Rick Warren - Transforming How I See and Use Money Part One

Hey, friends, thanks so much for joining us today on

Pastor Rick's Daily Hope, the Bible Teaching ministry of Pastor

Rick Warren.

We're so glad to have you with us.

And today Rick continues in his series called Transform. Together,

we'll dive into God's Word and discover powerful principles that

can truly change our lives from the inside out spiritually, physically, mentally, emotionally, relationally, financially,

and vocationally. You'll experience how God's truth brings real transformation

to every part of your life. And now here's Rick

with part one of a message called Transforming How I

See and Use Money.

Now, we've looked at your spiritual health, we've looked at

physical health, we've looked at mental health, we've looked at

emotional health, and we've looked at relational health. We've got

too more dimensions to deal with work and money, and

this weekend I want us to look at financial health. Now,

it may surprise you that Jesus actually talked more about

money than he did heaven or hell. In fact, half

of all of the parables that Jesus told are about money.

Half of them. In fact, in the books of Matthew

Mark and Luke, one out of every six verses is

about money and money management. Why because money can dominate

our lives, and money influences our lives for either good

or bad. It can be used for great things, it

can be used for bad things either way. And we

spend so much of our time thinking about it, working

for it, earning it, you know, studying it, saving it,

and investing it, all these different things. And if you

don't learn to manage your money, it will manage you.

Now this weekend, we're going to look at the most

misunderstood story of Jesus in the entire Bible. It's a

doozy and it's in Luke chapter sixteen. If you have

a Bible, you might want to turn to Luke chapter sixteen.

And the reason why this is a confusing passage is

because it appears that Jesus is approving of dishonesty. He's not.

He just uses a clever crook as the hero of

the story and he's using it for shock value. Now,

let me read you the story and then I'll make

a couple comments on it and we'll look in depth

at it. Luke chapter sixteen. Here's the story of Jesus

it's called the parable of the dishonest or shrewd manager.

Jesus said, there once was a rich man who enlisted

a manager to take care of his property. But the

manager was accused of wasting his master's possessions. So the

owner called him in and said, now, give an account

of your stewardship and report what you've done with what

I entrusted to you, because your time as a manager

is ending now. The manager thought, what am I going

to do now? I'm losing my job, but I'm not

strong enough to dig ditches, and I'm too proud to

beg I love that part. He goes, I know what

I'll do. I know what I'll do so that after

I lose my job, I'll have plenty of friends to

take care of me. So he called in everybody who

was in debt to his master, and he asked the

first guy, how much do you owe my master? The

guy says, five eight hundred gallons of olive oil. So

the manager said, okay, here's what I want you to do.

Tear up the bill and write a new bill that

says you only owe four hundred gallons. Okay, this is

going to between me and you we're not going to

tell this to the boss. And that's the manager found

another debtor and he asked him, He said, how much

do you Oh? The guy said a thousand bushels of

wheat And he said The manager replied, okay, here's what

I want you to do. Change your bill to say

you only owe eight hundred bushels. So he's doing this

under the table, obviously without permission. Now when the master,

this is the owner, heard what the dishonest manager had done,

he still praised him. He praised him for his shrewdness.

For worldly people are more shrewd in handling their affairs

than are those who belong to the like. Now, that

is a strange story. In the next couple verses, Jesus

gives a little bit into the meaning of it, and

he says in verse nine, So Jesus that I tell

you use your worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves?

What am I supposed to buy friends? This is getting

even weirder. Use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourself,

so that when it is gone, you'll be welcomed into

eternal dwellings. He's talking about heaven. Whoever can be trusted

with very little can also be trusted with much, and

who's ever dishonest with little will also be dishonest with much.

So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth,

he's saying, if you're not a good money manager, if

you're not taking care of the money that I've given you,

if you've been untrustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who's going

to trust you with true riches, spiritual riches, the real

riches of life. And if you have not been trustworthy

with somebody else's property, who's going to give you property

of your own. No servant can serve two masters. He'll

either hate the one and love the other, or he'll

be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot

serve God and money. Notice he didn't say you should not.

He said you can't. It's impossible. You cannot serve God

and money. Now, that may be the most frustrating, the

most shocking, and the most misunderstored story that Jesus ever told.

It's important to note a couple of things. First, Jesus

is not praising the guy's dishonesty. He's praising his shrewdness.

And we'll get back to that and just meanute what

That means he's not praising his dishonesty. Second, you didn't

learn from anybody. If you know the right questions, you

don't have to agree with everything a person believes or

does to actually learn from them. This is very, very

important because today people think because I disagree with you

on something, then I can't learn from you on something.

That's nonsense. If you can only learn from people that

you agree with one hundred percent, well guess what, You're

not gonna learn anything because nobody agrees with you one

hundred percent. Have you talked to your wife lately, or

your husband, or your boyfriend or your girlfriend. Nobody's going

to agree with you all the time. And you don't

have to agree with everything a person believes or does,

or acts or whatever in order for them to actually

teach you something. I learned from people all the time

who disagree with me, and you can too. And Jesus

is saying learn from all kinds of people. For instance,

if I got a brain tumor and I'm looking for

a neurosurgeon, my first question is not did you read

your Bible this morning? My first question to this brain

surgeon is not did you go to church last week?

My question is not even are you a Christian? Do

you believe in God? My question is have you ever

done this before? Because the guy might be cheating on

his wife. But if he's a brain surgeon, he's a

brain surgeon, if that makes sense, And so it is

nonsense to say you have to agree with everybody in

order to learn from this guy is dishonest. You don't

want to learn that part from him. But there are

some things that he did right that you need to

do with your money. Now, the other thing I want

you to notice is the two reasons Jesus tells his story. First,

who is Jesus telling us to. He's telling this to

the Pharisees. Who are the Pharisees. The Pharisees are the

religious leader of Jesus day. And there are the characteristics

of a Pharisee. Number one, they're incredibly arrogant, they're not humble,

they're incredibly prideful, they're self righteous, they're judgmental, there's demeaning,

they're demanding, and they really don't like people. But the

number one characteristic of a Pharisees they're hypocrite. They say

one thing and believe something else, and they tell people

to do things that they themselves don't even do. So

Jesus loved to poke at the Pharisees. He loved to

just kind of bop them in the eye. He loved

to pop their balloon. Jesus had an amazing ability to

comfort the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable, and he still

does that today. If you're in pain, any kind of pain,

Jesus wants to comfort you. If you're comfortable, Jesus probably

wants to put you in pain because there's some things

that need to change in your life. You've become very

comfortable with the status quo. So here Jesus knew that

the Pharisees loved money. That's why he tells this shocking

story and makes a crook a hero. Look at this

verse up here on the screen. This is the rest

of the chapter that I was reading from. It says

the Pharisees dearly loved money, so when they heard what

Jesus said, they made fun of him. But Jesus told them,

you're always making yourselves look good. But God sees what's

in your heart. The things that most people think are

important are worth lists as far as God is concerned.

Now that last phrase is the reason why we're going

to look at what we're looking at today. The things

that most people think matter, God says that don't matter

at all. What do most people think matters? Possessions, pleasure, power, prestige, popularity, sex, status, salary, money, lust, power,

those kinds of things. God says, those things really don't matter.

Those are the important things in life. And in this

series on transformation, we've been talking about the verse in

the Bible. It says, don't conform to the world's pattern,

don't fall into their standard of culture, but be transformed

by the way you think. I'm going to teach you

a whole new way to think about money today, and

it is radically counter culture. What God says about money

is the exact opposite of everything you've been taught about money.

So we're going to look at But Jesus is talking

about people who love money. And the second thing Jesus

tells this story, the reason he tells it is because

most believers are poor money managers. Many of you are

not very good at managing your money. You have no

emergency savings saved up for an emergency, you have little

or no retirement saved up, you're living from hand to mouth,

you're living on the build. In fact, you're living beyond

your means. It's not buy it as soon as I

get the money, it's buy it before I get the money.

And you're deeply in debt. And Jesus has some things

to say to all of us about money. Now, this

message today is not a message about giving. It's not

a message about tithing. This is a message about how

to manage your money well and how to think about

money the way God does. Because money is one of

the greatest sources of worries. It's the number one cause

of divorce. It's till debt do us part. Now, Jesus

doesn't praise the guy's dishonesty, but he does praise his shrewdness.

What is shrewdness? To be shrewd means you're smart, you're sharp,

you're strategic, and you're resourceful. And when you're shrewd, you

see a problem clearly, you know what needs to be done,

and then you figure out how to do it. And

what God wants you to do is God wants you

to learn how to be biblically shrewd with your money

for the rest of your life and from this story,

and we're going to look at it today in detail.

We learn four things not to do with your money.

God says, don't do these things with your money, and

five things you need to remember every day of your life.

And if you will remember them every day of your life,

your stress regarding your finances is going to go down dramatically,

and your joy and your satisfaction is going to increase dramatically.

All right, let's look at the Bible and see what

God has to say. First thing we need to learn

this story is four things not to do with your money.

I don't spend a lot of time on this, so

let me right quick and we'll get to the other part.

Four things not to do. Number one, don't waste it.

The Bible says, don't waste the money that God allows

you to have. Luke sixteen to two. The manager was

accused of wasting his master's possession. Now you know, if

I walk around thinking it's my money, well obviously, well

it's my money. If I want to waste it, who cares.

But if I think this is God's money, then all

of a sudden, I don't want to waste God's money. Okay,

this is a big difference. Don't waste it. Number two,

don't love it. The Bible says we are not to

love money, don't love it or live for it. And

that's what he says. In verse thirteen. He says, no

servant can serve two masters. He'll either hate one and

love the other, or he'll be devoted to one and

despise the other. You cannot cannot circle that cannot serve

both God and money. It's impossible to live a divided allegiance.

Have you ever tried to work for two bosses? How'd

that work out? Yeah? Not very good. The heart of

the problem is a problem with the heart, and God

wants your heart. And Jesus lays it out in Black

and Life. He isn't vague here. He goes, Okay, you

got to choose what's going to be number one in

your life. You can't have two number one things in

your life. You can't say my number one goal lives

to make a lot of money, and my number one

goal is to love God. You're going to have to

decide what's going to be number one. You can't have

two number ones in your life. Is God going to

be number one in your life? Or is making a

whole lot of money the number one goal of your life.

You cannot serve them both. Number three, he says, don't

trust it, don't waste it, don't love it, don't trust

money for security. I don't care how much money you've got.

You can lose it. And so he said, don't put

your security in it. Now. The manager learned this pretty quick.

In verse three, he says, what am I going to do?

I'm losing my job. Many of you know what it

feels like to lose your job, to be out of work,

and all of a sudden you got no source of

security anymore. How many times have I told you never, never, never,

put your security in anything that can be taken from you.

If you put your security in your appearance, how you look,

I hate to tell us you're not always going to

be as sexy as you are right now, Okay, those

looks are going to fade. If you put your security

in your health, you can lose your health. If you

put your security in your job, you can lose your job.

If you put your security in your marriage, you could

lose your marriage. If you put your security in a

loved one, you can lose a loved one. If you

put your security in your bank account, there's a thousand

ways to lose all your money. If you want to

really be secure, the center of your life has to

be built around something that can never, never be taken

from you. And there's only one thing that you can

never lose. That is God's love for you. You can't make

God stop loving you. You can try, but you will

fail because God's love is unconditional. It's not based on

who you are, It's based on who He is. So

you build your life on God's love for you and

that relationship. So he says, don't waste it, don't love it,

don't trust in it, because you can lose it. Proverbs

twenty three, verse five from the Bible says this, I

like this verse. Your money can be gone in a flash,

as if it had grown wings and flown away like

an eagle. Fly like an eagle. Okay, so just fly.

It can just fly away like an egle. People say

money talks. It does not. It just walks away quietly,

and you have no idea where it went, and you

have too much month left over at the end of

the money, you go, what happened here? Is money just

flies away. You know, the state's government is so polite

and helpful in this that they put an eagle on

every dollar to remind us that money could fly away

like an eagle. All right, So every time you look

at a DOLLI I'm not keeping this one very long,

all right, It's going to be gone like the wind.

All right.

Wow, some powerful words from Pastor Rick today. And now

this is really one of my favorite parts of the broadcast.

This is letters from our listeners, and now here's Rick Today.

I want to share with you a very special testimony

from one of our listeners named Marquita, and thanks to

Daily Hope and your support, she recently asked Jesus Christ

to be the leader of her life. Here's her story. So,

Pastor Rick, I wanted to let you know that I

have prayed the prayer of salvation that you included in

the Deepening the Eyes of Faith message. I've been listening

to your messages for years. In fact, my child wouldn't

even be here today if it weren't for your words.

You wrote there may be accidental parents, but there are

no accidental children. Well, I've given birth to a beautiful

baby girl, and she's the light of my life. In fact,

it now hurts to remember a time that I was

fighting to decide whether I was going to have her

or not. But I repeated your words throughout my pregnancy.

There are accidental parents, but they're no accidental children. And

although I'm a single mom today, with the support of

my family, we're thriving. I want to make sure that

she grows up to find her purpose and to serve God.

So thanks for renewing my faith in God. And as

I still try to find and fulfill my purpose, please

pray for me and my child. Wow, Marquita, you are

so right. God does have a plan and a purpose

for every single baby. There are no accidental babies. So

I want to take a moment right now and just

pray for you in this broadcast. Pray for you and

for your daughter. Lord, I'm asking you right now to

put your hand of protection, your hand of blessing, your

hand of guidance on Marquita and her daughter, and I'm

praying for both of them to know your purpose, to

feel your presence, to discover your power, to live in

your plan for each of their lives. In Jesus' name.

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