The Faithful Servant

Introduction

Last week we left the wise virgins standing in a lit room with a shut door behind them, and I told you to go buy oil before you needed it.

Afterward I began wondering how many of you are wanting to know exactly where the oil counter is located.

Because either that sermon landed, or it didn’t. Where it didn’t land, those people are still planning on running their whole Christian life on borrowed supplies and want a shortcut anyway.

I can appreciate the persistence. But, I don’t have the shortcut. Because there isn’t one.

Here's the good news. The oil illustration isn’t hanging out there all by itself, twisting in the wind, like a sermon nobody knows what to do with. Jesus told another story right before it, in the very same conversation, about a different person standing watch at a different kind of door.

It's not a bridesmaid with a lamp. It's a servant with a set of keys, and the question isn't whether he stayed awake. The question is what he did with the time while he was awake.

That distinction is going to matter more than it sounds like it should.

Two Servants, One Master

We’re still with Jesus on the Mount of Olives, just back in Matthew 24. Jesus is still answering the disciples' question about what it will look like when He comes back, and He tells them this.

Matthew 24:45–47 CSB

45 “Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his master has put in charge of his household, to give them food at the proper time? 46 Blessed is that servant whom the master finds doing his job when he comes. 47 Truly I tell you, he will put him in charge of all his possessions.

Notice the master didn't leave the servant a to-do list. No note on the fridge titled “Things To Do While I'm Away, In Case I’m Delayed.” He left the servant a job. Feed the household. Keep the lights on. Run the place like it belongs to somebody who's coming back, because it does.

Then Jesus flips the picture upside down, and this is where the parable starts getting uncomfortably personal.

Matthew 24:48–49 CSB

48 But if that wicked servant says in his heart, ‘My master is delayed,’ 49 and starts to beat his fellow servants, and eats and drinks with drunkards,

Matthew 24:50–51 CSB

50 that servant’s master will come on a day he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know. 51 He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Same house. Same keys. Same job description. Two entirely different outcomes, and the whole hinge of the story swings on one sentence the wicked servant says to himself, where nobody else is listening.

“My master is delayed.”

What Delay Does to a Heart

I want you to notice that the wicked servant isn't punished for saying the master is coming back late. He might even be right about the timing. The problem was never about the calendar. The problem was what the delay did to him once he believed it.

He didn't decide the master wasn't coming. He decided the master wasn't coming soon enough to matter. And there is a world of difference between those two thoughts, because the second one is the one that actually runs our life.

Nobody wakes up an outright atheist about the return of Christ. But too many of us wake up quietly convinced it's not relevant to today's calendar, which does the exact same damage. Just veiled with better manners.

Look at what that belief produces. He beats his fellow servants. He starts eating and drinking with the very people the household was supposed to be feeding, not joining them in drunken parties.

The moment he stopped expecting the Master’s imminent return, his wicked character showed up uninvited and took over the household. That's the part that should sober us all up.

The delay didn't create the wicked character. It exposed it. The same way midnight didn't create the empty flasks last week, it just revealed them.

Peter, writing to a church that was starting to ask some very similar questions about a Master who seemed to be taking His own sweet time, tells them plainly what that delay actually is.

2 Peter 3:8–9 CSB

8 Dear friends, don’t overlook this one fact: With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. 9 The Lord does not delay his promise, as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance.

What the wicked servant read as an opening for disobedience, God calls patience. Same gap of time. Completely different letter attached to it. That's not a small distinction, that's the entire difference between a household that keeps functioning like it's on mission and a household that turns into a party the moment the boss's car pulls out of the driveway.

Found Working

Here's what I love about the faithful servant, and it's easy to miss because Jesus says it so plainly it slides right past us. The blessing doesn't land on the servant who correctly predicted when the Master would return. It lands on the one the Master finds doing his job.

Matthew 24:46 CSB

46 Blessed is that servant whom the master finds doing his job when he comes.

Not found waiting by the window. Not found refreshing a countdown clock. Not found just waiting by the door. Found doing. Feeding the household. Running the place.

The whole scene assumes the Master could walk in at any moment on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon and find His servant elbow-deep in exactly the work he was assigned, because that's simply what the servant does with his days, watched or unwatched.

This is where last week's sermon and this week's sermon turn out to be the same sermon wearing two different outfits. The wise virgins were built by years of unremarkable oil-buying nobody applauded.

The faithful servant is defined the same way, by a job performed on days nobody was checking. Staying ready and staying busy were never two separate assignments God handed us. They're one assignment, described from two different angles.

Paul says almost exactly this to the Colossians, and I want you to hear how ordinary he makes it sound.

Colossians 3:23–24 CSB

23 Whatever you do, do it from the heart, as something done for the Lord and not for people, 24 knowing that you will receive the reward of an inheritance from the Lord. You serve the Lord Christ.

“Whatever you do.” Not “whatever spiritual, stained-glass, church-bulletin-worthy thing you do.” Whatever you do. The oil change. The spreadsheet. The dirty diaper.

The sermon prep, which, with full disclosure, occasionally happens at 11:47 p.m. on Saturday night. Though I'd never admit that from up here. Well I guess I just did.

Colossians erases the line most of us keep drawing between “sacred work” and “everything else,” and it hands the whole territory over to Christ. Faithfulness isn't a costume we put on for church. It's the same clothes we wear every ordinary day.

Who Gets Put in Charge of the Household

Luke tells the same story, but Peter interrupts Jesus in the middle of it with a question that I think every single one of us has secretly wanted to ask.

Luke 12:41–42 CSB

41 “Lord,” Peter asked, “are you telling this parable to us or to everyone?” 42 The Lord said, “Who then is the faithful and sensible manager his master will put in charge of his household servants to give them their allotted food at the proper time?

Notice what Jesus does with the question. He doesn't answer “for you” or “for everyone.” He answers with the same parable again, which is Jesus' polite way of saying the question answers itself.

If we’re wondering whether this applies to us, that wondering is our answer. The parable is for anyone who has been handed something that belongs to somebody else and told to manage it well until He gets back, and last time I checked, that describes every person in this room.

Our time isn't ours. Our money isn't ours. Our body, our family, our gifts, our Tuesday afternoon, all of it, are on loan, from a Master who is coming back to ask what we did with it.

Paul calls this exact arrangement stewardship, and he tells the Corinthians precisely what he thinks it requires.

1 Corinthians 4:1–2 CSB

1 A person should think of us in this way: as servants of Christ and managers of the mysteries of God. 2 In this regard, it is required that managers be found faithful.

Required. Not preferred. Not “nice if you can manage it.” A steward's résumé has exactly one line item God is checking, and it isn't talent, charisma, results, or how impressive the spreadsheet looks. It’s faithfulness. That's the whole review.

And in case anyone is tempted to think this is only for pastors, missionaries, or people who get paid to talk about Jesus, Peter widens the lens until it covers every believer in the building.

1 Peter 4:10 CSB

10 Just as each one has received a gift, use it to serve others, as good stewards of the varied grace of God.

Each one. Not the gifted few. Not the ones with a title. Each one HAS received a “varied grace of God,” which means each one us is a steward. You see, the faithful servant standing at that door in Matthew 24 is wearing your face and mine, whether we requested the role or not.

The Cost of Presumption

And let's not soften what happens to the wicked servant, because Jesus certainly doesn't. “Cut him to pieces” is about as unambiguous as first-century Aramaic gets.

And “a place with the hypocrites” is a chilling phrase precisely because the servant wasn't an outsider. He had the keys. He lived in the house. He simply decided the delay bought him permission to stop acting like it.

I think that's the warning most likely to slip past us, because most of us aren't tempted to walk away from the household. We're tempted to stay in it and quietly downgrade what faithfulness requires of us, while the Master seems to be taking His time.

Paul saw exactly that temptation coming for the Galatian church, worn out and drifting, and he didn't scold them into shame. He simply reminded them of the math.

Galatians 6:9–10 CSB

9 Let us not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up. 10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us work for the good of all, especially for those who belong to the household of faith.

“As we have opportunity.” Every ordinary day holds opportunity, whether the Master returns on it or not. Growing weary isn't a sin. Everybody gets tired; even Elijah needed a nap and a sandwich under the broom tree a few weeks back.

But growing weary, and giving up, are two different roads, that happen to start at the same intersection, and the wicked servant is what it looks like when somebody takes the second, unfaithful, road and calls it common sense.

Notice something else while we're here. Jesus never says the faithful servant was more talented, more organized, or more naturally gifted than the wicked one. As far as the parable tells us, they might have started with the same keys, the same pantry, the same list of names to feed.

The difference wasn't ability. It was what each of them believed about the Master's return, and that belief did all the heavy lifting from there. Theology isn't decoration up here on a Sunday morning. It's load-bearing.

What we actually believe about whether Jesus is coming back, and whether it matters, is quietly determining how we treat the people in our house on a random Wednesday, whether we notice it happening or not.

And this is exactly why the reward Jesus promises the faithful servant is so wonderfully anticlimactic. He doesn't get a throne, a parade, or his name in lights. “He will put him in charge of all His possessions.”

The servant gets more responsibility. More household. More people to feed. If that sounds strange, you've probably never watched a genuinely faithful person get handed more and more to steward.

They don't treat it like a burden, they treat it like Christmas morning.

I have watched my beautiful wife Tami, in her faithfulness, keep receiving more and more responsibility over the past 4 years. She’s like a kid on Christmas morning, full of excitement, and wondering what God’s going to do next.

You see, Jesus is telling us the reward for faithfulness is simply more opportunity to be faithful, which sounds unremarkable, and maybe even burdensome, until you realize that's also a fair description of heaven itself.

Feeding the Household

I want to wrap back around to where Jesus starts, with that odd little detail about giving the household “their food at the proper time.” It would've been easy for Jesus to describe the faithful servant guarding the silverware or balancing the books.

Instead He pictures him feeding people. On schedule. Whether he feels like it or not. Whether anyone's watching or not. That's a remarkably unglamorous definition of greatness, and I think that's exactly the point.

The Master isn't coming home to grade a highlight reel. He's coming home to see whether the people under our care were fed while He was gone.

Whether our families, our neighbors, our small groups, the folks two pews back, who are quietly struggling, were tended to on an ordinary Tuesday when nobody was filming it for a testimony.

Conclusion

So here's the question this parable actually leaves in the room with us, and it isn't “when is Jesus coming back.” Nobody in here can answer that one, and Jesus told us flatly not to bother trying.

I don’t mean we aren’t supposed to watch for the signs, I mean we aren’t supposed to try and predict the exact day and/or time He will return. He tells us nobody, not even Jesus Himself, knows the day and hour.

Be watchful, but don’t bother trying to answer the question “when is Jesus coming back.” Don’t waste our time trying to predict His return. That’s why the question the parable leaves us with is simpler and considerably more uncomfortable:

“If He walked through that door behind me halfway through this sentence, what would He find us doing?”

Not what would He find us saying. Not what would He find posted, sung, or prayed out loud in a room like this one. But, what would He find us DOING?

Feeding somebody. Forgiving somebody. Showing up for the ordinary assignment sitting in front of us this week, the one with no applause attached to it.

Last week I told you the oil can't be borrowed at midnight. This week Jesus tells us the job can't be faked at the door.

Both sermons are pointing at the same target from two different angles: A life built, day by unremarkable day, into something that's still standing and still working whenever the Master finally does come home.

And in case you're wondering whether that kind of unglamorous, unwatched faithfulness ever actually gets noticed.

Jesus answers that question Himself a chapter later, in words everyone of us wants to hear out loud one day:

Matthew 25:21 CSB

21 “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.’

Not “well done, spectacular servant.” Not “well done, servant who never got tired or never had a bad week.” Faithful!! That word is doing all the work in that sentence, same as it's doing all the work when Jesus answers who the “faithful and wise servant is.”

Matthew 24:46 CSB

46 Blessed is that servant whom the master finds doing his job when he comes.

Next week we stay on the Mount of Olives, with other servants entrusted by their Master. And Jesus hands out something even more specific than a job description. He hands out talents, actual money, unevenly distributed on purpose.

And one servant who gets so afraid of losing what he was given that he buries it in the ground instead. We're calling it “The Terror of Buried Talents,” and it turns out staying ready was never about protecting what God gave you. It was about using it.

Until then, go feed somebody. That's the whole assignment, and we already have everything we need to do it today.