ours and that we can use
it as we want, or
-Whether
it is the belief that what we earn belongs to all, and politicians can best
decide how we use it.
The biblical message about the resource we have
for life runs counter to what most people believe in this world for it declares
that all we have belongs to God, who has entrusted to us to use it for His work.
In
Jesus’ parable, news of the manager’s untrustworthiness has reached his Master,
and the manager has been dismissed. Although the manager is asked to do an
audit; to bring the books up to date for a final tally of the Master’s
possessions and the manager’s wastefulness, the decision about employment has
already been made. The manager will no longer be steward of the Master’s
property. The Master knows that a person’s character is at the very heart of
their work ethic. 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) This person does not have the character
necessary to manage the resources of this master.
Now we know that the manager in this
parable was the steward of a variety of his Master’s resources including olive
oil (3-years average wage worth) and wheat (8-9 ½ years average wage worth). This
was a big operation! Yet God has entrusted us with even more. We usually remember
our resources as the four “T’s” of stewardship:
-
Treasures
-
(Matthew 6:19-21; 25:31-46; Hebrews 13:16; 1 John 3:17-18)
-
* money and things
you buy with money (house/car)
-
* creation.. our
environment and all the earth produces
-
Talent (Romans 12:6-8)
-
* Skills for
earning a living and raising family
-
* Spiritual
Gifts... special abilities used within and from the
-
church to further God’s Kingdom.
-
Time (Psalm 90:12) ... something
becoming more and more valuable
in our fast-paced, busy culture
-
Testimony (1 Corinthians
4:1-5).. in many ways the greatest resource
God has given us... our personal experiences of his presence; his love, care
and transforming power in our lives.
As a NT professor named Murry Harris once noted:
All too
often we regard stewardship simply as a matter of our giving to God, but this
aspect is secondary. Before we can give, we must possess, and before we possess
we must receive. Therefore, stewardship is, in the first place, receiving God's
good and bounteous gifts. And once received, those gifts are not to be used
solely for our own good. They must also be used for the benefit of others, and
ultimately for the glory of God the giver. The steward needs an open hand to
receive from God and then an active hand to give to God and to others. – Murry
Harris
Do we have this correct worldview
that not only are we to give to God’s work, but that what we are giving is in
fact what God gave to us in the first place? Do we know the joy of living such a worldview?
In
September we will hear a lot from our youth about their summer experience at
CHIC, but today CHIC serves as an illustration of something; it was one
opportunity, one experience, .. one “resource” given to our young people by
God, which could have become self-serving or God-serving.
From
what I have heard, CHIC glorified God. For at CHIC, 5,000+ high school student
demonstrated that given the time; given a week in TN, and resources such as
spending money which could have been used for CHIC t-shirts and souvenirs, that
these resources were instead offered toward the needs of Sudanese people; an
offering which topped $100,000. In addition, time which could have been used
for more swimming, ultimate Frisbee, or excursions to water parks or horseback
riding was donated by CHIC youth to bag up food packets for starving children.
Nearly 2,000 youth gave their time to bag up over ½ million meals, which will
feed 1,620 Sudanese children for a whole year!
And
my guess is... it felt good to use God’s resources for God’s work. When we
recognize that we are managers not owners, stewards of the time and money and
talents and testimonies He has given us..... what a joy it is to see what God
will do with all he has put in our hands when we let go of it and use it according
to His will.
A second interesting lesson from Luke 16, about
exercising stewardship of God’s resources is that:
2.
People in the world give more thought to their future well-being than the
righteous do to their spiritual well-being.
To
be honest, this is a very tricky text to understand. On the one hand we have a
wasteful manager (the same term used to describe the prodigal son’s
“squandering” of his inheritance [Luke 15:13]), a manager whose wastefulness costs
him his job. And then, this same manager does something which appears to be
“underhanded” at best but somehow receives his Master’s praise, though he still
loses his job. There has been a lot of thought and theories presented by
biblical scholars regarding this parable. Two I found especially helpful:.
1.
When the manager decreased the prices of what was owed by debtors, he was
not robbing his Master, but was cutting out what would have been his commission.
Operating like a tax collector for Rome... like Matthew or Zacchaeus before
they met Jesus, this manager needed to collect a base fee for the person or government
he represented, but then could add to that whatever he could get away with.
What is apparent in this parable is that the manager’s wastefulness or
squandering had affected not only his master’s bottom line but his own as well.
2.
The manager was, in fact, losing his own money in order to gain friends and
create opportunity for future employment. This is why the master praised
him for his shrewdness; he saw and understood what his recently fired manager
was doing. And while this practice of using money for favors rubs us the wrong
way, especially in a parable told by Jesus, the point is simple; this is the
way of the world. We all use money, and the things we buy with money, to positively
influence our future. Retailers accept less money whenever they run a sale;
fast-food restaurants give away toys, with the expectation that their future
will be better if they give away something now.
People of this world give a lot of thought to
their well-being for the future, but as far as “the people of the light”; the followers
of Christ, how much thought do we give to our future? What should we be doing
right now, to prepare ourselves for our eternal dwelling? Jesus says that how
we view and use resources today will have an effect on our futures.
As one Christian CPA once phrased it:
Since we are only stewards of the
possessions God has seen fit to give us, every decision we make relating to our
possessions has a spiritual implication. I wonder sometimes what difference it
would make in our spending if Jesus had to appear in bodily form to co-sign all
our checks before they would be negotiable. - Cordell
Dick
Just
as the wasteful manager was praised for being prudent in considering and acting
upon what the future required, Jesus teaches that his followers must also be
prudent in considering how God desires us to handle his resources in light of
our eternity with Him.
For you see
3.
Heaven is pleased to accept those who have been generous.
For
while heaven cannot be earned, there are honors in heaven when it is obvious
that we trusted in God by being generous toward others with the resources He
placed in our hands.
-
When asked who might set on His right and on his left in
heaven, Jesus taught that “the greatest” would
be the
one who served the most. (Matthew 20:20-28; 23:11)
-
In Matthew 6 Jesus instructs us to care for the needy in
secret, so that our acts will receive reward from our Father in heaven rather
than reward from men on earth. (Matthew 6:1-4).
-
And in Luke 6:20-23a,
Jesus juxtaposes what we experience now with what we will experience in the
future:
20Looking at his disciples, he said:
"Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the
21Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
22Blessed are you when men hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you
and reject your name as evil, because of
the Son of
23"Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your
reward in heaven.
I believe that a taste of that great joy in
heaven was revealed in Jesus’ interaction with Zacchaeus the tax collector. He
is first introduced to us an inquisitive, wealthy, chief tax collector.... the
epitome of a money-loving person. But all that changed when Jesus invited
himself into Zacchaeus’ home, and suddenly this chief tax collector had a
different worldview:
Luke 19:8-10
8But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, "Look, Lord!
Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated
anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount."
9Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house,
because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10For the
Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost."
When
by faith, we like Abraham put our trust in God and not in created things like
money or possessions; we too will experience the joyful welcome of heaven. We will
experience just the opposite of what Jesus described in another parable found
at the end of Luke 16. A parable about a rich man who lived in luxury every day
of his life even as a beggar named Lazarus lay at his gate. But after death
Lazarus was comforted in heaven as the rich man was tormented in Hell; the two separated
by a great chasm.
Oh,
what that rich man would have given to have opportunity again to use his
earthly money to feed and cloth Lazarus.
Oh
what the rich man would give for Lazarus, in heaven, to speak on his behalf...
to offer testimony that the rich man had indeed helped him, and by helping him
had trusted more in God to provide for his future than he had trusted in the riches
of his bank account.
He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work,
doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share
with those in need.
A final message
about stewardship from Luke 16 is a very brief but personal one:
4.
There is a basic choice each one of us must make regarding all the resources we
have for life;
-
We have to choose whether we are stewards or owners of those resources? Are we “managers” or “Masters”
to use the
language of Jesus’ parable?
- We have to choose
whether our stewardship will reflect
our love of money, or our love for God?
Or perhaps most
clearly;
-
We have to choose whether we worship God and serve Him, or worship
our resources by giving our lives in the pursuit of them?
We
cannot have it both ways. We cannot love/serve both God and money. We have to
choose.
What’s
your choose? What, or who, do you choose
today? As I mentioned in last week’s message on the allure of materialism in
our culture:
“The real point of
materialism is not how much we have,
but what or who has
us...”
Salvation
comes to those who love God and put their trust in Him. This week, as you
evaluate how you view and use your resources for life, will you like Zacchaeus
hear Jesus’ words declare:
“Today salvation has come to
this house”
because you’ve decided to love
and serve God more than the resources he has given to you?
May your good stewardship not only glorify God in heaven,
but may it also bear witness to the salvation that is ours in Jesus Christ.
AMEN
Scripture taken from
the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION (r).
Copyright (c) 1973,
1978, 1984 by International Bible Society.
Used by permission
of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.
|
:: back to main :: All images and text protected by copyright © Copyright 2006 Community Covenant Church of Hopkinton All Rights Reserved. |