It doesn’t seem to make sense: Jesus tells his disciples to take a lesson from Satan himself.
A scandalous idea? Yes. Essential to the Christian life? Definitely.
Drawing on Jesus’s parable of the shrewd manager in Luke 16, Rick Lawrence explores Jesus’s shocking mandate to be as shrewd as Satan and as innocent as the Holy Spirit. In fact, Jesus implies, if we are going to be any good for the Kingdom of God, we’ve got to be a lot shrewder than we are now.
Shrewd shows us how Jesus was naturally shrewd in every encounter he had, using leverage such as laughter, generosity, and bluntness to influence a situation for good.
God calls us to be shrewd without evil intent, just as Jesus was. Because the truth is that we have no salvation outside of the holy shrewdness of a loving God. And that’s a scandalous story worth telling.