Monday, September 19, 2011

What Jesus Said about Your Money, Part 2 of 31

TEXT: "He also said to His disciples: 'There was a certain rich man who had a steward, and an accusation was brought to him that this man was wasting his goods. So he called him and said to him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your stewardship, for you can no longer be steward.’ Then the steward said within himself, ‘What shall I do? For my master is taking the stewardship away from me. I cannot dig; I am ashamed to beg. I have resolved what to do, that when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses.’ So he called every one of his master’s debtors to him, and said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ And he said, ‘A hundred measures of oil.’ So he said to him, ‘Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty.’ Then he said to another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ So he said, ‘A hundred measures of wheat.’ And he said to him, ‘Take your bill, and write eighty.’ So the master commended the unjust steward because he had dealt shrewdly. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light'” (Luke 16:1-8).

IDEA: The steward was shrewd in the way he handled his situation.

PURPOSE: To help listeners understand the dynamic of the parable of the unjust steward.

Manager: Come in. Welcome to my office.

RBC: Thank you. I appreciate your making time to see me.

Manager: Not at all. Can I get you something to drink? A little wine perhaps. Or a glass of sherry?

RBC: No. No, thank you. It’s kind of you to offer.

Manager: Anything else perhaps?

RBC: No, I’m fine. I don’t want to take up too much of your valuable time.

Manager: My secretary says that you’re with NBC, or is it ABC?

RBC: Well, actually, it’s neither. I’m with RBC—the Radio Bible Class.

Manager: Bible class? Well, if you’re looking for a contribution, you should have told my secretary. He handles things like that. There was no need to see me.

RBC: No, No, I’m not here to solicit funds. I wanted to talk about your story. I read about it, but I had hoped that you could fill in some details.

Manager: My story? You mean my life story? . . .

RBC: No, I was thinking about how you handled the way you were fired by your last employer. That particular story. I was interested in knowing more details about . . .

Manager: Oh, that! Well, it was a difficult moment for me, but nothing more than thousands of others in management have faced. You say that you represent some Bible Class? Well, my favorite sentence in the Bible is, “God helps those who help themselves.” That’s been my life’s motto.

RBC: Actually, that’s not in the Bible.

Manager: Well, it should be! It’s good sense, don’t you think? If you don’t look out for yourself, no one else will.

RBC: A lot of people would agree with you, I suppose. But I’d like to hear more about how you put that into operation after you were dismissed from your last position.

Manager: Dismissed. You have a nice way of putting it: I was fired. Given the old pink slip. You see, I managed a business near Jericho. The owner lived up north by the lake where it was cool. He put up the money for the business, and I supplied the brains. The owner didn’t want to sweat out the day-to-day activities. So for all practical purposes, he turned the daily operation over to me. All he cared about was his profit.

RBC: Were you running a farm of some sort?

Manager: No, not really. Our firm rented out land to tenant farmers, and I collected the rent. They agreed to pay a certain quantity of produce for the use of the land, and the price had nothing to do with the yield of the crop. They were speculators who were betting on the harvest. We made our money on the rental of our lands. It didn’t matter to me whether the harvest was big or small. We got what was coming to us. The farmer gambled. We didn’t. When the harvest came in, we got what was coming to us up front.

RBC: So the owner always won.

Manager: Right! I was the middle-man. I wrote all the contracts and collected on them. It was my operation. The owner got the profits.

RBC: You must have been paid well for your work.

Manager: Of course, I was valuable to the owner. He paid me a good salary. The renters also paid a fee for my services. There was always a little under the table that I could pocket.

RBC: A bribe?

Manager: No. More like a tip for special considerations. Then, too, I had an expense account to take care of the office. After all, it takes money to keep an operation of our size going. I saw to it that I made a good living. Salary and expenses put a nice house over my head, an up-to-date wardrobe in my closet, the best food and wine on my table, and the latest chariots in my garage. But that’s what got me into trouble.

RBC: What do you mean, “got you into trouble”?

Manager: That’s how I lost my job. Somebody down at the office was jealous of me. Whoever it was went to the owner and accused me of squandering the assets of the business. He ran a pretty tight ship and took reports like that very seriously. Too seriously for my liking.

RBC: Did the accusation have some truth to it?

Manager: “Squandering?” It depends on what you mean by squandering. I used the money. I didn’t feed it to a fire or give it away.

RBC: Well, what happened?

Manager: The owner sent a messenger to summon me to his villa. I thought maybe he was going to give me a raise or a promotion. Boy, was I wrong! He told me that he had heard reports about my mismanagement, and then he fired me on the spot. He didn’t give me a chance to explain or give my side of the story. He fired me just like that.

RBC: That bothered you, I suppose.

Manager: What could I do? The boss is the boss.

RBC: So you were finished right then and there?

Manager: Not exactly. The owner kept me on for a few days. He had to. He needed my accounts. after all, he didn’t keep track of the daily operation. I had to get everything up to date so he could hire another manager. But after I turned in those accounts, I was gone.

RBC: The firing must have come as quite a shock.

Manager: It devastated me. I mean, what could I do? I’d been a manager for years. I didn’t have any other marketable skills. The only jobs available were low-paying jobs—digging up rocks or working crops. Hard work isn’t beneath me, you understand, but sitting behind a desk and enjoying the good life made me soft and flabby. It would take months to get into shape again, and for what?

RBC: Couldn’t you have turned to some of your business associates and asked them for a job?

Manager: Ask for a job? You’re kidding. “Beg” is more like it. No, I thought about that. I had too much pride. Besides, they didn’t owe me anything. Why should they go out of their way to help me out? So there I was. I couldn’t do manual labor and I wouldn’t beg.

RBC: What did you do?

Manager: I went to bed and worried about my future. Then, in the middle of the night, a plan struck me. It was really very simple, but I knew it would work.

RBC: What did you do?

Manager: I knew I had to act quickly. The owner wanted those accounts in a hurry. I contacted some of the fellows that I had done business with and asked them to drop by and see me. These were wealthy men. Big operators. I had to get to them before news got around about my firing. I called them in one by one. I didn’t want them talking to each other.

RBC: They might ask too many questions, I suppose.

Manager: Right! They needed to feel that the whole scheme was on the up and up. The first one who came by was an oil dealer. He owed our firm a hundred baths of oil.

RBC: “A hundred baths of oil.” What kind of oil are you talking about?

Manager: Olive oil. Valuable commodity.

RBC: How much is a hundred “baths” of olive oil? I’m not familiar with that measurement.

Manager: Well, let’s see. Each bath is around 8-1/2 of your gallons, so 100 baths would be around 850 gallons. That would take the yield of over 145 olive trees. It would take an ordinary laborer nearly five years’ salary to buy that much olive oil.

RBC: That’s a lot. Then what happened?

Manager: I told the oil dealer to sit down and we could renegotiate his contract. It looked like a bad year for olives. There was a blight and some of his trees had died. I knew his back was up against the wall. I told him that we had been friends for too long to drive a hard bargain, and that the firm wanted to give him a break. I implied that I had talked the old man into a new deal. At my direction he wrote out a new bill for only half the amount—fifty baths of olive oil.

RBC: He must have been relieved.

Manager: He was elated! He kept asking how he could pay me back. Kept saying what a good friend I was. Couldn’t stop talking about it.

RBC: Was he the only one you talked with?

Manager: I had a parade of debtors to see me. For example, I ate lunch with a wheat speculator. He owed us 1,100 bushels of wheat. That’s a lot of wheat. That was the agreed-upon amount for the use of our land. But there had been that drought, and he faced a bath in red ink. So I told him that I had talked to the owner about his contract. I said I counted him as a friend and I didn’t want him hurt. I pulled out the bill and urged him to take off twenty percent and rewrite it for 880 bushels.

RBC: What was his reaction?

Manager: What do you think? He almost spilled his wine trying to hug me. After all, I’d saved his neck. Both of us knew it. He thanked me for being his friend. I made a stable full of friends that day. It was kind of nice. That’s why I said my favorite Bible verse is “God helps those who help themselves.”

RBC: That’s not actually in the Bible.

Manager: It should be. It makes sense to me.

RBC: How did making those friends help you?

Manager: A couple of weeks later, when I needed a position, several of those fellows were eager to hire me. They knew how I had worked their side of the street, and they wanted to return the favor. That’s how I got this position I’m in right now.

RBC: How about the owner of your former firm. Wasn’t he upset by what you had done?

Manager: Well, I suppose so, but what could he do? I didn’t steal his money. If I had done that, he could have had me thrown into prison. But I didn’t steal his money. I simply used my position as his branch manager and the money he let me control to make a few strategic friendships.

RBC: There was nothing he could do? Nothing at all?

Manager: What’s he going to do? My friends all had signed contracts. And you know what? Those guys all felt that the owner was a pretty wonderful person to help them out of a jam. He was stuck. He couldn’t enforce contracts that didn’t exist. And besides, if he had tried, it would have ruined his reputation in the community for being understanding and generous. No way was he going to do that.

RBC: So . . .

Manager: So he took the whole thing philosophically. He’s shrugged the whole thing off. I met him a while back and he said, “You know, I’ve got to hand it to you. You’re a shrewd one. When the money was down, you knew how to play your cards.”

RBC: That’s quite a story. Thank you for taking time to fill in some of the details for us. You’ve been very helpful.

Manager: Glad to do it. But you said that you read my story some place. I’m surprised. After all, it’s no big deal. Who would bother writing about something like that?

RBC: Our Teacher told your story, and one of His biographers, a physician by the name of Luke, wrote it down. It’s pretty much as you told it.

Manager: That right? How did I come out?

RBC: Well, listen to it and see what you think.

“There was a certain rich man who had a steward, and an accusation was brought to him that this man was wasting his goods. So he called him and said to him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your stewardship, for you can no longer be steward.’ Then the steward said within himself; ‘What shall I do? For my master is taking the stewardship away from me. I cannot dig; I am ashamed to beg. I have resolved what to do, that when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses.’ So he called every one of his master’s debtors to him, and said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ And he said, ‘A hundred measures of oil.’ So he said to him, ‘Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty.’ Then he said to another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ So he said, ‘A hundred measures of wheat.’ And he said to him, ‘Take your bill, and write eighty.’ So the master commended the unjust steward because he had dealt shrewdly. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light.” (Luke 16:1-8)