Four Radical Things Jesus Said About Money: A Look at Some of His Most Puzzling ParablesSample

Raise your hand if you’d like to be so rich that you have to figure out where to save your piles of extra money.

We would all love that, of course! 

For many of us, having “plenty of [money] laid up for many years” so we can “take life easy”—like the rich man in today’s parable—is our retirement plan. It’s what culture and commercials say is the ultimate success with our personal finances. It’s what most of us are working toward.

We are likely just as surprised by the twist in Jesus’s parable as his audience was. God called the rich man who achieved the same goal many of us are aiming for a “fool.” 

How can that be?

Jesus used this parable to illustrate an idea so radical it hardly makes sense—your money is not yours. 

You might think it’s yours because you earn it, control it, the accounts are in your name, and paychecks are written to you. But the unpleasant fact is, your money will still be here when you no longer are. Just like the rich man, almost all of us will run out of time before we run out of money. What we leave behind will be divided up and doled out for others to do with as they please.

It turns out, we are not owners of our money. We are merely managers, tasked with making the most of it for the short time it’s in our hands. 

How do we do that? We’ll camp on that question for the next three days. Jesus gave us an obvious (but not easy) answer. Keep reading to find out what it is.