Sunday Sermon – Luke 16:1-13

How Are You Using This Life to Plan for the Next?

I have to be honest: “I really don’t like this Parable.” The dishonest manager in Luke 16 is odd, and you can come away with some strange conclusions if you do not understand it correctly. When a couple of other men and I decided to preach through all of the parables of Jesus, we put them on a spreadsheet and started knocking them out. This one was left at the end, like the last kid picked for dodgeball. I figured I might as well take it as opposed to getting stuck with it, so I studied it, researched it, and found some great truths in there.

Zooming Out Too Far, Zooming In Too Far

Here is the too long didn’t read version. If you zoom out too far, you conclude that you should not be a dishonest manager. That is not what the parable is about. If you zoom in too far, needling away at every little detail, you can come to the conclusion that God is going to judge how you use your money in this life, and the better you do now the better off you will be in heaven. That is not the point either. We are looking for “the right focal point.”

At the right focal length, you get here: “we as Believers are supposed to use this life including our wealth to plan for the next one to plan for the future.”

The Parable (Luke 16:1-7)

A rich man hears that his manager is wasting his possessions, and he tells him to turn in the accounts. The manager says to himself that he is not strong enough to dig and is ashamed to beg. So he calls his master’s debtors one by one. How much do you owe? A hundred measures of oil: write fifty. A hundred measures of wheat: write eighty.

Remember this is two thousand years ago. Wealthy people hired others to manage a camel train or a business, and rich people today still have managers because they cannot be bothered with it. I once worked nights stocking shelves at the Kroger in Spring Hill, and another guy was put in charge of the deli. He was told to discount the Christmas hams, so the next day he sold them for ten cents a pound, they all disappeared, and he was fired.

There are theories about why this manager was dismissed. One says the discount was his own commission, given up so the clients would remember him as a good guy. Another says he was just trying to hurt his master by messing up the ledger. Another says the master was the dishonest one, like the tax collectors who collected for Rome and raked in extra profit. But those are only theories, because Scripture does not tell us who is right, and “the goal of this Parable is not to figure out who’s doing what.” It is to understand that the manager was planning for the future.

The Teaching (Luke 16:8-13)

In verse 8 the master commends the manager for his shrewdness. He has been outplayed, and he tips his hat. Then Jesus steps out of the story and teaches his disciples: the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.

Why are unbelievers better at building wealth? “Because that’s all they got.” They have to make their money now, spend it now, and enjoy this life now, since “without Jesus none of that goes with you.” We all have a lease on life and an expiration date. The manager had the company car, the company housing, and the company credit card, and he knew all of it would run out. So Jesus says to make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into eternal dwellings. Unrighteous wealth does not mean evil or tainted. It means temporary. “Use the temporary to make Eternal.”

We have the same opportunities, and more. “We have a market that we can invest in that yields Eternal returns as opposed to the temporary one that the unrighteous have access to.” It is not about money, “it’s about how you use what you have it’s how you use the temporary to plan for the Eternal.”

You Cannot Serve Two Masters

Verse 13 is the famous one: you cannot serve God and money. Yes, this text involves money. But remember the audience. Jesus was teaching his disciples, and “this was not a business course.” The question is whether you are using your temporary life, including time and relationships, to plan for the eternal.

How Are You Using This Life?

Everyone’s situation is different, and “everyone’s situation is different what it actually looks like is different.” But consider it. Are you investing your time in the next generation, the children of our church? Are you giving time in a small group, growing closer to God? The teenagers just went off to camp, so ask them what they learned. Are you investing in family, co-workers, and neighbors, and leveraging those relationships toward eternal fruit? It pairs with the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says to lay up “Treasures in Heaven where neither moth or rust destroys where thieves do not break in and steal for where your treasure is there your heart will be also.”