It is not perhaps the main thrust of the parable – which focuses on what the unjust steward does with his master’s wealth, still available to him to secure his future position following his discharge from his job – but there is a general application of this situation which is connected to our failed stewardship. The man could even have made a clean breast of it then. If only, even at that stage, he had gone with the books and said, ‘I have been an utter fool. I have got myself into this state. I have wronged you. I have allowed things to go from bad to worse. I have even been overpaying myself. I have built up there on the northeast corner of the estate, a house fit for a king. I have been drawing out of it myself.’ If he had made a clean breast of his failure, such is the tone of the owner's summons, that it gives us room to believe that he could have been helped. But no, he is not going to do that.
We are all stewards of God’s gifts: of our lives, of our minds and intelligence, of our strength and various capacities. Have we used these to serve the Lord or to serve ourselves? Have we given him his due as our Creator and Lord, as the one to whom we owe everything? Have we loved for him, and worshipped him, and studied his word? Have we made him our delight, and looked forward to being with him in the world to come? Given our unfaithfulness, have we acknowledged our guilt before him and our failure to obey him all life long? Have we repented of our sins and humbled ourselves before him? Have we understood his amazing grace in giving his Son to die for us, to take the punishment of our sins, and to credit to our account his perfect righteousness? Have we spoken to others about Christ the Saviour of the world, and helped to publish the tidings of great joy? No, by nature we have not done any of these things? We are therefore exposed to his anger, and we can expect nothing other than to have our stewardship taken away. For the steward in the parable this meant being put out of his comfortable job, and losing the security of being in his master’s house. For us it means the end of our temporary life in this world, and facing God’s judgment.
We are all due to give an account to God, and there is not the slightest doubt about what the outcome will be. It means giving an account for every moment of life, an account in which every detail of our behaviour will be brought out into the open. God forgets nothing, and the account that we will have to give at the end of life includes every action, every word, every thought, and every secret motive in our hearts. Just like the unjust steward, it will be found that the reports that have ‘got back to’ our Lord are all true. We have indeed broken his commandments constantly. We must be put out of our stewardship, which for us means that we must lose this temporary life, and face death without any prospect of mercy. That is the situation which the parable constructs for us to think about.
As this steward was called to give an account to his master, so it is with us. We get a jolt or two from God, even before death, as though God sends for us and says, ‘How is this that I hear this of thee?’ How is it that I know this, that you have ignored me, that you have spurned me, that you have gone against my requirements and my law, that you have gone your own way? The jolt comes in different ways. Sometimes, it's a jolt of conscience and we are ashamed of something we have done. Perhaps we are not very often ashamed, but this time we are ashamed and embarrassed, and we begin to think. It's as though we have been challenged by God. Sometimes it may be quite different. We experience a serious illness, a very severe pain in the chest, and we begin to worry about our lives and wonder if we have some terminal problem. ‘What about God? What about eternity?’ Sometimes it is just a great sadness, and the bottom falls out of life, and we wonder what the purpose of it is, and what we are here for, and we go down into gloom for a while, and questions arise in our minds. ‘What about purpose and meaning and eternity?’ and we struggle to get over it and put it behind us. ‘What is this that I hear of thee?’ You have ignored your God. You have ignored all that he has given you. You have gone your own way. You have lived for yourself. So we are challenged from time to time.
John Charles Ryle, great preacher in the last century, came from a very wealthy family. How did God shake him? How did God begin to speak to him? It was the bankruptcy of his father. As a lad, he revelled in being a wealthy middle class boy with money and with a future. In those Victorian days the upper classes actually believed that they were somehow a superior breed of human being to the lower classes. There he was at school in Eton, in the very kind of school where all these things are bragged about and contribute to your status, and his father had to go bankrupt. What a humiliation! But God was speaking to him and beginning to wake him up.