Luke #37: The Worldly Steward (16:1-18)

Again, welcome to Family Worship with the church family of Eastern Hills. Every week, I look forward to gathering with this wonderful church family to worship our Lord. I’d like to give a special acknowledgment of thanks to all of our Women’s Ministry Leaders. I’ve heard great things about the Open the Book Bible Confidence Seminar yesterday. Thanks to all of you who serve in the Women’s Ministry for your dedication to discipling the ladies of Eastern Hills!

If you’re a guest or visiting with us this morning, we would really like to be able to thank you for being here today, and to be able to do that, we have to get a little information from you. Could you please just fill out one of the Welcome cards that you’ll find in the back of the pew in front of you? When you’ve done that, you can return it to us in one of two ways: you can drop it in the offering boxes by the doors as you leave when service is over, or I’d appreciate the opportunity to introduce myself, so after service, I’ll stay down here, and I invite you to come and say hello and give me your card personally. I have a small gift to give you to say thanks for being here today.

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Opening

Our current sermon series on the Gospel of Luke is called “The Story of the King,” and we are walking through this Gospel verse-by-verse in order to see a clear picture of the life of Jesus, and to learn from His example and teaching. Last week, we covered all of chapter 15 as we considered the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son or sons, but what we found is that each of these parables points to God as the main character, not the lost things. It is God Himself who is “it” in the lost and found parables. He is the one who seeks, who celebrates, who restores, and who pursues us, so that we might be in a right relationship with Him through faith in Christ, by the work of the Holy Spirit. Those parables point to Him, according to the explanations given by Jesus.

This week, we will consider approximately the first half of chapter 16, where Jesus shares another parable: the parable of the unrighteous steward or manager, and the fallout from His teaching among the Pharisees. So as you are able, please stand in honor of the reading of the Word of the Lord, and turn in your Bibles or Bible apps to the sixteenth chapter of Luke:

Luke 16:1–18 CSB

1 Now he said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who received an accusation that his manager was squandering his possessions. 2 So he called the manager in and asked, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you can no longer be my manager.’ 3 “Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do since my master is taking the management away from me? I’m not strong enough to dig; I’m ashamed to beg. 4 I know what I’ll do so that when I’m removed from management, people will welcome me into their homes.’ 5 “So he summoned each one of his master’s debtors. ‘How much do you owe my master?’ he asked the first one. 6 “ ‘A hundred measures of olive oil,’ he said. “ ‘Take your invoice,’ he told him, ‘sit down quickly, and write fifty.’ 7 “Next he asked another, ‘How much do you owe?’ “ ‘A hundred measures of wheat,’ he said. “ ‘Take your invoice,’ he told him, ‘and write eighty.’ 8 “The master praised the unrighteous manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the children of this age are more shrewd than the children of light in dealing with their own people. 9 And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of worldly wealth so that when it fails, they may welcome you into eternal dwellings. 10 Whoever is faithful in very little is also faithful in much, and whoever is unrighteous in very little is also unrighteous in much. 11 So if you have not been faithful with worldly wealth, who will trust you with what is genuine? 12 And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to someone else, who will give you what is your own? 13 No servant can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” 14 The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, were listening to all these things and scoffing at him. 15 And he told them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts. For what is highly admired by people is revolting in God’s sight. 16 “The Law and the Prophets were until John; since then, the good news of the kingdom of God has been proclaimed, and everyone is urgently invited to enter it. 17 But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of a letter in the law to drop out. 18 “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and everyone who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery.

PRAYER

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve mentioned a couple of things about preaching verse-by-verse through a book of the Bible that can make it a little difficult: Deciding how much or how little of the book to preach week-to-week. Today, we run into a fact of preaching verse-by-verse that is both a positive and a negative: if you preach through a book verse-by-verse, you’re going to have to deal with difficult passages sometimes. This can be a great joy, because we will be able to focus on Scriptures that are often avoided: For example, I can’t tell you how many people shared with me during our series in Daniel that they had never heard anyone preach after chapter 6. If we go verse-by-verse through a whole book or section, we have to deal with every verse we meet.

But I’m going to be completely honest with you: This was probably the hardest message so far in this series for me. This is because I’ve never really had what I felt was a good understanding or explanation of the parable of the unrighteous steward. In my study for this message, I read (I kid you not) SEVEN commentaries on this passage this last week, and I think I read 5 different interpretations of the parable, and in fact, I think all of them said in some form or another that this is the most difficult passage in the entire book of Luke. We’ll unpack it in a moment.

Part of what made writing this sermon so arduous was the fact that I didn’t come in with an idea of what it meant. Each week, I try to approach our focal passage with somewhat “fresh” eyes as I begin to study. But none of us can or even should remove our filters completely, especially the filters of theological education and of “this is how God has used this passage to speak into my life before.” Before this week, this parable never moved me, never grabbed my attention (other than in frustration), never gave me some application that was meaningful to my life and faith. That may sound kind of “unspiritual” for a pastor to say, but it’s the truth. I didn’t really know where I stood on it.

So this week, I really had to wrestle with what Jesus was saying to His disciples as He spoke these words. I believe that my evaluation of this passage is the most reasonable one, but full disclosure: many would disagree with me. And that’s okay. Be like the Bereans in Acts 17: You search the Scriptures yourself to see if these things are so (Acts 17:11). My interpretation of this parable is for the most part in line with the commentaries that had a basic agreement on the main aspects of the parable, not because majority rules, but because I believe it makes the best sense of the Scripture.

Here’s what we can say for sure: This passage is about stewardship, but not just about money. It’s about faithfulness, generosity, and priorities. We start with a consideration of the parable itself.

1: The unrighteous steward

I know this isn’t really much of a “point,” but the things that Jesus teaches flow out of the parable’s explanation, and so our having a good grasp of the parable itself will help us apply His interpretation of it and the teaching that followed. Here’s the parable again:

Luke 16:1–7 CSB

The first thing we notice is that Jesus told this parable to His disciples. The teaching that this parable brings was for them, and thus, it is for us. As I’ve said several times in this series, parables generally have just a single point that they are making, and they are not allegories: it’s unwise for us to try to make it an allegory if Jesus doesn’t. And as we will see when He explains His meaning, Jesus does nothing of the sort. So we shouldn’t say that the master is God, and the steward is us. Jesus doesn’t leave us room for that when He explains it.

So let’s consider the story that Jesus tells: We have a rich man and a manager who is accused of “squandering” his master’s resources. This might be through neglect, mismanagement, or even outright theft. The rich man has only heard a report about the steward, and so he calls the steward to give an account of his management practices in order to see for himself, but just to be safe, he tells the steward that that accounting will be his last official duty. The manager does not defend himself or deny the accusation, so I think that as far as the purpose of Jesus’s story is concerned, we can assume that the accusation is accurate.

It’s possible that this steward was just in charge of his master’s goods while the master was away, or that the steward was the manager of a particular estate owned by his master, and his master didn’t even live there. This harkens us back to Jesus’s parable of the “faithful and sensible manager” in Luke 12:42-48, which we looked at a little over a month ago. This unrighteous steward may have started acting like he owned his master’s possessions, and began using them for himself much like the unfaithful manager in Luke 12. We do know two things: he was proud of his position, and he was physically soft, because when he realizes he’s about to lose his cushy job, he laments the fact that he is physically unable to dig, and he morally refuses to beg.

So he needs to come up with a way to have a job when he loses this one. He decides that his plan will be to ingratiate himself with some of his master’s debtors, so that when he loses this job, they might give him one. This is what it means when he says that “people will welcome [him] into their homes.” (v. 4) We know that these debtors owe massive amounts to the master. A hundred measures of olive oil was huge: about 875 gallons today. A hundred measures of wheat was also huge: about 1,100 bushels. In each case, he has the debtor discount his invoice by a large amount (50% on the oil, 20% on the wheat). Because the debt was huge, the discounts amounted to huge savings.

What do we make of this? Depending on our point of view of the interpretation of this parable, we might think this guy is unrighteous twice: once in his mismanagement originally, and then in how he adjusted the debtors’ bills. This really looks dishonest to us, but neither the master nor the Divine Storyteller condemn his actions as immoral:

Luke 16:8 CSB

8a “The master praised the unrighteous manager because he had acted shrewdly.

Ultimately, the best answer to me is one of two things: either the steward 1) removed his commission from the bills; or 2) removed interest from the bills that the master shouldn’t have been charging anyway according to Hebrew usury laws, such as those found in Deuteronomy 23. Both of these actions were completely within his purview as steward at that moment, and neither would be “immoral” by definition.

So which is it? The argument for the interest removal generally poses it as the steward doing his master a favor in the process by bringing him in line with Mosaic Law. But it doesn’t say that the steward gave his master a second thought. I doubt this character would have been interested in his master’s personal holiness. Therefore, and because the focus of the parable is actually the steward, we will assume that the reduction is his commission on the debt. Certainly, he could reduce this amount without harming his master, and it would make him look very good in the eyes of the men getting to reduce their bills.

The steward deals shrewdly with the situation he faces because he uses his own resource (commission owed) to ingratiate himself to his master’s debtors. He lost a little to potentially gain much more. At the same time, the master sees this and praises the man for his shrewdness. But while he praises the steward, that still doesn’t mean that he kept his job.

This teaching gives us two major applications for our own interaction with wealth or money:

2: Be generous and faithful.

While we shouldn’t say that we are the steward in the parable, if you think about it, we are each stewards of what God has given us to use for the time being. We are not owners—we are managers. Jesus’s explanation of this parable is kind of surprising. Notice how He explains the point:

Luke 16:8–9 CSB

8b “...For the children of this age are more shrewd than the children of light in dealing with their own people. 9 And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of worldly wealth so that when it fails, they may welcome you into eternal dwellings.

The worldly steward was generous as a manipulation tactic. He was scratching the backs of these debtors, and he expected that they would scratch his back in return. If he was giving up his commission to make sure he can find employment, then it was an investment in his earthly future. He was acting with great temporal foresight, having a reasonable expectation of what the results would be from his investment, using the resources that he had available to him in order to influence people.

Jesus says that the people of the world are more shrewd than “the children of light” are… that’s us. But it doesn’t say simply that they are more shrewd in their use of money… it says that they are more shrewd “in dealing with their own people.” The people of the world are better at dealing with the people of the world than the children of light are.

So, Jesus says, we should “make friends for yourselves by means of worldly wealth...” This is really difficult saying of Jesus, because if we lift it out of context, it sounds like He’s saying that we should bribe people into being our friends. But we need to see the connection to the parable. The steward looked to the future and shrewdly invested his commission for a worldly purpose: in order to win friends for himself that would outlive his stewardship and welcome him into their homes.

Likewise, we should keep our eyes on eternity by investing our resources in engaging the “people of the world” so that they might hear the Gospel and outlive our earthly stewardship through surrender to Christ. This isn’t manipulation for us… it’s just investment. We don’t actually save anyone, and our investment (unlike the steward’s) can’t manipulate people into being saved. But we can invest heavily in order to be in a position for them to hear.

Jesus went on to say that worldly wealth will eventually fail, and when it does, “they” will welcome us into eternal dwellings. Who are “they?” There are only three “friends” who can welcome us into dwellings that are eternal: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

So to summarize the parable’s meaning: Look to eternity and invest generously in Kingdom work in this world, because it’s the only work that will last forever.

The subsequent teaching that Jesus gives here in verses 10-12 flows out of this explanation of the parable:

Luke 16:10–13 CSB

10 Whoever is faithful in very little is also faithful in much, and whoever is unrighteous in very little is also unrighteous in much. 11 So if you have not been faithful with worldly wealth, who will trust you with what is genuine? 12 And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to someone else, who will give you what is your own? 13 No servant can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

So not only are we to be generous in our Kingdom investment, but we are also to be faithful with the resources that God gives to us. As I said earlier, we are merely stewards of God’s resources. Our responsibility is to be faithful in how we use God’s resources for the Kingdom work that He has called us to. Jesus illustrates this by using three sayings on faithfulness that build on each other, followed by an ending challenge.

First, how we handle “very little” will show how we will handle “much.” It doesn’t matter what the task is or the value of the investment—if we are faithful in the small things, it shows that we will likely be faithful in the big things. But the converse is also true: unrighteous in little, unrighteous in much.

There are several examples of this in the Scriptures. I think about Joseph, who was faithful in the small things while he was in Potiphar’s house and then in prison, and God exalted him to be second highest in all of Egypt. Or consider King David: He was faithful in the field as a shepherd over his father’s flock, and he became shepherd over the nation of Israel.

Who we are in the small reflects who we will be in the big. He follows this with a specific example for us: Whether we faithfully steward the financial resources at our disposal is an indicator of how faithfully we will steward more important kingdom service. We will see this more clearly in Luke 19.

And third, we must keep in mind that everything that we have: our time, our money, our spouses, our children, our jobs, our church, our very lives… everything we have is on loan to us from God for us to steward. These are all things that “belong to someone else.” We are to be faithful with every resource that God allows us to use, because we look forward to a reward that will be truly ours in heaven. Paul said it this way in chapter 3 of 1 Corinthians:

1 Corinthians 3:10–15 CSB

10 According to God’s grace that was given to me, I have laid a foundation as a skilled master builder, and another builds on it. But each one is to be careful how he builds on it. 11 For no one can lay any foundation other than what has been laid down. That foundation is Jesus Christ. 12 If anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, or straw, 13 each one’s work will become obvious. For the day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire; the fire will test the quality of each one’s work. 14 If anyone’s work that he has built survives, he will receive a reward. 15 If anyone’s work is burned up, he will experience loss, but he himself will be saved—but only as through fire.

Brothers and sisters, we are called to a faithful stewardship of what God has given to us. Our hands are to be open for God’s use today and every day. What God has loaned to us to steward is to be used for His purposes. Are you using your spiritual gifts and skills to serve others in the name of Christ? Are you faithfully giving to Him what He deserves from your time, your talents, and your treasure? If you read my article in the monthly church newsletter, the Informer, this month, you’ll see that Eastern Hills is being very faithful in our monetary stewardship, so thank you, church!

The challenge that Jesus ended with in verse 13 calls us to examine our allegiances. Who or what is most important to us: God, or money? We cannot serve two masters well, because they will compete with one another for our time, attention, and affections. Paul challenged his protege, Timothy:

1 Timothy 6:17–19 CSB

17 Instruct those who are rich in the present age not to be arrogant or to set their hope on the uncertainty of wealth, but on God, who richly provides us with all things to enjoy. 18 Instruct them to do what is good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and willing to share, 19 storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of what is truly life.

Money is an incredible tool, but a terrible master. Jesus isn’t speaking against having money—he’s speaking against it being our greatest drive, the focus of our attention, in short, our god. This brings us to our last point:

3: Keep your priorities straight.

The big question of stewardship here is a stewardship of the heart. You can’t serve two masters. Living for God and living for money are incompatible. So if we are going to follow Jesus, we are going to have to keep our priorities straight. The Pharisees didn’t do this:

Luke 16:14–17 CSB

14 The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, were listening to all these things and scoffing at him. 15 And he told them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts. For what is highly admired by people is revolting in God’s sight. 16 “The Law and the Prophets were until John; since then, the good news of the kingdom of God has been proclaimed, and everyone is urgently invited to enter it. 17 But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of a letter in the law to drop out.

Because they wanted to be wealthy, the Pharisees thought they could live for both God and money, and they actually had rules that allowed them to do spurious things financially that were still considered “righteous.” But they were wrong. As a result of this poor thinking, they were actually scoffing at Jesus as He spoke to His disciples about stewardship. The reality of their priorities was that they first and foremost wanted others to think highly of them, and so even the “good” things that they did with their money were done in order to impress others. We’ll see this even more distinctly when we get to chapter 21.

The truth is that God sees our hearts:

1 Samuel 16:7 CSB

7 But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look at his appearance or his stature because I have rejected him. Humans do not see what the Lord sees, for humans see what is visible, but the Lord sees the heart.”

We can’t fool God. He knows what’s really going on inside of us. People may look at our outsides and see something that they think is pretty great, but the question is whether our insides go with it. For the Pharisees, it didn’t:

Matthew 23:27–28 CSB

27 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of the bones of the dead and every kind of impurity. 28 In the same way, on the outside you seem righteous to people, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

People didn’t just admire the almsgiving that the Pharisees performed for them to be impressed by—many also admired the piety and holiness of the Pharisees, and in fact, many of the Pharisees worked hard to maintain their legalistic piety and holiness so that they looked better to people, and not because they loved God. They claimed to serve the Law, but they didn’t do that either: in their hearts, they were using the Law to serve themselves.

But Jesus said here that the age of the Law and the Prophets had come to a close with the arrival and message of John the Baptist, who had proclaimed the impending arrival of the Kingdom of God—the Messianic age. In a way, you could say that John had one foot planted in each age: as the last person of the age of the Law and Prophets, and the first person to declare the identity of Messiah.

And since the kingdom of God has come and is being proclaimed, then “everyone is urgently invited to enter it.” Jesus inaugurated the kingdom of God in His incarnation—that the King of the universe had come to earth in the Person of Jesus Christ, fully human and yet fully God. He was without sin, and yet in order to fulfill the Law, He was put to death so that we who are without righteousness could be justified. And He rose from death, proving that He is Lord over all things. We enter the kingdom of God through faith: believing that Jesus Christ is the Savior, and surrendering ourselves to Him as Lord or Master of our lives. Through faith, we also will overcome death because of His eternal life.

But Jesus went on to say that while the age of the Law is done because of the arrival of His kingdom, the Scriptures would never be set aside, but instead in Christ they would be fulfilled and completed. We would no longer need to live under the structure of the sacrificial system in order to be right before God, because Jesus would give what was necessary to meet the requirements of the Law through His life and death.

Matthew 5:17–18 CSB

17 “Don’t think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or one stroke of a letter will pass away from the law until all things are accomplished.

Jesus accomplished everything necessary for the Law to be fulfilled, and a day is coming when everything written in the Prophets will also be completed, when the Day of the Lord comes. Jesus will return to receive those who belong to Him, and to judge those who do not. That day is coming, as Peter wrote:

2 Peter 3:10–12 CSB

10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief; on that day the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, the elements will burn and be dissolved, and the earth and the works on it will be disclosed. 11 Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, it is clear what sort of people you should be in holy conduct and godliness 12 as you wait for the day of God and hasten its coming. Because of that day, the heavens will be dissolved with fire and the elements will melt with heat.

Do you belong to God through faith in Christ? Are you in His kingdom, or not?

Now, the last verse of this passage feels as if it doesn’t go with what was before it, but there is a point for its being here:

Luke 16:18 CSB

18 “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and everyone who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery.

Remember what Jesus has said to get us to this point: be generous and faithful, and keep your priorities straight. Stewardship is about more than money. It’s also about relationships. And for most of us, the most important relationship that you will ever be called to steward is the relationship with your spouse. This relationship is supposed to be a lifelong relationship of mutual service, faithful fidelity, and of the highest earthly priority.

And if you’re divorced, please don’t hear that I’m insulting you or anything of the sort. These are Jesus’s words, not mine. If you have a problem with what this Scripture clearly says, take it up with the Lord. And as this is one verse of the whole, I’m not going to go into much detail on marriage and divorce here.

Jesus brings this topic out here because it was one of the places that the legalists were most likely to fail. The reason for this was because of the interpretation of Deuteronomy 24:1:

Deuteronomy 24:1 CSB

1 “If a man marries a woman, but she becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, he may write her a divorce certificate, hand it to her, and send her away from his house.

One school of Hebrew thought said that “something indecent” could mean anything… as little as that your wife burned supper. But in Luke Jesus was pointing out that marriage was a question of stewardship, and getting divorced in order to marry another person was a failure in that regard. Elsewhere, Jesus qualified this with the exception of sexual immorality (Matthew 5:32 and 19:9), but this was not his point here. He was showing the Pharisees the failure of their stewardship in more than one regard, while at the same time teaching His disciples what kingdom faithfulness and right prioritization look like. Divorce is not what God intended for marriage.

Closing

To bring this to a close, we need to see that stewardship is a sacred trust. God gives us blessings that we are to leverage for use in His kingdom—whether those blessings are in the form of physical resources or relationships. The steward was worldly in his failure to manage his master’s resources well, and we often think in worldly terms about the resources that God has given us. We should invest wisely and with forethought in the work of His Kingdom, thinking in Kingdom terms, with Kingdom priorities.

But this isn’t possible if you’re not a citizen of the kingdom of God, and that only comes through faith in Jesus.

Baptism

Church membership

Prayer

Giving

PRAYER

Closing Remarks

Bible reading (Galatians 1-2, Psalm 78)

Pastor’s Study tonight: Beginning the Sermon on the Mount

Prayer Meeting: Finishing our look at the prayer of Daniel in Daniel 9, and this will finish our look at the prayers of the Old Testament. In two weeks, we will start considering the names of God in Scripture as foundations for our prayers.

Instructions for guests

Benediction

2 Corinthians 9:6–8 CSB

6 The point is this: The person who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the person who sows generously will also reap generously. 7 Each person should do as he has decided in his heart—not reluctantly or out of compulsion, since God loves a cheerful giver. 8 And God is able to make every grace overflow to you, so that in every way, always having everything you need, you may excel in every good work.

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