We're in our series called Stories We Find Ourself In, and we're looking at the parables of Jesus. The parables are these teaching stories that Jesus used to illustrate what life was like in the kingdom of God. And this morning we're looking at talking about one of my favorite parables is a parable that has been haunting my mind for the last year and a half. I don't tell you a story first about when I was in high school, I went camping with some friends, and you kind of look at the list of things you bring when you go camping.
And the one thing that we did not bring with us on that trip was a tent. We were going for like one night, like no we're not going to need a tent, we're going to go to this place that we know of. I got this is like pre-internet, pre-Amazon, like pre- cheap Walmart days of things, nobody had the money for a tent. We couldn't, so we're just going to go, we had a 10 by 10 sheet of this queen in a row, we're not supposed to rain, we'll be all right, we walked the two miles in to this campsite, and we built our fire that night and cooked like ramen noodles and that kind of stuff, and we put the piece of this queen down on the ground and rolled her sleeping bags out and tried to go to sleep.
We heard like a big crash in a bush, my friend said it was a deer, I thought it might have been Bigfoot, swishful thinking. And everything was fine and dandy, it was cool until like three o'clock in the morning, and it started raining. So we heard we got all of our stuff under a bush so we're sleeping bag with, got our 10 by 10 sheet of this queen, and this is not like thick, this queen, this is the stuff you buy at Walmart for a dollar, 99 for a paint drop, it's like trash bag material. And so we try to tie the rope and we ask, we didn't bring a steak, and we just not get big, a big limb pretty much, and I try to rig the rope up in therapy, so plastic over, and then three, like full size men try to get underneath a 10 by 10 piece of this queen, it's like hastily attached to this tarp.
And so we got rained on all night long. Our shelter was not big enough, our shelter in no way was adequate for our needs, it did not provide for us whatsoever at all. And this morning we're talking about what's been provided to us, and how we use what has been provided to us, and why how we use what's been provided to us matters. And so let's open our Bibles up, Matthew chapter 25, it's gonna be on the screen behind, if you didn't bring your Bible, you can use your phone if you want to, just make sure to check in on Facebook if you're gonna use your phone.
And I'm gonna trust that you're not on Instagram. So Matthew 25, we're gonna start in verse 14 and read through 30. Again, the kingdom of heaven can be illustrated by the story of a man going on a long trip. He called together his servants and entrusted his money to them while he was gone.
He gave five bags of silver to one, two bags of silver to another, and one bag of silver to the last, dividing it in proportion to their abilities. And then he left on a strip. The servant who received the five bags of silver began to invest the money and earn five more. The servant who, the servant with two bags of silver also went to work and he earned two more.
But the servant who received one bag of silver dug a hole in the ground and hid the master's money. After a long time, their master returned from his strip and he called them to give account of how they had used his money. The servants whom he entrusted the five bags of silver came forward with five more and said, master, you gave me five bags of silver to invest, and I have earned five more. And the master was full of praise.
Well done, my good and faithful servant. You have been faithful in handling this small amount. So now I will give you more responsibilities. Let's celebrate together.
The servant who received two bags of silver came forward and said, master, you gave me two bags of silver to invest, and I have earned two more. And the master said, well done, my good and faithful servant. You've been faithful in handling the small amount, so I give you many more responsibilities. Let's celebrate together.
Then the servant with one bag of silver came and said, master, I know you were a harsh man. Harvesting crops you didn't plant and gather in crops you didn't cultivate. I was afraid I would lose your money, so I hid it in the earth. Look, here's your money back.
The master replied, you wicked and lazy servant. If you knew I harvested crops, I didn't plant and gather crops, I didn't cultivate. I didn't deposit my money in a bank. At least then I could have gotten some interest on it.
In the order to take the money from the servant and give it to the one with thin bags of silver, to those who use well what they are given, even more will be given, and they will have an abundance. But from those who do nothing, even what little they have will be taken away. Now if they're on this useless servant into the outer darkness, well there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. So this is when these times with the words of Jesus kind of, it gets a little bit gnarly, doesn't it?
I told you I've been fascinated with this parable. It's been like in my mind for the last couple of years. There's some details that really help us understand what's going on, and the first thing is this, the amount that we see in here, this is kind of crazy. Because whenever we see amounts in the parables, whether it's money or crops or anything like that, the amounts typically are this outrageous sum that we can't even begin to comprehend.
And so the amount of your translation, like we just read one bag of silver, it might have said one talent, depending on what translation of the Bible you read. And some people have a number of coins. What pretty much is going on is just this one bag of silver that the master gave to the lazy servant is equal to 20 years of daily wages. So we think about that, okay?
And the one who had two bags of silver is equal to 40 years of daily wages. The one who had five bags of silver is equal to a hundred years of daily wages. The proportions here are just astronomical. And the reason we see these little level of proportions in scripture is people want to understand these are stories of abundance, and stories about what do you do with abundance?
What do you do when someone who has more power than you can comprehend is in control? So there's this, I've also, I remember last week, I told you I learned more about first century agricultural practices than I ever wanted to know. This week I got a banking degree in like first century. I learned a lot about investment.
You could actually invest money in a lot of different places back then. It wouldn't, it wouldn't uncommon for a rich landowner to bail the town out of something, or if a conquering king came and threatened them, the rich landowner would front the money to pay off the army that's surrounding you. Or you could like, there's this sort of genius in the money changers in the temple, like actually providing the money to operate a money changing station was a good investment strategy. This whole thing, like we read about, you've doubled your investment.
This was not an uncommon percentage. Like I really wish like my retirement fund would double. Like every single time, would that be nice? That'd be really cool.
But this was a comic, we can't understand that, but back then that was actually a pretty normal thing. It was expected if you invested that it would double because the distance between the poor and the rich in the first century was just absolutely gigantic. And so these numbers, this investment is not out of the, ordinary, but what's going on is you see him, he gives this amount of money according to the abilities of each one of these servants. Like he thinks they have the capacity to do this.
Like he's traveling for a long time. That was not an odd strategy also. Like, hey, listen, I'm gonna be going for like three years. I need you to keep up everything I have and keep the ball rolling.
Like he gave this to them for a purpose. It wasn't, like make sure nobody gets this. Like I'm gonna give you this, and I'm gonna expect you to now have the ability to work with what I give you, just as if I were here working on my own. He entrusted it to them.
There's another word, he entrusted this money to them according to their abilities. He gave them authority over it. He transferred his power and his influence and his wealth to them for a purpose. And so my question here is, I read this and oh, how many of y'all have heard this parable before?
There's bits and pieces that are pretty familiar, okay? So I've been reading this and for years, I got really like nervous about the back end of this, okay? Like the whole weeping and gnashing of teeth. Like that's what I would focus on.
Like how many of you, that's where your mind immediately went to when we got done reading this. Like that's what you were focused on. That's what I do. I get nervous.
I'm like, oh my goodness, what do I do wrong? What if I buried something? But we read this and if you look across, first of all, the story of, and we say that we always find our place and parables and you're finding the characters. And it doesn't, we figure out pretty quickly who this master is supposed to be.
And we see him interacting with these first two servers. Hey, you did a fantastic job. I trusted you with a little. I got trusted you with a hundred years of daily wages.
Let's celebrate. I still haven't, we're not gonna go to that rabbit shell this morning. But the character we see of the master in this is not the character of hatefulness and of anger and of vengeance. We're gonna talk about that in a little bit of, wow, we see that kind of trotted out.
But the character that we see across all of scripture, when it comes to these stories, is a character of very different, it's a God who wants to invest in this people, a God who wants to pour into people, a God who wants to rescue people, a God who wants to take care of his people, a God who wants to save his people. That's the character of God that we see across scripture. When we realize in our own brokenness, in our own fear sometimes we immediately will diverge ourselves like the bad portions of these stories. And we completely gloss over the amazing things that it can teach us, that we can absolutely carry into our daily life.
And we find our story in these servants, in their actions, we've all been all three of them. We've all been one, I've buried stuff sometimes. And sometimes I'm hopefully that I've gone out and done with what I've been given. So that's what we're gonna talk about this morning.
But what this launched me into was this tension, between the gifts he gave them and the abilities that they had. That's where we see the difference between these three servants, what gifts that he gave them and what abilities that they had. And that's the rub that we find. Our view of what we do with what God gives us matters.
So for the last couple of months, I've been thinking about how we're gonna talk about this parable. I found myself launching into this investigation of biblical multiplication. Like one of the stories we find in scripture were just big things happen. There's one for used to like feeding in the 5,000.
And like when Jesus asked him to cast the net over and grab the fish, going back to this character of God. And what does he do? What does he work with people who understand how he wants to multiply and see things exponentially grow? So as we prayed over this, I kept thinking more and more and more.
And this story of a man named J. Bess popped up into my mind. And the J. Bess story, I haven't gone over the book, the prayer of J.
Bess. I worked in Christian retail when that book came out. Let me tell you what, that was absolutely nuts. And we're gonna talk about this and what this looks like.
Because the J. Bess story is interesting. We find the J. Bess story in first chronicles.
And the first nine chapters of chronicles is all like the lineage, just all genealogy passages. Okay, how many of them genealogy would be extremely boring? Like it's like chapter, chapter, chapter, chapter of names. We can't pronounce names.
We can't understand names that we don't know what's going on. But we find this, let's open up first chronicles, chapter four. And inside the story of the tribe of Judah and the people who are left, we read about a man named J. Bess.
This is what four 10 says, he was the one who prayed to the God of Israel, oh that you would bless me and expand my territory. Please be with me in all that I do and keep me from all trouble and pain. And God granted his, him, his request. So in the middle of a list of, this is like a legal passage.
It's a whole chapter of just names that are in there for the sake of finding out who has right to land and has been dead for hundreds of years. We find a store to my name, J. Bess. Now to be complete honest with you, like with an Instagram, T.B.H.
Like I struggle with this, because here's the thing, we have some pictures of the prayer of J. Bess. When I worked in Christian retail, we sold all of these. If you could print that prayer on an item and sell it, you would double your investment.
Okay, I think I remember everything, one of these like prayer of J. Bess license plate covers. There's a phone cover for the prayer of J. Bess on it.
Pro pillows, things on your wall. There's a little coin you can keep in your pocket. Y'all, I'm not gonna lie to you. I glossed over this for years.
I was almost embarrassed. I was gonna talk about J. Bess this morning. Because in my mind, I go back to like mid 2000s, cheesy Christian marketing.
Because that's exactly what was going on. But think about that prayer. Oh, that you would bless me and expand my territory. What does that mean for us to pray that prayer?
A prayer of blessing. A prayer of expansion. What J. Bess was praying is something that we can all identify with.
These J. Bess is doubling his investment. He says, God, I want to experience more of you. God, I want to be able to influence more people for you.
I want to be able to take what I have and to expand that. Because you're doing better and bigger things than I can imagine. Bless me and expand my territory. This is not about getting a bunch of stuff so you can hold up and keep it for yourself, like Scrooge McDuck, like Slimming Through.
Okay, who remembers that? Duck Tails? Yeah, this isn't for that. This is like, help me take what you have already given me and do the absolute best I can so I can then go back and give to others.
Isaiah is a prophet. And at the very end of his prophecy, he begins telling a story of when God brings his people back to Jerusalem, back to that special relationship with him. And this is what this prayer says. Isaiah 54 verse two and three, says, enlarge the place of your tent.
Stretch out your tent. Stretch your curtains wide. Do not hold back, lengthen your cords. Strengthen your stakes.
For you will soon be bursting at the seams. Your descendants will occupy other nations and resettled the ruined cities. This is a projection, something that Isaiah is saying. He's talking about the future of what he believes and he expects what is assured.
And he's speaking about that future and he's pulling that into the present. Think about the power that stretches out your curtains enlarge the place of your tent. So for us to think about this morning, my natural reaction was I want to set a tent up. So I call Davis Panic because Davis is a boy scout.
And who do I call to set up a tent? Then a boy scout. I want to see this happen as we were talking about it. How many of y'all have ever set a tent up before?
Okay, how many of y'all have failed in setting a tent up before? How many of you have been stupid and even bring a tent in the first place? My hand is up, okay? So we have a tent.
It's simple. It's here in front of us. But would this protect us right now? No, no, it's right there.
It's a tent. It has poles. It has curtains. It's there to do what we need to do.
But this would not keep us dry on the least, but what? Some of us have tents that we've not set up right. Some of us have tents that have not gotten finished setting up. Some of us have tent sometimes that we are missing pieces of that we have failed to put together.
Davis will just keep it right now right now. No, no. Is it a tent? Not like this.
Like technically it's a tent, right? Davis thinks so much. Y'all, some of us live in tents like this. We worry about what's the matter.
And it tends to do two things. They keep the rain out and they give us a space to live. Okay, when we look at what God gives us and what we do with it, we realize he gives us those things so we can find ourselves. So we can discover who he uniquely made us to be.
The tent's gonna keep the rain out. A couple of things are going on. We have to ask ourselves questions. Are we living with an inadequate view of God?
We live with an inadequate view of God. We're not gonna have a good tent. That third servant had an inadequate view of God. He didn't know his master.
He thought he knew his master, but he didn't know what to do with him. He didn't know what he was asking him to do. And his response tells us everything. What's really going on is when this story about the master giving his servants these gifts for them to use, the same one God gives us.
It's an invitation to faithfulness. It's him saying, I want to give you ways that you can be part of what I'm doing. I want to invite you into a life with me and invite you into this place. The depths of what God is inviting us to do is where we find strength.
Nobody can live in a halfway set up tent. And many of us try to do it sometimes. And it's not gonna keep the rain out. The second thing tends to do is it give us a space to live.
It's back to this idea of an invitation of faithfulness. That the master is giving these servants the ability to be caretakers. He's saying, I'm going to give you what is mine. So that you can then go and do as you see fit.
He's stretching out our tent for us. And the founder of the estate Jesus is big enough. And many of us want to experience someone to live in a world where we know Jesus is this big, right? As far as my six foot frame can stretch out, I want to know Jesus this much.
But sometimes sadly my experience with Jesus is this big. And if we live in a world that's this big, we can't begin to comprehend and understand function in a world that's this big. So instead what happens is God gives us a gift and our world is this big. We take what he gives us, what he calls us to, what he invites us to do.
And we see our world get a little bit bigger. Then God calls us to something, ask us to be part of what he is doing. Gives us a chance to grow in our faithfulness and our world gets a little bit bigger. Then God calls us and gives a situation to invite us into a greater faithfulness and our world gets a little bit bigger.
You all starting to see the pattern here? It's not about us getting stuff, it's a reward, it's about us being given things. So we can be alongside of him in his world and his mission. Back to this, this servant, this third servant, the lazy servant, the unproductive servant, whatever you want to call him.
And it's this like the gnarly mean part at the end. He didn't know who his master was. He got called out on his failure to understand the mission. And instead of coming and saying, I'm really sorry.
Those two words right there are powerful, I'm sorry. Instead of saying that, immediately you got really defensive and start trying to fight back. I mean, who else does that? When we feel cornered, we know it's something wrong.
He steps into a place of condemnation. It begins accusing his master of things that he simply is not like. And the master says, listen, OK, that's the world you want to live in. If you really think I'm like that, I'll wait, I'll wait, you experience what that world's like.
You know, when we need Jesus to be this big, and we've only ever done the work for him to be this big, we're going to get really frustrated. That's how we get mad at God. When we have been living in that tent for years and years and years and years and we come into a situation where we need him to be huge. That space in the middle is where we get angry, where we get disconnected.
OK? That third servant was living in that space right there. So you have different gifts and different abilities. And there's that last verse, verse 29, is what I think about so much when he says, to those who have done well, this whole idea, if I can trust you with little things, I can trust you with even bigger things.
I want to know those situations where I need to live out my faithfulness in a way that expands it, where we invite the situation to know what greater faithfulness looks like. So we can grow past that dead space into the biggest expectation and understanding of who Jesus is that we can possibly comprehend. And the last thing is this. It says that he entrusted these gifts to his servants.
Now, entrusted, OK, I trust you. You have the power to do this. You have the authority to do this. It's the definition of interest that we can be used to.
There's also another definition to entrust it. It's right there in scripture. It's like a second level. To entrust something to someone was to hand something over for the purpose of death.
It's just a language of sacrifice. So sometimes we might be saying, God, you're never giving me anything. You never put me in a situation where I can be faithful. I'm really frustrated right now.
It's never got a chance to do this. Jesus has been entrusted over to every single one of us. That's a gift that's significantly greater than 100 years of daily wages. That space for our faithfulness to grow and grow wide has been given to us.
I'm going to entrust you with this. So there are some of you in this room this morning that you're unsatisfied. That feeling is there. If you're unsatisfied, what I would ask you is if you ever actually stepped into this relationship with Jesus of faithfulness.
Or you might know a lot about him, but have you ever actually met him? That first step to fixing that unsatisfactory is simply saying, Jesus, I'm going to let you take control. I've never let you do that before. I'm going to let you take control.
For others of us, we might be like aimless. We might be frustrated. That was my story for so much of my life. And that's the place where we start praying.
Jesus, I need to expand my faithfulness. I need to expand my quote. I need to expand who you are. I need to trust you more.
Please help me as I learn what it's like to do that every single day. There's other people in this room that you might be dreaming about what could be. That's the places where we begin praying those prayers, Isaiah. Lord, stretch out my tent, strengthen my stakes, lengthen my ropes, prepare me for what it takes for me to have an even bigger and bigger vision of who you are.
For instance, God just doesn't give us a gift one time. He's giving us these gifts, according to our abilities, every single day. And our decisions that we make with him last a lifetime, not just a moment. Because he doesn't want us to have to live in tents like this.
He wants us to have a strong vision of this world, with him in charge that can withstand anything, but also gives us the space to live and live in the way he created us to. Jesus, thank you so much. Thank you for forgiving us, your son. For coming to lay yourself down for us.
But not just to die, I mean, but for rising, and for defeating sin, and for giving us access to who you are so that we can live a life that we dream of and we think of being wide and being big. For creating us as unique people with unique abilities. For giving every one of us a unique story with you. For creating us as individuals who each of us is loved deeply and personally.
So God help every single one of us begin to learn what that next step of faithfulness is. For some of us, Jesus, it might be taking that first step of faithfulness. So finally saying, OK, I'm ready for you to be in charge. For others, it might be saying, God, I've been kind of sitting at the starting line for way too long.
There's others people in this room that have big visions. They want to see you move in big ways. And we know that you're there for us every single step of the way. We thank you so much for that.
Amen.