Luke 16:1-9 “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. ² So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’ ³ “The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg– ⁴ I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’ ⁵ “So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ ⁶ ” ‘Eight hundred gallons of olive oil,’ he replied. “The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred.’ ⁷ “Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’ ” ‘A thousand bushels of wheat,’ he replied. “He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’ ⁸ “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. ⁹ I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.

“Use worldly wealth to gain friends.” That is not where the manager in the parable began. He used the money he was managing to goof around. When you are spending someone else’s money, you tend not to be so careful with it. You aren’t so motivated to try to preserve it.

Former 20/20 journalist John Stossel once did a feature on a public restroom built by the New York City Parks and Rec department. The little building featured two or three stalls in each bathroom and a couple of sinks. It cost over 2 million dollars. That was much more than most of the upscale homes in the area cost–for just a bathroom. City officials explained that superior materials had to be used because of all the traffic. Stossel pointed out that a nearby city built a better looking facility of comparable materials for about one tenth the price. When the official explained that New York City pays workers a fair wage, Stossel discovered that meant about 100 dollars an hour. New York City is pricey, but even there those wages seem high. But when you are spending someone else’s money…

Sometimes God’s people forget that they are spending someone else’s money. We think that all this stuff is ours to do with as we please. We use God’s gifts like the manager in the parable. We manage and plan and spend as though our possessions have no higher purpose than to let us enjoy ourselves. It doesn’t cross our minds that we have to answer to the Owner someday, and that maybe he had some expectations for what the funds he placed into our keeping were going to accomplish. It would be a scary thing to hear him come and fire us from his service. “Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.” If we lose our relationship with our Lord, all is truly lost.

Let’s cut to the chase on the meaning of Jesus’ parable. He is not suggesting that Christians ought to be so self-serving in the way they manage God’s money for him. He is not condoning dishonesty, cheating, or fraud. These are all necessary components of the story to move the story along. They are needed to get to his point. They are not the point itself.

The point is this: the shrewd manager acquired a strong sense of mission and purpose when he heard he was going to be fired (twisted as that mission and purpose might be). He spent a long time thinking about how to use the time and resources he managed to accomplish that mission and purpose, and then he executed his plan. Central to that plan was using his master’s wealth to build relationships, to make friends who would take care of him later.

The manager in the parable was looking at a future which had suddenly become very uncertain for him. His career was over. His prospects were bleak. He didn’t know how he would eat or where he would live. His money decisions were driven by a need to bring some clarity and stability to his future.

We are looking at a future which has been made entirely secure for us. We don’t have to buy our spot in heaven’s courts. Jesus has paid all we owed at the cross. Forgiveness is full and free. We don’t have to scratch and claw to preserve our lives ourselves. Jesus has risen from the dead. His resurrection promises new life for these bodies on the other side of the grave. We don’t have to worry about our future. Eternal life is guaranteed.

Why not spend our money, why not invest ourselves, in the one thing we know is going to last, the one thing we know is going to be there in the end? One of my old teachers used to say, “What you invest in God’s kingdom is the only investment that will be worth a dime the day after judgment day.” We don’t have to purchase a place for ourselves there. But we can invest in ways that help others hear the gospel that secures their eternal future. Someday they will welcome us, as we will welcome them, into our eternal home.

Micah 7:19-20 “You will again have compassion on us; you will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea. You will be true to Jacob and show mercy to Abraham, as you pledged on oath to our fathers in days long ago.”

“You will again have compassion on us,” Micah says. Again. God showing compassion is practically the story of the whole Bible, isn’t it? Adam and Eve fall into sin, and God shows compassion by winning them back to his side from the devil. They lose a son Abel and God replaces him with Seth. Noah lives in a world that has become dark and dangerous for the believer in God, and the Lord shows compassion by sparing him and his family from the flood in the ark. Abraham and Sarah are childless, so God gives them a son in their old age. Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt, so God raises him up to become prime minister of that country. One story after another recounts God’s compassion.

We may not know the details of God’s plans for our future. But the conclusion he wants us to draw from thousands of years of previous history is this: they all involve compassion. Our pain genuinely moves him, and he cares how we are treated.

Do you want to know how to get a parent riled up? Then hurt one of their children, and see if the claws don’t come out. Do you want to see a parent moved to action? Then see what they do when their children are in distress. By sacrificing his Son and forgiving our sins, God has made us his children. When we hurt, whether in body or in soul, God plans to have compassion.

That doesn’t mean we never suffer now. This has been another year of hurricanes, wild fires, and extreme weather. You know that your own life hasn’t been an endless parade of happy events.

For the believing child of God it does mean that he isn’t punishing us for past indiscretions. “You will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea,” the prophet promises with two more pictures of grace that need no explaining. Our suffering may present our Lord with a new opportunity to show us compassion, but it is never payback for our sins. That’s not the kind of God he is.

These are all happy thoughts. They make our God truly unique. But we will share the prophet’s praise and optimism only if we can say with him, “Your promise is dependable.” “You will be true to Jacob and show mercy to Abraham, as you pledged on oath to our fathers in days long ago.”

Do you know what Jacob and Abraham had in common, besides being grandson and grandfather? They had the saving promises of God, the promises that involved a Savior, and blessings for all nations on earth, and heaven. We may not be their genetic descendants, but we belong to the same family of faith. We own the same saving promises.

All by itself God’s word is his bond. His promises never fail. Bible scholar Alfred Edersheim documents 456 distinct prophecies Jesus fulfilled, prophecies made hundreds and even thousands of years before his birth. Such accuracy gives us no reason to doubt God’s word.

In case some sliver of doubt remains, the Lord says, “I will go one step further. You have ample evidence that my word is good. But I will put myself under oath. Even though you have no right or reason to question me, because I am God and you are not, I make you my judge and invite you to hold me accountable to my promise.” If you were God, would you make a concession like that to the little creatures you had made?

Do you remember God’s appearance to the prophet Elijah on Mount Horeb after wicked Queen Jezebel threatened to end the prophet’s life? God put Elijah in a cave, and there was a great wind that tore apart the rocks, but the Lord was not in the wind. Then there was an earthquake that shook the mountain, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. Then there was a fire that swept across the mountain. But the Lord was not in the fire. Finally God spoke with a still, small voice–just a gentle whisper of his grace–and God was in that word.

Do you want to know what God is really like? Listen to what Elijah heard, look where Micah looks. In the forgiveness and compassion of an absolutely faithful God, you will find a God like no one else.

Micah 7:18b “You do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy.”

God is not a grudge holder. It’s true that sin does make him angry. Considering the nature of the revolt against him–billions of defiant rebels perverting the laws he gave for their own good, a rebellion stretching back thousands of years and involving every member of the human race–who could fault him if it took a while to get over the offense? Who would be surprised if he let his anger stew and build until it exploded on the ungrateful world he made?

But that is not his nature. Instead of reveling in his anger, he “delights to show mercy.” For our God, mercy is not a mere obligation he feels compelled to meet. It’s not just a job, where every day he has to drag himself out of bed and get ready to go to work and face the countless masses of people begging him for his help. It is more than a timeless principle of good he can’t help doing because it is part of “who he is.” It is his delight. This is what he loves to do. This is how he wants to spend his time.

On Labor Day weekend, most of us get an extra day off with the Monday holiday. It is a day on which we can do what we want. Originally the day was meant to honor those who work hard with their own hands, those who “labor” to make the life we enjoy possible.

For most people today, the day is spent cooking out and spending time with family. For some it may mean that last trip to the lake for the season. A few may tackle a fall project around the house. But whatever it is, it’s a holiday, a day for you to do what you want.

Ask the Lord what he wants to do on Labor Day, or any other day, and his answer is: “I would really like to show someone my mercy. I want to spare some poor sinner the consequence of his sins. I want to find someone who desperately needs my help and spend my time and effort in rescuing them. That’s what I do for fun. That’s how I spend my spare time, and every other moment of time I have.”

Understand the nature of our God, and we will understand, like Micah, that there is no other god whose anger so readily gives way to his mercy. We can count on it every day.

Micah 7:18 “Who is a God like you, who pardons sins and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance?”

The prophet Micah wrote at a time when the nation of Israel was on the decline. They were no longer the world power they once had been. Foreign powers invaded their land. The northern tribes were sitting on the edge of extinction.

But the real catastrophe was the way this people had turned away from God. They were duped by every feel-good religion that came along. Or they just gave up every pretense of religion and faith as they pursued their materialistic dreams. After all he had done for them, after all the miraculous ways he had delivered these people in the past, it was a wonder the Lord hadn’t just given up on them. In fact, that was what prompted Micah’s question.

Micah’s choice of words highlights why God’s grace and patience ought to amaze his people. “Sins” here is literally “bending” or “twisting.” It is the word from which the concept of “perversion” comes. People take God’s good creation, and then they bend and twist it until it becomes a grotesque mutation of itself that is no longer useful or good.

When I was a kid I once used one of my dad’s wood chisels to dig and pry a nail out of a piece of wood. The blade on the chisel was meant for contact with wood, not steal. The damage I did to the tip of the chisel as I pounded it into the nail and pried on the nail head practically ruined it. That’s not what the tool was meant for. My dad was not happy with me.

God gives his people good gifts, useful tools like human sexuality, or material wealth, or pain-relieving chemicals. Then we bend and twist these things for our own purposes. We use them to serve and satisfy our own desires in ways the Lord never intended. And in the process we often turn his good gifts into grotesque mutations that don’t merely fail to do what God made them to do. They even become dangerous to us. And it doesn’t make our Lord happy.

Unfortunately, we often fail to care. Behind the other term Micah uses, “transgressions,” is a word that suggests rebellion or revolt. So often sin is not a matter of ignorance, or carelessness, or weakness. It is a matter of defiance. When it was time for our friends to go home after a visit, we began helping their children pick up the toys. But one of them didn’t want to pick up the toys. He took one container of blocks, looked me in the eye, and then dumped them all over the floor again.

Sometimes we don’t want to stop doing what we were doing. So we look God in the eye, and we do what we want anyway. That’s the way Micah’s people treated him. We put on our own rebellions against his ways.

This is what God pardons. Again, the Hebrew is more colorful than our English translation. He lifts it off our shoulders. He picks it up and carries it for us. No longer do we have to bear the guilt, the responsibility, and the consequences. The Lord makes it his own to carry. I can’t help but think of Jesus words when he invites us, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Or Peter’s description of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.”

Who does that sort of thing? What teacher sits in the principal’s office in place of the unruly student in his classroom? What parent sits in the corner or goes to bed without his supper for the child who was lipping off to him? What mugging victim sits in jail for the creep who mugged him?

Our Lord does, that’s who! Like Micah, we stand here in amazement looking at God’s forgiving nature, and we ask, “Who is a God like you?”