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Introduction
Welcome
God and Money Week 3
Once again I am indebted to Capitol Hill Baptist Church for their wonderful material on this subject that has been so helpful to me.
Summarize the last two weeks.
- You don’t own what you own.
- We are stewards to use what we have been given for the purposes of the master.
- Last week we talked about why Christians are to give and how and to what we are to give.
If we are to use what we own for God’s purposes then we better figure out what those purposes are.
Before you met Christ - your life was about amassing things for yourself
relationships
money
success
fame
After you became a Christian someone teaches you to think that it’s not about doing stuff for yourself but about doing stuff for God.
So what you do is you take that exact same mindset that you had before and you simply aim that toward God and think that you are living like a Christian.
The thing is: God doesn’t need your help.
God’s not sitting there hoping you’ll lend Him a hand.
He is able to do anything you can do… and do it better than you can.
Of course that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t use what we do and it does not mean that what we do is unimportant.
But I want to place before you that it might be important for different reasons than you might think.
We are going to try and really look at a way of thinking about the things we have been given in a radically different way.
What is God’s purpose for our stewardship or managing of these good gifts?
I want to dip back into the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 which we just marinated in a couple of weeks ago.
We are going to look at what God’s goals are for our stewardship.
This would include money but is not limited to it.
This stewardship should also include our time, our jobs, our families and our bodies.
It’s about everything that God has entrusted to us.
Let’s read the parable again and just listen to what God is telling us in His perfect and inerrant Word.
This is the Word of the Lord.
Let’s pray and ask God to help us.
PRAY
I. Why Does the Faithless Servant Go to Hell?
The master gives 5 talents to one servant, 2 to another guy, and 1 to the final guy and then heads out.
He’s gone some time.
He returns and finds that the first two guys have used the talents and made more.
But the third servant hid the money in the ground.
The master comes back and rewards the faithful servants but did you catch the twist at the end?
The third servant goes to hell.
I said a couple of weeks ago that to us this seems extreme.
He didn’t lose the talent.
He gave it back.
But he gets hell just because he didn’t give back more than he was given?
To us that sounds unfair so we need to figure out what is really going on here.
- Let me stop here and point something out to you.
We tend to think of the one talent as not much to manage.
But:
Talent - largest weight of measurement of weight in OT times,
- worth about twenty years wages for the average day laborer.
So even the servant who got one talent to steward was entrusted with an enormous sum to them.
It was not much compared to the riches of the master but to the servant it was a big responsibility, even though it was less than the others had been trusted with.
So the poor steward is sent to hell.
And what is going on in this parable is the gospel.
IF you take out this pin of verse 30 then the whole thing turns into simple moralism.
Like, do a lot for God and He’ll be pleased with you.
That won’t suffice for what this about so if we can figure out why this guy’s actions deserve hell then we can read this with new eyes.
The key: What the servant’s actions said about his master.
He tried to have things both ways.
He hedged his bets.
If the master came back he could simply return to the master what was rightfully his and if the master didn’t come back then he had this talent hidden where he would be able to safely keep it.
He spent the time the master was away working for himself.
Hedging his bets said that his master wasn’t able to be relied upon to deliver on his promises.
It said that he didn’t trust the master to reward the servants or even to return.
Of course we know that this wasn’t true.
The master was trustworthy and as I showed you with the description of a talent, the master was extremely generous.
The master represents God.
When the servant said that he knew the master was a hard man it betrayed the fact that the servant didn’t really know the master at all.
The actions of the servant lied about the excellence and faithfulness of the master.
His heart didn’t trust the master.
The first two servants gambled everything on the promises of the master.
They bet with their lives that he was good to his word and that risking everything on him was the best thing they could possible do for themselves and it turns out… they were right!
They were all in on the master!
ILLUSTRATION ABOUT MISSIONARIES PACKING in coffins
In the end we find that this parable is about faith.
It’s about faith in the master.
Jesus taught that no one can serve two masters.
You can not have it both ways.
You can try but that ends in hell.
You don’t get to live for yourself your whole life while living just enough for God to sort of slide into heaven like you’re stealing second base.
The bad servant’s double minded life showed he had no faith.
What is the difference between demonic faith and saving faith?
James tells us that even the demons believe in God and they shudder.
Saving faith - not simply believing facts about God.
Believes that God is good for us
that his rewards are worth having
believes that God is so good that we can trust Him with our whole lives, leaving everything behind.
When we live in this way, our lives become like flashing billboards about how good and desirable God is.
When we say we want to get into heaven but we want to hedge our bets because we don’t really trust God’s plans for us, then we are a billboard that tells others that he’s not good or trust worthy.
We become like that faithless servant.
Someone said it’s far worse than if someone spray painted over the Mona Lisa.
If we were to look at another parable that Jesus told, the parable of the rich fool.
This guy builds bigger and bigger barns to hold all of his wealth and God calls him a fool.
Does this story change if he dude first gave 10% to God and then built those bigger barns?
NO.
The problem wasn’t how he spent the money.
The problem was what his hoarding said about who God is.
It lied about who God is.
Your actions tell the truth about what you think of God.
So - what are God’s purposes for your stewardship?
His purpose is that you be faithful.
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