“MONEY MANAGEMENT FOR THE SONS OF LIGHT”

a The 18th Sunday after Pentecost a

Luke 16:1-13

When you glanced over the service for today, which I’m sure many of you did, I wonder if you thought to
yourself when you saw the hymns, the readings and the sermon theme, “Oh, boy...here we go...Pastor White is
going to do what he publicly vowed he would never do...talk about money from the pulpit!” If you thought those
things glancing over the bulletin for this morning, I’m sorry that you have been misled. The next 20 minutes or so
is not going to be a “how-to” seminar on getting your household finances in order, though the spiritual principles
present will most certainly benefit us in that area of our lives. We aren’t going to lay out the church’s budgetary
needs versus our weekly intake of offerings, though the parable of the Shrewd Manager most certainly helps us to see
our monetary blessings in a very unique context and in a very different way than what we are probably used to.
At the beginning of the service today, we noted that the rest of the Pentecost season is devotion to the
development of the Christian character that our Lord accomplishes for us and in us by his Word. Last week, we saw
how important it is to have a love for the lost with the parable of the Lost Sheep and the parable of the Lost Coin.
Today, our Lord Jesus offers to us yet another characteristic of the Christian that is of the utmost importance, and
not completely independent from the first characteristic of having a love for the lost souls of this world: how we
care for and use the monetary resources that the Lord has entrusted to our management, because while money in
and of itself is not a spiritual thing, it is a worldly thing, the proper management of money most certainly is a matter
of the heart and to be taken with the utmost seriousness. With that in mind, we have two specific lessons that are
presented to us today in the parable of the Shrewd Manager, where our Lord offerings instruction in money
management for the believers, the sons of light: 1) Stake everything on the Lord’s mercy and 2) Spend everything
(in the sense of whatever money you use) to the Lord’s glory.

I. Stake everything on the Lord’s mercy

The illustration of the Shrewd Manager in Luke 16 is one of the most difficult parables to understand in all
of the gospels. Looking at it from a worldly perspective, it would seem that Jesus is condoning and promoting
dishonesty to his followers, in the way that the dishonest manager settles the accounts for his Lord. But nothing
could be further from the truth. So many times in Scripture, there are warnings against the love and trust in
mammon, worldly wealth which is here today and gone tomorrow, which leads us to look at this parable from a
completely different standpoint – focusing our attention not on the dishonesty of the manager, which is really a
moot point, but on the mercy of the Lord which stands out so sharply in the text.
“Jesus told his disciples: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. 2 So 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—“
Similar to the parable that precedes this one in Luke 15, which is the parable of the Prodigal Son, the central
figure is an individual who squandered possessions, who was a poor steward of monetary resources. And similar to
that parable, which is closely related to this one, the central figure loved and trusted in money more than the Master
to whom it belongs.
The difference in the parables, though, is that the dishonest manager immediately recognized his inability to
work his way out of the situation that he had brought himself to by elevating the money over the Master. Where
the Prodigal Son hired himself out as a slave and fed slop to pigs, the dishonest manager, knowing how badly he had
mismanaged his lord’s wealth, and knowing that he deserved to be fired immediately and that every single mishap in
mismanaging the lord’s wealth would be evident in the ledgers, confessed so clearly, “I cannot dig and I cannot beg!”
The only thing that the manager could take to the bank was the lord’s merciful character, which was
consistent and trustworthy, and didn’t change with the circumstances. You see, this parable isn’t about doing
whatever is necessary to keep yourself afloat when you’re in a bad financial situation. It’s about where we place our
trust. When the manager was about to be fired, he banked on his Master showing him mercy. He staked
everything on it and lowered his value of temporary resources to the point where he offered a 50% discount to one
of the debtors...bad business...terrible business practices... but a solid spiritual character, because his trust was rightly
placed in the Master and not in the money that the Master entrusted to him.
Mammon, money, possessions can be a real stumbling block for Christians, because the devil uses them to
tempt us to become distracted from our main focus of salvation. Instead of looking to a merciful Lord in whom we
can put our trust, we tend to elevate money over the Master who gave it and look for certainty and a solid
foundation in something that was never meant by the Master to serve in that capacity. Money in and of itself is
never condemned by God in Holy Scripture, but the idolatrous treatment of it is most certainly condemned and
what this parable does is it sets before us an encouragement to fear, love and trust in the mercy of the Master, which
you can take to the bank, which never fails, which never falters.
Money is temporary, transitory and so are we. Verse 9 says that unequivocally: “9 I tell you, use worldly
wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.” When it is
gone...either when it runs out, or when we die and no longer have the task of managing it, either way, it’s going to
be gone somehow and therefore not something to stake our eternal existence on – and certainly not something to
put trust in or find comfort in.
Find comfort in the Master’s mercy. Stake everything on his gracious character, the one who mercifully
receives dishonest stewards back into his company through his acts of kindness. There isn’t one person here today
who can say with a clear conscience, “I have never idolized mammon! I have never loved and trusted the money
more than the Master who entrusted it to me.” Saying such things, thinking such things would only be sad
delusions of our sinful minds. We have, and we continue to idolize mammon to our own detriment.
Finally, which one is more important, the money or the Master? Which one gives real hope, the money or
the Master? Which one gives us real and lasting comfort, the money or the Master? Which one can sustain us even
in the context of our sinful squandering, the money or the Master? Do you need the answer? Turn your hearts to
Calvary’s holy hill, and there you will see in terms as plain as day which one deserves our trust – not the money, but
the Master, who loved us enough to die for us so that we could be in his eternal dwelling. Stake everything on
money, and when it runs out, we’ll have nothing. Stake everything on his mercy, and we’ll have riches eternal
without end in heaven.

II. Spend everything to God’s glory

 The second lesson that we learn from Jesus when it comes to our management of money is that when we use
the resources that God gives to us, we are to use them in a way that is consistent with our Christian faith and
confession. Verses 9-13 read like this: “9 I 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. 11 So if you have not been trustworthy in
handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? 12 And 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.” 
Here Jesus tells his disciples in no uncertain terms that how one administers the things of this world is most
certainly parallel to how one administers the things of God’s kingdom. In the parable, the dishonest manager banks
on a couple of things. He banks on the mercy of the lord and the power of generosity. He trusts that the merciful
character of the lord will prevail even when he doctors the bills of the debtors, cutting one of them in half and that,
by being generous with the debtors, not only will the character of the lord be upheld, but he will have won over
friends, so that when the money runs out, (and once again, there is a death quality to money in this parable), he will
be able to rely on their mercy, having shown them mercy in the first place.
Now, as complicated as that seems, we can point to two very specific encouragements when it comes to our
own use of God’s resources. When we manage the resources of the Master, which includes spending, we are to
uphold the merciful character and integrity of the Master in way that exhibits his unequaled generosity. At times we
can be stingy with God’s resources, and at times we can be careless with them, neither one serving as a good example
of prudent management. When we make use of money and spend it, whether it’s in our own homes or as a
congregation, the integrity of God’s generous character must be upheld, the God who spared not his own Son, but
gave him up for us all, and also graciously gives us all good things. We must uphold God’s generous character,
honoring and glorifying his name and his reputation with every financial decision we make as managers, and using
his resources to extend the eternal generosity of our God to others, so that they may be personal recipients of the
grace and mercy that we ourselves have received through Jesus Christ.
This is one of the most difficult parables in the gospels, the parable of the shrewd manager, and we could
spend literally weeks on the details, but let’s not our Savior’s message be lost in the details. Be good managers of the
Lord’s resources by knowing what place money has in our loves. It is not to be loved. It is not to be an object of
trust – we cannot serve both God and money! Only the Master in his mercy is worthy of our trust, as exhibited in
his generosity to give up his one and only Son to save us, and the Master’s money is to be used to glorify his name
and reputation and to extend his saving generosity to a world that is in spiritual poverty! Stake everything on
money – and we’ll be spiritually bankrupt in the end. Stake everything on the Lord’s mercy, and we will have
eternal riches without compare forever and ever. Amen.