The following message was given at Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada. We're going to be returning to the parable of the unfaithful manager. And just as a heads up, I am reading from the ESV, but I am reading with the modifications that we discussed last week. So if that is not matching your ESV, that's why. Luke chapter 16, would you please stand for the reading of God's word? He also said to the disciples, there was a rich man who had a manager and charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his possessions. And he called him and said to him, what is this that I hear about you? Turn in the account of your management for you can no longer be manager. And the manager said to himself, what shall I do since my master is taking the management away from me? I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that when I am removed from management, people may receive me into their houses. So summoning his master's debtors one by one, he said to the first, how much do you owe my master? He said, a hundred measures of oil. He said to him, take your bill and sit down quickly and write 50. And then he said to another, and how much do you owe? He said, a hundred measures of wheat. He said to him, take your bill and write 80. The master commended the unfaithful manager for his shrewdness. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light. And I tell you, Make friends for yourselves by means of worldly wealth, so that when it fails, they may receive you into the eternal dwellings. One who is faithful in very little is also faithful in much, and one who is unfaithful in a very little is also unfaithful in much. If then you have not been faithful in the worldly wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful in that which is another's, who will give you that which is your own? No servant can serve two masters, for 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 God and money. This is the reading of God's word. Please have a seat. Would you join me in prayer? Our Father, we thank you that our treasure is not in what we own. We thank you that our treasure is not in our skills or our personalities or our upbringings. Father, we are so grateful that every treasure we have is in Jesus Christ, our Lord. We thank you for how richly you have provided for us that the poor would become rich through the poverty of Jesus Christ. Lord, we pray that you would teach us your way from these passages even now. Open our hearts, soften our hearts if we are opposed to your teaching. Lord, bring us into conformity with your word. Help us to repent of the worldly masters that we have served. And we pray that you would raise up in us faith to go forth and obey you and follow you. We pray this in Jesus's name. Amen. So we come back to this parable. And if you recall from last week, it is a hard parable. It is a complicated parable. There was just no chance I was going to get through it all last week. And I'll give you a recap in case your mind is, your memory has grown a little fuzzy on what it was, or if you weren't here at all, I will recap it. But what we get to do today is we get to move into the applications of this parable. Because actually, Jesus gives a lot of application from this one parable. And so we're going to spend our afternoon just trying to mine the depths of how much he gave us to apply from just this one difficult parable. So last time we discussed that the most likely understanding of this parable is that the manager here, he actually sacrificed his own commission on the debts, and he didn't actually steal from his master in order to reduce the debts for all the various debtors. Now, I said this last week, I'll say it again, this understanding has its own problems to it. It's not that any solution can just tidy up this entire parable because there is something we don't know going on here. But it seems the best odds, given the master's commendation of the manager, is that that manager actually sacrificed his own money and did not hurt the master when he reduced those debts. In the bigger point, though, we said the details are not where the meat of this is for us. The meat of this, the big point of this remains clear. Jesus wanted his disciples to use their fleeting resources to gain for themselves eternal treasure, eternal blessings. And he pointed his disciples very particularly at using their money to help the poor. using their money to help the poor. Now, he did not say that if you are charitable, you will save yourself. He did not say anything like that, but he is telling us that we can use temporary blessings that we have now, that we cannot keep, and we can sort of trade them in for eternal blessing, for eternal good. It's a great deal if you believe Jesus. It's a great deal. The unfaithful manager of this parable then, he ends up becoming a model to us, not in his unfaithfulness, not in what got him fired, but Jesus commends him for his shrewdness, for looking ahead and acting with insight and with wisdom. In a similar way, Christians are to look ahead to eternity. They're to look ahead at what's coming. and they're to use their worldly wealth to bless the poor and the needy right now. Jesus would want every one of his followers, every disciple that's here in this room, he would want every one of them to be shrewd. He wants every one of them to wisely use their temporary blessings to gain for themselves eternal blessings. This is the will of our master for us. So how can we apply this shrewdness that Jesus is commending and commanding? This is where we're going to dive deep. We're going to think about this. How can we apply this parable in three categories? Starting with God's priorities for money, followed up by the attitude God wants us to have toward money. which then will pave the way for the shrewd use of money. I thought about naming the sermon something like, here's how to use your money, but I didn't think people would come then. So, we lured you in with part two, but this is gonna have everything to do with your money. The money that the Lord has given you, how do you use it shrewdly? We start with God's priorities for money, right? That makes sense. This is of course where you would start. We start with just a simple question. How should any of us use money? Well, a simple question doesn't necessarily have a simple answer. It turns out there's not just some one size fits all solution to this. As soon as you say, God, teach me how to use my money. As soon as you go to the word of God saying, God, teach me how to use money. You will very quickly find that there are no spreadsheets in the Bible. There is no line by line budget in the Bible. There's especially not one that's got your name at the top of it that says, this is exactly what I want you to do with your money. It's not there. God doesn't expect us to find that kind of revelation. That's not how he expects us to make these sort of decisions. But while we don't have the specifics, what scripture does give us is a framework to operate within. What this is going to mean is that while we don't have the specifics for, okay, on Wednesdays, am I allowed to buy a lunch and go out somewhere? No, you're not going to find that. But what you can find is strong guidance, strong principles on which you're going to be able to build the use of your money. In the end though, we are each going to end up making decisions according to what we think is best. There's just no helping that. Some people will make better decisions. Some people make worse decisions, but in the end, the decision will fall to you. And so you are going to have to decide what you think is best according to the word of God and according to what he calls us to do. The shrewd use of money, it starts with God's priorities. And if you wanted to build a set of priorities, what's the obvious one? We seek to glorify God. We seek to glorify God with money. I came up with a little paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 10 31. Whatever you do, whether you earn, save, or spend, do all to the glory of God. I think that's a natural extrapolation of that verse, actually. Whatever you do, whether you're earning, whether you're saving, whether you're spending, do it for the glory of God. Now, to a room full of Christians, this is an obvious point, but do not miss that this is a completely different starting point from the world. No one in the world was like, oh, let me make sure I glorify God. This is a Christian position, and it is going to start you off on a trajectory that is radically different from the world. We start out with the commitment that our money serves our God, not the other way around. Not the other way around. Our money serves our God. And so then you ask, okay, great, so how do we glorify Him? And to that, I just give you the textbook answer. By loving Him and doing what He commands. How do we glorify God? By loving Him and doing what He commands. And you apply that to our money. So our money then is a means to love God. Our money is a means to obey God. We use it every single day to honor God. We use it to care for families. We use it to love our neighbor. We take all these priorities of scripture and we just apply them to finances. And one of the priorities that Christ has made very clear and is across the scriptures is that one of the priorities God wants us to have is to help the poor. Now, if you are a detailed person, if you're a detailed thinking kind of person, I've already run afoul because you were thinking, but how far do we go in those priorities? I want to know the details of all those priorities. Great. I am in all those, but what does that look like? And then you get right into the area that we, that we were already hinting about that we don't get all the specifics. I cannot sit up here and quote scripture to you and say, and therefore 3% should go to this 12% of this 25 to this. It's not there. We are already at one of the places where each of you will be called by the guidance of the Word and of the Holy Spirit to make decisions. At the end of the day, we will each always be left with a wisdom decision regarding how we implement the priorities of God. There's no avoiding that. A second layer we can add to our framework, if the first part is we are going to pursue God's priorities with our money, then a natural second part is to say we are going to guard against the things that undermine God's priorities. And those are everywhere in the world, particularly selfishness. No one had to teach me selfishness. I'm very good at it on my own. Selfishness comes natural and selfishness is absolutely going to undermine God's priorities. Love God and love neighbor are never going to get off the ground if loving self is on the throne. We have to fight trends out there in the world like materialism, right? That consumerism that just drives us bigger, better, faster, shinier. That is what the world tells you to pursue. And it is a poison that our country especially just pumps out like It's crazy. And this consumer mentality, it is the enemy of the contentment that our Lord calls us to. And it just leaves us endlessly chasing the worldly treasures that we can never quite get enough of. Now, again, if you're a detailed person, you're thinking, you're not saying enough here. Because how far is too far? How much is too much? How nice is too nice? Am I allowed to have a new thing of that? Am I allowed to have not just the worst version of that, but maybe the medium level of that? Am I allowed to have the nice things that the world is able to produce? What do you say? And again, again, I'm just going to throw it right back at you. I can't tell you that. Again, it is going to come back to you in faith and in diligence before the Lord to make a wisdom call based on your circumstances and based on the word. What you're going to find is this, there's all these great priorities. There's all this, this importance put here. And then suddenly you realize it all just comes down on my shoulders about what am I going to do with that? It's sort of unnerving. It's unnerving that something so important can actually be in some sense so fluid. Does that bother any of you? Don't you, if something's important, shouldn't it have just like a 10 point list, everything spelled out, no other requirements, that's it? Yeah, that's how we want it. And that is not how God did it. That is not how God did it. What you're going to find, you start with these kinds of priorities and that we're going to fight off these other things undermining these priorities, but you are going to find you're just going to have to keep revisiting these things over the course of your life. There's not going to be a point where you just think, and I got it just right. As your life circumstances changes, as, you know, dependents change, opportunities change, jobs change, whatever it is, you're going to find, I've got to go back and revisit what I've been thinking all along. That's going to take a humility because we would all just rather be right once and then move on. That's going to take just some openness. The idea that I will keep returning to this because I want to keep pursuing that balance that's going to best serve the Lord. So where we start that first step in being shrewd with our money, it's just in starting with the priorities of God. Now, as we continue in this passage, there is no missing that God intends to transform our attitude toward money and toward our lives in general for that matter. So what does he said here? He said, look ahead to the eternal blessings that are to come. Look ahead to the delights of heaven that lie ahead of you. And he tells us also that God wants us to shrewdly sacrifice our worldly wealth in pursuit of those eternal blessings. That is actually God's will for us. And so if we believe Jesus. If we believe Jesus, we are going to start asking a new question. We are going to stop asking whether we've given enough. We are going to start asking, how can I give more? How can I give more? Now, some of you hear that and you are already feeling guilty or at least like I'm trying to make you feel guilty. It's not a guilt question. How can I give more is not a guilt question. And if this question simply makes you feel guilty, just stop. Don't put a single offering in those boxes. Don't go out and just start showering your money out there. If the only thing you've got under your belt and in your heart is guilt. Stop because you're not seeing it the way Jesus wants you to see it. Don't give because you feel guilty. the truth of the matter, guilt giving won't work. It won't. If you think giving is gonna make you stop feeling guilty, you will never give enough to be able to deal with that guilt. You can't give enough to get rid of your guilt. And God doesn't want your guilt offerings. God doesn't want your guilt giving. So what you're going to end up with in the end is you will end up giving in a way that one, can't satisfy your guilty conscience, and two, is not really pleasing to the Lord. So where do you end up? Not really having accomplished that much and with an empty bank account. The new question, how can I give more? It must be a gratitude question. It must be a question of gratitude. What do we mean by that? You got to zoom back. You got to look at the big, big picture here. If someone asks you to trace the story of salvation, you have to start with the idea that humanity is lost, deeply lost, deeply lost in damning guilt that is going to come for us one day. Someday we will answer for that guilt and then we will answer for it for all eternity. Our guilt, it's all around us. It's all through our lives. It's in our heritage. There's not a single day goes by where if we took the word of God seriously, the law of God seriously, that we would think I'm not guilty today. Every single day will testify to your guilt and faced with your guilt faced only with your guilt. Every single person in this room is right to despair. Every single one of us should despair if all we have is our guilt. That's why Christ came. Because humanity should despair, because there's no hope. So someone else has to step in. And so Christ comes. And Christ, Christ is the shrewd Savior who looked ahead. He saw his people's eternal need and he traded his life for theirs. He saw that by his life and death, he could save many, and he embraced that mission. He saw that by his death, he could defeat death. And so for the joy set before him, he endured the cross. 2 Corinthians 8, 9, for you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. When we talk about giving to the poor, never forget where you came from. When we talk about the poor child of God, never forget where you came from. Because without Christ, we were the poor. We were the helpless. We were the dying. And Jesus, for our sake, embraced poverty so that we might become rich in him. In this we realize, that all that he's calling us to do, he already did for us. He already did it for us. Everything he talks about, sacrifice, giving to the poor, he did it and he did it for us. And he did it at a greater price and he did it at a greater sacrifice than anything we'll ever be called to, than anything we can ever give. And by his sacrifice, he earned for us a treasure that will never fail us. He earned for us eternal life. Just try and get your heart around that. Try and get your heart around that certain hope that Christ earned for us. In Ephesians, one of Paul's great prayers was that we would understand the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us. He would go on and pray again that we would have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. In other words, we need the power of God and the help of the Holy Spirit simply to understand how rich and how blessed we are. Wow. And when God grants you those glimmers of understanding, those glimmers of understanding into how rich you are in Christ, into how much was given for you in Christ, into this eternal blessed hope you have waiting for you, when God grants you just a little glimmer of understanding, then guilt gives way to gratitude. Guilt is transformed into gratitude. When you have soaked, just soaked, in God's grace to you, then you can understand the new question with the right heart. Then, in light of all that has been done for us, then we ask in gratitude, Lord, how can I give more? How can I give more? Once we have God's priorities for money, once we have the right attitude toward money, finally we are able to ask, so in everyday life, how can I be shrewd in giving? How can I actually do this? How do we employ godly strategy? It turns out you go back to the basics. It turns out you go back to the basics, submit your money to the word and prayer. Start there. As you read the Bible, pray that you would have an open heart to however God would lead you to spend money. As you pray, ask the Lord, Lord, help me, guide me in how you want me to use Money, how you want me to spend money. And what you'll find is as the word and as prayer build in you, you will be led to growing convictions. And then set your mind to planning. Set your mind to planning how you can act on those convictions. The Proverbs would tell us that the plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance. Shrewd giving will thrive with faithful planning. A shrewd giver will not just respond to what they see. I hope you do respond faithfully to what you see, but a shrewd giver will seek out opportunities. A shrewd giver will even create opportunities to honor God with money. Maybe that comes on the form of some wise budgeting. If I just am a little more careful here, maybe I free up this so I can do that. Maybe it's some wise time management. You know, I'm always killing 10 minutes here, 10 minutes here, 10 minutes here. String that together. I have an hour and I can go help that person. Maybe it's some wise networking. I know a person who knows a person that maybe they could help. Set your mind to planning. And then as well, with all things, with any pursuit of wisdom, seek your brothers and sisters, get that counsel that we all need. I think that'd be a cool conversation just to hear that it had happened where one of you went to another, went to a brother, went to a sister and said, you know, I would really like to be able to give in this way, but I can't figure out how to make it happen with my budget. How do you think I get there? Or maybe it's this, maybe you have the plan. So you go to someone you respect, say, this is my plan. A, B, C. Do you think that works? I think that'd be glorious. Seek counsel so that your shrewdness will succeed. Seek counsel. See, we can't help as we read this parable, there is no escaping that God is actually leading us to do something very concrete. This is not just a change your thinking kind of thing. It's change your thinking and then act. Change your thinking and then act because he is calling us not to just think differently toward the needy. He's calling us to shrewdly use our money to bless the needy. And so this is a call to faith and it is a call to action. And as you tackle this command, just rest assured he will help you. And as you tackle trying to bless others, believe he is blessing you and he will bless you. As Jesus proceeds in his application, it's really in 10 through 12 where Jesus then helps us to understand the importance of how we use money. Look back at the text. I'll read it for you one more time. One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much. And one who is unfaithful in a very little is also unfaithful in much. If then you have not been faithful in the worldly wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful in that which is another's, who will give you that which is your own? And so we have this general principle. What we do in little things is what we would do in great things. We like to think that those are divided, but they're not. What we do in little things is what we would do in great things. And Jesus takes this general principle, which you could apply to all number of situations, and he specifically applies it to the use of worldly wealth. What is maybe shocking to us is that when he's talking about faithful in a little, do you know what the little thing is? Worldly wealth. So often our lives do not act like worldly wealth is a little thing, huh? Especially not out in the world. Worldly wealth is the thing so often. The way Jesus thinks of it, worldly wealth is the little thing. What's the big thing? Heavenly treasure. Treasure that is yet to come. Jesus hints at this much bigger picture. in which God will entrust true heavenly riches to his children. And our faithfulness in the little thing that is our worldly wealth, that is the testing ground that leads to the treasures of the age to come. Money is not an end in itself. Money is the means. It is a testing ground for the treasures that are to come. We look at our monthly budgets and money seems to be a huge thing. Money seems to be a giant thing. Jesus wants you to look at your money, not in the sense of your month to month, your week to week, your day to day. Jesus wants you to look at your money compared to heaven, compared to eternity, compared to eternal riches. And then when we get that perspective, we can't help it. Money just seems to shrink in how important it is. Money looks a lot less important when we compare it to eternity. And it's in verse 12 where Jesus also points out that wealth doesn't belong to us. I've had a very hard time, you may or may not have noticed it. Every time I've said, do something with money, I've tried not to stick the word your on there. Because I knew I was about to contradict myself by the time I got to verse 12. Because it turns out your money is kind of a misnomer. Yeah, there's a sense in which you have money, that money belongs to you. But there's a bigger sense in which none of it belongs to you. None of it belongs to you. Nothing really does belong to us. We believe that, right? Nothing really belongs to us. Just like the manager, just like the steward in this parable, we are stewards. Caring for something that belongs to someone else. The big picture thing we need to know is that it is all his money. None of it is our money. We are just stewards. We're just stewards. But are we faithful stewards? A faithful steward will seek God's priorities for money. A faithful steward will use the master's money for the master's purposes. An unfaithful steward will seek his own priorities. A non-faithful steward will seek the world's priorities. And do you know why? He'll do so because he has a different master. That's how you get to the last application Jesus is gonna make. Verse 13. No servant can serve two masters. For 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 God and money. Who is your master? God or money? This is a hard question. It's a hard question, but it's a hard question. Who rules? Who rules in your heart, God or money? No one among us wants to say, ooh, money. Every single one of us wants to say, yes, God is more important than money. Of course, God is more important than money. But Jesus wouldn't give us this teaching if it were that easy. So how can we recognize the difference? between God reigning in our hearts and money reigning in our hearts. I want to ask you some questions. All of them are trick questions. No, I don't know. But I want to ask you some questions and we can see if we can get some illumination on our hearts. What would you like to accomplish in the next five years? If your mind is only jumping to financial goals. You have to ask yourself why. I didn't say, what would you like to do with money in five years? But yet for so many of us, five-year plan is not a term we use for spiritual plans. Not usually. Five-year plan is a professional label. It's a financial label. If your mind is jumping straight to financial goals, is it because money is disproportionately important to you? Spread it out. Just in general, what are your goals? What are your dreams? Are your goals mainly financial? Is all your passion, is all your excitement really devoted to worldly wealth or what worldly wealth can buy you. So you may say, no, I don't need money. I just want to have like a chair on the beach in Hawaii. Well, it takes some money to get that chair in Hawaii. It's all your excitement for goals that worldly wealth can get you. Now, if you were to ask yourself a question just in, you know, in your prayer closet, in the quiet of your heart, Would you say something like, yeah, I do want to be a better Christian, but man, I really want to have more money. If your spiritual goals do not at least rival your financial goals, money might be ruling in your heart. How about this? How do you feel about giving away money? How do you feel about it? Whatever that gut reaction you just had, I think that's how you feel. Is it joyful to you? Do you give with gratefulness to God in your heart? Or is giving bitter? Is giving like giving up a dear friend? Do you begrudge giving? See, giving is joyful if it's a gift to your loving Heavenly Father. Giving is bitter if what you're doing in that giving is sacrificing your true master. The question Jesus demands that we answer, is God the master of your money? Is God the master of your money? Is money his to do with as he pleases? Do you hold money with open hands to your God or with clenched fists? The unfortunate truth is that so often God is not the master of our money and even worse, we try to make God our slave. Because instead of God using our money, we use God to get money. Lord, if I trust you and if I follow your principles, I know I'll succeed. You end up with the creation using the Creator, God Almighty, as a means to get our true treasure, the world's wealth. God won't be our servant, and God will not be used. God must be master of all our lives. God will rule your life and he will rule it down to the very penny. And he won't share that rule with anyone or anything. And if you have been living for money, turn back. Turn back. See, money's actually a cruel master. Because there is no such thing as enough if all you want is money. No one who ever set out with their only goal being to get rich, no one ever had enough. They never get there. There's always more to be had. What you end up with if money is your master is you end up spending your whole life for a master that will leave you empty and abandoned on the last day. God must be the master of all your life. But the bonus is this, God is a good master. God is a loving master. Money is the master that will take everything from you. God is the master who gave everything for you. Money is the master that tells us to just keep slaving for that worldly satisfaction because maybe, maybe tomorrow we'll find it. God is the master who tells you to stop slaving because the work was completed long ago. Your soul's satisfaction was purchased by Christ on the cross 2000 years ago. There are two masters fighting for your soul. They are fighting for your soul right now. God and money. So which one will you serve? Let's pray. Our father. Thank you for the wisdom of your word. Thank you for the glorious inheritance that we have in Christ. Thank you that we are rich through no work of our own, but through the work of a gracious savior who died for us. Thank you that our worth is not bound up in this world. Thank you for a hope that cannot be taken from us. Thank you for an unfailing treasure that cannot be stolen from us. Lord, we pray that you would help us, help us to have the faith because so much of our life is bound up in money. And Father, there's so many ways it's important and there's so many ways we can't see when it's not important anymore. There's so many ways that we're torn on this, our hearts are divided on this. And Father, help us to believe you. Help us to trust you. Help us to save money for what it is, a fleeting treasure we can't keep. Help us to see eternity for what it is, our true hope, our everlasting life with you. Lord, we cannot pretend this battle is easy for us, and so we pray that you would help us to renounce the worldly master of money and help us to embrace you, our true master. Lord, be our help, be our guide. We commit these things to you in Jesus's name, amen. We hope that you were edified by this message. For additional sermons as well as information on giving to the ministry of Grace Community Church, please visit us online at gracenevada.com. That's gracenevada.com.