Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.
Luke 16:10
Very Little
Jesus has just finished a strange story. A manager is about to lose his job, so before the news gets around he visits everyone who owes his master money and cuts each of them a deal. He's hoping they'll take him in once he's out of work. Then the master commends him for being shrewd. It's one of the stories people get confused by, because Jesus seems to be praising a man for hustling.
Verse 10 is where he turns from the story back to us, and if you read on a couple of verses he gets to his point. If you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? Money is the "very little." What we treat as a great test, the number that decides whether we feel safe, is the small stuff in this passage. He isn't saying money is unimportant, and he isn't telling us to be careless with it. He's saying money is the training ground rather than the destination. Something larger is waiting on the other side of it.
He also says it twice, once in each direction. Faithful in little means faithful in much, and dishonest in little means dishonest in much. That's less a warning than an observation about how people actually work. We'd all like to believe we'd be different if the amounts were bigger, that we'd rise to the occasion once it really counted, but the person handling twenty thousand dollars is the same person who handled twenty.
Faithful Where Nobody Checks
Nobody audits most of what you do with your money. It shows up in the expense report that would never be questioned, and in the hour on the timesheet you maybe didn't work. It shows up in the change handed back to you that was five dollars too much. It shows up in the small promise you made a friend, on a night when keeping it means giving up your evening.
Nobody's going to review any of those, and that's exactly why they form us. We're not waiting for some moment of great integrity to arrive so we can find out what we're made of. We're becoming, in the small amounts, whoever will show up when a large amount is finally in our hands.
I wrote about money from another angle in What a Life Is Made Of, where Jesus refuses to settle a family argument about it. That piece is about what your life is made of. This one is about who you're becoming while you handle your money.
None of this is meant to make you feel watched. God's kind enough to start us with small amounts, where the cost of learning is low. He doesn't hand us large amounts first and let us find out the hard way what we'd have done with them.
Prayer
Father, you know the small places where we cut corners and assume nobody's counting. Thank you that you start us with little, and that you're patient with us while we learn to be trusted. Make us people who can be trusted in the amounts nobody's checking, and keep our hands loose enough with money that it never becomes our master. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.