Read Luke 16:1-13 with your family.

Sometimes stories we read in the Bible can be really confusing. This is the first clue that something was happening in the days of Jesus and the writers of the Bible that we do not understand in our modern world, so we have to dig deeper to figure out what the story means.

This story was always called The Dishonest Servant in English Bibles, so right away we are supposed to think the servant is bad and the master is good, but that is not what we are told by Jesus in the end. We have to look at it a different way.

These are what the words meant: For Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, the “Children of the Light” were his disciples, his followers, and the “Children of this age” were everyone else. The same word used for squandering or giving away, was used in other places for sowing seeds on the ground. And the word for shrewd is also the word for wise.

So the conclusion we have to come to is that this was not a bad servant and a good master, but rather when the servant was giving money to people helping them build their business, the master did not know about it. Some people got jealous and gossiped to the master that the servant was doing a bad thing (he was not), so the master thought he had no choice but to fire the servant.

In fear of being fired, the servant went to all the people who borrowed money and told them to lower the amount so it would look like he had not given as much money. The master then saw the lower limits and how much good the money had done, and told the servant that he was shrewd/smart. In the end the master did not fire the servant.

Jesus tells us to be smart like this servant, understand the importance of what the world values and use it to make things better, but do not become focused on those things. We can only worship God or money, but not both. Money is to be used wisely, and Jesus understood it was important in society, but God is where we should put our trust and energy.