The First Surprising Thing
The first surprising thing to me is that Jesus basically said that how we handle our money is a test. We’ll go ahead and look at Luke 16:11, and here we have Jesus saying,
So, if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches?”
We see something similar in Matthew 25, in the Parable of the Talents. Basically, the gist of the Parable of the Talents is that you have a guy who has some wealth, and he has three different employees that he gives his wealth to, to manage it while he’s gone. Then he comes back to see how they did, and the ones who stewarded that money well, he gave them more to take care of; and the one who didn’t manage it very well, he actually took away what he had and gave it to the one who handled it the best.
So, what I take from all this is that God is testing us with our money to see how we’re going to handle it, and see if we’re trusting Him with it. I don’t know about you, but I want to pass the test.
The Second Surprising Thing
The next surprising thing that Jesus said about money is that we should pay taxes. I wish I could pay taxes the way Jesus did in one of these passages.
If we look at Matthew 17:27, we have Jesus saying,
But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch, open its mouth, and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.”
Yeah, you just can’t make this stuff up. I love it.
Then in Matthew 22:17, Jesus gets a little bit more specific with all this. It says,
Tell us then, what’s your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?” These are the Pharisees talking to him. “But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, ‘You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax.’ They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, ‘Whose image is this? And whose inscription?’ ‘Caesar’s,’ they replied. Then he said to them, ‘So, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to God what is God’s.”
So, as much as we all probably hate paying taxes, Jesus said we should pay taxes.
The Third Surprising Thing
The third surprising thing Jesus said about money is basically that we should budget our money.
In Luke 14:28-30, Jesus says this:
But don’t begin until you count the cost. For who would begin construction of a building without first calculating the cost to see if there is enough money to finish it? Otherwise, you might complete only the foundation before running out of money, and then everybody would laugh at you. They would say, ‘There’s the person who started that building, but couldn’t afford to finish it.”
Yeah, this is a tough verse for a lot of us financially because I think it makes us realize that we can’t just do whatever we feel like doing and we have to think through it a little bit.
This verse also goes right against the idea of spending more than we earn and living beyond our means, especially to impress other people. Maybe this is buying a nicer car than you can afford; maybe it’s buying clothes to impress people that you don’t actually have money for. Yeah, it can be a tough pill to swallow, but I think God’s trying to communicate something to us in this verse.
Now, there are tons of other verses where Jesus talked about money and referenced money, so I’d love to hear from you what ones you would add to this list. So, let us know down in the comments, down below.
