LEARN FROM THE DISHONEST BUSINESSMAN, Luke 16:1-15 Jesus tells us an interesting story this morning. He tells the story of and commends the action of a dishonest financial manager. I must tell you this story always catches me off guard. I always have to think about this idea that the actions of a dishonest man hold a lesson about how I should act toward God. Church life is always about holiness. “Be holy for you Father in heaven is holy.” There is an obsession with doing the right thing. Though we speak of grace we are more often than not driven by good works. We define others by their good works. We say of someone, “He is a good man,” and what we mean is he does good things. “She is a good woman,” she is kind and helpful to others. Works consume our lives. After all, the Bible says, we will be known by our fruits. When good work becomes our focus we become concerned with such things as lying, cheating, steeling and a whole host of other questionable behavior that will lead us way from God. The truly over obsessed among us get worried about taking pencils from work. We can get caught in the details. We become Pharisees straining at gnats and swallowing camels. The law becomes the motivation for all that we do or don’t do. We fret about our actions. Did we do the right thing in any given situation? Is God pleased with me? How can I do better? It is the good people we want to learn from. They are the one’s we want to emulate. And then Jesus comes along and tells this story. There is a rich man who had a financial manager who was less then diligent in his duties. In fact the man was more than lazy, he was wasting his bosses possessions. It is one thing to be lazy on the job and another to be actually costing the boss money. So the boss calls the manager into his office and hands him the pink slip. As I read this story the first thing that comes to my mind is good for him. He is getting what he deserves. Still the boss’s money and you get canned. If I were Jesus the lesson I would draw from this is don’t take what doesn’t belong to you and work hard at your job for good work gets rewarded and poor work will get you fired. A truth we all know but should be reminded of because even the best of us goof off at times. This guy is worse than I thought. Knowing he is being laid off and knowing that being fired from a job never looks good on the resume he knows he has to do something to secure his future. He wants to be rehired so he has to win favor with his potential future employers. So he begins calling on all of his former boss’s debtors. He asks each on what they owe and he than cuts their debt in half. This man’s last action on the job is to alter the books. He was fired for wasting his master’s money and now he again costs his boss money by lowering the debt of everyone who owes his boss money. I don’t know about you but this sounds like a lawsuit to me. You waste the firm’s money to the place that you lose your job and the last action you take before they walk you out the door is to change all the contracts so that everyone who owes the company gets a reduction in their debt. This would get you on the evening news and the front page of the New York Times. Put here is were the story gets interesting and here is where Jesus wants to make his point. The boss commends the dishonest manager for his shrewdness and Jesus agrees. Now Jesus is not saying being dishonest is a kingdom values, let’s make that clear before you all go out and start stealing from your boss. The bad behavior is not what Jesus is drawing attention to. Jesus wants us to look at the man’s attitude toward his future. The man took the action he did because he knew that his future would be terrible if he didn’t do something. Jesus tells us to make friends for ourselves by means of unrighteous wealth so that when it fails will be received into our eternal dwellings. We get caught up in the present. Even our over emphasis on good works leaves us in the here and now. One of the driving beliefs of the people today is the idea that all our pleasure comes from this material world. Any joy I have, any satisfaction we draw from this life happens in the here and now. This is not the hope of the church. We look for a city whose builder and maker is God. We long to be with Jesus. “Absent for the body and present with the Lord,” is how Paul puts it. “To live is Christ, to die is gain,” he says in another place. So we run around looking to find pleasure in this world. We try to manipulate our lives around what we can get out of life. When that happens we become the center of our lives and the things of God grow dim even as we fool ourselves into believing that all of our good works will find us favor with God. If we are good enough God will reward us and that reward will come in this life. Jesus tells us to look to the future. Make friends for yourself with unrighteous wealth so that when it fails you will be received into the eternal dwelling. What does that mean? How do I make friends with unrighteous wealth? We make friends with unrighteous wealth by investing in the kingdom. Stop looking for the payoff in this world. Jesus tells us to put our money in a place where moth and rust don’t destroy it. The things of this world are temporal and therefore unrighteous. They fade away. The things of God are eternal. Remember the story of the farmer with the bumper crop. He wanted to take down his barns and build new ones to store all his crops because he thought he had enough to last him the rest of his life. Turns out he did, he died that night. How many people work hard all of their lives, good people who love Jesus? To often I have heard people say they have no time to serve God now, but when they retire they are going to serve God full time. Right now there are other concerns and God understands. The problem is too often they never get around to serving God. There is always some pressing need they have or in many cases they die. At the end of this story Jesus says straight up, “You cannot serve God and money.” We hear that, we understand the words but do we take it to heart? Christianity is a walk in faith. We have to put the things of the kingdom before the things of this world. We must be willing to forgo the pleasures of this life in order to reap the rewards of heaven. The satisfaction we get is not found in this world but in the world to come. Jesus promises to meet our needs and he promises to give us abundant life but he defines that life not the world around us. But what happens if I give my all to the work of the kingdom and just suppose it’s all in vane? You see the fear is that maybe, just maybe Christianity is not real. Suppose I die and that’s the end. Christians have the same problem as the people of this world. We all have the awareness of God within us but we suppress it with sin. Some people who question the existence of God, they don’t really believe his exists still go to church just in case. They play around with religion just incase God is real. If they die and stand before the judge of the whole world they want to be able to point out how much time they spent in church and how much good they have done. Christians approach this problem from a different angle. Our take is suppose we die and there is no God, and don’t tell me you haven’t had those moments of doubt. If we dedicate our lives to serving Jesus and sacrifice all, making eternal friends with our earthly resources and we die and there is nothing else. We would have missed out on the pleasures of this world. So Christians give enough to feel good about them selves and invest enough in the kingdom so that if God is real as they hope he will be satisfied. Faith demands our all. Jesus said come follow me. He tells us the world will hate us, and we might suffer the lose of all things, but our hope is in eternity. Do you believe it? To the Pharisees, and we all have Pharisaical tendencies, who loved money Jesus said know this. “What is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God.” Chose this day who you will serve.
Posted on: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 14:44:27 +0000
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