Shrewdness: How to Honor God With Our Money

The Parable of the Shrewd Manager is a parable of Jesus found in Luke 16 and one that I had a lot of difficulty understanding for a long time. If you read through the parable I believe your initial impression will be that this character is acting pretty immorally, but then at the end of the parable Jesus tells us to act like him. It might seem like Jesus is condoning this man’s actions, but there is in fact something deeper going on.

In the parable, the main character works as a manager for a wealthy man and then is told that he is going to be fired for wasting and poorly managing the wealthy man’s assets. After hearing this, the manager goes to two people that owed debts and lowers the amount they owed in the account. The manager’s thought process is that after he is fired these debtors will allow him to stay in their homes because he has decreased their debt for them.

Now certainly what the manager has done is illegal and immoral. This is also why companies typically disable your computer login before telling you that you’re fired, so that you have no opportunity to do what this manager has done. Although what he has done is illegal and immoral, Jesus commends him on his shrewdness. The manager’s plan was smart and effective, even if it was dishonest. He recognized a problem and figured out what he could do to solve it with the limited time that he had remaining with the resources available to him.

So this parable should not be seen as an example of morality for us, but as an example of shrewdness. Jesus specifically instructs his disciples to make friends that will receive them into eternal dwellings. The only one who will give us an eternal dwelling is God, so Jesus is instructing us to use our wealth to honor and glorify God. I say “our wealth” but of course, like in the parable, our wealth is not actually our own but it belongs to God and we are only managers of it.

Another similarity with the parable is that we are only managers of this wealth for a short time. In the parable the manager is being fired for wasting it, but whether we honor or dishonor God with our money we will all someday die and leave it all behind. Matthew 6:19-20 tells us not to store up treasures on earth because they will eventually be gone. Some of our treasures get destroyed, some get lost, some get stolen, and everything that remains will not go with us when we die.

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Matthew 6:19-21 ESV

One response to this reality is to use the wealth we have to honor ourselves. In Luke 12:13-21 Jesus tells the crowd the Parable of the Rich Fool, in which a man saves up all his money and possessions to last himself many years. He then tells himself that he has done all that he needs to do and that he can relax, eating and drinking and rejoicing in the things that he has. The problem is that very night he dies, and none of the money or possessions that he has saved up will do him any good now.

The lesson is not that we shouldn’t save money, but that our security and our joy is not found in our retirement account or in our savings account. Jesus says in Matthew 6:21 that our heart will be focused on whatever our treasure is. A few verses later he says that no one can serve God and money, and he says the same thing at the end of the Parable of the Shrewd Manager as well. We naturally gravitate towards money and possessions for security and this directs our hearts away from God. The Bible speaks so much on the dangers and evils of loving money because it is so easy to fall into and because it is so foolish when you take an eternal perspective.

When I was in college the students would purchase meal plans in order to eat at the dining commons, and each meal plan would have a certain number of meals that you had available to use each week. The way it worked was that the number of meals available would reset every Monday morning. So if you had purchased the 14 meal plan, on Monday morning you would have 14 meals available to use that week. If you ate ten meals in the dining commons, you would have 4 leftover, which all go away when it resets to 14 the next Monday morning.

How would you react if someone came to you on Sunday night and bragged about having 12 meals remaining while you only had two? You would probably think they’re pretty foolish, because those 12 meals won’t do them any good before it gets reset the next morning. They’re completely useless precisely because they don’t carry over. This is exactly how God views our obsession with wealth. God is not impressed by how much wealth we’ve managed to accumulate in our short lives when eternity is so much longer and we can’t take any of it with us.

This is the context in which Jesus tells us to be shrewd with our wealth like the manager. What if we could spend those 12 meals on Sunday night for something that would carry over to the next day? Such an offer would be easily taken, and we would be called shrewd for taking it.

In John 12, Jesus is eating in the town of Bethany, and at the meal Mary pours out a large jar of expensive perfume on Jesus’s feet and wipes his feet with her hair. She is using her wealth to honor God, which Jesus would call shrewd just like the manager. Judas’s response is that it was a waste and it could have instead been sold and the money given to the poor. Likewise, by the standards of the world, this was a huge waste of what Mary had and it would not be called shrewd at all. It is only when we look at things from God’s perspective that Mary’s actions begin to look shrewd.

Selling the perfume and giving the money to the poor would also have honored God, but Mary felt it would honor God more to anoint Jesus with it, a choice which Jesus affirms. The New Testament provides us with many examples of people using their money to honor God. The early church provided food for many widows. Some individuals in the early church sold land that they owned and gave all the money to the church. Many people offered their homes to be used by the church to meet and worship in. Many of Paul’s missions were funded by financial support from churches and Paul collected money himself to be given to churches in Judea after a terrible famine there.

The ways that we can use our money and possessions to honor God are numerous and varied. But each time we honor God in this way we turn our heart a little away from the earthly treasures that captivate it and towards God instead. There’s only one word to describe using our resources that we cannot keep to honor God and gain eternal treasures. Shrewd.