A manager embezzles his employer for the purpose of personal gain. But ill-gotten gains aren’t gains at all. Discover how you can enjoy true, lasting prosperity.

<p>A manager embezzles his employer for the purpose of personal gain. But ill-gotten gains aren’t gains at all. Discover how you can enjoy true, lasting prosperity.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

It Is Written

John Bradshaw

True Riches

Thanks for joining me for In The Word, where together we will open the Bible and we will spend time in the Word, looking into the Word of God, expecting God to speak to us.

Our Father in heaven, we come to you in the name of Jesus.

Thank you that your Spirit would guide us at this time.

Thank you that you would speak to our hearts.

Now bless us through your word we pray in Jesus name, Amen.

You might hear people say you can't live with it and you can't live without it.

Well You certainly would find it difficult to live without money.

And you shouldn't find it difficult to live with it.

But for some people it is a great difficulty.

And I mean, no matter how much they have, they can't have enough.

It's a real problem if you don't have it.

The challenge is, of course, according to the Bible, that the love of money is the root of all evil, or as some translations would say, the root or a root of all kinds of evil, the love of money.

We like to think that more money would make our problems go away.

The research shows, and you might be surprised by this, that money does buy happiness.

Now the amount of money seems to increase as time goes on, but I read a couple of years ago that the first $50, 000 that you have does, in the words of the researchers, buy happiness.

Your happiness is linked to the amount of money that you have, up to the first $50, 000.

Beyond that, you could have $51, 000 or $51 million, and it won't make a bit of difference to your happiness, your overall happiness.

Of course the more money you have it means the more stuff you can have, the more you can give away, the more you can do, but with that extra money comes extra responsibilities, extra headaches, extra hassles, extra problems, and more money doesn't always buy more happiness.

So I think we can understand how that works.

If you don't have a roof over your head and now you're earning $50, 000 a year, that's going to go a long way towards providing you with a place, a warm, safe, dry place to call home.

If you have no money at all, clothing and food and life's basic necessities become a real challenge.

That's going to take care of most of anything that you could need.

Beyond that, our needs And a few of our wants, it seems that you can flood your life with wealth or with abundance doesn't necessarily make you happier.

Now I know that some of us would say, I'd sure love to find out.

But the old maxim is, be careful what you ask for, because it might not quite be what you expect.

So our relationship with money ought to be well established and well thought out.

And if you stop to think about it, you'll say, Ah, of course, I've seen many places in the Word of God, in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, In the book of Proverbs, where money is spoken of, God would have us relate to money on a very mature way, on a very spiritual level.

You understand, I'm sure, that if you put too much faith in money, then you may well be led to put a whole lot less faith in God.

And if you believe money is going to supply all your needs, then perhaps you'll be less inclined to look to God to supply your needs.

In the word of God, in Luke chapter 16, We are introduced to an individual who had a fraught relationship with money, a troubled relationship with money.

We're going to pick it up and Luke chapter 16 will start in verse 1.

There are many lessons for us in this parable.

The Bible says, and He said also unto His disciples, There was a certain rich man...

You will notice throughout this parable that the rich man isn't implicated.

So here's a man who is described as rich, he has plenty, there is no word of censure or criticism in this parable.

Sometimes, and even in church, 1 can get the impression that to have money isn't a good thing.

You look in the Bible and you find people such as David, he was wealthy.

So in this passage, God does not say, there was a rich man and that was his problem.

There are other parables, in fact, the same chapter, where there is another rich fellow and he is implicated by God, but not because of his wealth.

So let's understand God is not against wealth, not at all.

But he wants us to be able to relate to wealth in a healthy, in a spiritual way.

And so Jesus says, there was a certain rich man, which had a steward, a manager, And the same was accused unto him that he had wasted his goods.

And he called him and said unto him, How is it that I hear this of thee?

Give an account of thy stewardship, for thou mayest be no longer steward.

So this wealthy man evidently placed a great amount of faith and trust in his steward.

He did not discern that there was anything wrong with the man's stewardship.

You know trust is a wonderful thing and trust can very easily be abused.

Nobody who calls themselves a believer in God should ever be able to, heard it said of him or her, my trust was misplaced.

Christians in the labor market, in the workforce, ought to be the people of which employers say, I want more of them.

I was on a plane once on the continent of Africa.

I was flying from Lusaka to Johannesburg, Zambia to South Africa.

I was sitting next to a man who was a coffee farmer.

And I was asking him about his operation and it was just small talk and chit chat.

And somehow he mentioned people who were of a certain religious denomination.

Now I'm not going to name the denomination as much as you might wish that I would, but it's 1 of these denominations which gets a bit of criticism and some of it is pretty well deserved and the people are sort of marginalized generally speaking by the rest of society.

I'm marginalized might be a bit of a strong way to put it, but this denomination comes in for a bit of criticism from time to time.

The man sitting next to me, a coffee farmer from Zambia, said, I only hire people who are members of this church." I said to him, why is that?

He said, oh no, I would never belong to that church.

I said, so why do you hire people from that church?

And I thought to myself, what a fantastic thing for somebody to be able to say about a group of believers from a certain church.

These people, he said, I will only employ people from that church.

Now I don't know how that goes in terms of labor laws and so forth in his country and maybe he doesn't advertise it, maybe it just seems to work out that way, but if you aren't a member of this particular church, no need to apply because he has figured out that those people are honest, they're diligent, they work hard, they don't steal, they don't bring problems to the workplace, they are valued employees.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if Every employer could say, the Christians I have working for me are the best people you could ever employ.

Maybe in some places that is said, and if so, that's a good thing.

But here we have a man, a man of means, of some means as a matter of fact, and he employs a steward and learns that the man is not honest, he's not trustworthy.

This man is a bad egg and he says to him, you can't be steward any longer.

The steward reacted of course and he said to himself, ooh what am I going to do?

My Lord is taking away from me the stewardship.

Maybe he just didn't like hard work, I don't know.

He went on to say, this is in Luke 16 and verse 3, to beg, I am ashamed.

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True Riches

Transcript

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