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“Desiring to Save All”
Amos 8:4-7
1 Timothy 2:1-15
Luke 16:1-15
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18 Sunday after Pentecost
God our Savior desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
Grace to you and peace from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Bridge
Jesus commends the shrewd. However, He commends the shrewd as they use their shrewdness in
eternal things. He was talking to His disciples … but He did so in the company of the Pharisees.
Known for their secular shrewdness, Jesus made sure they heard that the exaltation by men that they’d
worked so hard to gain was an “abomination in the sight of God”.
Shrewdness, though, Jesus commended … even noting its use in the secular realm.
I’d have to say that there may be no more profitable personal characteristic than shrewdness.
Success by, perhaps, any measure gets accomplished by no characteristic better than by the presence,
and exercise, of it. To be shrewd means to muster every other beneficial chunk of knowledge and skill
… being able to cycle all of the best of each one of them and employing what (from each) will best
navigate any obstacle or opportunity. One shrewd understands knowledge, but does so from a
worldly-almost wisdom kind of use of it … then has the cognizant skills to employ the best of any
expression, strategically placing it in the best possible location to result the exact outcome expected.
Synonyms that may help us recognize this characteristic include caginess, sharpness, cleverness,
astuteness, acumen, keenness, soundness, insightfulness, and craftiness. The opposite would be one dull
… just not aware, oblivious and incapable. Again, perhaps the best of all the best in knowledge,
awareness, perspective, discernment, capacity, and capability is where shrewdness gets identified and
exercised. One perceptive … and able to, then do something with that accurate perception … is
about as soundly shrewd as anyone could be.
Jesus commends the shrewd, but expects them not to miss what characterizes it more than
anything could: and that is being shrewd in eternal things.
Text
“God our Savior desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” For
those missing the rest of Scripture, God puts it in one sentence. For the earthly shrewd, listen up! You
don’t, even, have to read any more of the big Book to grasp the key idea. Efficiently, you can
comprehend … then formulate a response to … the entirety of God’s plan if you, just, let this one
sentence sink fully in.
If I wanted the Cliff Notes version of the Bible, I’d go to the word index and look for a quick trip to
something that told me what “God wants”. Here it is! Without wading through the rest, here’s the
place where God, specifically, tells us what He “wants”. Nowhere else do we get that direct language
… God “wants” … God “desires”. He doesn’t tell us this so clearly anyplace else.
For you who are shrewdly listening, God wants 2 things: 1) that “all people be saved”, and 2) that
they all “come to the knowledge of the truth”. He desires that “all people”, first of all, “be saved”.
Everybody! No exception outside of every last person from every corner of this planet out of all of time
from the very beginning to the end of it. God wants no one left out of the salvation that the Gospel of
His Son’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection makes possible. Now, to be clear, that salvation
is a beyond-this-life kind of thing, so, first, you have to be OK with the idea of beyond-this-life; then
care to concern yourself with it … so it begins with fuller eyesight. That salvation into more than,
just, tomorrow … here … is necessary and acquirable is a huge step that only those really cagy
understand … so, first, be one who’s, really, that cagy!
By itself, that’s a major hurdle. The earthly-astute plan for the future … they really do … but
the future they plan for is, often, as limited as next week, next month, or retirement. They look that far
forward … setting the stage for its success … but may miss the whole point of the bigger picture,
which is why Jesus calls people to be really shrewd. One might have abundant investments to draw
from for the latter years of this life … one may have built their portfolio and resume for any fall-back
contingencies, if they’re needed … even insured for every earthly possibility … yet skipping being
diligent in the one eventuality that we’re all destined to die into.
I’d say that it’s impossible to be a shrewd atheist (probably in much of any sense). To be so
knowingly … chosenly … blind to the inevitable that’s obviously bigger than we are and
uncontrollable-by-us can’t be anyone’s definition of astute or perceptive. But Jesus, here, isn’t
talking to atheistic idiots … He’s talking to neglectful Pharisees … to ones who should know better
but (for whatever non-shrewd reason) guide their time and energies other directions. Misguided
might be a nice way to describe them, except that the jeopardy of their misguidedness is, potentially,
much more serious than the use of that word might suggest. The shrewd earthly manager manages
well in earthly issues … he does … Jesus acknowledges that. But He does so to point out that if, only,
he’d do half that well with eternal things, what God would open-up to him from real awareness …
things that would astound and embolden him … the revelations would blow his mind … and heart.
Maybe you’ve got, at least, the basics covered. Maybe the salvation-thing is, for you, past history
(been there / done that / now, let’s move on). Maybe Heaven is, indeed, your home and home is (as
the expression goes) “where the heart is”. Maybe you’re good … at least for the moment. But don’t
forget, please, that “God our Savior desires all people to be saved”. Don’t miss, please, the “all” part
of His desire, kicking back on (what you think are) your laurels … and leaving others to fend for
themselves.
See, some of those “all people” might be members of your family, for instance. Maybe (if you’re
Godly-crafty) someone besides yourself needs to experience that craftiness of yours in opening-up
their minds and hearts to things that are beyond this life that you know about. Maybe your skill and
perception is perfect to assist another in discovering that, indeed, Christ died, also, for them and
Heaven is as close as grace-received. Maybe an eternal perspective might be contagious if you, just,
let it out and not be so closely-protective of it. ….
Application
And, then, there’s, also, another whole side to this. For those thinking themselves shrewd because
you’ve accomplished the salvation part and, for the most part, you’re trying to spread that offer
around, God gave another half sentence to completely-describe the fullness of His desire. Salvation
(great as it is) isn’t all that there is. Sanctification (or an appreciation of that salvation / justification)
… and the knowledge of Him that makes Heaven, just, the completion of stuff that began-to-beenjoyed here … is how this sentence dictates a, still, personal ongoing development.
“God our Savior desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” The
truly shrewd gain and build that knowledge … they let it grow by knowing how that’s done,
making sure that they put themselves well-positioned for it to happen.
Our Wednesday evening group is reading a book that (shrewdly) describes the circumstances of our
misdirecting society as in the midst of a “perfect storm” … one that’s about the task of shredding our
spiritual / eternal landscape. Three influences, it says, set the stage for a counterfit religion …
something too many call “Christianity” … but something that, really, has nothing (at all) to do with the
Lordship of God in Christ.. The first of these influencing forces (the book says) is “a growing
ignorance of history and the Bible”. That folks, either, don’t care, or don’t teach anything more than
the here-and-now (and how, only, to feel about something that’s got the word “Bible” on it) just
decapitates anything that might really want to be the Christian Church. Second of these societal
influences is “an insatiable appetite for entertainment and leisure”. Again, how we feel about
anything (from society’s encouragement) is more important than what the thing itself is … and that
pulls the rug out from under anyone trying to firmly stand upon a ground that’s solid. Lastly, the book
cites an ever “mounting desperation for success” redefining shrewdness such that, even, Jesus (in our
Gospel account) had to address the error, even, back then.
Ultimately, the book we’re reading says that God’s Words get, regularly, gutted from those who
would be God’s people. Using, even, the same language but having no semblance to the same thing,
so-called “Christian” institutions, even, are made rickety scaffolding upon which many affix
themselves … while the real Person, Words and knowable past, present, and future activity of the
institution’s Namesake has been pulled, too often, from the equation. Our membership, we think, is
enough. Our connection to something with, maybe, some of the right words, seems an acceptable
sacrifice.
How might one know the difference between the charade and the real thing? Well, I don’t know
how one might but that one, really, comes to know the difference (comes to the “knowledge of the
truth”) … something the book we’re reading suggests that only the true “Remnant” of godly-shrewd
people, even, concern themselves with finding-out about. Jesus could have written the book we’re
reading as you can see Him, here, telling the so-called church (in Pharisees) what the Real Church is
… and they (not being eternally shrewd) weren’t it.
So, of the 2 things that God wants, this second one is no less essential than the first: “God our
Savior desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” Where a “growing
ignorance of history and the Bible” plagues the society in which we live … and we’re encouraged to go
shallow, rather than deep, in the knowledge of Who God in Christ really is … this real eternal
shrewdness Jesus demands of us just as fully as He did disciples standing in the presence of fakers.
Real shrewdness God defines by the whole sentence that we began with … just one sentence, but one
sentence so essential that fulfilling its charge ought to be what occupies our energies. “God our Savior
desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”
Saved as sinners humbled by our continuing sinfulness … needing saved-from-it daily …
appreciating the graciousness of God in doing-so with us continually … then concerning ourselves with
the rest of the “all people” for whom grace stands available … along with our (simultaneous) learning /
growing and embedding, again, the rest of “all people” (with us) in this same learning / growing /
“coming to the knowledge of the truth” … that’s the shrewdness that Jesus commends in us when He
sees it. Eternal success can be defined as the astute-navigation of pleasing God’s desire.
So, appreciating (thankfully) God’s Amazing Grace-to-us and evangelizing (knowing grace as
amazingly designed-for-everyone-to-whom-we’re-to-persuade), then catechizing ourselves continually,
growing as ongoing disciples who learn from, uniquely, God of His things, and participating (actively)
in that same development-process with every one, is the calling that the Great Commission gives to us
… and pleases God (all of it) as He’s told us in this one direct sentence.
Scripture … the Bible … God’s will / desire / good pleasure … Word … He’s put into a big Book,
and I don’t want to diminish that fact by, just, calling it one sentence. He has so much to unfold to us,
even well before He unfolds all-of-it so overwhelmingly in the Paradise to come. Epiphanies /
revelations / understandings / joys He’s got for us plentifully … to never be exhausted while we’re,
even, here. There is no down-side to our participation in what pleases Him from His desire. The upside (for those counting) is so well-beyond what we could calculate that, even here, growth means
growth for-and-in us … an expanding of where and how we are into an awareness and wisdom that
we can’t, even, imagine or predict.
And that’s not, just, what awaits us in the new mercies of each morning that we can be awakened to.
It’s a newness that’s designed for everyone who you and I come into contact with (from presidents to
prime ministers, store clerks to school bullies, friends to adversaries, family to people-not-yet-known-byus).
“God our Savior desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” Jesus
commends the shrewd. However, He commends the shrewd as they use their shrewdness in eternal
things. May we be ones so commended … so conscious and deliberate in our God-pleasing caginess
… His desired participation, by us, in the fulfilling of this, just, one sentence of His Word.
In +Jesus’ name. Amen.