Luke 16:1 Meaning He Also Said to His Disciples

Everything in your hands is on loan, and an accounting is coming. That is the position of a steward: real authority over goods, real freedom to use them, and no ownership at all. Time, health, money, influence, the years themselves, none of it was manufactured by the person holding it.

Waste is the charge, and it runs quieter than theft. Nothing has to be stolen for a life to be squandered, since goods can simply leak away on nothing. What a person owns carries a claim from the poor built into it, which makes hoarding and frittering two versions of the same mismanagement.

The steward is your memory, the keeper who holds the record of each day. He answers to a rich man, the abundant life within, and he is charged with wasting his master's goods. His waste is simple. He lets the day's events stand exactly as the senses reported them, filing every loss and slight as final fact, and so he squanders the wealth he was set to manage.

The parable praises the steward only when he grows shrewd and revises. To revise is to take a scene that went wrong and replay it in imagination as you would have wished it, quietly falsifying the record before it hardens. A memory kept honest to appearances impoverishes a man. A memory bent toward the future he wants makes him rich. The record a person keeps becomes the life he later meets.