What Will Be Your Reward?

Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

Do you trust God? I mean, really trust God? It’s a question we ought to ask ourselves from time to time, especially about our lives and about our possessions. That is the subject of the parable I want to read to you today, a very unusual parable and one that is often misunderstood. It is called the “parable of the dishonest steward.” It’s about a man who is a manager or steward for a rich man; in Biblical days rich men would often hire men to manage their property and it is the same today. If we work for any company, we are stewards of other people’s property, the stockholders or the person who owns the company. This man, as happens today, was an embezzler. He was dishonest and stole from his master. His master caught him and called him on the carpet and told him to give an account of his stewardship, that is, that he was going to fire him. What’s unusual about this story is that the steward begins to think about what he’s going to do. Since he has some time, this hasn’t been announced into the community, he decides to go to each of his master’s creditors or the people who owe him things. He will ask them how much they owe and then when they tell him, he will tell them to change their bill from one hundred gallons of oil to fifty and so on. He did this throughout the community, banking on the fact that maybe the community would take him in after it was over and maybe his master would be stuck. So it happened that he was and the master commended the steward and told him that he was wise after his own fashion. This parable is often misunderstood; was Jesus commending dishonesty? What was He doing? It’s an unusual story. I would ask you to listen to it and we’ll apply it to our own lives.

The parable of the shrewd manager (Luke 16:1-13)

Jesus told his disciples: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. 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.’ 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 – I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job, here, people will welcome me into their houses.’ So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ ‘Eight hundred gallons of olive oil,’ he replied. The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred.’ Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’ ‘A thousand bushels of wheat,’ he replied. He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’ The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. 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. So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own? 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.”

This is often misunderstood and that’s why I think that many preachers don’t preach on this very often; they stay away from this kind of story. It seems that Jesus is commending someone for dishonesty, but of course that cannot be the case. We have to remember this is a story, a parable, and Jesus often said things quite shocking to get his audience’s attention. It’s kind of a like a story I heard about the famous preacher Tony Campolo. When he was young (and maybe didn’t know any better), he was preaching to a group of Christian students in a college and he was preaching on feeding the poor and hungry. He looked at his audience and said, “You don’t give a ________ for the poor and the needy.” Then he looked at them and said, “And what is so bad about it is that you are more upset that I said _______ than you are about the poor and the needy.” He was trying to get their attention. This is what Jesus was trying to do; He was trying to get people’s attention.

What is He trying to tell us? If you read the story a couple of times through, it is fairly easy to see that at least one thing that Jesus is trying to tell His audience is that they need to be smart. They need to be smart about their lives and about their possessions. As I said many times before, we live in a world in which to have faith as a Christian is often said to be not too smart by the elites of this world. Well of course we disagree with that; I don’t think we need to check our brain at the door when we come to church. It’s not really intellectual smarts that Jesus is talking about here though. It’s almost like a street-wise smart, a smart which knows how to take care of oneself when one gets into trouble. I read a great story about a man named Jay Wilkinson; he is the son of Bud Wilkinson (the famous football coach at Oklahoma). Jay went to college at Duke and married one of the finalists for Miss America. Then he went on to Harvard Divinity School. There came a time when he was going to run for office for the House of Representatives in Oklahoma. This was an advertiser’s dream; you had a beautiful couple, idealistic, young. They made several commercials. One had Jay and his wife walking hand in hand through a pasture, looking up into the blue Oklahoma sky with the caption “A better future for Oklahoma.” Jay was running against a man named Ted Steed who was a “good old boy” and Ted knew he was in for a tough fight. He only made one commercial. It said something like this: “I may not have a fancy degree from Harvard like Jay Wilkinson does, but I know not to look up into the sky when I’m walking through a cow pasture.” And he won. Jesus is telling us to be smart about our lives.

There are a couple things that even Christians hardly ever talk about. One is the fact that you and I are stewards of everything in our lives. The Bible regularly tells us, in one way or another, that we do not own anything, especially ourselves. The Bible is not communist, nor is it against private property. From a bigger perspective you and I are not owners of anything. Your life is not your own, my life is not my own. We are stewards. You know a steward is someone who manages someone else’s property. We don’t talk about stewardship very much but we should because we are. Wrapped up into that is another subject that we hardly ever talk about and that is the fact that we are going to “graduate” from this life. We talk about people going to college and taking four, five, six or seven years to graduate. In life, some of us take a long time to graduate but sooner or later we are going to get out the door and receive a diploma, if you will, from God. In other words, all of us are going to give an account of our stewardship to God. This is said again and again by Jesus; it’s said by Paul and all through the Scriptures too. You and I are going to give an account of the stewardship of our lives and of our children and of our jobs and possessions. I want to tell you that we are going to have a judgment, but I want to make something clear and a lot of people don’t understand this, there are actually two judgments. We all have this image that we are going to stand before God and He is going to determine whether we are going to the “hot” place or to the “cool” place. You know what, if you are in Jesus Christ, if you know Him as your Lord and Savior that first judgment is not going to happen for you because it’s already been made. You are going to Heaven! You have eternal life! You don’t have to worry. I want you to know that. Most of you already do. The misconception about “we aren’t going to find out until we get there” is wrong. But we are going to be judged in another way and God is going to ask all of us, “What did you do with your life? Did you live just for your own personal peace and prosperity? Did you try to live as comfortably as possible, as long as possible? Or did you invest your time and your talents and efforts for the kingdom of God? Did you use other people’s money for their benefit?” We see the parable of the talents; some got ten, some got four, one got one. Some people use their talents well in the parable that Jesus tells, but some didn’t. There will be judgment. It doesn’t mean that you are going to the “hot” place if you didn’t do very well. I have no idea what kind of reward we will get, but we know there will be rewards and no rewards. I’m not sure I want to stand before God and tell him that I lived for myself with all the things he gave me.

Jesus is saying, “Be smart, listen to what is being told to you.” You see, the steward saw the future very clearly. His master told him that he was going to be fired and he started weighing his options. He said, “Well, I’m not strong enough to dig and I’m too ashamed to beg. No one is going to hire me. What can I do?” He hit upon a desperate plan and he used, in a dishonest way, the stuff that he had to get his way. Jesus is using this shocking story to say, “Okay, all you good people who wouldn’t do that, you need to take heed. Look to the future. Use what you have been given to make friends.” Jesus says the same thing; he says, “Don’t let your treasure be here but let it be in heaven where moths can’t come and eat and rust can’t come and destroy.” It’s the same message told again in a different way. Jesus says be smart about your life and your future; an example would be your possesses ions. I had an uncle; he was maybe a second cousin. He was an odd fellow. When he died, he left most of his money – and there was a fair amount – to the local Methodist church. Now I know my uncle Arthur never ever went to church. In some sense, it seemed like he was trying to hedge his bets that somehow he would try to make up for whatever life he had led. I think that’s probably the case though I don’t know for sure. In a backwards sort of way, my uncle had it right. We are told to do the same thing in a sense, not to leave all your money to the church after you die in the hope that God will give in because we go to be with God through faith in Christ and in serving Him through that, but we are told again and again, “Don’t let your treasure be here. You can’t serve God and manna (money and possessions).” Yet I think that if we were to examine our lives, we would find that ninety-nine percent of what we do is for us; it has very little to do with God’s kingdom or with seeking first His kingdom and His righteousness. “All these things will be yours as well,” Jesus said. We need to be smart.

Finally, and maybe this is the key, we need to be smart about God. It’s interesting about this steward…he was taking an awful chance. His master could have turned him in or threw him into jail, but this steward was banking on something. He was banking not only on the reaction of the community – he thought the community would put pressure on the master and claim that he was a rich man trying to take advantage of the steward – but there was another thing going on. The steward trusted the master’s character; he knew his master was a merciful and good man. He was banking on that, on the fact that the master would be merciful in the end and not throw him into jail even though he had stolen from him a vast amount of things. He trusted the master. You know, to give our lives and our possessions over to God requires trust. That’s why I asked the question at the beginning: “Do we really trust God?” Because people don’t really like to talk about these things, we don’t act on them well; we don’t really give our lives and our stuff over to God. If we were to look at our check book, for example, where are most of our expenditures? Is there a line in there for God’s work in the world? If there is, how big is it? Is it much? If we were to take a look at our time, how much time is spent for God’s work in the world? That’s something we all need to look at and examine ourselves about. It requires trust to do this and I think we have trouble with it. I heard a wonderful story many years ago about a little boy who was homeless. They found him underneath a stairwell in Chicago on a winter’s day; his clothes were in rags, he was shivering and starving. They took him to a place of shelter. The little boy was very hungry but he was more concerned about his clothes. When it came time for bed the first night, the social worker was talking to him and he wanted to sleep in his clothes, he didn’t want to get out of them. She finally convinced him to do that and he got into bed. She was teaching him how to pray; she taught him the old prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” He was praying that, except at the end he changed it. He prayed: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my clothes to keep.” She said, “No, no. You are supposed to pray for your soul.” He looked at her and asked, “So, you won’t sell my clothes for money or whiskey.” She said, “No.” He said, “Okay.”

We really do have trouble trusting God with our lives. It takes trust to write out a check for God’s work in the world when we have bills to pay. It takes trust to go out and do things for God when maybe we haven’t done them before or it takes time and we have so many things to do. It takes trust to not worry about the fact that we are going to graduate, but rather to look forward to it. It takes trust to seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness and trust that all these things that we need (and even some we may not) will be ours as well. It takes trust to know that God, when we are judged, will be a God that rewards, in whatever fashion that is. But we trust in God’s character and who He has demonstrated Himself to be. That is the point of this parable. Do we trust God? Are we smart, if you will? Are we smart like the dishonest person was smart, who in a backwards sort of way put his trust in his master? We belong to our Master, we love our Master, but do we trust Him? It’s a question I will leave with you today, but I will leave it in this way. Most of us don’t trust as we should, but our Master is merciful, whether we trust Him or not. I leave you with that question in the context of His mercy; if you ask the question honestly of yourself, God in His mercy will give you the answers you seek.