What does waiting for Jesus’s return look like? Are we just trying to “make it through” until the end? This week we turn to Matthew 25:14-30, looking at the “Parable of the Talents” and what it says to us about what God calls us to do with our lives right now.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be here with you tonight as we continue our series, The Future is Here. We’ve been thinking the last few weeks about the urgency we need to have about the kingdom of God and what it means to focus on it. We thought last week about what it means to have a sense of urgency and service, that we’re so excited about Jesus returning that we do everything we can possibly do to be prepared and ready for his return.
We saw that with the foolish bridesmaids who didn’t put in the extra work to be prepared and they were just sort of skating along. They’re apathetic. And then the wise bridesmaids who brought the extra oil and were ready and got to see the joy of the coming of the bridegroom. But what happens if we say, well, I am excited and I want to serve and I want to do all these things, but I feel like maybe I’m falling short. I even have, I’ve always had everything stacked against me. Other people have more opportunities to serve, more gifts, more abilities.
It probably goes back, we probably can think of times in our childhood where we knew someone, whether it was a friend or a sibling, who seemed to have advantages over us and we were annoyed by it. Maybe you have a funny story about that and you’d like to share it in the comments. We all have those sorts of stories, right? Those experiences. I was thinking as I went through this passage about a time a few years back where I had a colleague who was complaining to me about his work and how he had to put in four or five extra hours a week over a normal work week. And then he mentioned how much he was paid and how he wasn’t paid enough to be doing that.
And in a sense, I was sympathetic, although, and he didn’t realize this, I was working 20, 30, 40 extra hours a week, but he didn’t know that. He wasn’t trying to be mean. But the thing that really stuck in my head, it wasn’t that he was working four or five extra hours a week and I was working more. It was that when he named how little he was being paid, I was being paid $10,000 less than he was being paid. And at that point, I felt all kinds of unpleasant things come up in my heart because it was sort of, well, I have more responsibility and I’m working harder than he is, and yet he has more. And yet, at the end of the day, when I get evaluated, I’m not going to be judged on the fact that I was paid less, I’m going to be held up to the same standard or even a higher standard than him and how unfair that was. And I had to wrestle with that.
These sorts of things can affect our attitude in ways we’re probably not very proud of. I wasn’t. And I had to think, well, I love what I do, I need to focus on that, and I need to focus on doing the best job I can. And it doesn’t matter if he makes more and putting in fewer hours. It’s hard to do that, though, isn’t it? And it’s even harder in life when we look and we feel like, well, some people are getting more gifts from God or more opportunities, and yet he’s going to demand that I have to show my talents, I have to serve, and then he’s going to judge me, but those people have an advantage.
However, as we turn to this next parable, we see that’s not how God works. So let’s come before our God, ask that he would direct our hearts to the way he really is, and then we’ll dig into this parable. Let’s pray. Father, we know that you are our loving Heavenly Father, and yet so often in our hearts we get distracted by how we perceive other people seem to have an advantage, more gifts, more opportunities, more time to use their gifts, and we start to think, well, how is this fair? And we start to wonder how you’re going to judge us and start to feel like you’re being a cruel taskmaster, even though if we look back at what you have done for us, what you call us to do, we see that you are anything but. Lord, would you forgive us for those times, and would you help us to understand who you really are through this parable, that we might instead experience your joy, not the fear of your judgment. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
We see, as we go from this parable of the ten virgins who all had the same, they all had torches, it was a matter of some planned and brought oil and some didn’t, to this parable, an important shift, because in this next parable, not everyone receives the same amount of the tools they need to serve. Let’s go ahead and look at the parable of the talents.
Jesus says, “For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. And then he went away.”
So this is a fairly common arrangement in the ancient world, and sometimes in the modern world too, there’s someone who has a great deal of property, and he’s going to go away, we’re not even told where he’s going or why he’s going, but he’s going to go away, and he needs someone or someones to manage it. And so he takes his servants, his most trusted servants, and he entrusts to them all the materials that they need to go and do his work while he’s gone.
And in that, we see a picture of what God does for us, that he gives us his grace and his love and his Spirit, and then he sends us off to go and do his work. But we might say here, well, how can this be about God’s grace, or even his Holy Spirit in us, because not everyone gets the same amount here, and God’s love, God’s love is infinite and unmeasurable. We can’t say some people are loved more by God.
Sometimes we may feel that way, but we realize that can’t be true. So what is going on here? And in some sense, that question is answered more clearly by a very similar parable Jesus tells on another occasion in the Gospel of Luke, in Luke 19. There he tells the parable of the ten minas, and each of the servants receives the exact same amount. And so it’s focused on how we have this same amount of God’s love and grace that he gives to us.
However, we know from experience that even though God gives us that grace, that all-encompassing grace that’s immeasurable, there are times in this life where it seems like we look around, and maybe occasionally we look at our own life and are in awe of how God has entrusted what he has to us to do, and the gifts he’s given us, and the abilities and the opportunities. But a lot of times it’s more in the context of looking at someone else and thinking, well, why is that person able to do so much more? Why do they have all these abilities? Why do they have all these opportunities, all these blessings?
And Jesus is addressing that, I believe, in this parable, because everyone gets this baseline. Everyone is entrusted with at least one talent. But certainly we know as we wait for Jesus’ return, there are times where it doesn’t seem all nice and fair and even, and we grumble.
Now to understand the point that Jesus is going to make, we need to start with understanding that even the servant who only receives a single talent is receiving a huge sum of money. Commentators have wrestled with exactly how much this would have been in the currency of the time, but we have a pretty good sense that it was a very, very large amount, somewhere in the order of two to two and a half decades’ worth of pay to the average day laborer.
This wasn’t just a little bit of money. This was hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now you may have notes in your Bible that note a smaller sum. Part of that’s this debate, and part of it is the fact that there’s inflation. But the best records we have would indicate that a day laborer was paid such a small fraction of a talent that essentially the master is empowering each of these servants to have enough money to hire people, to accomplish things, to lend, whatever they were going to do, to a very, very large enterprise. They could actually go and do big things.
So even the servant that we may sort of sympathize with and think, well, he sort of is like me, he only gets one talent, and I feel like I’ve only gotten a little bit from God, and other people have so much more. Even the one that we would say doesn’t have very much actually has an enormous amount, enormous amount of this empowerment from the master.
And that’s the first point we need to hold on to here is that that’s true of us, too. When we look at ourselves and we think, well, these other people seem to have advantages over us and abilities over us and opportunities beyond us, God is still entrusted with us with so much more to go and do what he has called us to do. And while we don’t necessarily understand how, just like this master has looked at the abilities of his servants and chosen that some should be entrusted with more than others, we may not understand why he’s done that in our lives.
What we do know is he’s entrusted with us a vast, vast fortune. And so all of us have the ability to go and be successful at the things that God has called us to do. And that point there is that all of us need to go and do it. That’s the starting point. Whether we feel like we have a ton of gifts in comparison to everyone else or we feel like we got the short end of the stick, all of us have been entrusted with so much that we need to go and we need to do something with it.
That’s what we see as we go on in verse 16. Jesus continues, “He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them and he made five talents more. So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master’s money.”
Now after a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. And he who had received the five talents came forward bringing five talents more saying, “Master, you delivered to me five talents, here, I have made five talents more.” His master said to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant, you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much, enter into the joy of your master.”
And he also who had the two talents came forward saying, “Master, you delivered to me two talents, here I have made two talents more.” His master said to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant, you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much, enter into the joy of your master.”
Something that’s really important that we need to notice in the account with the first two servants. Now the servant who only received two talents, and I use only lightly because that would have been something like 40 years of wages for somebody that he’s been entrusted with, a huge sum of money, you’d only entrust this with someone special, someone that you really felt could handle it, someone who you knew could go and do something with it.
He doesn’t get caught up in the fact that he is less than the person with five talents. In any case, both servants are praised exactly the same. They’re both praised and told to enter into the master’s joy. Yes, they’re going to have more responsibilities now. They’ve shown themselves worthy. They’re going to go and do more, but they’re going to enter into the master’s joy, something that an ancient Near Eastern master wouldn’t have normally said.
This is so much more. This is being rewarded with something far greater than any servant could expect. He’s going to actually feel the master’s joy. That’s what God calls us to do. He entrusts us with whatever he entrusts us with, whatever abilities, whatever time, whatever resources. All those things seem to be being referred to here. It’s not just spiritual gifts. It’s how much time we have. It’s the opportunities we have. Yes, it’s the money we have.
It’s all those things, all those different forms of gifts from God, all those different places that he puts us. All those things we have, when we start to add them up, they’re a vast sum. When we simply go and use them and we move forward with the mission that God has called us to do, what does he say? “Well done, good and faithful servant. Come and enter into the master’s joy.”
And even if we feel like, well, someone else got way more, what do we know? That master’s joy is still there for us because he’s rejoicing in what we did have and what we’ve done with it, that we’ve followed him using it.
And then that reminds me of something that happened this spring in the garage. Now, garages are usually not overly exciting places, but in the garage this spring, or actually this winter, something incredibly exciting happened to me. I happened to move some boxes and some old onions had rolled behind the boxes. I didn’t have any idea they were there, but when I moved the box, look what I found.
These little onions had been in the dark, been in the freezing cold, been totally ignored, hadn’t received any water, weren’t in any dirt, were sprouting. And I felt real delight seeing these onions sprouting. I couldn’t wait to go and reward them with more to plant them in dirt when it was finally warm enough because, wow, these onions had taken this circumstance in which if onions could complain, they should have complained a lot, they had nothing, but they went and did with what they had.
Now, if they hadn’t done anything, I just found old rotting onions, I probably would have just ended up tossing them. What did I do instead? I, of course, planted them as soon as it got warm enough in March. And I’ve delighted in them so much, seeing them grow, and you can see that they’re a little scraggly. Certainly in the garage, there weren’t much to look at, but they weren’t in the ground either. They’ve been through a lot. They didn’t have much.
Where was my delight? My delight was the fact that here they were, here they were sprouting, here they were doing something with what they had. And when God calls us to follow him and to serve him, he doesn’t look at us and say, well, I only gave you a dark, cold garage, and you’re a little scraggly and a little yellowed. How dare you? You’re wicked. You’re awful. You failed. You didn’t do enough. You’re not a perfect plant that’s growing nice and straight and beautifully.
No, he delights in us. Whatever our state, as we’re doing what we’ve been called to do, he delights. And yes, we may look at some people and they seem to have more of whatever we feel like we’re lacking in. People with more gifts or money or what have you. But the joy that we are invited into in the master, in our heavenly father, comes from doing with what he has given us. And unlike these onions who were held back and couldn’t in any way be said to have received much of anything from me, we’ve received so much in God’s grace.
And so all of us can go do something. And then when we’re in God’s joy, what happens? Then we can bloom. Then we can show the full splendor of what God has made us to do. That’s what these onions have done. They may not have had much, but I delighted in them because of what they could do, because of what they were. And likewise, we see with our God that he delights in us.
How amazing is it that he can do that? How amazing is it that he can take us, even when we’re a scraggly onion, and delight in us? Even when things aren’t going quite right right now. I’m having a bit of a technological problem and it’s sort of, it’s annoying and I think, well, why can’t everything just work right? But what do we know? Our God delights in us.
As we go on, though, we see a servant who doesn’t take that approach. And let’s go ahead and turn, as we go on, to the next servant, the one who’s ultimately going to be called wicked. Take a look at what happens with him. It says, “But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master’s money.”
Now, after a long time, the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. And he said, settled accounts with him and he who had received the five talents came forward. Okay, so we saw that. Then the two. Now listen to what happens with the one.
He who had also received the one talent came forward, saying, “Master, I knew you to be a hard man reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you scattered no seed. So I was afraid. And I went and hid your talent in the ground here. You have what is yours.”
Those master answered him, “You wicked and slothful servant. You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed. You ought to have invested my money with the bankers. And in my coming, I could have received what was my own with interest.”
Master says, “You think I’m awful, master? You think that I’m hard? You think that I demand what isn’t really mine? Well then, why didn’t you go and at least do something? Why did you just sit there and bury that talent?”
And so he goes on in verse 28. He says, “So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant out into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
What happens with that servant? Well, I think we understand it more than we’d probably like to admit. At those times where we feel like maybe God hasn’t given us enough, we start to think about how hard he is, that he demands us to follow him. We forget the grace that he has shown us. Instead we start to think, he’s just going to demand more and more and more, and then he’s going to be disappointed in whatever I do.
I think that’s what goes through this servant’s mind. He’s not looking at the fact that a vast fortune has been entrusted to him. He’s looking and saying, they got more. Everything is going smoothly for them. They have so much. They can be successful. I’ll never be successful, and I only have a little, at least comparatively, and so I better just go and bury it in the ground.
Now we should say something about that because today that’s not really the best investment strategy, burying in the ground, and it wasn’t the best investment strategy at the time, but it certainly was a secure one. It was like taking a bunch of gold and putting it in a safe deposit box or something along those lines where at least you know where it is and nothing’s going to happen to it. So people did do that.
There’s actually a rabbinical tradition at the time that the only safe place to put money was to bury it in the ground where nothing could happen to it. But the master says, I didn’t give you money just to make sure no one stole it. I gave you that money to go and be successful for me, to carry forward my mission, and instead because you were so focused on how hard I was, you didn’t live up to the standard you thought that I had. It doesn’t make any sense.
Now this isn’t saying that God is an evil master that takes what isn’t really his. That statement as he responds to the servant that says, you thought these things, well then here they’re true, is really probably said in sarcasm. Well, if that’s how you think I am, then let’s go ahead and judge you according to that standard.
And it’s so different from how the first two servants approach the master. When the servant with just two talents comes before the master, he doesn’t say, well, I know I didn’t have as much and so I still don’t have as much and I hope that maybe you have some mercy on me. I know you’re hard and I fell short. No, what does he do? He looks at his master and just delights to give him what he was able to do.
And if the servant with one talent had done the same, we have every reason based on how this parable is structured to believe the same answer would have been given. “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been entrusted with little, now come into your master’s joy and take much responsibility.”
Now, this is a key place where this differs from the parable in Luke that I referred to, the parable of the minas, and that parable, the wicked master or rather the wicked servants actually take the minas and put them into cloth bags, a very dangerous way to store a large fortune or even a small amount of money in the time, just like it would be today. And I think Jesus has this different story here to emphasize something different, which is that it’s not enough simply to hang on to what God has entrusted us with.
That’s not what he’s given it to us for. What brings him joy is that we use what he’s entrusted us with. And the implication isn’t there’s three possibilities. There’s success with what he’s entrusted us with. There’s failure with what he’s entrusted us with. And there is utter, utter, utter failure if we don’t do anything.
No, there’s either success or failure. If you go and use what God’s gifted you to do, if you go and use the resources God has given you, even if you don’t ever reach the same heights as someone else, God’s going to look at what you’ve done with what you have and he’s going to delight in you, just like I delight in those onions and think, wow, isn’t it amazing what’s happened with them? And that’s what we see here.
The problem is the person buried it. The problem is this person, instead of understanding that he’d been given these talents because he was called to serve, thought he was merely called to conserve. Merely to hold on and be able to say, I passed it on and nothing bad happened. But God doesn’t place us here to do that. He places us here to proclaim his kingdom and to expand it. And sometimes that means taking risks.
And this isn’t an argument to go and be a daredevil. This is an argument to go and to be astute, listening to what God has called us to do, just like those first two servants did, and then go and do it. Because when we do, God uses that and he delights in that.
What he doesn’t delight in is us thinking about him in terms of that last servant. Oh, there’s that harsh master. There’s that one who’s going to condemn me. And then not doing anything at all. Not trusting that when God calls us and empowers us, that he is giving us the things that we can succeed with.
But in fact, that is what he does. He gives us what we have and he enables us to serve because he is there with us. We have his love more than any earthly master will ever give honor or praise or love to the one serving him. Far more than anyone we can know. God loves us. And we can go and we can take those risks because we know he loves us.
Where are those places that we’re holding on and we’re just conserving what God has given us because we’re afraid that he’s going to just see us as failures if we try to go and do what he’s called us to do. And so we think maybe it’s better if I just don’t take the risk.
Where are those places in our own personal lives where he’s called us? Maybe it’s, you know, you’re supposed to go into a different line of work, but you’re afraid that God’s just wanting you to just plod through life. And you think, well, maybe it won’t work out. Maybe it’s silly that I feel like I should go and do something. Maybe this is an opportunity to actually explore that.
And again, these servants aren’t crazy. They don’t go and gamble the money to see if they can make an absolute pile of cash they can bring back. They just go and do what’s responsible. Doubling these talents would have been a very normal thing in the investment situation of the time.
And in other words, what can we do that makes sense in just the normal framework of our lives and of the things that God has given us and the situations God places us in that can better use the talents he’s given us?
This is a challenge for us too as Christians in the church. How are we using the church to do that? So often the worst of the church comes when we think we have to conserve the church and make sure that we can pass along the organization. They’ll be there for another decade, another century, another millennia, however long we need to wait before Jesus returns.
Because if he returns and we tried to expand God’s kingdom and we failed, he’s just going to be angry at us. And so we see bad things happening, but we don’t criticize them because it might hurt the church. We focus on making sure we don’t lose anyone in the church and don’t really care about our neighbors outside the church so that we can have a perfectly seemingly vibrant church that never actually reaches anyone.
We do these sorts of things because we start to take on that mentality of that third servant, even if we wouldn’t ever put it that way. But when we actually understand that our God delights in us and using the things that he’s given us to his glory, our perspective changes. We start to see, I might not always make five talents more. I might make two talents more. I might make one talent more. I might not have any idea how much I’ve made more, but our God is with us and loves us.
All of us have probably seen some talent shows at this point. They’ve been on TV for a couple decades at least now, and of course there were ones long before that, but the current wave at least. It seems like inevitably one of the stories that catches all of our attention in any given show, it’s probably at least a few per season, is the person who’s doing some job we would deem menial and yet has this beautiful singing voice or some other amazing ability, and we think, what a wasted talent. This person should have gone out and used that talent long before, and everyone rejoices that they finally ended up on that talent show.
We wonder, well, why didn’t they? Why were they just doing menial things? And probably it’s because they think, well, what happens if I fail? And in that situation, it makes sense because how many people, for example, have wonderful singing voices or beautiful ability with instruments, but never actually can turn it into something that can take care of their family and just their general earthly needs?
But in a sense, what we’re told here is that this is a call to come and enter into the Church’s Got Talent, not America’s Got Talent. And there’s a difference. God has selected each and every one of us, not so that he can eliminate us and throw us out and say, you fell short. He’s chosen each and every one of us because he already knows the talents he’s given us. The only failure is to choose to turn it down, to say, I’m not going to play that game. I’m going to be angry at God for not providing me more, or I’m just going to hold it all in and assume that maybe somehow, someday, I can just hand over what I have and say I didn’t ruin it.
And what God’s saying is, come on to that stage. Use every ability I’ve given you. Use it knowing that as you do it, you’re not going to fail, you’re going to delight me because I made you and I gave you those abilities, I gave you those resources, I gave you those opportunities. And when you use them, you’re serving me and I’m delighting in you.
Let’s pray that we can do that this week and do that with our lives. Will you join me? Father, thank you for your goodness and your love. Thank you for delighting in us even when we don’t really understand how you’re using us. We don’t really understand what we’re supposed to do. Lord, would you help us not to approach life as those who fear a wicked taskmaster, but rather a loving Heavenly Father who is calling us to come on stage and to show what you’ve given us because you delight in us.
I want to pray that for each and every person that’s here tonight and every day. I’m saying this in Jesus name, for it is in him whom we have that grace immeasurable that all of us, whatever we have, have more than we could ever need. Pray this in his name, amen.
Well next week, we are wrapping up this series and dealing with a challenging topic, but one that I hope is maybe a little more approachable given what we’ve been talking about tonight. That’s the subject of judgment. If we understand how our Heavenly Father approaches things that all he’s doing is calling us to do to actually come into his mission, it’s a little less scary to think about judgment, but it’s still intimidating.
I hope you’ll come back next week so we can think about it and we can think about how God is going to approach us ultimately. That is how Jesus wraps up this message that he’s been giving to his disciples.
Please feel free to share this. In fact, I would encourage you to share it with someone who has fear about God’s judgment and needs to hear about our loving Heavenly Father. In the meantime, I’d encourage you also to join in a little bit of the joy that I’ve been having and the rest of us at Little Hills and Faithtree have been having over the weekend. We were all celebrating because Faithtree, which is our partner ministry, is celebrating 20 years of being online as an online ministry.
And to me, that’s just so exciting thinking about how it started as this meager little thing, an idea in my head on a vacation years ago, and that God has allowed it to continue and to serve in ways I never would have imagined. That’s how he works when he uses the things that he gives us. So anyway, we’re celebrating 20 years by celebrating the gifts and the talents of the people around us who are proclaiming God’s word.
And if you go to grow.faithtree.com, we have the brand new service, Faithtree Grow, where you can see messages, devotionals, and other forms of scriptural encouragement from pastors and gifted people, gifted believers all around the community. I really hope you’ll check it out, grow.faithtree.com. Go and see it today. Use it this week to encourage you. I think it will be a blessing to you.
I do hope that you’ll join me again next week. If there’s any way I can be praying for you in the meantime, feel free to shoot me an email at the email address on screen or leave a comment in the comments below. It’s always so great to hear from you.
In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week and I’ll see you again next week.
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