The sermon by Peter Allison, titled 'Planning for the Future,' explores the parable of the unjust steward from Luke 16. It draws a comparison between the 'sons of this generation' who are worldly and self-serving, and the 'sons of light,' or believers, who serve Christ. The parable illustrates how the unjust steward, despite his unethical actions, demonstrates foresight and planning for his future after losing his stewardship. The speaker emphasizes that believers should similarly be future-oriented, preparing for their eternal home in heaven. Jesus teaches that 'unrighteous mammon'—worldly wealth—should be used wisely to build treasures in heaven, advocating for generosity and faithful stewardship. The sermon stresses the importance of being faithful with the resources God has given, including time, abilities, and wealth, and encourages believers to use these resources to further God's kingdom. It also warns against the dangers of being overly attached to material wealth, urging a balance that includes heavenly planning and generosity.

Please turn with me to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 16. So we come back to our look at Luke here, picking back up. I'd like to read the first 13 verses. These things I have spoken to you that you should... My mistake.

Try again. 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 them and said to him, what is this I hear about you? Give an account of your stewardship, for you can no longer be steward.' And 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 masters 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 generations than the sons of light. And I say to you, make friends for yourselves by unrighteous mammon, that when you fail they may receive you into an everlasting home.

He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much, and he who is unjust in what is least is unjust also in much. Therefore, if you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will permit to your trust the true riches? And if you have not been faithful in what is another man's, who will give you what is your own? No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.

Blessed is the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night. Heavenly Father, thank you for your word. I pray that You would open our eyes this morning, eyes of our understanding, that we might behold You in it as You have revealed Yourself. I pray that You would sanctify my sinful lips to proclaim the riches of Your grace. And I pray that our hearing this morning might be mixed with faith, that it may bring to us greater, more faithful obedience to you, our Lord and Savior.

Amen. Well, this parable, which many have found a little bit enigmatic, is a comparison between the sons of this generation and the sons of light. That's the whole parable right there. It's a comparison between the sons of this generation, those who serve themselves, and the sons of light, those who are serving Christ. Let's say it's a comparison between believers and unbelievers.

Jesus is here doing something like what parents do when they say to their older child, well look at your younger sister here. She's able to do this better than you. It's a bit of an indirect rebuke that is directly felt. That's what Jesus is doing here. He's comparing the sons of light to the sons of this generation.

And He's saying they do something better than you do. The parable itself is very simple. There is a steward, might call him a manager. We don't typically have people like that in our homes, but wealthy people do. I know some of you are working the trades, and if you work in one of these wealthy homes in certain sections of Houston, you probably don't deal with the owner, you probably deal with the steward of the house, the manager.

Businesses will have somebody like this. He might be the, you know, the owner might have a chief executive officer that's running his business for him. That's what this person was. He was a manager, a steward. He had a trust.

He was responsible for a business. And he isn't exactly just. He's in some way, he's doing something that is wasting the goods that he was entrusted to keep. Maybe he made a bad investment decision and caused a loss of money. He did something.

This steward wasted the goods of the owner. And so he's caught. He's caught in this. And the owner calls him to account. He says, What is this I hear about you?

You're wasting my goods. You're not being a good steward of them. Give an account of your stewardship, for you can no longer be steward. We would say today, you're fired. You're fired.

Give me your books. Turn over your books. Turn in your badge. Turn in your computer. You're fired.

You've not been faithful. Well, the steward's caught. The next step in this parable is his careful deliberation. He plans what he's going to do with great deliberation. He thinks about it.

He weighs different options. Something he maybe should have been doing with his stewardship. He said, I can't dig. It's one option he considered. He can't dig.

He didn't have the strength maybe to do hard manual labor. Probably had never done hard manual labor before. In his age, wasn't something he was able to do. He said, I can't dig. He said, I'm ashamed to beg.

He's too proud to simply ask people, to ask for handouts. And So he comes up with a plan. He has a goal, he needs to eat, he needs to have a way to provide for himself. And so he hatches a plan to be able to be received into people's lives and to have support. To basically build indebtedness among people so that they'll be willing to be friendly to him.

Maybe that means they're willing to give him another job like he had. Maybe that means they're willing to give business to him if he had a job. In other words, he's doing something to endear people to himself so that he can secure his position on being fired. And then he goes and executes this plan. And this was his plan.

He called all his master's debtors to him, and he renegotiates their contracts. He calls the first one, and we're given two examples. We don't know how many he had, but he calls them all. In one example, the first example we're given, this person owed a hundred measures of oil. A hundred measures of oil.

He says, well, take your bill and sit down quickly and write 50. He does the same thing to the next person who owed wheat, 100 measures of wheat. And he says, well, take your bill and write down 80. Now, there's a number of different theories about what's actually going on here with this steward lowering the debt. Some people think that because the Israelites were forbidden from charging interest, what they did is inflated the principal.

And so they were just paying back this inflated principal. They could say, well, they're not paying back interest. Actually, school boards love to do this today. They're called capital appreciation bonds. The school boards will borrow a million dollars and then 30 or 40 years later, they will pay back 10 million dollars as principal.

You know the interest just accrues over the 30 or 40 years and gets added to the principal. Well what that allows the school board to go to the tax payers and ask for a bond for a million dollars and it allows them to avoid any interest because there's restrictions on how much interest they can pay. So it allows them to evade a lot of things. That could be something what's going on here. Maybe it's contracts for rents on land.

Maybe they are, this is what they, you know, they have a field. This 100, 100 measures of, or 100 bags of oil would be something close to 1, 000 gallons, 800, 900 gallons of oil. It was the yield of maybe 100 acres, 150 olive trees, and probably represented the wages, typical wages of a wage earner for three years. So this is a substantial debt here. We're not talking about poor people who didn't have anything.

These are businessmen. And this may have been a contract, the rent that they were supposed to pay for the field, for this Grove, Olive Grove, that they were in business when. It doesn't say for sure, but that's, I think, probably the most likely. And so they negotiated contracts. And it wouldn't be unreasonable to renegotiate contracts.

And very typical in business to have clauses that trigger renegotiation of prices if commodities change and so forth you renegotiate price so What he's what he does here? I think is is renegotiate these contracts and what is owed and and and so there's justification for it it's it's not something that's unreasonable and probably the people doing it aren't aware of the situation. He doesn't tell them why he's doing it. He's just renegotiating it. And so all these business people, now they owe less.

That's great news for them. And he's now their best friend. A hundred measures of wheat is around a thousand bushels. That would be about a hundred acres of land to produce that. Okay, that's more than what one person could farm.

And it represents the number of years, several years of wages. So whatever is going on here, it really, the exact details of what's going on, is not significant here. It's not relevant to the point of the parable. The application of this parable is that this guy, This unjust steward, this son of this generation, is able to think ahead and plan for his future estate better than the sons of light plan and prepare for their future in heaven. See, this isn't saying that the sons of this generation are better with finances, that unbelievers make better financial planners, or that they are more shrewd businessmen.

That's not what this is saying. It's saying that Even unbelievers do a better job preparing themselves for the day they can no longer work than believers do of preparing themselves for the day that they die and go to heaven. And So Jesus is teaching us here first of all, that we need to be future oriented. We need to be people that like this unjust steward who thought ahead and made a plan and executed that plan to prepare for when he no longer had a job. Jesus said, we need to be people like that.

We need to be future-oriented. I say to you, make friends for yourselves by unrighteous mammon that when you fail, they may receive you into an everlasting home. This man was preparing to go to an unemployment, be unemployed, and so he endeared people to him that could help him, but he did it in such a way that the master wouldn't be able to easily undo it. And the Master commends this steward for his foresight in planning. You see, we are planning to go to heaven, aren't we?

If we're going to be as smart as this unjust steward, this unjust servant, we need to be preparing for that day, so that When we fail, we may be received into our everlasting home. This word fail is an interesting word. It means obviously when we die. But the word literally means to be bankrupt. So Jesus is saying when we are bankrupt, when we die, but because this is a finance, He's using finances in this parable, He uses a word for die or an expression for die that is somewhat financial, has to do with running out of money.

You're saying when we die, when we die, we need to be preparing for that day so that When we fail, when our money fails, when we die, we can be received into an everlasting home. In other words, we ought to be considering the eternal consequences of the decisions that we make today. We need to be asking ourselves, how does this prepare me for heaven, for the age to come? Does this build treasure here on earth, or only on earth? Or is this also building treasure in heaven?

There are two errors that we can slip into in this regard. We can become, we can so totally discount this world and its mammon and say money is unimportant And that we can fail. We can be so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good. This was the view of some monks who took vows of poverty. And it's the view of some today who talk about rich Christians in an age of hunger and would want to make us feel guilty for the wealth that we enjoy.

That's not what Jesus is saying. Of course, we can become so absorbed with money in this age that we fail to lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven. That is the error, that's the problem that Jesus is discussing here. He's saying when we fail to lay out treasures in heaven, when we fail to think about what happens after we die in our planning and in our actions day to day, then we aren't being even as good as this unjust steward. So we need to be future-oriented.

We need to prepare for our eternal home. Secondly, Jesus commands us to use the mammon of unrighteousness to build treasure in heaven for the age to come. The mammon of unrighteousness. Make friends for yourselves by mammon of unrighteousness. Now it's called the mammon of unrighteousness.

Your translation might call it unrighteous mammon, but it's literally mammon of unrighteousness because Jesus is, I think, emphasizing here that those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. Those who desire to be wealthy, to be rich, those who desire to simply accumulate more and more of This mammon fall into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. It's also, I think Jesus is calling it the mammon of unrighteousness to bring attention to the fact that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, from which some have strayed from the faith and pierced themselves through with many sorrows in their greediness." See, we need to be those who pursue godliness, faith, love, patience, gentleness. So it's not saying that money or mammon is wrong, unrighteous in itself, it's simply pointing out this connection that when we desire it, it is a snare to us. When we desire to be rich, it's a snare to us.

When we love it, it is a root of all kinds of evils. A root, not the only one. But how can The mammon of unrighteousness then be used to build treasure in heaven. Well one is to be generous with it. To be generous with it.

We want to be good stewards of it. We don't want to waste it. We want to conserve it. We want to be able to leave an inheritance for our children. These are all important aspects of our use of money.

But we also want to be generous with it. Romans 12 describes this as being generous, giving with liberality. If we have been given the grace of wealth, if we have been given the grace of giving, and if we have wealth and we should have that grace, then we need to give with generosity. We need to give to build treasure in heaven. Then the king will say to those in his right hand come you blessed of my father inherit the kingdom Prepared for you from the foundation of the world for I was hungry and you gave me food I was thirsty and you gave me drink.

I was a stranger and you took me in naked and you clothed me I was sick and you visited me I was in prison and you came that's the use of the mammon of unrighteousness to build treasure in heaven they were giving food to people that were hungry they were giving clothes to people that were naked. They were visiting people in prison. Those all take time and money. Command those who are rich in this present age not to be haughty, not to trust in their riches because they're uncertain. They're uncertain riches.

It means they can disappear. Just like look at Job, one of the wealthiest men in the East, and overnight he was nothing. Nothing, not even his children anymore. So riches are uncertain. And command those who are rich in this present age not to be haughty nor to trust in the uncertain riches, but in the living God who gives to us richly in all things to enjoy.

Let them do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to give, willing to share. Notice what that does. Storing up for themselves a good foundation for the time to come that they may lay hold on eternal life. Jesus doesn't say money is bad and you need to get rid of it. He says you need to use it wisely.

You need to use it, and that means generously. And when we do that, we build a foundation for the time to come. We need to be those who are rich toward God. Not like the fool who built bigger and bigger barns so that he could eat, drink and be merry. God is preparing a house for us.

In fact, it's so wonderful that the eye has not seen nor our mind imagined the good things that God is doing. Are we preparing to live in that house? God's preparing the house. Are we preparing to live in it? You know, young ladies like to fill a hope chest in preparation for a future marriage.

That's future planning. They collect things that they may not need now, but will need them then. Do you have a hope chest for heaven? Are you adding to it? Are you collecting your treasure for it?

Second thing Jesus teaches is that on how to use unrighteous money, mammon, is faithfulness with the resources of this world. See, if we're not faithful with the mammon of unrighteousness, we can never be faithful with greater things. We need to be faithful in the little things in our lives. It's like cleaning our room and keeping the house orderly. And the meals, cooking meals in an orderly way.

If we're ever going to be entrusted with greater resources. Proverbs talks about the lazy man doesn't even roast what he took in hunting. But to a diligent man his possessions are precious. It doesn't matter how much he paid for it. Doesn't matter how he got it.

It is valuable. He doesn't ignore it, he doesn't waste it. And you are Christ and Christ is God's. Let a man so consider us as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful.

It is required of stewards that they be found faithful. So What has God given you? Maybe He's given you a strong body. Maybe He's given you a brilliant mind. Maybe He's given you money.

Maybe He's given you none of those things. What has He given you? Maybe he's given you a weakness. Maybe he's given you a disability. Think of the people that have done great things through their disability.

Faithful with what they've been given. What do we do with our time? We've all been given time. Nobody can say they haven't been given time. We've all been given the same amount of time.

We haven't all been given the same amount of money. We haven't all been given the same strengths and abilities. We've all been given the same amount of time. We haven't all been given the same amount of money. We haven't all been given the same strengths and abilities.

We've all been given the same amount of time. That's a precious resource that we will one day give an account of. How are we using it? Are we faithful? And Jesus talks about one more thing, and that is loving the Lord.

I think we'll save that to next week. It's been a long day already. So let us pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you for all the resources that you have given to me and to everyone here. Lord, we ask that we might be more faithful in using them.

That we might be more faithful in thanking you for them and recognizing and remembering that all that we have you have given to us, how tempted we are to look at our homes and say, look at the house that my labor has built. Look at the estate that we have and forget that it is you that gives us the power to get wealth. It is you that gives us even our very health and any strength that we have and any work that we do we've done by your mercy. Lord may we be ever more mindful and aware of all that you have given to us, of all that you have poured upon us, for you have looked on us with a bountiful eye. We pray that we might be more faithful as stewards of the great riches you have bestowed upon us, not the least of which is the riches of your grace, of the gospel.

We've been given stewards of those mysteries. May we be faithful with them as well. As parents, Lord, may we be diligent to teach them to our children. May we be diligent to train them to obey you, by training them to obey us as parents so that they can obey you. May we be diligent to teach them your word and to walk before them with an example of piety and godliness.

May we be those who confess our sins and set an example for our children of this piety as well. Lord, we ask that you would Teach us faithfulness with our wealth, with our time, with our abilities. We ask all this Lord in Jesus name. Amen.