Book of Luke - Ch. 19, Vs. 11-23 (06/20/2004)

I believe we're in Luke chapter 19 and verse 11 because I don't think you moved any further last week, did we?

Okay, so that should be where we are, Luke chapter 19, verse 11. In deference to my father since it's

Father's Day and he says the game has already started, this will be a short lesson. That's right.

That's true. Well, it's Father's Day, we should be able to take a nap today.

All right, that's good preaching. Okay, Luke 19, verse 11, and as they heard these things, he added and spake a parable because he was nigh to Jerusalem and because they thought that the kingdom of God should immediately appear, isn't that interesting?

Why did they think that? Because they had been taught that by their teachers for 300 years and that's what the

Jews were teaching. So he said, therefore, a certain nobleman went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom and then to return.

And he called his 10 servants and delivered them 10 pounds and said unto them, occupy until I come.

I like that phrase because that's what we're called to do. Occupy until I come, isn't that neat?

We're here and we're his representatives here and we're kind of like the Marines. We go in there and we're supposed to occupy until the army gets here.

Army's going to arrive on white horses. One of these days soon, we're supposed to occupy until I come.

But his citizens hated him and sent a message after him saying, we will not have this man reign over us.

And it came to pass that when he was returned, having received the kingdom, then he commanded these servants to be called into him to whom he had given the money that he might know how much every man had gained by trading.

It's interesting, when I got the opportunity to go down and speak at Letourneau University Business School this past year, had a wonderful time with those young people.

They really paid attention. But I taught, I was supposed to teach business principles, but I taught them out of the

Bible. And so I taught them the fact that a lot of passages in the Bible have a primary teaching and a secondary teaching.

And then there's something there called a hidden teaching. And what

I told them I meant by that is that many times Jesus will use a physical example to teach a spiritual truth.

And the whole parable is not about the physical thing at all. It's about some spiritual point that he's making.

But my point was that the physical example that he uses is always true. In other words,

Jesus would not use a lie to teach a truth. So even though the passage primarily is not about business at all, obviously, if there are business things in the passage that he uses to teach spiritual truth, then those business principles must be true as well.

And therefore, if we would follow those, they would work in this world because God made the world and this is like the owner's manual for how everything works.

So there are principles embedded within the teachings that do relate to business.

Not that I think you should stand up on Sunday morning and teach business principles. You should teach about God and God's person and God's works.

But there are times during the life of the church, I think, when a pastor should instruct his people and especially his men on any principles in the

Bible that have to do with business, marriage, children. You know, it's interesting.

A lot of people shy away from Christians making money in business.

And yet I find it interesting that one of the verses in the Bible, it says that if a man does not take care of his family, he's worse than an infidel.

Now, you won't find a verse that says if you skip the revival meeting, you're worse than an infidel. But there is one that says if you don't take care of your family financially, you are worse than an infidel and you have denied the faith, it says.

If that's true, then it means that supporting the family is a vital part of the Christian faith for the man.

So if God holds us responsible for that, then he must give instruction in the word of God to give us wisdom in business endeavors.

And I think most of them are hidden or embedded in some of these stories that Jesus uses to speech far more important spiritual truths than the business life.

But the business things he says have to be true or he wouldn't use them. Now I find one right here.

Notice this is not the passage I taught from in Laterno, but it's kind of a parallel passage so it's similar.

Right here he says that at the end of verse 15, he says that he might know how much every man hath gained by trading.

Do you know what that teaches? It teaches that the Lord says that capitalism is a biblical principle.

To go out and purchase something and then spend the money it takes to move it to a place where there's a market and add that price on and then add a profit for yourself and then sell it at a marked up price, that's biblical.

There it is right there. It talks about gaining by trading. In verse 16 says, then came the first saying,

Lord thy pound hath gained 10 pounds. So this one man took a pound and he invested it and wisely and it turned into 10 pounds.

He multiplied that pound by 10 for his master. All right, now verse 17 and he said unto him, well thou good servant.

So it would be impossible for me to believe that Jesus would use this physical example and not agree with it.

So I believe there's an embedded lesson here that it pleases the Lord when we take his things that he shares with us and we invest them wisely and turn them into even more.

In this world money operates nearly everything in the physical realm.

The nation, your Christian school, the church facilities, if houses burn down it takes money to rebuild them or to help a family get in a new one or if the clothes are gone it takes money to buy more clothes for them.

It takes money and God is teaching us that when we have some we are to invest it wisely and multiply it so that we have that money within God's kingdom.

We know the world has plenty, don't we? They have, seems like they have all the money sometimes, doesn't it? And yet God really owns all the money.

And so if he shares some of it with us, a pound here, we are to be wise with it, invest it and turn that into ten pounds and then he'll say well done.

Now it goes on and says because thou hast been faithful in a very little have thou authority over ten cities.

So I believe the spiritual teaching behind that by the way is that if we, I believe it says very clearly here that the money is little to God.

If he gives us money and we invest it wisely and we take care of our families, we take care of our church, that's a little thing compared to where we're going.

And he says if you'll do the little things here wisely then you'll inherit ten cities that you will oversee in the kingdom.

Now I don't know how literal that is. I don't know if Brother Otis gets to have

Corsicana and hey, y 'all would have a nice city out there, get rid of all the places that sell the liquor and out there, what's that little town right before you turn to go to your house?

I forget the name of it. Angus, yes. And we would have

Forest Glade, you know? I don't know. But one thing it does teach obviously is that the

Lord expects us to do well with what he gives here and that will have something to do with the rewards when we get to heaven and also with our service when we get there.

Alright? Now, look at verse 18, the second one comes and says, Lord, your pound has gained five pounds.

Well, he didn't quite do as well as the first guy but look what the response is, and he said likewise to him, be thou also over five cities.

He was pleased with this man. The Lord knows what gifts he gives everyone.

He knows what abilities he brings into their lives, the opportunities. He just expects us to do the very best with what he brings.

And if you do the best with what he brings into your life, he's going to say well done. And another came saying,

Lord, behold, here is your pound which I have kept laid up in a napkin. Well, now, let me tell you, this teaches the underlying physical lesson that Jesus is using to teach the spiritual truth is that entrepreneurial risk is not frowned upon by the

Lord. It pleases him because in business we know there's the risk -return tradeoff.

You can't have return without taking risk. It's a law. It's just as sure as the law of gravity. In business, you must take a risk if you're going to return that.

If you're going to take one pound and turn it into 10, you're going to risk that pound. And he frowned on the man who said, well,

I just put it in a napkin and kept it in a safe place because I was afraid of you and I knew if I lost that, you'd probably kill me.

So I didn't do anything with it. Now let's look and see what the response is. First, he says, the reason

I did this in verse 21 is I feared thee because thou art an austere man.

Thou takest up that, thou layest not down, and reapest that you did not sow.

And he said unto him, out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant. Thou knewest that I was an austere man taking up what

I laid not down and reaping where I didn't sow. Wherefore then gavest not thou my money to the bank and at least earned some interest on it.

He says. So he rebuked this man for not taking entrepreneurial risk.

Now think about that. That's in the Bible, it shows clearly that Jesus has set up the system.

Now if you want to know how the world of money works, start right here. It doesn't work like you were taught in high school and college and even in business school because there all they teach you how to do is go work for somebody else.

Now that can be noble if what you're doing is taking care of your family, putting food on the table. However, if you want to know how to create more income than that, you get into the

Bible and you look at these principles. And one of the principles is very clearly that you must take some entrepreneurial risk.

You take some of the money that you have laid aside and someday you will risk it towards some opportunity or investment that can multiply it by 10.

And that is how you create additional money with the money that you have.

God smiles upon that, it simply is the way he has set the world up to work. You were never taught that in high school, they don't teach any business in high school.

We probably have some here, but in public school you don't have any. You get to college, even if you got an

MBA degree in business, they're teaching you how to go work for another boss. They are not teaching very much entrepreneurship.

In other words, how to own your own company or run your own company or make investments and know how money works and know how to invest wisely.

That's not taught usually. So there are some very good books about those topics in the bookstore.

You go read them for yourself, but you won't learn that in business school. So it's interesting how the world system,

Satan you see is the little g God over many of the systems in our world. He's over all the universities.

They are run according to his hand and his mindset. He withdraws the kind of information that could set people free financially, it's not taught.

You have got to go dig for that. You got to go down to Barnes and Noble and go in that business section, and then you've got to weed through the bad books and find the good ones.

But there is some information that has not been taught to you that fits what this Bible passage teaches about risk and return and how to invest.

And don't ever try to do it, by the way, without reading those books. Because if you try to go out in ignorance, you will lose your money.

So you have to learn a little bit about how the world works. But Jesus obviously expected these men to know how it worked and to invest wisely.

He rebuked the man that didn't. Now that would surprise an awful lot of people if they had not known this previously.

Now let me show you another principle. Now some of you sitting out here, if you'll listen to this, it will give you some clues on how you can take some of the money that you've saved on the side and how to use it wisely to create perhaps more money than you ever made in a job.

It could even make it where you don't go work for that person anymore for the small wage that he pays.

And he owns your time. He tells you when you got to be there. He tells you when you can go on vacation, when you can't.

He owns you. And our society from a little boy growing up, everything I ever learned in school, taught that that's okay, that's the way it's supposed to be.

Well, get up, we go to work in the morning. But if you go back to the Bible days, you find that although in some cases you have to start out that way, maybe in those days the rich man owned the land and you had to come in and pay to get to plant some crops.

But you were expected to save some aside over a period of years and then someday be able to take that and invest and become free, become a landowner yourself.

And that was sort of the principle. It was that way even in this country until the industrial age. I think if you go back to about 1910, 90 % of the

Americans owned their own business and 10 % worked for somebody. Now it's the opposite. And that's a fact of statistics.

So let me show you one more principle that's kind of interesting. Look at this part here in verse 21.

For I feared thee because thou art an austere man. Now look at this phrase right here. You take up where you did not lay down and you reap where you didn't sow.

How is that possible? Well that's what we call in business, it's the principle of leverage.

This man had many other people who were out planting seeds for him in acres so far removed that he could have never planted those seeds himself.

And all of that crop came up and he gleaned some profit from it. So this man was earning profits off the efforts of many, many other people.

That's called leverage. Now in the company that you work for, ladies and gentlemen, the CEO of that company and maybe a few of the vice presidents get to leverage a little bit of all the work that's done by everybody.

That's a good thing. It's the way it's supposed to be. But you need to realize if you're the one being leveraged that if you could spend some time, and I'm not saying you do this overnight, but over a period of years as you're going through life, keep your eyes open, always setting some money aside, and find a way that you can leverage.

Find a business situation that you could start or a franchise perhaps that you can come involved with, some way that you can get involved where all of a sudden you may have 5, 10, 15, or 100 or 1 ,000 people out working and you're paying them fairly but you're taking just a little piece of everything they do because you gave them the opportunity.

That's how you leverage. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the only way wealth is ever created in this world, the way that the systems are set up.

So leverage is a biblical principle. Now Jesus shows here that he smiles upon it because the

Lord in this situation was the one doing the leveraging. This man admitted, he said, I know that you go out and you reap crops that you didn't even plant.

It's because he had hundreds of other people planting those crops. Now he paid them fairly. He paid them a fair wage for doing the work, but he took a little bit of the money from all the work they did too.

So if you, listen, if you can make just a little bit off of 100 ,000 people, you're going to be wealthy.

So you want to share fairly with all the people. Pay them all a lot of money but take just your little bit. Mr. Wrigley proved that.

Who can tell me how he proved it? He learned how to get a nickel from everybody in the world when he sold chewing gum.

Think about that. That's leverage, you see. He was willing to take just a little bit, but he wanted to get it from everybody.

So this is the principle that's taught in this passage. If you can, if you can keep your eyes open, pray about it, ask the

Lord to give you wisdom with the money that he does give you, to set some aside, and someday if there's an opportunity to invest it wisely, either in a company that already knows how to leverage or you learn how to do it yourself, you learn how to leverage, you create an idea, you come up with an idea or a product or something where you then bring in people to help you make that work, help you get it to market, and you're paying them all a fair wage but you're earning a little bit off of all the mass number of products that go out or whatever this is or service.

That's how you leverage. You leverage other people. Usually it's going to be the younger people that are first starting out.

They are happy to have a job. They want to earn some income. And if those young people are smart, it's like I told the young people at Letourneau, I said, look,

I don't expect you to graduate from school and go start your own business. Now some of them will.

Joby Weeks is an example of somebody who did. But most won't. Most will go into a job and really work for another boss.

But I said, here's the thing. You need to watch everything that man does. If it's a smaller to mid -sized business, watch everything he does that's right.

Watch everything he does that's wrong and figure out the system that he's created because it's systems that can be duplicated that make it possible to leverage.

So figure out how he built his system. Figure out what he did right and what he did wrong. And then slowly over time, when you get to be maybe 45 or 50 years old, you will have gleaned so much from the others and improved their system that you can start your own and then leverage.

And then you begin to create something that can last for several generations in your family. It's taught right here underneath the spiritual truths.

It's the physical teachings. And if you'll mark them down, think about it. You can go read a lot of books at the bookstore about how to make money.

None of them will be any better than the passage you just read. It's right there. Let's pray together.

Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you that it touches on every issue of life.

It truly is the owner's manual for a human being. And we know that you've set up every system that's in the world.

We know that you even have delegated some things to Satan to do, where he controls some of the systems in this world, all according to your purposes.

And yet still, everything is on the shelf that your children need when they need it, and it's all under your sovereign will.

And we ask you to give us wisdom with the money that you choose to send our way and the jobs that we have, the income that we can have, that we would lay some aside and turn it from one pound into five or one pound into ten, that we might be pleasing in your sight.

And also that our families might have the financial backing that they need, even our children, even our grandchildren.