The Wake Up Call. You’ve been in your job for quite a while. You’re comfortable. You feel secure. You even feel a little bit indispensible. Therefore, you don’t worry a whole lot about getting to work on time, or getting back from lunch on time, or leaving work early, or calling in sick when you’ve got the equivalent of a hangnail. No big deal – they need you too much to care about such minute concerns. You have a budget for professional development. Even though your role does would not in any direct way be enhanced by that Racquetball course offered at the college, you submit the tuition cost for reimbursement. And, you don’t mind using the company car for personal trips because Yosemite is on the way to somewhere job related, right?
Then one day you get word that your head is on the chopping block. Someone ratted you out. Your boss is not as gracious about your time card, expense account, sick days and mileage as you’d assumed. You’re told be someone you can trust that the next day will be your last. Sure enough, you get a call from your boss requesting a meeting first thing the next day.
Urgency, Clarity, and Creativity. Suddenly, you realize that by the day’s end, you are basically unemployed. You have at least one mouth to feed, and a lifestyle you don’t want to scale back. Your primary objective is your future. You don’t give a rip any more about what your boss thinks of you – not like you’re going to get a good recommendation anyway, right? – so you spend your last day cashing in every favor you have, providing whatever information you have about your company to whoever needs it in order to land a job as soon as possible. You work like you’ve never worked before, cutting deal after deal – a record day, with several offers for possible work if you’d be interested in leaving. Your boss would not approve of half the deal you made, as they severely cut into the company’s bottom line.
Praise for Being Shrewd. The next morning you meet with your boss and, as expected, you are terminated. But before you are escorted out of the building, the boss looks you in the eye and tells you that your work the previous day was impressive and shrewd, and while not altogether in the company’s best interest, you played your last hand on your last day brilliantly. If only you had shown that kind of initiative and passion for the past season than led to your dismissal, things would be different.
Faithfulness and Dishonesty: Practice makes permanent. Jesus told a similar story as the above (Luke 16:1-13) to encourage his disciples to live with great intentionality and resolve to be faithful to him and his way of life. He made a remarkable observation: how we deal with little things is how we’ll deal with big ones. If we choose not to follow Jesus and his way in the small stuff, it is highly unlikely that we will deliver on the larger scale. And if we are faithful in the minute, we are much more likely to be the same with the grand. I had a music director once who used to say, “Practice makes permanent.” Not perfect, but permanent. His point was that if we practice the music wrong, we will perform it wrong. Same with Jesus. If we practice our relationship with Jesus “wrong” on stuff that seems inconsequential, we will likely take the same approach on issues with a much higher price tag.
Do we have the same sense of urgency? The dishonest manager in Jesus’ story had the gift of knowing that if he didn’t act, he would be in really tough shape, sooner than later. His news gave him a sense of urgency that greatly clarified what he needed to do, which fueled his creativity to protect his future. Most of the time I think we give into the temptation to not live with any sense of urgency. I think we very easily dismiss better choices in favor of staying comfortable, all the while telling ourselves that we can put off to tomorrow what we can do today with no negative consequence. I think most people don’t change until they hit the wall, wake up, and begin doing what they needed to all along. Some people – very few, I think – are motivated by God’s judgment when we die, when we’re held to account for everything we did with our lives for good and bad. That will happen, but most people in our culture of comfort and collective assumption of grace are simply not impacted today by what will happen on some tomorrow in the future. But maybe that tomorrow is actually today.
Luke’s Understanding of The Age To Come: already here and coming. Luke’s view of the age to come when God’s accountability would come fully began when Jesus hit the planet, and continued to be present from the giving of the Holy Spirit forward, through now and on forever. In other words, today is judgment day, so to speak. And so is tomorrow and every tomorrow after that, until we draw our last breath, at which point the final accountability session will take place where we see the full picture, weep appropriately, and rejoice eternally as we discover that God’s grace really is greater than our sin.
No need to wait. Luke was right. God’s truth is an ever-present constant that is never mocked. Nobody ever gets away with anything, really, because God is always present. The judgment of God generally doesn’t come in the form of lightning bolts. The accountability comes when we discover our maligned decisions don’t deliver life as we thought they would. We experience the dings in every facet of life as we live in this broken world – broken as we make stupid choices intentionally and unintentionally, and as others do, too – we experience the consequence of all the choices all of the time. It’s pretty mind-boggling. But there is, in the middle of the mess we live in, a Way that is beautiful, true, and capable of delivering wholeness wherever it is allowed. This is the Spirit of God, the Way of Christ – all that is holy and good. When we discover that Spirit, that Way, the holy and good, and begin practicing them in small ways which lead to big ways, we see our lives transform from death to life. If you don’t, you’ll experience the brunt of your arrogance, and others will, too.
How does this literally play out?
Relational Health. Got any problem relationships in your life? Guess what? You are part of the problem! There is a Way for that. There is a new Spirit, a shrewd approach than can bring health to your relational system.
Physical Health. Collectively, Americans are out of control when it comes to physical health. The elementary ideas of self-control when it comes to eating habits: what goes in and how much – are lost on most of our citizens. The result is likely to be a collective health-care price-tag that we will all pay for in the future. The extra value meal isn’t, really, if we have to pay 100 fold more in related health issues down the road. What are you eating? How much? There is a Way, there is a Spirit, there is a shrewd approach to your physical life that leads to health and all of its benefits.
Emotional Health. Much like our physical health, I’m not sure we’re doing great on the emotional side of things. How we chose to deal with our emotional life messes with our entire life – our health, our relationships, our spirituality – everything. There is a way of honesty and grace that works, that creates a new way of being and relating to the world. A positively shrewd way of working through and with your emotional life for your advantage – because there will be winners and losers – if you’re not paying attention, you’re the loser in many respects.
Financial Health. The way of God relating to money is counterintuitive. Most people feel pretty good if they have more money than month throughout the year. Others with higher incomes feel good if they can set aside for retirement, for emergencies, for their kids’ education, etc. People watch their bottom line to make sure they are covered. But God’s way instructs us to watch our bottom line so that we can be generous toward others. The biblical standard that shows up again and again is 10% set aside for God’s purposes – not yourself.
To get into detail on any of these is too much for one blog. Indeed, it takes a lifetime to move toward mastery of all the areas of life. Remember, however, that today is judgment day, and you can do something about it. Make the most of your daily life by intentionally choosing the Way of Christ, living in the flow of the Spirit. Be positively shrewd.
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