Lance Sawyer First Baptist Church Muskogee, Oklahoma Sermon Transcription October 7, 2012 A Bad Man s Good Example Luke 16:1-13 I d like for you to turn with me in your Bibles to the Book of Luke, Luke 16. We re going to look today at one of the most peculiar parables in all the Gospels. This is one that I ve read for years, I ve thought about preaching on but I ve honestly never known how to come up with a sermon on this and I think you re going to see what I mean when we begin to read it. It s not as easy to understand as most of Jesus parables are. It s hard to see right off the bat what the lesson could possibly be here, but I promise you I m going to do my best to draw those lessons out of it. Let s just start by reading it and I think you ll begin to get a feel for what I m talking about. Luke 16. We re going to be reading verses 1-9. 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. Have you ever heard that expression? We re too old to work, too proud to beg. This is where it goes back to. Don t have the strength to dig ditches, too proud to beg. Aw, 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 told him, Take the bill and quickly change it to 400 gallons. And, how much do you owe my employer, he asked the next man. I owe him 1,000 bushels of wheat, was the reply. Here the manager said, Take the bill and change it to 800 bushels. Now how do you expect the boss is going to like this? The amount of money has been cut down. He s going to be mad, right? Well, this is going to surprise you. The rich man had to admire the dishonest rascal for being so shrewd, and it s true the children of this world are more shrewd in dealing with the world around them than are the children of the light. Here s the lesson. Use your worldly resources to benefit others and make friends, then when your earthly possessions are gone they will welcome you into an eternal home.
Now one of the first things that hits me about this is that Jesus had an amazing way of seeing spiritual lessons in almost anything. All of us believe that God is everywhere. There s no place you can go that God is not, and therefore every experience in life has something to teach you if you have eyes to recognize it, if you re paying attention, if you know what to look for. Jesus could take a story about a crook and how he dealt with his customers and actually use it to teach us something about the kingdom of God. That amazes me because I run into so many good stories, interesting stories that I can t wait to tell you, but I can t figure out a way to use them. I can t find a good way to apply them in any of my sermons. Now let me explain what I mean. I m always collecting stories because you know I love stories and use a lot of stories. I ve got this illustrations filing cabinet at home. And it s a file drawer that is packed full of stories that I ve collected down through the years and they ll come from a book I read or some magazine article, something in the newspaper I clipped out. It just grabbed my attention and I think, One of these days I m going to be able to use this in a sermon. I don t know how I m going to be able to work it in but this is such a cool story I want to have it on file. So I ve got my illustration file alphabetized and I ve got it divided into categories -- like I ve got in the A s, I ve got aging, adversity, attitude. In the C s I ve got commitment and church, and I think I ve even got one for cloning in case I ever get ready to preach a sermon on that. I ve got a whole bunch of stories. So every time I prepare a sermon on a certain subject, I go through and look at the stories and I pull some of them out to use, but I ve got some stories that I ve never been able to use. It s just a crying shame, because they re such awesome stories. I decided if I m ever going to tell them, this is the day to do it because we re talking about a story that Jesus used about a crook and how he swindled his master and dealt shrewdly with his customers, and Jesus can draw something out of that. I want to tell you some of mine. I want to tell you some that I ve always wanted to tell you and just never found the place. If not now, I don t know when I ll ever tell you. The first, all of these are true stories by the way. You just need to know that my stories are always true. Unless I tell you different, you can assume it s true, whether it s an experience I had or something I read. This is something I came across, I think like three years ago -- a true story. There was a wave of bizarre incidences in Mississippi where this man was going from one McDonald s to the next and turning a live opossum loose in the crowd. He did this like five or six times before he was finally apprehended. Now there s a beautiful sermon in that -- I just don t what it is. 2
Here s another one that I came across. The Texas Legislature will soon make it easier for the blind to hunt with guns. All hunters in Texas are currently banned from using laser sights on their high-powered rifles, and this is a serious hindrance to blind hunters who have other people aim their rifles for them using the laser sights and the blind man pulls the trigger. Well, the Texas House has a bill to make an exemption for the blind, allowing them to use laser sights when hunting. The hope is it ll get more blind people out into the great outdoors. Now can you see the implications of that? One more for you. This is from June 07 and it s entitled, A Bad Week for Neighborliness. A teenager recovering from a car crash in a German hospital s Intensive Care Unit unplugged the life support machine of the man in the next bed because its incessant beeping was keeping him awake. Fortunately nurses were on hand to reconnect the man and save his life. Now I can take incidences from real life and sometimes bring a spiritual lesson. Those are three examples that I just have failed with. But Jesus took something just about as difficult and He told this masterful lesson that s full of applications for us. I want you to go back through the details of this story because I believe that this was an account of something that had actually happened. Different parables were created in different ways. I think you have some parables, like for example, Jesus said, The kingdom of heaven is like a woman who had 10 coins and she lost one of the coins and so she swept the house clean looking for the one coin. It was that important to her. His point there was the lost person is even more important to Him than all the saved people. So what that means, for example, is that if you feel far from God today, if you re just sort of confused and lost in life, you need to know that God is more interested in you than anybody else here. He s probably much more interested in what you re going to do than He is in what I m going to do today. You re very important to Him. Jesus sometimes created short parables like that to make a point. Other times He drew the story from real life. For example, the prodigal son. My guess is that growing up in Nazareth, Jesus actually knew this family where the son took his inheritance early, went into a foreign country and squandered it, and I definitely think the story about the crooked manager is one Jesus was taking from current events. It s also important to know who His audience was. Now the passage begins by saying He spoke to His disciples -- but which disciples? Well, this is important and will be interesting to some of you, I think. If you back up to chapter 15 you ll discover that this whole series of parables was spoken not so much to the 12 though they were present. It was spoken to the publicans and the sinners. That s the tax collectors. You know Jesus got accused of hanging around tax collectors, eating with them, sinful people. What do you think Jesus talked about when He was eating supper with these people? 3
He talked about things they could relate to. He told stories from their world and then used those stories to lead them into His world, and this story about a crooked manager is one they would relate to. Do you know why? Most of them were crooks -- the publicans were crooks. They made their living by overcharging other people on their taxes. Their whole life was just hook-andcrook. That s the way they operated, and some of these people were actually coming to Christ. They were actually coming to Christ and they had a lot of money. One of their questions was, Okay, how do I use this money? The disciples didn t really need a parable on that because they didn t have any money to do anything with. These publicans who came to Christ did have money, so one of the things Jesus was teaching them is, if you ve got money to work with how can you use that in the service of God? How can good come from the money that you ve made? You know everybody s blessed in different ways. Some people have this talent, others have that talent, and some people are in a unique position to be able to bless a whole lot of other people with their money. That s where these people were, so we re going to see some things about this parable that teaches us what to do not only with our money, but also with our time. I want to first take you back to this manager, the one who s the main character in the parable. He has just been told that he s getting fired. That s bad news because he realizes he s got nowhere to go. The only way he knows to make a living is by being a loan shark, and it was a business similar to what you have in Muskogee and most every other town. You ve got these quick-loan places, paycheck loans where you can go and get a loan until payday and they ll charge you ridiculous amounts of interest. I mean, as much as 30 and 50% interest. Why would anybody go to those places and deal with those kinds of crooks? Well, it s very simple. These are people who ve got bad credit, they can t get a loan from the bank and they ve got no other choice, so, these loan sharks are taking advantage of these people s misfortune and making a huge commission on the interest. This man in the parable was engaged in a business sort of like that, but he was in a bind and he knew he had to do something to save his neck, and he came up with this clever plan. The plan itself seems crooked on the surface, but you re going to see when we dig into it that it actually has some important positive lessons to teach us. He went around to all the people who owed money to his boss. Went to one -- in another translation it says -- He went to one. The man owed 100. He said, Quickly write out the bill. We ll make it 50. To another he went and said, How much do you owe? I owe 100. Make it out for 80. So this shrewd manager was doing something that helped the person in debt. He was also helping his boss because his boss was getting the principle at least. He was getting back the money he had loaned. But have you figured this out yet? Cutting the 50%, cutting the 20%, he was cutting out his own commission. That s the reason that his boss was so pleased with him when he realized what this manager had done. That s the reason he hired him 4
back, because this is a man who sacrificed his own commission, not really out of the goodness of his heart, but he realized that unless he gave up something he wasn t going to gain anything. It was only by giving up his commission that he was going to gain some possible security. Now there s a spiritual lesson for you. Do you recall that Jesus taught us, If you seek to save your life you will lose it, but if you lay it down for My sake you take it up again? Jesus taught us if we go through life putting our self first and trying to make sure we get our share, whether anybody else does or not, if that s our way of operating, then we may get ahead a little bit in the world, but in the process we re going to lose our soul. That s true in almost every area of life. The only way you really get ahead in the long run is by giving something, and my goodness, if we don t understand that principle we re going to have trouble at work and we re going to have trouble at home, not to mention in our dealings with the Lord. For example, have you ever thought of it this way? Wherever you work, whoever you work for, even if it s the customer, everybody works for somebody. Think about what you re doing. You are giving up something, your time, your energy, your ideas, your labor. You re giving up something but you re going to get something back in return. That s simply the way the world of commerce works. You give up something and you get something. The sad thing is, we ve got a lot of people today who don t comprehend that and they think they can get something without giving up anything. They think it s their right to take but they never put anything in. The same problem happens in marriages. If you want to have a successful marriage, you ve got to constantly be giving up something. You ve got to give up something that you want, and if you do that, the hope is that you will in turn get back some of the things you need. A healthy marriage always works this way. Both husband and wife have that same attitude. Both of them are giving up something or they re giving the other something the other needs, and the other is giving something they need, but both are sacrificing. Do you see that? If you re not both sacrificing then somebody is going to get shortchanged. Somebody s going to get done wrong. That s one reason Jesus said, Give and it will be given unto you. I mean, there are even people who do it with the church. I mean, church is just a place where I go and receive, and it is to be a place to receive. But is it also a place for you to give? If it weren t for the people who give their time and their money, we wouldn t have the service for those other people to receive. In every area of life you ve got to be willing to give up something in order to get something, and that s what this teaches us. Let me give you another lesson. The arrangement that this manager came up with was a deal where everybody won. You see, his boss won because he got 5
his principle back, the amount of money he had loaned. He had gotten his money back. The customer won because they got a tremendous cut in their interest payment, and surprise -- the manager himself won because he got to keep his job. Do you know what you call this? Stephen Covey would call it a win-win. It s actually a win-win-win. Everybody won, and that is the ideal business transaction. It s amazing how many of us don t approach our business transactions that way. How do you operate when it s time for you to sell your car? Or when you go looking to buy a car? I want to say to you that the only kind of deal that God really blesses, the only really good deal is a deal that s good for both parties. But there s a whole lot of us who aren t taught to do business that way. Actually I was not taught to do business that way. Before I was working in my daddy s tire store, where I did learn a lot of these good lessons, I was already trading horses and I learned a lot of my horse trading from cool, fast-talking old men who smoked cigarettes and chewed their gum real fast, and they wore their hats cocked to the side. I admired them because they were so shrewd and they would brag about their deals they came across in horse trading. Here s a good deal. A good deal means you got a steal, or a good deal means you took them. I mean you really made a fool out of them and you sent them away having been ripped off but thinking you did them a favor. I can remember sitting around talking with men who bragged about those things and I was impressed with it as a 14-year-old until I started realizing those same men were doing that to me. One of them, I think I told you about before, sold me a blind horse. The reason I fell for it is that rather than explaining this blue, glazed-over eye that you see here means he s blind, he said, Look at that eye. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? Just look at the color of that blue. It shone like that light blue in the stained glass window there. And he said, You could look all over this county, Lance, and you would not find another horse with a brown eye and a blue eye like this. I was terribly impressed. I bought him. Another of my mentors sold me the craziest, meanest horse, one of the craziest, meanest horses I ve ever owned. It was definitely the worst one I d ever had up until that time. Big palomino. He said, Now I ve got the horse for you. You need to name him Trigger, Jr., because he looks just like Trigger, smart, smart as Trigger. I went over to look at him. I was all excited because I had just graduated from high school and I had $500 in graduation money, and what a coincidence that turned out to be. It just so happened that that s what he was asking for that horse. Well, he said, Let me load him up for you. I ll bring him to you. I figured out later why. It s because you just about had to put him to sleep to get him on a trailer. I found out the only way I could catch that horse, he was so wild, that I would have to get in the truck with a BB gun and chase him all around in the pasture and head him off. If I wanted him to turn to the 6
left, I d shoot him in the left rump, and if I wanted to head him to the right, I d shoot him in the right rump. I d drive him up into my granddaddy s catch pen where he had one of those things that you slam down and catch the calves head but he was so tall, he d jump over that, so I piled up posts. You know, about every third time I could catch that horse without him busting out. I wound up having to sell him for, I think, $200. That wasn t a win-win, and that didn t help our relationship any. I want to ask you, when you re dealing with other people, are you genuinely wanting the kind of deal God wants? God wants a deal where you get what you need, they get what they need. You get what you deserve, they get what they deserve. That s the only kind of business dealing God will bless. Now what s another lesson we can draw from this parable? I think it s this. The best investments you can possibly make are investments in other people, and I know the minute I say that, it may pop into your mind, Whoa, I thought we were supposed to give our money to God. We re supposed to invest in the kingdom of Heaven. Yes, but how do you do that? It s not like God needs anything. It s not like He s worried He s not going to be able to keep the waters of life turned on this month. God doesn t need our money. He doesn t need our service, but God has a lot of children who do. So do you recall how Jesus said, When you ve done it unto the least of these, my brethren, you ve done it also unto Me. Also, when you don t do it, when you don t take advantage of the opportunities to help the people in need, then what s really happened is that I was the one who was sick and you didn t visit me. I was the one who was hungry and you didn t feed me. I was the one in trouble and alone, and you didn t reach out to me. The way you give to God is by giving to the things that God loves, to the things that are important to Him, and that s people, and that s also the work of God. Do you know that one of the reasons that I m able to be here today is that 10 years ago now, over 10 years ago, a man pulled up at my office in Goodway, Alabama and he said, Lance, have you ever thought about working on your doctorate? And I laughed and said, Ha ha, yeah, every preacher s thought about it, but there s no way I can afford that. I m doing okay. I make ends meet but I can t imagine paying for something like that. It would be terribly expensive, and he said, Well, I want to send you to school. I want to invest in you, and he said, I m going to pay your tuition and your books and I want you to go to Samford University in Birmingham. He said, My daughter s going there. It s a great school. I want you to go there and I want you to work on your doctorate. I would never have done that had he not come to me saying, I want to invest in you. He said, Because I believe that you ve got potential to bless a lot of other people but I want you to have a larger audience and if I can invest in you and bless you this way, it will in turn bless others. Well, do you 7
know where I was when I met the pulpit committee from this church? I was in that doctoral program and I would have never met them if it had not been for that. It was one of my professors in that doctoral program who introduced me to First Baptist Church, Muskogee. I wouldn t be here if it hadn t been for that, and I ll be eternally grateful. So I don t know if you ever get anything out of my sermons or not, but every time you do, whenever you do, you need to remember that you wouldn t if it weren t for that one man who invested in something other than himself. He invested in the work of God. The way to invest your energy, your time and your money, the best investment is in people and in the work of God. Listen to what Jesus said about this. Here s a verse you ve heard before, but I want you to hear it again in light of what we re talking about. It may have a new significance for you. Jesus said, Store your treasures in Heaven where moths and rust cannot destroy and thieves do not break through and steal. I don t have to tell you that there are not very many secure investments in our economy right now. There are not very many places you can put your money and know that it s even going to be there a year from now, much less bring you a return. I think we ve all gotten a taste during the recession of how true it is that things we invest in, in this world, have a way of getting eaten up, but Jesus is saying, There s one place you can put it where it ll be safe and there will be a return on the investment. It reminds me of a story I read just this week about a wealthy man who had a dream, and he dreamed he died and he went to Heaven. He was excited to be there. The angel was nice and friendly, showed him all around walking up and down the glistening streets of gold, passing by these amazing mansions. It looked like where the Beverly Hillbillies lived or something. It was incredible. Finally they came to a dead-end street and the angel said, Here s your house. The man stepped back and his jaws dropped. It was a plywood shack, not even painted. The angel saw the disappointment on his face and said, Well, I m sorry, we did the best we could but you just did not give us much to work with. How much are you giving God to work with? Jesus went on to say, Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Have you ever really thought about what that means? Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. When you give the best you ve got into anything or anybody, that thing or that person becomes very important to you. One of the reasons we love our children so much is that we probably put more into them than into anybody else. We pour our treasure, our best into them, and therefore our heart is with them. But where is your treasure going? Where are you putting the best things that you have? 8
Do you know, if you want a measure of that, here s a couple of very practical things you can do. Look at your schedule from this past week. Think about how you spent your time, and most likely you spent at least 40 hours of it at work. That was nonnegotiable. You had a certain amount of time that you slept and that you had to spend eating. What about the rest of that time? What did you spend it doing? I actually know what you spent it doing. You spent it doing the things that are most important to you, and so did I. The question is, what are those things? What are those things that are most important to you? There s one other lesson here. Jesus said, The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of the light. Here s what I think He s saying. The children of this world, people who live just for this world, are often very, very ambitious about getting ahead in this world. They will go to any length. They will work themselves silly to get ahead in a worldly sense. What if the children of the light were as ambitious about the things of God as the children of this world are about the things of this world? What if we were as ambitious if we got as excited, if we put as much of our heart and soul into God s work, into seeking Him, into looking for ways to be the hands and the feet of Christ? Do you realize what a different world it would be? How it would transform our town if just the Christians in this church got as ambitious about the things of God as they are about the things of this world? So, I want to bring this down to a practical application. I ve given you several lessons drawn from the parable. Be ambitious for God. Look for a win-win in every transaction. Recognize you ve got to give something up in order to receive something. But here s something practical I want to ask you to do, and it will take about five minutes of your time. In fact, it may have already done so today. I hope you did. This week I sent out an email to all of our adult teachers, directors and care group leaders. Raise your hand if you re a teacher, director or care group leader. Okay. I sent out an email to all of you. The reason is, the last month for some reason has been unusually low in our attendance. Our attendance has been down in Bible Study and this is usually the time of year when it s highest. So we ve done some research this week, the staff and I. Where are these people going? What s going on? What accounts for this number? It s not that anybody is really leaving and going to other churches, it s just that we ve got a lot of people that aren t coming at all. Their time is going somewhere else. Their treasure is being poured into something else. So what I m challenging our teachers to do -- I hope you did this in your class today, because I sincerely asked our directors and teachers and care group leaders to do this. I said, Please, take five minutes. If you didn t do this in your class today, then ask your leaders why you didn t and make sure you do it next week. Simply take five minutes and name everybody in the class who s been there during the last year but for whatever reason is not there now. I 9
mean, even people who ve missed the last two weeks. Then assign somebody in the class to call every one of them. Then have care group leaders send them a card. Have at least two people send them a text. Let them know we care, but also remind them that when they joined this church, they promised to be part of this church. I do want to tell you one other thing that you ll see a change in. You re going to see fewer people joining this church over the next six months and here s why. I m done allowing people to join the church simply because they re telling me they re going to go to a Bible Study class because I ve trusted them, and they ve not done it in large numbers. What I m asking people to do from now on, if you come to me about joining the church, I m tickled to death to have you, but you re going to need to go ahead and get in a Bible Study class and you re going to have to show me you ve been there six weeks in a row. Because if you re not willing to make that commitment, then we still want you to come, you are welcome as welcome can be, but membership means something. Membership means this is important to you. Membership means this is something you re committed to. So let s all think about our own commitments. The reason we do as well as we do here is because so many of you are so committed. But God only knows what we could accomplish if all the rest of us were to rise up and get as serious about the things of God as we are about the things of the world. That s our challenge today. 10