Matins Devotion: May 27, 2025

Luke 16:1-18

The parable of the dishonest manager is probably the most confusing of Christ’s parables, certainly the hardest to preach on. The reason for this is that, while the other parables have a direct allegorical fit, this parable has a kind of indirect and almost backwards one. So, for example, in the parable of the sower, the Sower is God and the seed is the word and the different kinds of soil are different people with different responses to hearing the word. But in this parable, the Rich Man isn’t really God the Father and the dishonest manager isn’t really Christ and the debts aren’t really sins. And yet, they’re all attached to these things.

To the point, the dishonest manager is an unchristian person who is nevertheless acting in an imperfectly Christlike way. He slashes debts but doesn’t completely forgive them, and all this he does out of self-interest. He abuses his master’s funds to buy friends for himself. 

But in the true version of the story, God the Father, the Rich Man has a faithful manager whom He sends into this world to completely erase the debts of mankind. The Manager then takes your bill, the debt of sins you could not possibly erase, and He erases it all with the ink of His blood. On every man’s bill, the Savior writes “paid in full.”

So if that’s how the true Manager treated you, use your money to do the same. If even the pagans know how to use forgiveness to buy friends for themselves, then we as Christians should use forgiveness to buy brothers for the kingdom because we have a greater example than the dishonest manager. We have the faithful One. Help build up the church overseas so that, if the day comes when you need to flee this nation to escape persecution, you will have brothers to take you in. Use your money to preserve your congregation, to bring in the lost, so that, if your children turn from Christ, you will still have sons and daughters in the faith to care for you and protect you. Use your money to support the preaching of the Gospel, so that the sinners of this world may know that their debts have been fully paid in the blood of Jesus Christ. Buy friends with your money because your Lord bought you with the greatest currency of all, the currency of His holy, precious blood and His innocent suffering and death.