The Parable of the Talents

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 All right. Good morning. Good morning everybody. Make your way to your seat, but don’t sit down yet. We’re gonna read scripture together. I remembered. You’re welcome. Woo-hoo. Normally I invite everybody to see sit, but not today. Today we begin with reading. Uh, we’re gonna be continuing our, uh, series through the parables, and we’re looking at what has been called the Parable of the Talents.

And so, uh, I’ll have you look at it with me. It’s Matthew Chapter 25, verses 14 down through 30. I’m gonna read it out loud. You read it silently there. Verse 14, for it is just like a man about to go on a journey. He called his own servants and entrusted his possessions to them, to one, he gave five talents to another, two talents and to another one talent, depending on each one’s ability.

Then he went on a journey. Immediately, the man who had received five talents went put them to work and earned five more in the same way. The man with two earned two more, but the man who had received one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground, and hid his master’s money. After a long time, the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them.

The man who had received five talents approached, presented five more talents and said, master, you gave me five talents. See, I’ve earned five more talents. His master said to him, well done. Good and faithful servant. You were faithful over a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Share in your master’s Joy.

The man with two talents also approached. He said, master, you gave me two talents. See, I’ve earned two more talents. His master said to him, well done. Good and faithful servant. You were faithful over a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Share your master’s joy. The man who had received one talent also approached and said, master, I know you.

You’re a harsh man reaping where you haven’t sown and gathering where you haven’t scattered seed. So I was afraid and went off and hid your talent in the ground. See, you have what is yours? His master replied to him, you evil, lazy servant. You knew that I reap where I haven’t sewn and gather where I haven’t scattered, then you should have deposited my money with the bankers and I would’ve at least rec and I would’ve received my money back with interest when I returned.

So take the talent from him and give it to the one who has 10 talents for, to everyone who has more will be given, and he will have more than enough, but from the one who does not have even what he has will be taken away from him and throw this good for nothing servant into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Let me pray for us. Father, we come to you and Lord, we submit ourselves to your word. God, we trust that you were revealing yourself to us through this passage of scripture, and in the same way revealing something for us. God, help us to hear that today. It’s in your son’s name we pray. Amen. Amen. Y’all can be seated now.

So this passage is an interesting one. I really, really love it. And even as I approach it though, I, I want to begin by sharing with you a question. And this is important because this whole passage inspires a bunch of questions. And, and there’s a question that I, that I ask probably once a week, if I’m being honest, as I go about my life and go into stores and as I buy things, as I go to restaurants, um, I find myself asking this question, are you the owner when I go into stores?

And there’s a really simple reason for that. You can tell the difference between an employee and an owner of a store. Can you not? I mean, how many times have you walked into a McDonald’s and thought, wow, this guy running the cash register is on it, right? This guy. Must be running this place. Who am I kidding?

McDonald’s, they don’t even have people working the cash registers anymore, am I? Right? It’s become like the most inhospitable place that I go into on a regular basis. I have watched people walk in, and now they’ve built all these little windows where you can stand and look at the people who are working and avoiding looking at you.

And so I’ve watched people come in and they’re waiting for service, waiting for service because they dared not use the app from McDonald’s. And so they, I’ve watched people stand at that little window and be like, excuse me, excuse me. Trying to get someone’s attention and the employees. Are like the most well-trained employees I’ve ever seen when it comes to avoiding, catching someone’s gaze.

I mean, they are eight feet away. And you know, they hear this lady that’s yelling, excuse me, and they just avoid her. And that’s because that’s a room full of employees, right? People who are there because they would like money in two weeks. That’s why they’re there. And there’s just a difference when you see an owner of a business because the owner doesn’t just want money, the owner wants money for his children.

The owner is looking at this enterprise that they’ve created, and they want to see it continue to expand because the expansion of what you own is the expansion of your family’s ownership. And so you can see all the time the difference between ownerships, uh, owners and employees. And this is really important when we look at this parable because this parable begins by pointing to an owner.

And an owner has an expectation for the way that his employees will work for him. And that’s what we’re gonna see is that Jesus is telling this parable about an owner who gives responsibility to his employees. Now, at this time, the way that they would think about it, and the way that I would encourage us to think about this is that this is meant to be a, a story about stewardship.

Now, the, the definition of stewardship is just that. It is the, the practice, the art of taking responsibility for someone else’s goods. That’s what a steward is. And this, this stewardship parable. Is meant to function like a mirror for all of us. And again, I told you it brings up a lot of questions. We’re gonna ask a lot of questions when we go through this because e every mirror, you approach a mirror with questions, don’t you?

Like some of you walk up to a mirror and think, man, how good do I look today? Some of us look in the mirror and we’re like, wow, my shirt got tighter. Some of us, we look in the mirror and we’re wondering, what is our hair doing? Some of us look in the mirror and we wonder, God, why did you take my hair? And we all approach mirrors with questions, do we not?

And so this is, this parable is meant to create questions that function like a mirror revealing our hearts to ourselves. And so today I want to help you with that. Get you started with three questions that I think this passage spawns and I want us to, to walk through together. 📍 The three questions are simple.

What do you have that belongs to Jesus? 📍 📍 What are you going to do with what belongs to Jesus? Or what, what are you doing with what belongs to Jesus? 📍 And what do you want to hear when you meet Jesus? And so this passage falls in a series of parables that Jesus told, and this is important for us to understand its placement because we need to be really clear about who the audience is in this parable.

This is not like the, the four soils parable where Jesus sits down with his disciples and gives us an explanation over the meaning of it. So we have to do a little bit of the work ourselves to figure out the meaning. And one, the, the placement of this parable helps us understand who Jesus is talking to, because this is not just a parable about good management, business ownership, or leadership or anything like that, although those principles are in here.

This is not just a parable about how God would invest if he were an investor, although you can also see that in this parable, the stakes of this parable and its placement help us realize that this is actually talking about something much bigger. This is talking about our eternal relationship with God, the father, the owner of all things.

And we know this because it’s placement. Uh, Jesus in chapter 24 of Matthew, uh, his, he went through this little prophetic moment where he was explaining, uh, you know, what would happen to Jerusalem and the, the end of all things that was inevitably coming. And more importantly, his role in that, which is he was going to return.

And then you can get into, uh, chapter 25 and the parable that he tells right before this, the parable of the 10 virgins. This is about people who were waiting for the groom to return. A, a bridal party that knew the groom was coming from far away, and the bri, the, the, the party would begin once the groom showed up and some of the, the bridal party, they were prepared, waiting and anxious for when the groom came.

Others were wasting their time doing whatever they wanted to do, thinking to themselves, I will get ready for the groom. Once the groom arrives, well, the groom does arrive, and those who waited found out that they waited too late. The party began without them, and the doors were shut to them. And then you can look after this parable.

There’s the, the, the parable at the end of chapter 25 of the sheep in the goats, where the son of man separates the sheep, who a as a sheep herder, he wants to have from the goats who may look like sheep and kind of sound like sheep, but are not his prized possession. And you get from this, the idea that Jesus is going to return and when he returns, it’s about separating those who know him from those who don’t know him.

And so that’s who this parable, what this parable is all about, those who know him and those who don’t know him. And I think that’s why Jesus picked stewardship to be the center of this parable. Because stewardship is not a Christian thing. Stewardship is a human thing. I mean, you can go all the way back to the beginning of scripture and you can discover that stewardship is at the center of who God created us to be from the very beginning.

And we can, I want us to actually look at this. Uh, we’re gonna look together back at, uh, Genesis, uh, chapter one. Hold on. My, my phone is talking to me. There we go. Uh, we’re gonna look back at Genesis chapter one verses uh, 26 through 28. And it’s gonna, I’m gonna put it up on the screen, but I want you to see this, that even before the fall of man, God’s plan was to create man and woman in order to steward his creation.

So look at this, uh, Genesis chapter one, verse 26. Then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and be, and the creatures that crawl on the earth. Why did God create man and woman that we might rule?

In his stead over his creation. Then the action goes on in verse 27. So God created man in his own image. He created him in the image of God. He created the male and female, which is really important because it’s not just a man’s right and responsibility to rule over God’s creation. It is both man and woman.

In fact, we do that together in verse 28. God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. God comes back to not just thinking this idea for man, but now the very first command that he gives them is to steward his creation. This parable is meant to harken back all the way to God’s plan for humanity, that we would steward his creation in his place, and that’s before the fall ever happened.

Right. Stewardship is central to who we are as humans, and that means that this parable about stewardship applies to every person everywhere. In fact, the way that we would think about this in the context of Jesus one day returning as judge Jesus one day, returning to separate his people from those who are not his people, we would have to say this is actually an evangelistic passage, this story that Jesus is telling.

And so in that context, I want us to think about the questions that arise from this. So for those of you who may not be followers of Jesus, I want you to understand the first question that we should be asking. For those of us who are followers of Jesus, you may need to receipt. The importance of stewardship in your own heart.

It’s not about your money. So many times when we talk about stewardship in the church, it’s at the beginning of a campaign where we’re asking you to give us a lot of money, right? That’s how we usually hear of a stewardship campaign. But that’s reductionist in such a disappointing way when we limit stewardship to talk just about money, because it’s not, it’s about everything in our world.

📍 But I want you to understand this because the first question that we ask is, what do you have that belongs to Jesus? So tell me, what do you have that belongs to Jesus? Everything. Everything. Absolutely. Uh, everything that you have belongs to him because in the very beginning, you were created in order to steward his stuff.

And so the, the problem here is that that can be a little overwhelming. Like everything that, that, you know, it, it, it’s, it’s a little bit ambiguous. It says too much to be any good to us. It’s like that philosophical powerhouse of a film. The Incredibles, when Dash is talking to his mom about wanting to use a super powers and his mom says to him, everybody is special.

And he replies, which is another way of saying that no one is in the same way when we tell you that everything you have belongs to Jesus, it’s very easy for you to then say, well that’s just too much. So I’ll just give him these things and, and I’ll give him these things. But I’m gonna hide all those things ’cause those are mine.

And so what I want us to do is I wanna give you a little framework here to help you get more specific than just saying everything is his. I want us to think about the things that God has actually given to you. And my favorite way to do this is to use a framework from, uh, a guy that is a, a pastor and a disciple maker that has been enormously influential in my life and my, in my discipleship.

His name is Mike Breen. And, uh, Mike Breen wrote this little tiny book that’s called Omics. And it’s basically the, the economics of a household. And the whole point of it is how do you think about the things that God has given to you? And so I wanna share the different capitals that God has given to you and I, this, this can feel a little heady, so just stick with me for a minute.

We’ll break it down a little bit. But the first capital that Jesus, that God has given to every one of us that we use on a regular basis, and what we think of when we think of capital is 📍 financial capital. Right. Money. Yeah, that’s, that’s exactly what it sounds like. And you know, for the advanced economist out there, yes.

We are also talking about the, the means to produce money as well, falls under financial capital. That’s something that God has given to you and he wants you to use it. But then he’s also given you other capitals. 📍 He’s given you physical capital. And this is more than just like the, the physical act of working it.

It’s bigger than that. This, this includes all the, the physical stuff that make up our activity. So think of this as like all of your time, all of your energy, all of your attention fall under physical capital that God has given you. You have time, you have energy, you have attention that you can focus on whatever you choose to in this world.

📍 The next one is relational capital. Exactly what it sounds like. Your friends, the relationships with people that God has given to you, and I mean all of them, your neighbor that you haven’t talked to in five years, that’s relational capital that the Lord has given to you, your spouse. That’s the, the deepest well of relational capital that the Lord has given to you.

Your children are relational capital. And so then the, 📍 the final thing that we have is spiritual capital. And this is our relationship with God. So if you think of each of these as money that you can choose to invest in or trade, what you’re gonna discover is that you have the ability to trade one capital for another capital.

And we do this every time that we go to work, right? We are trading our physical capital hopefully, so that we can build something really cool and great that we’re proud of. But sadly, most of us trade our physical capital for financial capital. Isn’t that the reason that many of us are stuck in jobs that we hate?

And why do you hate it? Because what you’re actually seeing on the screen there is the order of importance of these capitals from least to greatest at the bottom. And so when you are trading your physical capital only to get money, that’s why you feel like you’re stuck in a dead end because you’re going the wrong direction.

That’s a word when you’re, when you’re trading your physical capital just to get financial capital, you’re making a bad investment. Because you’re trading a more valuable resource for a lesser resource. And I think about this. ’cause you may think, well, I hate my job. Yes, I know. We all do. And so you, to help you understand though, what I’m talking about, I go back to you’ve, you’ve heard the story of like, uh, you know, two guys that were, uh, working on the, the building of the Notre Dame Cathedral back in, whenever that happened, the 12 hundreds.

14 hundreds, I don’t know. Um, and one guy is, is working. And both these guys, they make bricks. That’s what they do. They make bricks so that we can put them into the building. One guy is over there and he’s got, you know, the clay in the mud and the straw, and he’s forming it into a form. And you ask him, what are you doing?

And he says, I’m making bricks. The other guy, you go to him and you say, Hey, what are you doing as you mix all these things together? And he says, I’m building a temple. That’s the difference between someone who is giving their physical resources for something greater. Something they’re passionate about, something they believe in.

And so many of us hate our day to day work because we’re trading our physical capital for something of lesser worth. And you see this, my favorite thing to do with this idea is to look at Jesus. Uh, because Jesus, if you look in scriptures, in, in the scripture, you can actually trace what Jesus did with all of these capitals.

And it’s amazing because Jesus never trades a LA less, uh, a more valuable capital for a less value cap. Val, valuable capital, never. He doesn’t do it. And we have all kinds of different stories that we can look at, and it’s really fascinating. I’ll just run through a few of them because. Let’s, let’s start at the bottom.

Let’s think about financial capital. Let’s think about the story, uh, of Jesus at the temple, watching people bring their money up to, to put in the, the offering box. And first off, I want you to think about that fact. Jesus was totally cool standing at the front of the room, watching as everybody brought their, their financial gift up to the front.

Like, that’s Jesus. So when you get bent out of shape thinking, oh, they can’t know what I give at church. Understand you don’t think about this like Jesus does. Jesus was totally happy standing at the front, watching people give money. By the way, you should be giving to your church. I am not the pastor here, so I can say things like that without fear, without shame, and not because your church needs it, because Jesus has said You will be blessed by this.

So back to what we’re talking about, this financial capital, that it’s the story of this old woman who comes up and she’s bringing her last penny as she is poor. When you are down to counting your last pennies, you are poor. And she brought that penny up and she put it in the box and Jesus looked at her and said, grabbed his disciples and said, look at this woman.

Sure that rich guy just gave thousands upon thousands of dollars. But look at this woman. She gave the last of her financial capital so that she could purchase spiritual capital, a relationship that is deepened by her faith in God. By giving the last that she had trusting him to provide more, she traded up.

In a big way through these capitals, and Jesus called it out. We can continue looking at other passages. Uh, another place where we see this principle in reverse, where Jesus is approached by this really, really rich guy, rich young ruler. He had power, he had authority because he had money. And he comes to Jesus and says, Jesus, I wanna follow you.

And Jesus says, great, what I want you to do, sell everything you own, give it to the poor and then follow me. And this guy looks at Jesus like he just grew a third head. I don’t know what happened to the second one. Yeah, that’s so anyways, who knows talking before, I think it’s what I’m great at. Uh, so Jesus is, uh, Jesus is talking to this guy, and when he hears this, he, I mean, when he says this to the guy, the guy leaves and is like, crest falling.

And he is like, man, it says he’s sad. He walked away sad. And Jesus looks at this guy walking away sad. And he rebukes him. To his disciples, he calls the man a fool. And it’s because Jesus understood what that young man did, not that Jesus was offering him something of so much more worth than just your money.

He says, you can trade all of that money and get a relationship with me, and it’s the best investment you’re ever gonna make. And this guy walked away from it. It’s like Jesus was offering him a hundred dollars bill, but he wouldn’t let go of his $1 bill. And so you see all through scripture, the the stories of Jesus.

He is always advocating and choosing to trade lesser valuable capitals for more important capital. So now let’s bring that back to us. 📍 What are you doing with what belongs to Jesus?

Are you spending the capital he’s given you in a way that matches his values? Are you going to him and asking him, master, how do you want me to spend this money? These are the questions that we should be asking when we read this passage about the stewards, some good and some bad. And we think about the, the go back to what we’re talking about.

’cause most of us, our values are disordered. I mean, we’re in America, so many of us, whether we would say it or not, our actions display that we think financial capital is the most valuable thing we can find in this world. And how do we know that? Because we will sacrifice anything for it. We’ll sacrifice our relationship with our kids so that we can expand our financial capital a little bit more.

We will stop showing up to community groups, stop showing up on Sunday mornings if it means that we can put in extra hours in order to earn a little bit more capital. And what that means is that we are depleting our spiritual capital in our relationship with the Lord in order to do so. See, to be a good steward, you have to know what does the master value most.

And the challenge there is you actually have to know your master. And so if you want to be a good steward, you have to know what God has given you. You have to understand that it’s all his, and you need to know how he values those things that he’s given you. And when you learn the answer to those questions, what has God given me?

How does he want me to use these resources? It’s gonna make a lot of the questions that we grapple with for years at a time. A lot easier to answer in the short term. The question, what should I be doing, gets a lot easier. When you understand that the most important thing you can do is invest in your spiritual relationship with God, it gets a lot easier that when you understand that the only thing that you’re gonna carry out of this world into the next are the relationships with the people who are also stepping into that eternal world with you.

It gets a lot easier to figure out how do I make enough money that I don’t have to sacrifice other things to get more, to get more of it. It gets a lot easier to answer those questions in the short term, but in the long term, it’s going to bring up the last question that we listed at the beginning. 📍 What do you want to hear when you meet Jesus?

The one talent servant in this story was held to account by his master, and this is probably where we need to start. This is an evangelistic parable that Jesus is telling. This is being told, and the focus of the story is on the one talent servant, the the servant who did not know the heart of his master.

And so we need to start there by telling you perhaps one of the most important things you will ever hear, Jesus is going to return as a judge over the living in the dead. And that means that we will have to give an account. For the way that we have used his things. And in this parable we see this one talent servant.

The place where it all went wrong with him was that he did not know the heart of his master. He chose to hide his talents to not use any of the gifts that he had been given in order to expand. He chose not to follow the will of his master and he’s held to account for that. And that’s gonna happen to all of us.

We will be held to account. And it makes me think of a quote from CS Lewis where in our culture we tell people you can be whatever you want to be. You get to choose your life your way. You are in charge here. But CS Lewis points out that idea. It mirrors this. 📍 What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happen to like doing.

What does it matter? As long as they’re content. We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as we do a grandfather in heaven, and all of you with toddlers that you’re trying to keep healthy, know what it means when they’re with the grandfather instead of the father. Right? I don’t know what happens to y’all when you get older.

It’s like, I could not have found a grain of sugar in my house to save my life, and now my parents are like pouring it in buckets down my children’s throats. Like I will never understand the switch that happened there. But CS Lewis is pointing to it and saying a lot of us, when we live by the mantras of our culture and think that we can do whatever we wanna do, it’s our world, it’s our life.

It’s up to us. In that moment, we are banking on the fact that our master is not gonna hold us account. He’s not gonna be a good father who has expectations of his children. He’s gonna be a grandfather who just wants you to be happy, but that’s not who God is. And so this servant, the one talent servant, was held to account in this moment, and I want you to understand what Jesus drills in on that was so important.

And it’s this, that the servant did not know who his master was. He looked at him and said, you are a hard, harsh man. Is that really who that owner was? I mean, I look at the five talent servant and he expanded the territory, grew the investment as he was expected to do, and he was rewarded for it. I look at the two talent servant and he expanded the investment.

Grew it just like he was supposed to. And even though he made less money, he was given the exact same response, which means that God looks at every one of us and says to us, you are going to be held accountable for what you are capable of. Not anybody else. That’s a merciful and gracious master when he came to the one talent servant.

If the one talent servant had said, I only have one talent more to give you, he would’ve heard, well done, my good and faithful servant. Some of us get stuck in our lives because we’re convinced that we’re just a one talent servant. Amen. And I want you to understand, our master loves his one talent servants just as much as he loves his five talent servants.

I’m never gonna be Trey VanCamp. Praise God. I want to, I mean, look at his hair. It’s beautiful. I just will never betraying God doesn’t expect me to, God doesn’t expect you to be someone else other than who you are, and he’s going to reward you if you are faithful with what he’s given you.

The master of the, the servant had no idea who his master was, and that’s the danger for every single one of us, that if we don’t learn the heart of our master, we’re never gonna receive the blessing that he promises us. And I just want us to, to look at this, the, the way that I wanna say this is that 📍 knowing the heart of Jesus empowers us to do the will of Jesus, and then the incentive that the master gave and enter the joy of Jesus.

God believes in massive incentives to get us to follow him. I think about, uh, Warren Buffet and his partner Charlie Munger, the two greatest investors that the world has ever known, and Charlie Munger has a statement where he says, uh, if you show me someone’s incentives, I’ll show you the, I’ll show you the result.

We follow incentives and so listen to me. If you are out there and you think that God is a harsh, cruel accountant looking for you to do things right and looking to punish you when you do things wrong, you don’t understand who God is, you don’t understand that he offers you the most valuable thing you can get spiritual capital with him.

That results in eternal joy that never ceases without work, without sorrow, without suffering. Because he is there and he will be our God and we will be His people that’s offered to you. If you will just submit your heart to him and give him 20 years, 30 years, 60 years, whatever he’s given to you, the incentive is out of this world for you to follow this good and gracious God who welcomes you to use your gifts and talents to stop walking around in misery thinking that everything is hopeless.

But instead to think I can be a part of what God is doing in this world if I will just use what he’s given me. So that’s my hope for every one of us, that we will submit our lives fully to him so that the day that we meet Jesus, we get to hear what Jesus said to the good servants. Well done, good and faithful servant.

You have been faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness. That’s the beauty and the promise of a life that is spent in, in submission as a steward of God’s glory and his grace.