burying talents

My friend David recently spoke of how we are given talents from God and too often we are found burying them, Mt 24.14-30. When the Lord returns, what will He find? How have we sown the deposit of His Holy Spirit in us?

As I meditate on that, there seems to be several reasons for burying the talent. The servant cited fear as the cause. Good one, that is often true. We sometimes fear our master. We troll through Scripture finding abuses. We look around at others and find abuses. We use these examples and even God's Word confronting them as our reason to not step out in what God has given us.

Then the master's perspective. The servant is wicked and slothful. Another reason we do not use what God gives us is due to our laziness. We simply don't give Him our time, energy, and money. We find that we simply love a life of ease. It takes effort to invest.

I think these are obvious and have been preached on a lot so I won't belabor them. The less tought on angle is that we often do not see what life in the Kingdom looks like. We do not clearly see what the return on the investment is. We are comfortable with our old life. Our sinful nature, that body of sin, is too familiar to us. We settle for much less than God's desire for us. C.S. Lewis puts it like this,

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

We must see the Kingdom of God and understand its value. Having found it, we sell everything that we have to purchase the Kingdom. There is nothing of greater worth. There is no recognition from man that can compare. God and His Kingdom is worth our all.

To complete the cycle, we can never give to God anything that didn't originally come from Him anyway. Our talent is His to start with. We are simply demonstrating our trust in His provision and recognizing His greatness when we give back to God.

Do not be caught still hanging on to that original talent. Give all that you are and all that you have for the purpose of His Kingdom. Then you will be found to be the good and worthy servant.

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