1. Please pray with me. May the
words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O
Lord, our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word today as we
continue our Stewardship Emphasis, “Bringing
out the Best,” is taken from Matthew 25:14-30 (READ TEXT), it’s entitled, “Talents—The Joy of Investing
Yourself.” Dear brothers and sisters
in Christ.
2. Things aren’t always what they seem—including Jesus’ parables, or
stories. What’s the point of the story of the talents? The easy answer is that
Jesus wants us to use what’s precious for his work. That’s probably why the
word talent has moved from describing precious money in New Testament
Greek to describing precious abilities in American English. But there’s also a
deeper meaning to this parable. A talent was the
largest measure of money in Jesus’ day and equaled the total wages of an
ordinary person from between 15 to 38 years. Yet two of the servants went out
and risked that money by making investments. What if they had lost the money?
What would their boss have said then?
3. But it’s the last
servant, the one who does nothing with his boss’s money, who gets punished.
Often you and I are most like that person. We may not take risks for God
with our abilities, because we are afraid, first of all, that we may
fail. The condemned servant says in v 25, “I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here
is what belongs to you.” By burying the money, the servant thought it was
at least safe. But he was disobeying his boss. The servant had been given the
talent to use it.
4. The servant was
afraid, second,
that he would have to work. In v 26 the boss says, “You wicked, lazy servant!” Does either adjective sound familiar?
You or I won’t try to use a skill or ability that God gave us because we may
fall flat on our face, and we don’t like to be embarrassed if we fail. Or we
may simply be lazy and want always to receive rather than give. For those and
other reasons we may not take risks with our abilities. As a result, they don’t
get used very often. That’s our problem. God has given them to us to be put to
use for him. When we don’t use our talents, our abilities, for the Lord, that’s
sin.
5. Here’s an illustration to help us understand what happens when we don’t
use our talents for service in the Lord’s Kingdom. It was New York City in 1964. Kitty
Genovese, a young woman from Queens, was stabbed to death. But this was no
ordinary murder. She was chased by her assailant, Winston Mosely and attacked
three times on the street, over the course of half an hour, while 38 of her
neighbors watched from their windows. During
the entire ordeal, not a single one of them came to her rescue. They didn’t
shout for help. They didn’t even bother to call the police. As one reporter noted, Kitty’s murder “came to symbolize… indifference.” Her
death did prompt the adoption of our current 911 system and Good Samaritan laws. But do these systems and laws really address
the “bystander problem?”
6. Two New York City
psychologists – one from Columbia University and the other from NYU – decided
they wanted to dig deeper into what they called the “bystander problem.” In a fascinating set of studies, outlined by
Malcolm Gladwell in his book, The Tipping Point, these two
psychologists decided they would stage a series of emergencies of differing
kinds and in different settings in order to see who would come to help. They found out that one single factor
determined whether people responded to a need. What mattered was how many
witnesses there were to the event. The
more people who were around, the less people tended to respond. In one of the experiments, they had a student
who was alone in a room stage a seizure. When there was just one person next
door listening, that person rushed to the student's aid 85% of the time. But
when the test subjects thought that there were as few as 4 others who also overheard
the person having the seizure, they came to the student's aid only 31% of the
time. The essence of what the two psychologists discovered is that when people
are in a group, responsibility for taking personal action gets watered-down.
People assume that someone else will respond to the need. Since no one else is
responding, there must not be a problem.
So in the case of Kitty Genovese, social psychologists argue that the
lesson isn't that no one called despite the fact that 38
people heard her scream; it’s that no one called because 38
people heard her scream. If she had been
attacked on a lonely street with just one witness, she might have lived.
7. I’ve often
wondered why there can be such a lack of individual responsibility among Christians
in relation to the mission of the church established by our Jesus. It becomes
almost natural for people to come, sit, enjoy, benefit, receive, appreciate and
profit, but never feel a sense of personal responsibility for responding to the
needs within its midst. When they come,
it seems like everything is cared for and everything is humming along. And if a
need is made known? Well, there are so many others around that it never even
enters their mind that there won’t be a response to meet that need or that
things might depend on them. Whether it’s giving, serving, leading or inviting,
there are others around to see it done.
And that’s why it’s not being done.
8. The idea that they
are the key – that what they do or don’t do matters – isn’t even on their radar
screen. It’s not because they are
hard-hearted or because they don’t care, but because they don’t feel like they
have a personal responsibility to act. They don’t have a sense that there is a
need for them, and them alone, to respond.
They can be lulled into becoming like one of the witnesses to the death
of Kitty Genovese. The result of that
indifference was the death of a young woman.
The result of Christian indifference to the cause of Christ will be the
death of the local church.
9. But, thanks be to
God that despite our indifference and faithlessness to serving in Christ’s
Kingdom our Lord Jesus took on the risk of the cross for us. Heb 12:2 notes, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author
and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross,
scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” What
did Jesus risk? First of all: to be crucified on a cross was considered a
disgrace. His people, the Jews, would have to get over that shame before they
could consider believing in him as the promised Savior. Jesus took a risk.
10.
But,
Jesus also took a risk with the rest of the world; namely, that we’re free to
reject Jesus as the way in which God our heavenly Father restores our
relationship of life forever with him. God forces no one to believe in him.
When Jesus went to the cross, he knew that many wouldn’t believe in him as the
God-man Savior. Yet Jesus took the risk, because it also was through this
singular means that the Holy Spirit could work faith in the hearts of those who
trust in him as their Savior and Lord.
11.
As
a result, Jesus calls us to be faithful and follow him. When Jesus
returns as our Master, whether that is on the Day of Glory or the last hour of
our own lives on this earth, we shall be gladdened to hear him say to us, “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” (vv 21, 23). Like the faithful
servant and empowered by the Holy Spirit, we are able to do what we know Jesus
wants us to do with our abilities, even though it means taking a risk.
12.
Dr. Chandrasekhar, a professor at the University of
Chicago, in 1947 was scheduled twice a week during the winter to teach an advanced
seminar in astrophysics. Because only two students were enrolled, most people
expected the professor to cancel the class because he lived in Wisconsin and,
after all, it was winter! But for the sake of the two students, he taught the
class. He commuted 100 miles round-trip through backcountry roads in the dead
of winter.
13.
His
students, Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, did their homework. They benefited
from Dr. Chandrasekhar risking his talents on only two people. In 1957, those
two students won the Nobel Prize for Physics. In 1983, so did Dr. Chandrasekhar.
For a faithful teacher, there is no such thing as a small class. For a faithful
Christian, there is no such thing as too small a way to use a talent for our
Lord.
14.
There
are many references in the New Testament that teach us the Holy Spirit gives
us abilities (talents) to be used for God’s work. That’s what v 15 says the
boss did. He put the servants in charge of what was his, “each according to his ability.” What are your abilities? God calls us
to use our talents in all of our lives in service to others and to the glory of
God. What happens then?
15.
Jesus’ example and his words point us to the result. Jesus goes to the
cross and serves for the “joy,” Hebrews says. The boss says to the faithful servants
in vv 21 and 23: “Come on in and share my
joy.” It is the joy of Jesus in which we share when we use our talents for
God’s purposes.
16.
How
can you and I “bring out the best” in
our talents, our abilities, for our Savior? Jesus is the way in which God the
heavenly Father “brought out the best”—in
person. When we seek to use our talents and abilities to build up Christ’s
church, including helping our neighbors in need, we will receive the joy of
investing ourselves. Amen. And now
the peace of God that passes all human understanding guard your hearts and
minds in Christ Jesus until life everlasting.
Amen.
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