Let’s Celebrate Together!

July 11, 2019

Let’s Celebrate Together!

“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 many more responsibilities. Let’s celebrate together!” (Matthew 25:21).

Parable of the Three Servants - Matthew 25: 14-30

Today we read the parable of the Three Servants which is another advent parable. That is, the parable is looking to the future coming of the Kingdom of God and how God’s people are preparing to receive their Messiah. Some translations of the Bible may refer to this as the parable of The Talents. That can be a bit misleading as the word talent connotes to us something to do with skills and abilities. In Jesus’ time, the word translated talent was a unit of measure of money, roughly the amount a laborer could earn in fifteen years. Understanding that reveals the meaning of this parable. The three servants are not being judged by their master for how they used their particular abilities to care for his property. What then is the master expecting when he returns? He is simply looking for good and faithful disciples of Jesus.

If we stand back and look at the whole of Matthew’s Gospel, we can see continuity in Jesus’ invitation to come and live under the reign of God. In this parable, you can hear echoes of the Sermon on the Mount: “But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn’t obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand” (Matthew 7:26).

Jesus is saying that ultimately, the only important thing in life is how we perceive God. If we perceive God as generous, gracious, loving and faithful, we will then embrace the Gospel as truly Good News and joyfully enter into the Kingdom of God; we will become good and faithful disciples of Jesus. If, however, we believe God is an evil task master, tough and uncaring, then our destiny will be to live our lives in fear.

The editor of the New York Times wrote an article a few years ago that reveals how the servant with one talent thinks in today’s culture. He noted that of the Republican presidential candidates, one was a Mormon, two were evangelical Christians and one was a conservative Catholic. He wrote that this “raises concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention separation of fact and fiction” (Bill Keller in the New York Times Magazine, August 28, 2011). Mr. Keller has a very dim view of people who believe human life is more than billions of years of evolution and survival of the fittest. Such a worldview hardly motivates people to get out of their comfort zone and take risks with their time and possessions in service to others.

My Takeaway: Jesus is saying I get to choose my future. He is saying that if I choose to live under the reign of my generous, gracious, loving and faithful God, my mission is to live my life in such a way that Mr. Keller and all the others for whom the love of God is still a stranger will find in me a generous friend. 

Sē’lah

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(Selah is a word that appears in the Book of Psalms that I often use as the Complimentary Closing in my correspondence. Its meaning, as I use the word, is to pause and think about these things.)

These meditations are written by Alex M. Knight as he seeks the life in Christ as his way of life.  The meditations are published on the BLOG, http://seekingthelifeinchrist.blogspot.com/ and they are also distributed on the Constant Contact email server. You may subscribe to this email service by sending an email to: amkrom812@gmail.com. The BLOG is also available on Amazon Kindle, by subscription.

Copyright © 2019 by Alex M. Knight

Publications by Alex M. Knight:

• Seeking the Life in Christ, Meditations on the New Testament and Psalms has been published and is now available at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle.

• The second edition of  First Think – Then Pray is available on Amazon Kindle.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.