Weekly Sermon Overview

Message Date: August 31, 2014 Message Title: Don’t Waste Your Life

OVERVIEW In college, I ran across a fascinating poem by Robert Frost called, “The Trial by Existence.” It’s not the most profound or beautiful poem ever written, and it’s not something that I would deem to be theologically sound, not a piece to build a philosophy of life upon, nevertheless, I remember being deeply drawn to the poem the first time I read it. On one level, it’s a poem about heaven, about what happens to a person when they die and find themselves in Paradise. Frost goes into some detail describing the scene: The light of heaven falls whole and white And is not shattered into dyes, The light forever is morning light; The hills are verdured pasture-wise; The angel hosts with freshness go, And seek with laughter what to brave;-- And binding all is the hushed snow Of the far-distant breaking wave. For Frost, however, heaven is not the primary theme but rather the bravest souls that, upon waking in heaven find, to their surprise, “that the utmost reward of daring should be still to dare.” In other words, Frost proposed that, in heaven, God gives each soul the opportunity to be reborn, to prove its courage, its strength, its worth by forsaking paradise in order to participate, once again in the trial by existence. Like I said, not a good starting place for a systematic theology, but what originally appealed to me about the poem was the idea that this life matters, that there is something at stake in my existence. I suppose every college student—really, every person—wants to believe that this is true; however, despite the pop mania of American Idol idealism, the prevailing atmosphere of postmodern culture is saturated with and defined by an often unspoken fatalistic nihilism. To quote a much less optimistic poet: “The mass of men lead lives of quite desperation.” The question of ultimate meaning is not a new one and is not merely the playground of poets and philosophers, though these spend more time addressing it directly. The rest of us, however, are no less concerned. We spend our entire lives pursuing

significance, often unaware of the fact that this is what we’re doing. We are all desperate to mean something. We all long for this life—its joy and sorrow, its pleasure and pain, its energy and apathy, its excitement and routine, its…well, you get the idea—to matter. So, the three parables of Matthew 25, should be, for all of us good news: it does, we do, matter. Two weeks ago, we addressed the first of these three parables, the parable of the ten bridesmaids and discovered that it’s message is two-fold: 1) Jesus, our bridegroom, will come back for us, and 2) our job, in the meantime, is to keep watch, to be prepared for His return. Then, last week, while it was not our primary text, we spent some time looking at the third parable, the parable of the sheep and the goats, identifying as one of its central ideas the return of Jesus and His final judgment of the nations. This week, we look at the middle parable and ask ourselves what life means, what it means to live, in light of these two realities. “Again, i t wil l be l ike a man going on a journey, who cal led his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. To one he gave f ive bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag, each according to his abil i ty. Then he went on his journey. The man who had received f ive bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained f ive bags more. So also, the one with two bags of gold gained two more. But the man who had received one bag went off , dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. After a long t ime the master of those servants returned and sett led accounts with them. The man who had received f ive bags of gold brought the other f ive. ‘Master, ’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with f ive bags of gold. See, I have gained f ive more.’ His master replied, ‘Well done, good and fai thful servant! You have been fai thful with a few things; I wil l put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness! ’ The man with two bags of gold also came. ‘Master, ’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with two bags of gold; see, I have gained two more.’ His master replied, ‘Well done, good and fai thful servant! You have been fai thful with a few things; I wil l put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness! ’ Then the man who had received one bag of gold

came. ‘Master, ’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvest ing where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’ His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received i t back with interest . ‘So take the bag of gold from him and give i t to the one who has ten bags. For whoever has wil l be given more, and they wil l have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have wil l be taken from them. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there wil l be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ (Matthew 25:14-30) Following on the heels of the parable of the bridegrooms and preceding the judgment parable of the sheep and the goats, this parable answers the questions, what does vigilance look like in light of judgment? In other words, what does it mean to be prepared for, to keep watch for, the coming of our Judge and Savior? In this way, it deals with the somewhat vague warning of the first parable—something that, we all wrestled with, as a teaching team and as a church—and it preempts the very specific actions of the third. For this reason, it is, in my mind, the most significant of the three because it provides the answer to the primary question of our inter-advent existence: What is the meaning of life? Or, more precisely, what must I do to live a meaningful life? The answer, according to the parable of the talents: be a good steward of what you have been given. Now, I recognize that that phrase, “good steward,” is much used—over-used—in modern Christian parlance and, as a result, carries with it implicit baggage, some of which is true and helpful and some not so much. So, I think that, if we are saying that, to be a good steward of what we have been given, is what it means to live a meaningful life, then our most significant task this weekend will be to consider and define what it means to be a “good steward.” So, let’s strip away the baggage and walk through the parable afresh, looking to see stewardship through the eyes of Jesus.

The first thing that we see is that this is not a story about a stewards or servants but about Jesus. The Kingdom of the Heavens is not like a servant but like “a man going on a journey,” and it is this man—the main character of the story—who calls his servants together and “entrusted his wealth to them.” The reason I stop to make this point is that we need to be very clear that a servant—more precisely, a slave—is not a property owner but rather a steward of his/her master’s property. The wealth, the resources, is the Master’s to be distributed at His discretion, used in His name (that is, in ways consistent with His character), and resulting in His glory. It all belongs to Him; to be a steward, then, is to be an overseer of something that does not belong to you by right but rather by relationship. The second thing to notice is that both the Master’s wealth and His trust are vast. We have come to misunderstand this parable because we impose the English meaning of “talent” on the text when, in fact, it is the Greek, via the Latin, that gives the English word its meaning. The original meaning of the word used here, talanta, does not mean, “ability” or “skill,” but rather means, “a large sum of money.” Many commentators have suggested that the approximate value of 1 talent was around 6,000 denari, that is, 6,000 days (over 16 years) wages. So, we see that when Jesus says that the Master entrusted His “wealth,” He is speaking literally. He has given His servants stewardship over a significant estate. Third, the Master distributes His resources at His initiative and His discretion. Many people, over the centuries, have discussed what it means that the Master gave more talents to some than to others, specifically in light of the “twin” parable in Luke 12 and its oft-quoted statement: “To whom much is given, much will be required” (Luke 12:48). It is often concluded, then, that some people are simply more “gifted” (whatever that means: a point we’ll consider next) than others. This may be true, and it is certainly worth considering what Jesus means when He says, “he gave…each according to his ability” (Matthew 25:15), but I don’t think that’s the most important point here. Far more significant is the fact that the Master gave something to everyone, a fact significantly echoed in 1 Corinthians 12: Now to each one the manifestat ion (a gif t ) of the Spiri t is given for the common good. (1 Corinthians 12:7)

Now, all this, of course, raises for us, as interpreters of the parable, an important question: what do these “talents” represent our lives. Many have suggested, again, influenced by the English word, “talent,” that the wealth the Master has distributed represents skills abilities. Others point out the connection between the Greek word and physical wealth, saying that the talent God has given us is monetary. Others still, say we should understand time or opportunity as the true wealth. I am inclined to say that the best answer is “D – All of the above.” Everything we have been given—skills, wealth, time, life itself—comes from the hand of God and, preempting our next point, is to be used for His sake. One of the most fascinating aspects of this parable, for me, is the difference between good stewardship and bad stewardship, between the “good and faithful” servants and the “lazy and wicked” servant. The first two, the good servants, take the Master’s wealth and “put [it] to work,” in investments that, over time, double the wealth. Think about that, for a moment, in terms of sound financial principles: there must have been some measure of risk—potentially significant risk—involved in these investments. There was a chance that the investments would not have paid off and that the servants would have lost their Master’s money. Yet, He calls them “good and faithful. The final servant, on the other hand, buried the money in the ground, which, in his mind (as well as in the minds of many in the ancient world), was a safe bet. In doing so, he had essentially ensured that when his Master returned, his money would be waiting for Him. Yet, the Master calls him, “Lazy and wicked.” There’s a principle for anyone who has been entrusted with the Master’s resources—which, we’ve already established, is all of us—to learn here: risk is right. We have been entrusted the resources of the Kingdom not so that we can survive but so that we can thrive! God has called us to a life of mission (talent means mission), of adventure, of abundance. And, this leads to a final principle: abundance here will be rewarded with abundance there. “For whoever has wil l be given more, and they wil l have an abundance.” (Matthew 25:29a)

This should get us pretty excited about the resurrection, once and for abolishing the notion of a “boring” heaven. Part of the image of God in us is authority, sovereignty. We were made to reign, to work, to matter, and consequently, if we exercise that authority and sovereignty here with wild wisdom, much greater adventure, much greater authority, much greater sovereignty will be ours on that day! If we do not, however… “Whoever does not have, even what they have wil l be taken from them.” (Matthew 25:29b Author: Josh Harrison REFLECTION QUESTION

1. What would you consider your ‘talent?’ What has God uniquely entrusted to you that you are called to use for His kingdom?

2. When you assess the way you live your life, do you see a life of risking for the kingdom, or a life of playing it safe?

NEXT STEP RESOURCES (Check out these resources for additional reading on this topic.)

1. Who Is This Man: The Unpredictable Impact of the Inescapable Jesus by John Ortberg

2. The Jesus I Never Knew by Phillip Yancey