The Parable of the Shrewd Manager

A Prayer and the Subaru Brat

Father, you’ve given this man so many gifts, and one of them is definitely speaking. I learn every time I listen to him. So, Father, I just pray that your Holy Spirit flows through John, and that the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ comes out in his words, and that the power of Jesus touches each and every heart as he speaks to us today. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.

Thank you. It occurs to me, standing here and looking at the little monitor I’m speaking on, that a black shirt on a black background is probably not optimal. You get to focus on my face, really just floating around there.

To bring everybody back together again, we’re talking about a shrewd manager today, a parable. In 1996 the Japanese were facing a 25% tariff. Tariffs are nothing new, if you wanted to know that. There was also a problem with light trucks. They would not let light trucks come across unless it had something to do with chickens. Yes, chickens. You can look it up. The vehicle was the Subaru Brat, B-R-A-T, a light pickup truck. So the Japanese came up with an ingenious way of getting around the tariff. They put a couple of plastic chairs in the back of the pickup, and now it was a passenger vehicle. They shipped a bunch of these over here, and once they had passed through and didn’t have to pay the 25% tariff, they removed the plastic seats. The Subaru Brat pickup. These guys knew how the world worked. They knew how contract law works, and they looked for a way around it. I love that kind of thinking.

Forewarning

Today the parable of the shrewd manager is focusing on somebody, and I want to set this up in context. This guy had news. He had the ability to see that he was about to get fired. In a lot of businesses today you don’t get forewarning. You just show up one day with your badge. I’ve been part of an IT department where we cancelled somebody’s credentials, and they said, “I can’t get into the building.” Oh, they didn’t tell you? You don’t work here anymore. This guy had forewarning, and he realized his life was going to go in a completely different direction, so he wanted to do something about it.

I believe God is giving us forewarning about things that are happening in this world today. A lot of people are talking about a lot of prophetic things. Some are talking about God bringing reconciliation to the world, or God shaking things, and there’s a lot of discussion and a lot of concern about what is happening, how it’s going to play out, and what my role in it is. I don’t know. But I know God is a father, and I know he loves his children, and I know he’s ready right now to pour out his love on this world like never before. I’m excited about that. I don’t know what it’s going to look like, but sign me up. I believe he’s given us forewarning that things are about to happen on that level, and that we have the opportunity to prepare our hearts, and sometimes even more practical things, so that we can participate in what God is inviting us to do.

Reading the Parable

With that in mind, let’s read this parable. Luke 16, starting in verse 1.

Jesus told this story to his disciples: “There was a certain rich man who had a manager handling his affairs. One day a report came that the manager was wasting his employer’s money. So the employer called him in and said, ‘What’s this I hear about you? Get your report in order, because you’re going to be fired.’ The manager thought to himself, ‘Now what? My boss has fired me. I don’t have the strength to dig ditches, and I’m too proud to beg. Ah, I know how to ensure that I’ll have plenty of friends who will give me a home when I am fired.’ So he invited each person who owed money to his employer to come and discuss the situation. He asked the first one, ‘How much do you owe him?’ The man replied, ‘I owe him 800 gallons of olive oil.’ So the manager said, ‘Take the bill quickly and change it to 400 gallons.'”

I’m not sure how contract law and invoicing worked back then, but I assume through this story that he was actually changing the record, so that from an auditable perspective this man now owed less money.

Verse 7: “He asked the next man, ‘How much do you owe?’ ‘I owe him 1,000 bushels of wheat,’ was the reply. ‘Take the bill and change it to 800 bushels,’ the manager said. The rich man had to admire the dishonest rascal for being so shrewd.”

So just to be clear on what’s happening here, this guy could see what was coming. He knew he was going to be set up in a bad situation, he knew how the world worked, he knew how people’s hearts and motivations were affected by different things, and he came up with a strategy to do something about it.

Now the rest of verse 8, where Jesus talks to the disciples about the lesson: “And it is true that the children of this world are more shrewd in dealing with the world around them than are the children of the light.” There are three groups of people in that verse. Is God putting us in a position to say, “Feel free to take advantage of your employer if you want to”? No. There are the children of this world, there are the children of light, and there is the world around them. Those are the three groups. Where do we fall? Children of light. Absolutely. When we are the children of light, we’re not supposed to act like the children of this world, but there is a lesson to be learned from this.

Verse 9, here is the lesson, in case you wanted to know: “Use your worldly resources to benefit others and make friends. Then when your possessions are gone, they will welcome you to an eternal home.” Jesus uses the same word, friends, that the manager used up in the story when he said he would have plenty of friends if he did these things.

Verse 10: “If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones. But if you are dishonest in little things, you won’t be honest with greater responsibilities. And if you are untrustworthy about worldly wealth, who will trust you with the true riches of heaven? And if you are not faithful with other people’s things, why should you be trusted with things of your own? No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

To be clear, Jesus is not telling us to follow the example of the guy who fraudulently changed the invoices. In John 17:15 Jesus is talking to the Father about his disciples, and he prays: “I’m not asking you to take them out of the world, but to keep them safe from the evil one. They do not belong to this world any more than I do.” Jesus is not a part of the world, and neither are we. We are the children of light, and we want to do things according to being the children of light.

Know How Things Work

There are a few points I want to make. Number one: know how things work. Use critical thinking. In verse 9 it says, “Use your worldly resources to benefit others and make friends.” The shrewd manager seemed to know the social impact that reducing some debts would have. Do you understand the impact your management of resources has on those around you? In Matthew 10:16 Jesus says, “Look, I am sending you out as sheep among wolves, so be as shrewd as snakes and harmless as doves.” Jesus is encouraging us to not be part of the world, but to understand how we impact the world and to be wise about that. What can you predict? What can you see coming?

We’re not being fired. I guarantee you the Father is not about to fire you. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that good to know? You have an eternity wrapped up with the heart of the Father. If you’ve accepted Christ as your savior and you have a restored relationship with the Father, you are on the right path. You are not going to be fired. Sons don’t get fired. Daughters don’t get fired. But we know something is coming. God wants to do something in this world. He’s going to pour something out in this world. What can we do to impact that? What can we do that would make it better? What can we do that could make it worse? Can we use critical thinking and be wise with our choices?

Then there is the phrase “make friends.” What Jesus is saying is that you can impact people to receive the kingdom of heaven. You can impact people to meet God and to accept Christ as their savior. You can have that impact even if you’re not an evangelist who runs around asking people to do an altar call at the bus stop. Some of you may be, and some of you may not. But you can have an impact on people. The people whose seed you sow, the people who see your life and your testimony and how you live it out, will receive God with greater enthusiasm when they realize that how you live is tied to the Father, to what he has done in your heart. Everybody agree with that? Okay.

Be a Good Steward of Your Resources

Number two: be a good steward of your resources. Use what you have. What worldly resources do you control? This parable is talking about money. The guy is about to be fired, and he’s looking for physical resources. He figures out how to change the way other people view him by reducing the amount of debt they owe. That’s all about money, so obviously there’s something to do here about money. Do we have money that we control? Yes. It doesn’t say in here that you shouldn’t manage your money. In fact, you should be wise about the way things in this world work. If you’ve never sat down with a financial advisor because you don’t think you have enough to deal with, I have amazing news for you. Your mind will be blown when you sit down with one and they show you how you can use the government’s tax incentives and create a tax-free way to build money that you can invest. It’s amazing. We should be wise to the way this world works. Amen.

I think Jesus used the finance angle because it translates to every generation. When Jesus was speaking, he knew that what he shared was going to be spoken for thousands of years. There are things we control today that were not available in the early church, so it’s a bit myopic to look at money as the only thing we focus on. What else do we have? We have time. How do you invest your time? What do people see you doing with your time? What do your children see you doing with your time? Your time speaks to what’s important to you. We also have resources like tools, a lawnmower, a pickup truck. How free are we to lend them out and let people use them? Are we hoarding things for ourselves because we have a poverty mindset that says, “If I lend this out, I might not get it back”? I’m not saying you have to give all your tools away. What I’m saying is, do you recognize the impact of what’s happening to somebody? Let me put all of this into context. One day somebody is going to hear your testimony and say, “Wow, that’s an amazing testimony,” and they’re going to broadcast it, and a lot of people are going to hear it. When that happens, is the guy you wouldn’t lend your lawnmower to going to say, “He lied about not having a lawnmower”? That’s a really bizarre example, but I want you to think about what impact it’s going to make down the road.

Think about the things you care for or manage: your influence, your job, your title, who you hire, how you hire, how you treat your employees. Does that speak to your sonship? Does it speak to how you operate from a position of knowing God as a father? Do you exude the love of the Father to those around you, even when you need to bring correction to an employee? I’ve had employees over the last number of years, and twice I’ve had to fire somebody for very fireable offenses. I had a really hard time with it. I didn’t want it to happen, but it had to happen. Both times the person came back later with donuts to say thanks and to tell me how much they appreciated the words I gave them on the way out. That’s bizarre. Maybe I was really soft. Maybe I was light. Maybe I was exuding the love of the Father in that moment. It makes an impact on the people who are going to listen one day.

Social Media and Your Witness

One that I think is really important, and that we should discuss, is social media. What do you control that has an impact on an audience? I want to honor Pam today. A number of years ago Pam was getting involved in social media and answering people, and she ended up in a conversation with her son Aaron. If I get this wrong, feel free to correct me. Aaron said, “Mom, you don’t have to answer everything on social media. Who do you want to be, and how do you want to be perceived? If you can figure that out, just be that, and don’t involve yourself in the rest of it.” Now go back with that information and look at her social media profile and her online footprint, and you will find an amazing daughter of God who exudes the goodness of God, who is authentic and real. There is nothing in the way she presents herself that would discount her words when one day she stands up in front of a large crowd. That’s a great testimony. We honor Pam. How many of you can say the same, that they honor you? How many of you honor Pam? Everybody honor Pam. Yay.

Honor the Father by the way you represent yourself on social media. I love this type of thinking. This guy in the parable could read a situation. I like reading contracts, especially ones that affect me. I can see how clause 2F contradicts clause 6H, and I can tell you how I could fight it in court and get around what they were trying to do. I love that kind of thing, and I’m good at it. So there are parts of me that this parable speaks to. I like to practice critical thinking. I like to play out scenarios in my head and understand how things work, so I have a lot of strong opinions about things in this world. My son-in-law does too, an amazing young man. We can get together and debate and argue and all kinds of things, and I won’t do it online. I won’t do it online. There are people who will see the injustice in the world and think that retweeting some political talking point that’s a gotcha to the other side is going to sway an election. It isn’t going to make an impact on anything. What it will do is show who your heart is to the people who might matter one day. So be wise to the way the world works. Some of us leaving here may need to go back and scrub our social media history and see if there are things that discredit us. That’s a good exercise, and I thoroughly encourage you to do it. Be a son and a daughter in the way you represent yourself to the world, because it will have an impact on the way people receive your message.

Making Friends for Eternity

Be a good steward of the things you have. Imagine you have the opportunity to lead somebody to the Lord, and the person listening is the last person you tipped. The things of this world are passing away. We don’t keep any of it. Being stingy, being concerned about our finances, being concerned about provision, being concerned about whether or not some vaccine is unjust, whatever those things are, they’re fading away. Eternity lasts forever. Eternity is where we are with the Father forever. That’s the most important thing about all of this, so don’t get caught up in those things.

It came up in the prophetic words this morning and struck me, and I was reading in Isaiah 8 this week. Isaiah says, “The Lord has given me a strong warning not to think like everyone else does. He said, ‘Don’t call everything a conspiracy, as they do, and don’t live in dread of what frightens them. Make the Lord of Heaven’s Armies holy in your life. He is the one you should fear. He is the one who should make you tremble.'” He will keep you safe.

If you can represent that to the world, I’m going to tell you a little secret. If you can figure out what your friends of eternity need, then you can share that with them. In this parable, what those friends needed was to save some money on their debts, and this servant figured out a way to do that. Jesus is saying you can make friends in eternity by how you impact people on this earth. If you can figure out what they need and how to give it to them, you will make friends for eternity. What does everybody need? The love of the Father. Everybody needs the identity that comes from being a son or a daughter. Everybody needs to know that they are not an orphan. Figure out how to give people what they need. Make that your social media profile. Make that the way you tip. Make that the way you conduct your life.

The Father’s Value System

Number three: it’s the Father’s value system. It’s our family’s values. Going back to verse 10: “If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones. But if you are dishonest in little things, you won’t be honest with greater responsibilities. And if you are untrustworthy about worldly wealth, who will trust you with the true riches of heaven? And if you are not faithful with other people’s things, why should you be trusted with things of your own?”

When we hear that, our first instinct is to disqualify ourselves, because many of us came to understand the need for salvation through our own faults and failures. We read it and think, “I haven’t been faithful. I don’t deserve anything. I haven’t been trustworthy with worldly wealth. I’ve made some really bad decisions. Why would God trust me with the riches of heaven? I haven’t been faithful with other people’s things. I’ve made mistakes. I didn’t pay back some debts. So why would God trust me with an eternal home, with things of my own?” That’s orphan thinking.

I have kids who are having a hard time getting into the workforce. They aren’t learning workplace skills because they aren’t in a workplace, and when they go to interview for jobs, they have a hard time showing up in the right way. So I came up with a system. It’s actually an online system. The kids have to sign up and apply for a job. They have to sit through an interview, and I ask them really dumb interview questions like “Tell me about a time you had to overcome adversity.” Once they get the job, they fill out their availability, and my system, which is all driven by AI, assigns them shifts and tasks. Then I grade them on how well they do, and we discuss it at the weekly staff meeting. I’ve made it very corporate so that they have to work through these processes. I’m going to tell you something. When I started this, my kids were not faithful with very little. They were not effective in how they managed their time. When I started, I would not have entrusted them with the keys to anything. But today, because we’ve been working this through, and I’ve been giving them feedback, correcting them, encouraging them, showing them things, and paying them, they have learned skills and responsibility, and they are better than they were before. That’s the way family works.

Let’s reread this passage in that light, with God as our Father. This is a great exercise, by the way. Take any passage in the Bible, read it and understand it, then say, “Father, what does this mean with you as my father and me as a son?” and read it again. If you are faithful with little things, you will be faithful with large ones. Wow. You’re promised encouragement and advancement and greater responsibility just from doing a little thing. Start small. Start somewhere. If you’re untrustworthy about worldly wealth, who will trust you with the riches of heaven? It’s good to understand that this is the Father’s value system. He cares about eternal things. What is eternal that God wants the most? Our hearts and the hearts of everyone else. He would have none perish. That is the value system of the Father, so he wants whatever we do to move toward that. It helps to understand the family values.

There was a time when my father, without going into details, was in a position where he had to walk away from a church for unjust reasons. I asked him why, because it was obvious he could have defended himself. He could have stood up and said this was unjust, exposed a whole bunch of things, and saved his place. My actual father, Ernest Culley, said, “I don’t believe the pastoral role is like that. This is a God-given position, and if God wants me in it, he’ll keep me in it. And I don’t want to expose the church.” I thought that was crazy. But I came to realize something: my father had a value system. He honored the Church, with a capital C, more than he cared about his own reputation or anything else. Do you know what an impact that had on me as a son, as somebody who looked up to him and was trying to figure out how to follow life? It had a huge impact that he didn’t want to expose the church, that he cared about it and didn’t want to make it look bad even if it made him look bad. We can debate whether or not that’s valuable, but I learned something about my family’s values, and I carry those values. We have a Father with values we can buy into, and they impact who we are as his sons and daughters.

Serving God, Not Mammon

In the end it says no one can serve two masters. This is about God. This is about eternity. This is about living with God. We can’t serve God and be enslaved to money. Other translations use the word mammon, a term for wealth that is stored up and that you trust in, like an inheritance or a nest egg you’ve squirreled away, thinking, “Doesn’t matter what else happens, that’s going to save me.” There are people who live to serve that, and it is not God. That stuff can go away in the blink of an eye. You lean on it and you will fall. God is faithful. This doesn’t mean you can’t build up wealth. It means that as you build it, one day God might say, “This is how you’re going to use that today,” and then you follow him.

The early church had a lot of wealth and a lot of property. Through the Holy Spirit they were led to understand that they were about to be invaded and overrun, that they were about to be scattered throughout the world, and that a great time of persecution was coming. Through the Holy Spirit they were all led to sell their property and bring their resources together in community. That is not necessarily a pattern we are all supposed to follow, unless one day the Holy Spirit shows up and asks you to. If the Holy Spirit shows up to do that, don’t be like Ananias and Sapphira, leaning on your nest egg. Be prepared to follow the Father. Know how things in this world work, know how you’re supposed to follow them, and know how it impacts people when they see it.

Something Is About to Happen

Going back to what I said at the beginning, I believe God is about to do something amazing in this world. I believe he wants to pour out his love into this community and into this town. I believe something is going to start here. If not at The River, then at least in the Abbotsford and Lower Mainland area, something is about to kick off. There are all kinds of prophetic words, and I’m not one to spend a lot of time focusing on the news and chasing everything that comes out. There’s an overwhelming amount of information coming. What I care most about is what the Father is saying to me today. This last week I heard God say, “Take care of the small things. Take care of the administrative things. You’re not going to have a lot of time soon.” Okay. All right. Thank you. It was kind of a weird week, and I spent a lot of time catching up on little things I’d been putting off. I care about what the Father is saying.

I believe God is preparing us for something that’s available. I think this message is timely, because we have the opportunity to look at our impact on the world and on those around us: on the people who are watching us, on the way your family is watching you, on the people you’re driving next to on the freeway. We have an impact on the people around us. Everywhere you go, you represent this family. I don’t mean the River Community Church. I mean this family where God is our Father and we are brothers and sisters in a global community of what God is doing. We represent it, and we have the opportunity right now to participate.

Invitation and Prayer

I’m going to invite the prayer team to come up, and I’m going to invite a couple of different groups of people. First and foremost, if you’re in the group who hears that word, where it says that if you’re unfaithful you won’t be trusted with the true riches of heaven, and you feel disqualified because of something in your life, I want you to come up and have God fill you with the knowledge of his love as a child. This is a family value system, and it isn’t static. If you were unfaithful with it yesterday, you get another chance today. It’s something you can continually learn and continually improve on. That’s group number one. Everybody stand.

Number two: if you are hearing God calling you forward, and there’s a hunger growing in your heart and in your spirit about the things God is about to do, and you want to be a part of it, and you want to say yes to God, yes to what he’s calling, yes to being a steward of something bigger than what you’ve got today, then help me steward what I’ve got today. If that’s you, I want you to come up and get prayer, because God wants to pour that into you. Amen.

Father, we thank you as everyone comes forward who wants to participate. We thank you for this word, and we thank you that you speak to us, that we get the opportunity to see what’s coming and to make strategic moves that will help impact it, just by checking our own hearts, our own motivations, and the small decisions we make every day. Father, I pray that as we go from this place, you would continue to pour in your love, and that you would begin to pour it out, so that there would be more for the people around us than they expect, because there is more in us than we expect. In Jesus’ name.