Risking It All

There’s a story about a shipwreck along the New England coast many years ago. The weather was terrible, and the churning seas were a terror.

A young Coast Guardsman surveyed the situation as his crew prepared to go out and rescue the survivors.

“We can’t go out there,” he said. “We’ll never get back.”

His grizzled old captain looked at him and responded. “We have to go out there. We do NOT have to get back.”

Today, we are concluding our short series on church basics, and as you listen, I want you to remember those words from the grizzled old Coastie. They tell us something about our mission and the expectations we should have about it.

As a brief review, you will recall that we talked first about the most important thing: How can we legitimately claim the title of Christians?

We learned that it’s not about how long you’ve been a member of a church. We learned that baptism carries no power of salvation. And we learned that simply knowing Christian doctrines and stories about Jesus makes us no better than the demons, who know these things and tremble.

Each one of us is a sinner. Each one of us has fallen short of the glory — the perfect holiness and righteousness — of God. In small ways and, perhaps, in great ways, each one of us has failed to demonstrate the character of the God who made us in His image. Furthermore, no amount of good deeds can ever cancel out the debt we owe God because of our sins.

And

And the price of our sins is huge. God is loving and merciful, but He is also perfectly just and holy, and He hates sin and will punish sinners with eternal separation from Him in Hell. Scripture calls this “death.” He has warned us about that, and as our creator and the owner of everything He made, He has the right to do with us as befits His perfect nature.

But God is also gracious, and He does not desire that any of us would suffer this fate, so He arranged from before the beginning of time to provide a sacrifice to pay the price for our sins.

As God’s only Son, Jesus Christ, hung on a cross, He took on the sins of the world — the Bible says He BECAME sin — so that we could be saved from the punishment that we deserve for them.

But

Being a Christian means you have chosen to put your faith in that sacrifice of righteous and perfect Jesus — His blood for yours, His death for yours — rather than relying on your own righteousness to save you.

His death showed that He had won the victory over sin. His resurrection on the third day proved that He had won the victory over death. And His ascension into Heaven showed that He has the power to do what He said He will do — return again one day to take His followers, the living and the dead, home with Him.

We also learned that the place for those who have followed Jesus in faith is in His church, the body by which He continues to accomplish His work of redemption here on earth.

If you are a believer, you need to be part of a community of believers. In such a community, you will be discipled, you will be disciplined, and you will find opportunities to keep Christ’s “new commandment,” to love one another. And by loving one another, you will prove your love for Him.

We learned that loving one another is expressed largely through the spiritual gifts each believer receives from the Holy Spirit who dwells within them and that those gifts are meant for the building up of Christ’s church.

And finally we heard the first half of a lesson on stewardship. We studied the Old Testament concept of the tithe, and we learned that under the New Covenant we have in Jesus Christ, our giving is actually called to a higher level. It is to be sacrificial in nature as a demonstration of our faith.

But you’ll recall that I said I wasn’t a big fan of the word “stewardship” in the context of giving, and that’s because I think our modern understanding of the word encourages us to think of giving to God as something we do after we’ve taken care of everything else.

When we handle our finances that way, we can be sure that the devil will so arrange things in our lives that we have little, if anything, left over at the end of the week or the month to give to the One to whom it all belongs in the first place.

Whew. I don’t normally review past sermons in such detail, but I think that sometimes we allow our picture of the church to be painted in colors that didn’t exist when Jesus established it. I think that we tend to paint the church in the image of the world, rather than the image of the One who has overcome the world. And I want us to have a clear, biblical picture of what the church is about.

So let’s move along and into the final message in this series. Today, I’m going to give you a picture of biblical stewardship from the perspective of the church.

In other words, if you are a true follower of Jesus Christ and if you are doing all these other things we have reviewed this morning, then how should stewardship look? How should it look for you individually, and how should it look for the church?

Turn with me, if you will to Matthew, Chapter 25. Today, we will examine the Parable of the Talents, which starts in Verse 14.

Jesus is teaching here about the Kingdom of Heaven, and the context of this parable, as well as the ones preceeding it, is a series of warnings about the Tribulation and the remnant of Israel that will turn to Him in those days.

But there are clear lessons for us from this passage, as well.

Read

Now someone brought it to my attention a while back that I don’t much do the regular preacher thing of giving you sermon points and a close.

Coming from a newspaper background as I do, that’s just not the way my brain normally works, but I was up for a challenge this week, so I’ll step out of my comfort zone a bit.

So today, you’ll get three points and a close. We’ll see how it goes.

First of all,

Each slave was entrusted with something valuable.

We see this in Verse 14. The master was headed out on a journey, so he called his slaves and entrusted his possessions to them.

We trust people whom we have reason to expect to have our interests at heart.

I read a story this week about a man who went hiking one afternoon with his young son. They were climbing around on some rocks when the father heard a voice above him yelling, “Hey, Dad! Catch me!”

As he turned toward the voice, the man barely had time to ready himself to catch the boy, who had already jumped. They wound up in a pile on the ground, and after the father had caught his breath, he asked, “Why in the world would you do that?”

“Because you’re my Dad,” the boy replied.

I was pretty naive at the time, and we had a bunch of guys on the site, so there was always more than I could carry

Well, in the case of this parable, the Master trusted His slaves because they were His slaves, and they were supposed to have his interests in mind.

The Master here is Jesus, and He is entrusting His life-giving Word to His people.

Now you need to understand that the Sermon on the Mount, which appears in Matthew 5-7, is really the linchpin of this Gospel. This is Jesus’ teaching about man’s need for God’s righteousness as opposed to his own self-righteousness.

It is God’s righteousness that is in view when Jesus said,

That’s the context

Matthew 7:7 NASB95

7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.

Only the righteousness of God, which we receive when we turn to His Son in faith, can save you when you stand before His throne of judgment. Only the righteousness of Jesus Christ brings eternal life in His Father’s Kingdom.

And that is the treasure that is in view in this Parable of the Talents.

How valuable is this treasure to you?

In the context of the parable, the Master’s treasure was wildly valuable.

Scholars say that a talent was a coin worth about 6,000 denarii, more than 16 years of wages for an average worker or soldier.

So each of the slaves in this parable was given something hugely valuable, and the one who received five talents could be thought to have received more than a lifetime’s worth of wages.

And that brings me to my second point:

Each slave received according to his ability.

We see that in verse 15.

As we said when we talked about spiritual gifts, we don’t all receive the same gifts from the Holy Spirit. I think it’s fair to suggest that the spiritual gifts we receive are in line with the natural gifts we also have received from God.

And even if I might have the gift of teaching, someone else here might have a greater gift for it. We have people within this fellowship whose gift of service far exceeds my own abilities in that regard.

In the end, it is the Holy Spirit who decides what gifts to give and to what degree. He is God; we are not. Just as the Master in this parable gave his possessions according to His own counsel, so God gives to us according to His own will.

What was significant in this parable was not how much the Master had given any particular slave, but what each of the slaves thought about the gift.

And here comes the third sermon point.

Each slave had a perspective regarding the treasure he had received.

The first two slaves went out and traded with their talents, and both came back with twice what they had received.

You see, the point is that they believed the treasure they had been given was valuable, and in the context of Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, the value was that what Jesus was giving the people was words of life.

We have been entrusted with the Gospel message, the message that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life and that no one can come to the Father except through Him. We have been given a message that is far more valuable than even a lifetime’s worth of wages, because this message is the difference between Heaven and Hell.

This message is the message of redemption through the blood of Christ. This message is the message that we who follow Jesus have been set free from the bondage of sin, that we have true freedom in serving our new Master.

What you do with that message says a lot about how well you value it.

Do you trade it like the first two servants did? Do you recognize the power of this message to reproduce life in others? Do you go out and share it in the confident hope that others will receive the magnificent gift of faith that you received when the Holy Spirit drew you to Christ?

Or are you like the third slave, the one who buried his talent?

The thing about the third slave is that he did not have the same perspective as the other slaves on the treasure that had been given. He did not place the same value on it.

Again, looking at this from the perspective of Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, this slave did not believe that the words of Jesus could bring life. He rejected the idea that he could not be saved by his own righteousness.

This was the problem Jesus continually pointed out in connection with the Pharisees. They kept the Law to a fault. They believed that their Jewish blood and heritage, combined with their legalistic approach to righteousness, earned them a place in the Kingdom of Heaven.

But in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus made their mistake clear.

Matthew 5:20 NASB95

20 “For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

In that portion of the Sermon, Jesus described how keeping the Law was about far more than simply doing or not doing certain things. It was about the heart.

So “Thou shalt not commit murder” is really about not hurting your neighbor. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is really about not lusting after another. “You shall not make false vows” is really about personal integrity. “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy” becomes “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

The righteousness to which Jesus calls us is more than we can attain. So we have been given the treasure of Christ’s atonement FOR us, His righteousness imputed to those who follow Him in faith.

What are you doing with that message? How well do you value it?

If you have buried it, then you have rendered it useless. If you have buried it, then the suggestion here is that you do not really believe in its life-giving power.

And if you do not believe this message, then you, like the third slave, are standing on your own righteousness, and you will be judged by the perfectly righteous God not on the perfect righteousness of His Son but on you own righteousness.

That will not go well for you, because God is, in fact, just as the third slave describes Him.

Matthew 25:24 NASB95

24 “And the one also who had received the one talent came up and said, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you scattered no seed.

This isn’t the way we like to think of God, but you’ll note in Verse 26 that the Master does not deny the description, so let’s take a look at what’s going on.

The perfect and holy God demands that those who would enter His Kingdom have perfect righteousness. That’s what Jesus was saying in the Sermon on the Mount when He said that “until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” That’s what He meant when He said that we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless our righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and the Pharisees.

Only those who are clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. So, yes, God is a hard Master.

But what about the part about “reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you scattered no seed”?

Think back to the story of the exodus. God sent 10 plagues against Egypt, and the Pharoah sent the people of Israel away. But they did not go empty-handed. Even in the midst of their mourning over the 10th plague, the people of Egypt gave the Israelites vast treasures to take with them.

And when the Israelites entered the Promised Land 40 years later, they came into a land flowing with milk and honey. They moved into cities that were already built, and they harvested crops that already had been planted.

God took from the Egyptians and the Canaanites and gave to His people.

This third slave recognized something about the character of his Master, but instead of rightly feeling grateful for the gracious provision, he was afraid, and that demonstrated that he did not have a right relationship with the Master. He saw some of God’s characteristics, but he failed to recognize God’s mercy.

Here’s the thing: If you have received the mercy of God — if you recognize the value of His mercy as demonstrated by Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross — then you will understand that it is GOD’S mercy and it is not yours to hold onto. Like the first two slaves, you will trade it — you’ll give it to others, you’ll be compelled to share this life-giving message in some way, according to your abilities.

Which brings me to my closing point, and it has everything to do with stewardship within the church:

RISK IT ALL!

Take a look back at verses 16 and 17.

Matthew 25:16–17 NASB95

16 “Immediately the one who had received the five talents went and traded with them, and gained five more talents. 17 “In the same manner the one who had received the two talents gained two more.

How many talents did the first slave receive? How many did he trade with? How about the second slave?

Now, name one thing for me that either of these slaves could have done that would have guaranteed a return on their investment, much less a doubling of it.

Right, you can’t, because there is no such thing as a guarantee in such matters.

From the standpoint of this parable, they risked everything their Master had given them. They were all in.

The guy who sat on the nest egg, burying it in the ground, is the one who was thrown into the outer darkness.

Now the parable doesn’t show us a slave who invested his talents and lost the money, so we have to be careful drawing conclusions about that.

But I’ll make two observations.

First, if we recall that the treasure we have been given is the life-giving Word of Jesus Christ, then we should also remember that God’s Word never returns void. If we’re out sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, there WILL be fruit. We might not see it all, but we’ll see some evidence of it — some growth, some change, some softening of hearts.

And second, the return on our investment of this treasure is out of our hands, anyway. It is the Holy Spirit’s role to pierce the hearts of unbelievers, not ours. Our role is to share this treasure, to invest in the things God has called us to invest in.

Our role is to be all in for the work of the Kingdom of Heaven.

If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, then that’s your role as an individual. It’s also our role as a church.

We cannot be a people or a church that buries the treasure we’ve been given.

Let’s be all in. We do not have to come back, but we do have to go out there.