FBC Daily Devotional – July 26, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

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Good Monday morning to you. Hope you're off to a good start this week and trust that one of the ways you're getting your week off to a good start is spending some time with with the

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Lord in his Word and prayer and I trust that these daily devotionals will help facilitate that a little bit.

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If you're following the reading plan we're in Luke chapter 16 today and the first several verses of that passage present this parable that is it's a little difficult for us to understand in terms of the interpretation of it and so forth as far as the parable itself.

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It's about the unjust steward who is caught in really kind of being unfaithful to his master's resources, but then he very shrewdly figures out a way to use what he has at this point to secure a future ahead.

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But rather than get bogged down in the parable itself, I just want us to focus on Jesus' application of the parable because you know we often think of we often think we need to have more and we complain and grumble about what we don't have.

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But what Jesus is emphasizing is the need to be faithful with what we do have. This is what he points out in verse 10.

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He says, he who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much.

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He who is unjust in what is least is unjust also in much. So the challenge is no matter what you have, whether you have little or much, and most of us in the

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United States compared to the rest of the world, we have much. But when we compare ourselves with ourselves, which isn't wise necessarily, we also realize that there are an awful lot of people who have more, who have more than I have, and we can complain about that.

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But Jesus tells us stop complaining about it and instead focus on faithfulness.

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Be faithful with what you have, however much or however little. And he says if you want to, if you really want to be blessed with more, be faithful in what little you have.

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And that's not a prescription for prosperity as some might interpret it. It's just the recognition that you're not going to be entrusted with greater responsibility, with greater resources, if you can't be faithful with the resources that you have.

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So let's learn to be content and learn to be faithful. But let's also not allow that application to get us so focused on material possessions and material wealth, because as Jesus goes on to say in verse 13, he says,

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No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will despise the one and be loyal to the other.

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You can't serve God and mammon. Okay, so even though he's been talking about in the parable about money and handling of money and wisely handling it and so forth and being a good steward in that, being faithful in all of that, at the same time he wants to emphasize that money, material wealth, cannot be our master.

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We must not be a slave to that. Instead, our focus must always be upon serving our

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God with the resources that he has given to us. So even in the daily grind, if you will, of paying our bills, getting groceries and stuff for the household and taking care of the needs of the family and so on and so forth.

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And, you know, working hard to have the resources that we need to take care of those things and then wisely managing those resources.

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We must not allow ourselves to be a slave to the resources, a slave to the money that gets us the stuff.

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Instead, we want to serve the Lord. We need to look at our, for example, our going to the grocery store and getting the groceries we need to prepare meals and have food to eat and so forth for our family.

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We need to look at that as a way to serve the Lord. I'm serving my family by serving the

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Lord. I'm actually in the proper use of my resources in purchasing goods from the store and so forth.

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I'm actually serving the Lord by serving others because it is my purchases that are helping them to put food on their table and so forth.

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So anyway, the big point here is we want to be faithful with the resources that we have and the key to our faithfulness is using those resources as unto the

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Lord, serving Him above all else, not becoming a slave to the wealth, to the resources, to the money.

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So I trust these thoughts will challenge us because it is so easy in our consumer culture, so easy to be unfaithful with the money

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He gives us, squandering it on stuff that's useless and worthless. It's also easy in a consumer culture that's constantly telling us we need to have more.

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It's so easy to become a slave to the mammon. Let's not go there.

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Our Father, help us to be faithful with what you've given us and in all that we use, in all the use of those resources, may we serve you in it, we pray.

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This we ask in Jesus' name and for His sake. Amen. All right.

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Well, God bless you on this Monday and on your beginning of a new week.