The Stewardship of a Scoundrel, Part 1 | How to be a Faithful Steward

The Stewardship of a Scoundrel, Part 1

Luke 16:1-8

Turn in your Bibles to Luke 16 and we’ll be looking at verses 1 to 13 of Luke, chapter 16. Let’s read the whole thing now. “He also said, Jesus 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. 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.” The manager said to himself, “What shall I do since my master is taking the management away from me? I’m not strong enough to dig and I’m ashamed to beg. I’ve 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, sit down quickly and write fifty.” 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 eighty.” The master commended the dishonest 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 unrighteous 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 dishonest in very little is also dishonest in much. If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? 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.’”

I’m told that preaching on money is a sensitive topic. One that preachers naturally shy away from and probably should stay away from. Some seem to believe the preacher should address the subject of money only, maybe in like a self-help fashion. Like giving Dave Ramsey seminars and that kind of thing. Giving people practical tips on budgeting and advice for financial planning and the like.

But really confronting people about money. Preacher makes demands on people’s money and it’s considered out of bounds, off limits. As going too far, as maybe looking like a health, wealth and prosperity preacher. For many, when they hear the preacher tackle the subject of money and finances and challenging the church, that’ll be the last Sunday they attend your church if you talk about money.

It is the stock and trade of false teachers to go after people’s money, to bilk the guilty and the gullible for all that they can get away with. They promise them health, wealth, and prosperity. Promise them forgiveness. Promise them a lessening of a guilt and lessening of a burden just if they’ll write that check and hand money over. They’re going to take them for all that they can. It’s a criminal enterprise in the name of religion, in the name of Christ.

And I think it’s a tactic of Satan to spoil the good reputation of all true churches that are dealing obediently with the subject and with the text of Scripture. When the subject of money comes up in the text, listen, that is what we’re going to cover. This is his church. It’s his word. And so it’s his agenda that sets our agenda. We just be obedient and as we can see in this text, and if you’ve ever looked at the rest of the chapter, this is about money. It’s about people’s attitudes about money, toward money. How people use money. How people misuse money.

And I know this chapter is going to provoke you. And I pray that what Jesus says here in this chapter will not leave you unchanged, because Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Where’s your treasure? Where’s your heart? The Pharisees, as we see in the very next verse after what we read there, verse 14, the Pharisees were lovers of money and notice that they reacted by ridiculing Jesus’ teaching. But they did not change.

Others, perhaps less volatile than the Pharisees, but they, too, were indifferent to his teaching. They left unchanged. I am praying that Jesus’ teaching here softens and instructs our hearts. I’m praying that his teaching will inform our thinking and inform our will. I’m praying that his teaching directs our giving. In verse 1, as Luke, the narrator, briefly sets the scene, you can see that he intends us to view these two chapters, Luke 15 and Luke 16, as connected. Jesus delivered the teaching of these two chapters on the same occasion.

The previous teaching was delivered or directed to the Pharisees to answer their criticisms that came up in Luke 15:2. And then in 16:1, Luke tells us, “He also said to the disciples,” so it’s the same crowd, same occasion, but Jesus has shifted the focus of his teaching to instruct those who are following along after him. So the twelve disciples, obviously they’re in view, at the very least, but there are also other men and women who are his true disciples, but as is usual, there are also those who are following along after Jesus in their true nature, whether they’re disciples or not, their true nature has yet to be revealed. And so this parable is meant to instruct true disciples, those who will discern the true meaning, but it’s also going to serve, as parables always do, to sift and to separate the false disciples from the true. Those who fail to discern the meaning of the parable, they will lose interest, and they will fall away.

We know from Luke 15:1-2, “As the tax collectors and the sinners are coming to him,” they’re also the ever present Pharisees and scribes that are there. They’re always there to check up on him. Always there ready to criticize him and depose him before the people. We see in verse 14, the Pharisees loved money, but they’re not the only ones who loved money. How did the tax collectors, after all, how did they start down the road that led to their total betrayal of their countrymen?

Collaborating with the hated pagan Romans, who were occupying their land. How did they get down that road? How did they start down that road in the first place? Because they loved money. It’s not because they were rich already and loved money is because they were poor and loved money, and they saw this as a pathway to getting money for themselves. Listen, we know this to be true, don’t we? You don’t have to be rich to be a lover of money. In fact, I’d know a number of rich people that don’t love money at all, very generous people. I find sometimes that it’s the poorest who are the greatest lovers of money.

We can see no one, young or old, rich or poor, female or male, no one is immune from this form of idolatry called the love of money. Love, “of which is the root of all kinds of evil,” as Paul says, in 1 Timothy 6:10. As we consider how the Lord wants us to use money, Jesus tells us a story of a landowner and his wasteful manager or we could call him the prodigal steward.

The charge against him in verse 2. It says, “This man was wasting his possessions.” That’s that verb diaskorpizó. It’s the same verb that was used of the prodigal son back in Luke 15:13, where he went to a foreign land and squandered his father’s possessions. Same verb, same idea. Definitely one of the several points that connect these two chapters, but the point Jesus is making as he teaches his disciples is that it’s not okay for prodigals to continue to act like prodigals. If they’re coming to him, they need to drop that prodigal nature. Stop squandering, stop wasting, stop acting like prodigals.

Discipleship means stewardship and all of us, listen, no matter where we come from, whether we come from the lowbrow company of tax collectors and sinners or whether we come from the highbrow company of Pharisees and scribes, many of the Pharisees themselves were land owners, many of them were wealthy businessmen, the scribes were highly educated, so whether we come from the lowbrow, gutter trash, trailer trash, whatever, or we come from the highbrow, from the academic elites and all the social elites, listen, all of us are prodigals.

Because of the biblical principle of stewardship, namely that God owns everything and we own nothing, we’re simply managers of resources that God entrusts to us. So I understand there is, biblically speaking, there is such thing as property ownership. There is money ownership, there is power and authority for us to do with that property and money what we’re supposed to do. That’s the basis of law. It’s the basis of property law. It’s the basis of a charge of theft, and graft, and embezzlement and all the rest is because somebody owns something and you can’t just take what doesn’t belong to you.

That’s why socialism is bad, cause it is fundamentally a system of theft, of stealing. Listen, we need to understand more fundamentally, more basic to that, is the fact that God owns everything. We own nothing. He entrusts to us what we have, he entrusts to some more, and to others less. That’s by his good and sovereign and wise design. It’s for his purposes. So for us to complain about what somebody else has and we don’t.

Like this whole social justice thing of oppressor and oppressed, and victims and victimizers and all the rest, it’s fundamentally based on greed. It’s fundamentally those who have less, who are coveting and desiring; they’re loving money and they want to get it from those who have earned it or those who have inherited it. All of us though, it doesn’t matter if we’re Christian or non-Christian, everybody on this earth, we are stewards of what God has given to us. God has entrusted resources to us in every single person on this planet, at every time, and every place in history is going to give an account to God for their stewardship.

We, too, as Christians, we need to think about that, because now that we’re saved, as I said, discipleship means stewardship. Discipleship means now we’re awakened to our stewardship. Now we have, because of the regeneration of the spirit, because we have a new nature given to us from God, because we’ve been set free from our sins, because we’re born again, because we have been justified, declared righteous by God, because of the perfect work of Jesus Christ.

We are, as Jesus called us, in verse 8, we are sons of light, that is, the light has been turned on for us. Now we understand that we have a stewardship, that our money is not our own. It’s to be used for his purposes. Everything we have is a stewardship from God and we all will give an account to him for how we have managed what he’s entrusted to us.

So in going through this chapter together, we’re going to see that since we’re all prodigals in some sense. So we all need to confess the sin of squandering resources God has entrusted to us. We all need to come to a place where we repent. So we need to listen attentively today. We need to learn from our Lord and we need to learn to obey him in this and we will find that his way of stewardship, the greatest blessing on earth apart from our salvation. It’s the greatest blessing. Cheerful joy, gratitude comes out of exercising a good and righteous stewardship before God.

So Jesus begins his instruction with another parable. It tells about a landowner and his wasteful manager. We can see that verses 1-8 are laid out in literary chiasm. A chiasm, that’s a chi or a chi, is the Greek letter, looks like an X to us, but that X, with the outside stanzas of that X are parallel and as you get closer to the center, you’ve got parallel stanzas and then you get to the center and the main meat is there.

So we see verse 1 introduces us to the owner and the manager and verse 8 then at the end, parallel thought, it provides us with the owner’s reaction to the manager. So owner and manager verse 1, owner and manager verse 8. The next set of stanzas are parallel as well. Verses 2-3 portray the manager’s problem. What is his problem? He’s out of a job. Verses 5-7 show him trying to solve that problem, trying to fix the problem of not having a job. The central stanza, then, is verse 4 and the central stanza is this man’s, what we might call his eureka moment.

This is showing us in this moment of clarity as he, put it in the prodigal son terms, he comes to himself. Shows us his motivation. That’s what is at the center. What’s his motivation? Look at verse 4, “It’s in order that,” it’s a purpose clause there, “In order that people may receive me into their houses.” Jesus comes back to that. He revisits that central point when he comes to verse 9 and starts applying this working out the implications for us. He says in verse 9, “I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth,” he’s pointing back to the prodigal, “in order that,” that’s another purpose clause, “When it fails, they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.” That’s the central idea found in verse 4 and then repeated in verse 9, as he starts to work out the implications.

So that basic structure in mind, let’s get into the details of the parable. It starts with point one: An existential emergency. An existential emergency. You look again at verse 1, it says, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his possessions.”

I mentioned earlier this is a notoriously difficult parable to interpret, primarily due to our distance from the culture. Our distance from the economic practices that Jesus assumes in the parable here, but you got to understand everybody in the audience listening to Jesus on this particular occasion, they’re going to be tracking with this parable with no problem whatsoever. In fact, they would be loving this story. It’s not a story about virtue, as we can plainly see, but rather we see in here characterize the impish cleverness of the main character, who is a scoundrel.

Jesus introduces us though, first to the aggrieved party. An extremely wealthy man, this man is the owner of vast tracts of farmland. Many thousands of acres that he rents out to tenant farmers, and these farmers paid rent. There’s a fixed price of the produce, such as we see there, olive oil and wheat. And then that’s just two of the representative crops that are produced on his land.

If you scan down to verse 6, you can see the rent for one farmer, it says, is a hundred measures of oil. That’s his original bill, his rent. One hundred measures of oil. That’s about eight hundred and seventy five gallons of olive oil, worth about a thousand denarii, which a denarius is a day’s wage. So the rent a thousand denarii is about a three years wages for a day laborer. Three years wages paid his rent to farm on this guy’s land. If we estimate about twenty bucks an hour, this tenant farmer was paying nearly one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to grow and harvest olives on this man’s farmland. Pretty big bill, isn’t it?

Down in verse 7, the rent for another farmer is a hundred measures of wheat, the term for measure there is core which is between ten and twelve bushels. So one hundred cores of wheat is about a thousand, twelve hundred bushels of wheat that he paid the landowner in rent. A thousand bushels of wheat was the yield of about a hundred acres of land. So before modern farming, that’s not too bad. That was a worth of between twenty five hundred and three thousand denarii, which is at the low end. That’s about seven years’ worth of wages. So again, estimating twenty bucks an hour, that tenant farmer’s paying, at least at the low end, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to grow wheat on this man’s land.

So just try to step back from that, what this means is if you think about the high rents, this represents huge acreage. This guy’s estate is vast. There’s lots of olives and wheat. This is a vast farming enterprise. Rents like this mean these tenant farmers, they themselves are very wealthy men as well.

So again, Jesus is telling a story and he’s telling a story that has magnanimous, huge proportions to it. This is something that everybody in the crowd is like imagining this hugely, wealthy person. He’s introduced us to an extremely wealthy man and it’s one who obviously requires the services of a very skilled, very competent steward, such as this steward.

Stewards, managers, the term is oikonómos. Oikonómos can refer to several different kinds of managers, managers of households. They, they provide oversight to the household slaves like the one we met back in Luke 12:42. Oikonómos can refer to a civic official, like a city treasurer. We see that in Erastus, mentioned he’s ministering there with Paul in Rome, Romans, 16:23. But here this oikonómos refers to an estate manager. This is a legally authorized agent of the owner. This man has authority to broker contracts. He’s like these rental agreements with the tenant farmers. He’s responsible for keeping track of of all the accounts he’s responsible to collect rent when it’s due.

Now this land owner, clearly portrayed here, as a gentleman farmer. He’s a respected man in the community. He’s trustworthy. He’s an honorable man, and we know that quite simply because if he weren’t, other wealthy men would not be willing to do business with him. They do business with men that they trust. This man is trustworthy. Someone, we can see in verse 1, again to commend this land owner to us. Someone, according to verse 1, is looking out for him.

Someone is concerned about this land owner’s interests. Person is unnamed in the story, but he’s crucially important to the story because this anonymous person, or perhaps we could say these anonymous people. They see the landowner as aggrieved by the steward. He’s a victim of the manager’s bad management. He’s misusing the man’s funds through wastefulness. Notice, the steward here is not charged with fraud or embezzlement. That’s important. He’s not stealing from the landowner. The complaint is not that he’s stealing from the tenants. The complaint is that he’s squandering possessions. He’s wasteful.

So whoever it is, or whoever they are, they report this prodigal manager to the owner and that prompts a meeting, verse 2, “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.’” The owner, he’s on top of it, isn’t he? Hears the report, calls the man in, summarily fires him, like any careful owner would be; this is how he acts. He didn’t become rich by being neglectful, by letting things go. He’s diligent, he acts quickly. He deals with the problem, and he summarily fires this prodigal manager.

Couple things to notice here. First, notice that Jesus says nothing about the steward’s response. The manager, by the way, steward, manager, same interchangeable terms. I’ll use them interchangeably, so don’t be confused by that steward, manager, but the manager is silent in the presence of the owner. He says nothing. It’s probably his best quality in that moment, isn’t it? Doesn’t answer the owner’s question. Doesn’t protest his firing. He doesn’t make excuses. He doesn’t even plead for his job. He just takes it.

What does that tell you? He’s guilty and he knows it. He knows that the master knows it. He knows the gig is up. He’s got no case to plead and so very wisely, he says nothing. First hint about his shrewdness. First time we hear him speak is in the next verse, and he’s talking to himself as he comes to himself. He formulates the plan, but in the presence of the owner, he’s silent. He says nothing. Why not? Well, because he’s guilty.

And second, cause he seems here to spot a tiny window of opportunity in the way that the master has been dealing with him. Notice the master’s simply firing him. He’s simply letting him go. Now, remember this steward, he’s pictured here, not as a slave, many stewards, oikonómos, they were slaves, but this steward is a free man. so for this man in particular, it means personal freedom, yes, to be free in his person, but listen, this also means responsibility. This means a legal responsibility for him as a steward. This means a fiscal responsibility that he owes, not only to this man, but to the whole profession, to the whole community. His master is letting him go. That’s it.

There’s no SEC investigation, pursuant to legal action. There are no public charges. There’s no yanking of his license. There’s no exacting repayment of whatever he had squandered. No, there’s no beating in the office, not even a harsh word spoken. The master is being remarkably gentle here. He’s dealing him with the utmost kindness. May none of us be like that unrighteous steward. Taking our Lord’s grace for granted. May we not see his patience as a reason to not repent of our sins. Viewing his mercy as a reason to take more advantage. Let us instead take hold of our stewardship.