Our Beliefs : Sermons : Sermon Archive - 2004 : October 3, 2004
Use Your Wealth as a Worldly Means to a Heavenly End
Pentecost 18
What is the meaning of life? Why do I exist? That's a tough question for some people. Now those who don't know Christ will come up with all kinds of answers to that most basic of questions. One might say, "I'm here to live a good life." Another might say, "I'm here to find out what life is all about." And yet another might say, "I have no idea why I'm here." Those who don't know Jesus can't come up with the right answer to that question -- they will get it wrong every time. In fact, most people in this country of materialism that worships at the altar to the Almighty Dollar would join the Epicureans in saying that life is all about eating, drinking and being merry, for tomorrow we die. But you, as a believer, have a different answer to why you are here: to glorify God, to serve God, and to tell others about what he has done to save all people. That is why you're here. That is why you exist.
This morning we will look at one aspect of why you are here -- one way you can glorify God and serve God and tell others about God's love. That one aspect is how you use your wealth. Now usually when we think of earthly wealth, we think of something that can easily get in the way when we want to serve God. After all, the love of money is the root of all evil, and Jesus deals with the subject of wealth and its dangers many times in Scripture. But in our lesson for today, Jesus is going to tell us how you can Use Your Wealth as a Worldly Means to a Heavenly End.
How do we do that? Jesus says we do that by first of all using it wisely, as the manager did in Jesus' parable. This manager was an unbeliever. He was slimy and unscrupulous and a cheat. But Jesus tells us that he can teach us something. In Jesus' parable, a rich man has hired this manager to take care of his estate. After finding out that the manager was dishonest, the rich man said something that Donald Trump says all the time these days: "You're fired!" The manager, as he's packing his bags, thinks about what he can do. "I could earn an honest living." Nah. "I could beg." Nah. Then he had an idea. He called in the people who owed his master money and told them not to worry about paying back some of their debt. And even though the rich man finds out about it, he has to admit that it was a pretty shrewd thing to do. Now the manager would have some friends he could go to after the rich man threw him out of the house.
Jesus wants us to act like that dishonest manager, not emulating his dishonesty, but his wisdom, in dealing with our money. For unbelievers, money is an end to itself. They have the idea that the more money you make in your lifetime, the more of a success you are. They subscribe to the philosophy, "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." A believer cannot have such a philosophy -- it would show that his true god is money, not the true God. A believer does not see money as an end in and of itself, but Jesus says he must see it as a means to an end -- a heavenly end. Now that doesn't mean that a believer thinks he can use his money to buy salvation, which is what Martin Luther could not tolerate at the time of the Reformation. Jesus' point is this: a time would come for the dishonest manager when he wouldn't have any money to use, but while he had his master's money, he could use it. When will a believer no longer be able to use money? When he or she gets to heaven. You can't take it with you. What did the manager of the money do with it while he could use it? He used it to make friends. In so doing, these friends would later help him out when he lost his job, maybe even welcome him into their homes. How can we make friends in this world? By doing the same thing -- by giving away wealth that isn't even ours. In other words, what does God want us to do with our money that he has given to us? Hoard it? Build up a big stockpile of it? No! We should give it away. Who should we give it away to? Those who need it -- the poor, the government, our family. All of those are examples of those Jesus tells us we should spend our money on.
But there is one particular way that we can use our earthly wealth to make friends for eternity. God wants us to put it to use in his kingdom. When we give offerings to our Lord, we are showing him how much we love him for what he has done for us. When we give offerings to our Lord, we are using that resource to spread the message of Jesus throughout the world. Then we will be making friends, spiritual friends, who will one day welcome us into heaven because we used our earthly wealth as an earthly means to a heavenly end for someone else. Jesus says the same thing in verse 9: "I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings." The ones who will welcome us will be those on whom we spent our time and our treasure to win them for Christ. That's why we're here -- to win more souls for Christ. What would you rather do -- amass a huge amount of money that you can't take with you when you die anyway, or amass a huge amount of people that you helped turn from unbelief to Jesus Christ, those who will welcome you into heaven? When we see wealth from Jesus' perspective, our wealth takes on a whole different aspect doesn't it? It's not meant for us -- it's meant for others. Some of the people you will meet in heaven someday you never even knew, never even saw before in your life, but they found out about Christ through a missionary who was supported by your mission money.
That is how Jesus wants us to use our money -- wisely. But he also wants us to use it faithfully.
When the Frankish kings were conquering much of Europe under Charlemagne and others, the story is told of whole armies being baptized because of the faith of the Frankish king. But when the soldiers would go down into a lake or river to be baptized, many of them would keep their sword hand above the water. Their thinking was that they thought it would be okay to continue to mercilessly kill and slaughter with their sword because that part of their body wasn't baptized. There is a saying today that is similar to that story. It says that a person's wallet is the last thing to be converted. And we can see why that saying has come into existence, can't we? It's easy for a person to confess Christ and say they will serve Christ in everything in life and that Christ is the most important thing in their life, but when it comes to giving up their money into the collection plate, suddenly it seems that it isn't quite so easy for us when we have to put our money where our mouth is.
So Jesus gives us a warning: "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. If you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches?" Very simply stated, if I look at your checkbook, I can tell how strong of a Christian you are. If you are faithful with earthly wealth by happily giving to God of your firstfruits and it's a generous percentage of what the Lord has given to you, then God will bless you with even more blessings -- spiritual riches, like peace and contentment and happiness, even when the money runs low. Do you consider yourself wealthy? If you have a toilet in your house and drove to church in your own vehicle, then you are wealthier than 80% of the world's population. You don't have to be a Bill Gates to be wealthy. What do you do with that wealth?
Have we been trustworthy with our wealth? Have we been faithful with it? At times, yes. And often we have the best of intentions. But those best intentions don't always translate into true faithfulness. I happen to know a 3-year-old kid who always has the best of intentions for putting the caps back on the markers he's using. Every time I tell him, "Make sure you put the cap back on or the marker will be ruined," he has the best of intentions and says, "Okay." But ten minutes later I can walk into the room where he was coloring and find five markers lying around with no caps on them. Did he have the best of intentions? Yes. But did he do what he should have done? No.
And it's the same with you and me. We have the best of intentions of using our money wisely -- to spread the message of Jesus with the lost. We have the best of intentions to use it faithfully -- by giving Jesus of the best of what we have, our firstfruits, not our leftovers, a good percentage of what he's given to us, joyfully because he's given us eternal life. But what do we often find? What we do doesn't match up with our best intentions. When it comes to money, we have often been very unwise and unfaithful.
Jesus said, "And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else's property, who will give you property of your own?" How true it is that we've been untrustworthy with the property God has given us! But listen to this -- in spite of our failures, Jesus has indeed given us property of our own -- he has given us heavenly property free of charge. Think about it. God's Son gave up his heavenly property when he came to this earth to live a perfect life for us under God's holy law, the law that we time and again have broken by being selfish with our money and spending it on ourselves instead of primarily spending it to win friends for eternity by giving to the work of the church. Jesus' whole life showed us where our priorities should be. But he didn't just give up his heavenly property -- he gave up his own life to save us from the punishment we have earned by the mismanagement we have shown with God's money. He died to take away every covetous and greedy and selfish sin of ours and of the world's forever. Christ gave us his earthly life of perfection so that it could be credited to our account, as if we had never sinned. Yes, God certainly has given us "property of our own," our home in heaven. Since Jesus did so much for us, we will strive to use our money wisely and faithfully as we reach out to others who will one day join us in our heavenly home.
How will people remember you after you die? Leonardo daVinci is known for painting the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper; Bill Gates might be remembered as the richest man in the world. How will people remember you? What will they say of your time on earth? Will they say that you fulfilled your purpose for being here? Will they say it was a waste of a life? Or will someone that you don't even know be able to approach you in heaven and say, "Thank you, friend, for using your worldly wealth as a worldly means to a heavenly end, because your support of the gospel ministry sent a missionary to my door so I could hear the good news about Christ"? God grant it for Jesus' sake. Amen.
