Start with the End in Mind Matthew 25:14-30

For the last few weeks churches around the world have been celebrating the birth of . We decorated the church; we sang hymns about the birth of our Lord; we read Scripture; and we’ve heard sermons about the nativity. Churches do a good job of celebrating the birth of Jesus. But what can easily be forgotten in this time of year is the reality that Jesus is going to return one day. Several passages in the talk about the birth of Jesus - but the Bible talks even more is His .

Every book in the either alludes to or directly mentions the second coming of Christ. Do we know when He’ll return? No, but here’s what we do know: We’re closer today than we were yesterday. We’re closer this year than we were last year. What we do know is that Jesus will return. The question is: “Are we ready?” What are we, as God’s people, to do while we wait for His return?

We’re certainly not the first ones to have ever pondered this question. Before Jesus ascended back to heaven His disciples asked: “Lord, if you’re going away - what are we supposed to do?” Jesus responded by telling His disciples a series of parables.

If you’re not familiar with the teaching ministry of Jesus, He loved to tell simple stories from everyday life in order to teach spiritual truth. These stories are often referred to as parables. By definition, the word parable means “to place beside.” Jesus placed spiritual truth beside simple stories and familiar word pictures. He used ordinary things like a mustard seed, a hidden treasure, a determined woman looking for a lost coin, oil lamps, fig trees, a feisty widow seeking justice and a wayward son in order to teach timeless truth about God’s kingdom. As we read the , it’s important to understand that parables are not just stories about God and His kingdom – they’re also stories about you and me – the choices and the challenges we face in life.

In the parable we’re going to look at this morning, Jesus exhorts us to serve Him with the awareness that He will return one day. Moreover, He makes it perfectly clear that we’ll give an account for how we used the blessings He gave us. Let’s open our Bible’s to Matthew chapter 25. 2

The first thing we find in this story is that Jesus calls us to be stewards of what belongs to Him.

1. The Master Relinquishes. Our text of the morning begins at verse 14: “For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master's money.”

Jesus tells us that the kingdom of God is like a man who took a long journey. While he was away, he entrusted his wealth to three servants. To one servant, he gave five talents. To another, he gave two talents. And he gave one talent to a third servant. The obvious question we need to ask is: What is a talent?

Whenever we read or hear the word talent in English, we automatically think of a talent as being a natural ability that someone has – like singing, or playing a musical instrument, or excelling in a sport, or an artistic talent of some kind, or knowing how to build and fix things. But in the first century, a talent was a unit of weight. Later, it came to represent a weight in gold and silver coins – roughly 75 pounds. One talent was worth the equivalent of 15 year’s salary for a common