14
Sep '20
Don’t Bury What God Gives
14
Sep '20
September 13, 2020
by Pastor Joel Plisek
Scripture Reading: Matthew 25:14-30
Growing up I had this dog named Misty, we learned not to leave things around the house. Why? Because she would eat them? No! Misty’s problem was that she would bury what she found outside in the back yard. There was one time I could honestly say to my teacher that my dog took my homework. Shoes, hats, coats, if you were looking for a missing sock it was outside. She just had a natural inclination to bury things.
When I was reading this scripture, I was thinking about Misty and how sometimes we bury that which God gives us.
Today I want to speak on the subject – how to be good stewards by looking at the Parable of the Talents. Every single one of us has a special purpose, a special job to do that will bring glory to God in His Kingdom. Let’s see what God has to say to us so that we don’t bury our blessing.
- Get to Know God
Do you remember why the man was unfaithful to his master? Because he was afraid?
He said “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was AFRIAD, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.” (vs. 24b-25)
The servant was unproductive because of his fear of the King. His insecurity about the King, and his insecurity about his standing before the King paralyzed him.
I believe that there is an application for all of us. One of the main reasons I think we can bury our blessings is that we are insecure about who God is and our own standing before God. When we misunderstand the character and the ways of God it paralyzes us for being productive for God. On the other hand, the better we know God, the more we will trust God and realize that we are secure in Him because of His grace. The result will be that we can serve the LORD with joy and bear fruit and live fulfilling lives.
In “The Pursuit of Christ” by A.W. Tozer he writes “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” Why? Our view of God will affect everything about us. It will affect our career, our relationships, our money, our hobbies, our sin, our view of society, and our view of eternity. A confused understanding of who God is results in distracted service. The better we understand God the more we will be able to focus on our service and be productive for Him.
Over the week I was doing some reading on the Golden Gate Bridge and I want to share with you some of the things that stood out to me. They had set a timeline back in 1937 to have the Golden Gate Bridge completed, but they fell way behind schedule. The workers who were building the bridge were moving very slowly and when you understand a couple of facts about the bridge, you’ll understand why. It’s 245 feet from the deck of the bridge to the water. If you fall off the bridge, it would take 4 full seconds to hit the water. When you hit the water, you would hit it at 75 miles per an hour. It would be like hitting concrete. There is a 98% chance that you will die.
Now we understand why construction was progressing so slowly, the workers were afraid. One slip, one misstep and they would fall to their deaths below.
The Engineers of the Golden Gate Bridge came up with an idea that they thought would help speed up progress a bit. They built these huge safety nets that span underneath the bridge. Once they had the safety nets in place, guess what happened to the progress of the work? It sped up. Why? Because the workers felt secure so they could focus on their work knowing that even if they slipped, they’d be okay. In fact, I discovered that 19 men fell while working on the construction but were saved by the safety net. They had a name for a special club of those 19 men who fell, they called themselves “The Halfway to Hell Club” and you can understand why (various facts and figures from facts.net).
Here’s my point, their work sped up, they became productive because they knew they were secure. As we recognize our security in God through Jesus Christ because we are getting to know God better, we’ll be able to better GRASP our Kingdom Purpose and be productive for the LORD.
- Recognize your Faith Covers All Areas of Life and Thought.
Part of stewardship is recognizing that faith covers all areas of life. The unfaithful man failed to recognize his opportunity from the King as a stewardship. Here’s what I am thinking; it is easy to compartmentalize our lives. We have this folder over here in our life that we’ve labeled spiritual, that describes going to church, reading the Bible, all the spiritual things we do in life. Over here we have another folder, on that folder is the label secular, those are the secular things in our life, our work, our hobbies, our entertainment, our relationships, etc. We live our lives in these different compartments, but what I want us to understand is that the Christian faith is designed (if I can put it that way by God) to have one folder. In that one folder we put the spiritual things going to church, reading the Bible and praying; along with the secular things going to work, entertainment, hobbies, relationships all in one folder, “Jesus is LORD.”
We can fool ourselves into believing that the Christian faith is a personal belief or a private belief, but the Bible presents Christianity as a worldview that affects every area of our lives and our thinking.
I came across a fascinating article that I want to share with you. It’s “Titanic’s Sinking: A Mathematical Certainty.”
“Titanic had earned the title of unsinkable from the watertight compartments in the ship’s hull. Doors between the bulkheads could be dropped to prevent flooding from spreading across all 16 compartments in the hull. The ship was designed to take on water in any 3 of the compartments and still sail on — Thomas Andrews said that Titanic could even tolerate flooding in a fourth compartment if necessary. But five flooded compartments mathematically guaranteed that Titanic would sink
But when the ship struck the iceberg, the lightweight air was quickly replaced by the dense water pouring into the damaged compartments. As a result, the ship’s front (bow) became much heavier than the back (stern) and began a slow and steady descent downward.
The Titanic didn’t just sink — eyewitness reports testify that it broke in half. Science supports these accounts. In the middle of the ship, the stress of bearing the heavy weight of the water-filled front compartments overwhelmed the steel structure. As the bow dipped beneath the waterline, the keel began to rise high out of the water and the steel plates holding this portion of the ship together started buckling under the pressure. This stress reached 35,000 pounds per square inch on the boat deck; that’s nearly 50 percent more stress than the Titanic was designed to withstand. At last, the plates gave way. The bow plunged downward, and the ship snapped in two. When it severed, the flickering electricity was finally extinguished, and passengers and crew were left in the darkness of a moonless night. Less than half would live to see the sunrise.” (Melanie Radzicki McManus & Kathryn Whitbourne. HowStuffWorks.com. 13 October 2008.)
When I read that I thought about the fact that we do compartmentalize our lives. Here’s what I mean. We will take a look at our life and we’ll say I can compromise this compartment. I can compromise this area. Listen, the Christian faith was designed to rule all of our lives, all of our thoughts. When we decide to compromise any area of our life we begin to take on water and the more we take on water the more we are going to sink and snap in two. The Christian faith is a worldview that covers all areas of life and thought.
III. Put Your Life into Eternal Perspective
As I go back to verse 24, I notice that the unfaithful man really didn’t consider the future. He really didn’t consider that one day he would be called into account. Can I close with this? Let me remind everyone that God is interested in the here and now, but He is also very interested in eternity. God is always active in our lives and around us.
The older I get the more appreciative I am of God’s methods of bringing us to our senses and bringing us to His Son. The question is not – Is God Active? The question is, are our spiritual antennas high enough that we are picking up His activity in our lives? I want to encourage everyone to be alert to how God’s at work in our lives. Let’s put our lives into an eternal perspective and enjoy His work in us.
I love stories about how God is creative and getting our attention. I want to share this story with you in closing. In 1850 while traveling in the west, a new Christian by the name of John Vassar who had given up his family fortune in beer brewery to sell Christian literature visited the home of a praying wife whose husband was an infidel. She begged for a Bible which Vassar gave her. Coming home her husband saw the Bible and was enraged. Seizing the Bible with one hand and an ax with the other he hurried to the chopping block and hacked the Bible crosswise in two. He threw half of the Bible at his wife saying, “Since you claim half of all the property around here, there’s your share of this.” The other half he threw into his tool shed.
Months later, on a cold winter day, the husband retreated to his shed to get away from his Christian wife. In boredom he looked around for something to read, thumbing through the mutilated Bible his attention was caught by the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. He became absorbed in the parable only to discover that the ending belonged to the wife’s section. He secretly searched the house, but finally broke down and asked his wife for her part of the Bible, reading it again and again. In the process of reading the ending of the Prodigal Son story he came to his Heavenly Father like the penitent prodigal returning home.
I love those kinds of stories, because it reminds me that it is unlimited the number of ways that God gets our attention. God loves us so much that he wants to get our attention and draw us to Himself. God created every one of us and designed us with special gifts for his Kingdom Purpose, our job is simply to put those gifts to use, in all the variety of ways for his glory. Get to know God. Keep your life in eternal perspective. Look at your life and the events of your life, both the good and the bad as God’s way of bringing you to Himself. Amen.