One Big Bag of Gold

Thanks for listening to the His Hands Church podcast.

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And thank you for being part of what God is doing at His Hands.

Good morning.

If it's your first time here, welcome to His Hands.

We are really excited that you're here.

If you want some more info just on who we are, what we're about, we've got these little booklets you can grab.

They're at the four columns in the back of the room, or the info desk, or the check-in for the kids, or the source.

They might even be in the restrooms.

I'm not sure.

But my point is they're everywhere.

And you can grab one and they will tell you all you need to know.

Um don't really have any big announcements this morning, other than just, again, saying a big thank you to everyone who helps us financially.

Uh, we need that, and God is using it.

We've been able to share over the last few weeks uh how much we've been able to give to some of these local ministries that we're just trying to help support.

Uh, one of the things that we do here is we give 15% of every dollar that's given to us to these three local ministries that we really believe in and support.

Papa's Pantry, that helps uh feed hungry people and provide jobs for people in need.

There's the Cherokee Family Violence Center, which helps with families that are dealing with abuse.

And then uh the Hope Center, which is a crisis pregnancy ministry.

And so God's really blessing us, and we're thankful for every dollar that's given because we're being able to not just use it for here, but for the whole community.

So thank you for that.

Um, the next two weeks, we're in for a treat.

Ken Kington will be with us for the next two Sundays, which is always exciting.

It's been a little while since Ken's been with us, so it'll be uh it'll be good to have him back, and I know he's excited about that too.

Let's just go ahead and pray and jump into what we're gonna talk about this morning.

I'm really excited about it.

God, thank you so much for loving us like you do.

Thank you that you're a God that we can run to.

And we can just be who we are and wrap our arms around you and know that you love us, and the number one thing you want for us is a relationship with you.

You just want to walk with us and know us, and we appreciate that, God.

We need that.

Pray that you would speak to us this morning, Holy Spirit.

Just speak directly to our hearts, whatever it is that we need to hear through your word, and we just we trust you for that, and we ask all this in your name, Jesus.

Amen.

Well, we have spent the last few months taking a look at the stories that Jesus told.

The Bible calls them parables, and they were these very short stories that Jesus would tell to try to help everyday normal people like you and me understand God.

We've spent two months going through a lot of those.

There's actually over 50 parables that Jesus told, so we could spend a whole year on it if we wanted to.

We've only been doing it for the last two months.

This morning we're gonna kind of wrap that up.

But we've looked at stories so far that Jesus told about wine, about annoying neighbors, about parents, about pearls, about criminals, you know, just the garden variety stuff you'd expect God to talk about if we were hanging out with him.

The last two weeks we focused on one parable, and that was the parable of the shrewd manager.

And it's the story of this man that's that finds out he's gonna be fired, he's been mismanaging his boss's wealth, and so realizing that he has very little time left, he decides to go out and use the resources he still has to bless the people who owe his master money.

And it's not exactly honest, but Jesus used it to get our attention and to show us that we are God's managers.

We are the ones that he has entrusted his resources to.

We talked about money and how God wants us to see everything we have is his.

And even if we feel like we need more or want more, which is totally okay, to understand that if we use what he has given us faithfully, if we use it honestly, wisely, and generously, he will bless us with more.

We are a manager of that resource.

We talked about time last week, and how time is the most precious resource we have.

We often don't see it that way, but it's incredibly limited.

And all through the Bible, God reminds us that our time is shorter than we often think, but that's okay because something that is limited is by definition valuable.

And so our time is extremely valuable.

We had these glow sticks last week.

We talked about how a glow stick only lasts six or eight hours, although I heard some people say theirs lasted days, which I'm viewing as a miracle because that usually doesn't happen.

And the challenge was to leave here and to spend your time doing something important, something with your family, something with someone who you love or someone that needs love before that glow stick faded.

And just seeing the things that you guys posted on Facebook and even things I heard from word of mouth, it was it was incredible.

If we did that every week or even just once a month, imagine the memories that we would make and the people whose lives would be blessed.

I mean, that was awesome.

So great work there.

But the main point of all this is that we are God's managers, and we've been like that from the beginning.

In Genesis, God creates the earth, and then he tells us that it's ours to manage.

In Matthew chapter 28, right before Jesus went back to heaven, he it says, Jesus came and told his disciples, I've been given all authority in heaven and on earth.

Matthew 28 · chapter mention

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you, and be sure of this.

I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

So Jesus spends three years traveling all throughout the area that he was in, all throughout Israel, teaching people who God really is, and then at the end, he entrusts his message to us.

Originally it was his disciples, and then they left it to the generation after them, and that's happened for thousands of years, and here we are, the managers of God's message.

Given that task by Jesus, we have to see ourselves as God's managers.

He trusts us.

And we have his resources at our disposal.

This morning we're gonna take a look at one more parable.

It's gonna kind of wrap up our study of the parables, but it's also gonna wrap up this theme that we've been looking at the last three weeks of being the managers of God's resources.

It's usually referred to as the parable of the talents.

Sometimes it's called the parable of the three servants.

And we mentioned it really briefly two weeks ago when we looked at money, but we didn't get to go into a lot of detail.

So I want to do that this morning.

It's in Matthew 25, we're gonna start with verses 14 and 15.

It says, For the kingdom of heaven is like a man traveling to a far country, who called his own servants and delivered his goods to them.

And to one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one, to each according to his own ability, and immediately he went on a journey.

So this master is going on a long journey, and he distributes his wealth to three servants.

The Bible says he gives them talents.

Now, when we hear the word talent, we naturally think of a God-given ability.

Some talent, some gift that we have, maybe a spiritual gift.

It might be something like athletic ability or artistic ability.

And it's interesting because the meaning of the word talent having to do with God-given abilities did not exist until this story.

It's this parable that that meaning originates with.

So before Jesus told this, no one ever thought about a talent as this God-given ability that we have.

That meaning has happened slowly over time and it originated with this story.

Jesus' followers would have understood a talent as an amount of money.

In the Roman Empire, a talent was this method they would use to measure things, and it was equal to the amount of volume you could store in this vase called an amphora.

Most of us don't do a lot of vase trading anymore.

It's a lost art, I guess.

And so we don't really have a point of reference.

We don't have any context to understand how much that is.

And so other translations will change talent to something else.

One of them we'll see in some translations is bags of gold.

I think it's really important that we get a clear mental picture of what's going on here, of this exchange between the master and his servant.

So we're going to look at it in a different translation where it talks about bags of gold.

It's Matthew 25, 14 through 18.

We'll read a little further.

It says, again, it, talking about the kingdom of heaven, will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them.

To one he gave five bags of gold, to another, two bags, and to another one bag, each according to his ability.

Then he went on his journey.

The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more.

So also the one with the bags, the two bags of gold gained two more, but the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground, and hid his master's money.

Now, if we stop there, we might be curious about what's going on.

If you've never heard this story, we may not know what this servant is up to.

A few weeks ago, Steve talks about the parable of the pearl of great price.

And in that story, this man finds a pearl of incredible value.

So he takes it, finds a field, and buries it in the ground, and then goes and buys that field.

And he does that because in Jewish law, if you bought a field, anything you found on it belonged to you legally.

No one could ask questions.

You can say, hey, I found this in the field I bought.

That makes it mine.

And so we might think something like that is going on here.

This man is taking his master's wealth, he's digging a hole in the ground.

Is he trying to steal it?

Is he trying to take it?

Is this a situation like what we saw with the shrewd manager where he's trying to be dishonest with his master's money for his own personal gain?

Let's read further and find out.

In verses 19 through 30, it says, After a long time, the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them.

The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five.

Master, he said, You entrusted me with five bags of gold.

See, I've gained five more.

His master replied, Well done, good and faithful servant.

You have been faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things.

Come and share your master's happiness.

Then the man with two bags of gold also came.

Master, he said, You entrusted me with two bags of gold.

See, I have gained two more.

The master replied, Well done, good and faithful servant.

You have been faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things.

Come and share your master's happiness.

And then the man who had received one bag of gold came.

Master, he said, I knew that you're a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown, and gathering where you have not scattered seed.

So I was afraid, and I went out and hid your gold in the ground.

See, here is what belongs to you.

His master replied, You wicked, lazy servant.

So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed.

Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the banker so that when I returned, I would have received it back with interest.

So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags.

For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance.

Whoever does not have, even what they have, will be taken from them.

Throw that worthless servant outside into the darkness, for there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Well, that got pretty intense.

Ron Burgundy would say that escalated quickly.

That's what he would say.

Few people got that.

So this is a great day for the five-talent servant, and a great day for the two-talent servant.

They got to become eleven talent servants for one, because he got the five and then the one from the other, and then the other one became a four-talent servant.

They got promoted, they got to share in their master's happiness, they got favor with their master.

It is not such a good day for the one-talent servant.

He makes this heartfelt excuse about believing that his master is a terrible person and therefore not doing anything.

And this is not the focus of our message, but if you ever find yourself in a bad position with your boss, leading with the whole, you know how you're a horrible human being?

Okay, so it doesn't tend to win you much favor.

It doesn't work here either.

Even if we're tempted to do that.

The master is furious.

If you read the master's reaction to this, not knowing what had happened with the money, you would think that this servant lost the money.

You would think that he had invested it poorly, or tried to steal it, or spent it on himself.

That's how angry this master is, but that's not what happened.

We know that.

He didn't steal it, he didn't try to use it for himself, he didn't invest it foolishly, he just didn't do anything at all.

He did nothing.

And it was that that total lack of initiative that infuriated the master.

Now it's really easy to read this and to feel bad for the one talent servant.

You know, the other servants got more.

One got five talents, the other got two.

I mean, it was just one talent, it's just one bag of gold.

What was he supposed to do?

Maybe if he had more, he would have been able to do something worthwhile.

It almost seems like he was uh set up to fail.

You can see the excuses just going through his mind.

It's really easy to look at this story and feel feel bad for him.

Well, the reason for that is really simple.

We do not understand the value of a talent because we're not first-century Roman citizens.

And even when we read the other translation that says bags of gold, that's deceptive too.

Because not all bags are created equal.

Just out of curiosity, how many of us, when we were reading that, pictured like a jewelry-sized pouch?

You know, picture the master grabbing a bag with one hand and handing it to his servants.

How many of us pictured something along those lines?

Something small?

Yeah, most of us, I would assume.

I'm doubting most of us have a lot of experience with bags of gold.

If you do, congratulations.

That is awesome.

But we don't really have experience with that.

So, I mean, at least for me, I naturally pictured him grabbing a bag, something between the size of a little jewelry bag, maybe a lunch bag or something like that.

But that's what I'm picturing.

Here's your bag of gold.

Here's your next bag of gold.

But like I said, not all bags are created equal.

I learned that lesson with experience when I was in high school.

I played basketball in high school, and our coach gave all of us on the team these blue Nike duffel bags.

These were for when we would travel and go out of town and play in tournaments and stuff like that.

Our coach wanted us all to look the same, and we had these warmups that we would wear, and we had these small blue Nike duffel bags.

Well, somehow throughout the course of that year, I lost mine.

And it's weird because I look back, it's a long time ago.

I don't remember all the details.

I don't think I lost the contents of the bag.

I just lost the bag.

I don't know how you can do that.

Except to say that I have a gift for losing things.

And my wife will tell you, it's true, I have a gift.

It's a rare gift.

I can lose anything.

And I lost this bag and I panicked because I knew my coach was gonna give me a hard time about that.

If I showed up at our next game with a different bag, I was gonna have to run.

He was gonna rag on me a little bit.

I was one of the team captains, so he liked to be a little harder on us.

And I'm like, I've gotta find this bag.

I looked everywhere, I could not find it.

I eventually went to my mom and I said, Mom, we've got to find a bag that's an exact match of this.

I'm pretty sure Nike made more than the 12 that are on our team.

We've got to find this bag.

And so my mom took it upon herself.

She's awesome.

She went and searched and she found the bag.

She called me, let me know, Justin, I've got the bag, and I'm excited.

I go home, I see it, and I'm even more excited.

It is the bag.

It is the exact same color blue, it has the same strap.

The big giant Nike logo is in the same exact spot.

I'm thinking, I'm off the hook.

No one's ever gonna know.

Well, like I said, not all bags are created equal.

And the bag that my coach gave us, you know, it was enough to fit a towel, a pair of shoes, a change of clothes, maybe something more.

And something you would take on a one-night trip, not something you would use to pack for three or four days.

And the thing about bags, I actually have the bag, I brought it with me, I've kept it all these years.

The thing about bags is you never really know how big they are until you start to stuff them.

When it's sitting there empty, its size is a little deceiving.

So I start to stuff this bag for a trip that we have coming up.

And this is the bag.

As a speaker, that's probably not important.

Hold on, I'll just.

There we go.

Back to where I was.

Yeah, this is the bag.

Right here.

I'll come into light.

A more flexible version of myself could fit in this bag.

At least in high school, in at least high school.

Um, I started to fill this bag up when I go to my mom panicked, and she's looking at me going, Well, do you do you think they'll really notice?

And I'm like, mom.

I mean, we're supposed to be walking up and down the aisles of a school bus with this.

They're gonna notice.

So I showed up with this bag, and everybody noticed, everyone knew my bag really well, because if I was coming down the aisle, you better move.

You know, it's there was no way.

I was like, it was really awkward.

I had to lift it over my head sometimes.

This is the bag.

Not all bags are created equal.

A bag of Skittles and that monstrosity are not the same thing.

So the question now becomes: how big is a talent-sized bag of gold?

Well, here's some perspective.

I don't know if anyone knows what the going rate for an ounce of gold is right now, but I looked it up last night.

It is twelve hundred and eighty-five dollars.

If you have one ounce of gold, twelve hundred and eighty-five dollars.

That means a pound of gold is worth just over 20 grand.

Now, here's where our perspective on this story totally changes.

Because in the Roman Empire, a talent weighed 71 pounds.

So that means that the five-talent servant, the one that got five 71-pound bags of gold, received 356 pounds of gold, which is the equivalent in our economy today of 7.3 million dollars.

The two-talent servant, 142 pounds of gold,$2.9 million in today's economy.

And the the poor one-talent servant, the guy that just got one,$1.5 million.

A talent was worth 15 years of wages in the Roman Empire.

And this man did nothing.

Does anyone feel a little less sorry for the one talent servant?

I got online last night and I Googled how to invest a million dollars.

Just in case I ever find myself in the same position as the one talent servant.

I want to do it differently.

And the options are endless.

There were words used that I have heard.

I really don't understand them because none of the people that have ever given me financial advice have thought that these were appropriate for me.

Things like hedge funds, commodities, endless opportunities.

This man had$1.5 million.

He could have bought businesses.

He could have started a vineyard.

He could have bought real estate.

I mean, you name it, he could have done anything.

In fact, one of the articles that I looked up online began with this sentence.

It said, if you have one million to invest, you are in a position of strength that most people never reach.

And that's exactly where this man was.

He has$1.5 million worth in our economy to invest.

And he's given free reign.

He can invest at however he wants to.

Not only does he have a lot of money, he has a lot of time.

The master is gone for a very long time.

It gives us the impression that it's years of time.

He could have done anything.

It was enough money to just pick and choose how you want to invest it, and enough time for the other servants to double their master's income.

That doesn't happen overnight.

And despite having those resources, the resources we've been talking about the last two weeks, money and time, having those in abundance, he just doesn't do anything at all.

It's easier, I think, knowing that, to understand how angry this master got.

You get the impression that if he would have said, hey, I I had an investment that I thought was perfect, I just it just didn't work out.

I I tried, I invested it, it all it all got lost.

Everything went south.

You think his master would have been happier to hear that news than just to hear I dug a hole in the ground and I put$1.5 million in it.

But it's okay because I I found it all.

We don't know why the man dug the hole in the ground and hid the money.

His excuse about his master being this terrible person doesn't really fit because if that was the case, you would think that the five-talent and the two-talent servant would have been even more terrified.

But they just got right to work.

We can try to infer and try to guess what's going on, try to pull some experiences from our own life to try to fill in the blanks.

One of the things we can think of is that maybe he got so caught up in looking at what he didn't have, looking at the fact that the other servants had more, that he didn't value what he actually had, he didn't realize the value of what he had.

And it is really easy for all of us to fall into that trap, to lose sight of the value of the things we actually have because we're so focused on the things we wish we had or what we don't have.

We can do that with our money.

We can say, oh, if if I had more, if I had more money, I'd be generous.

If I had more money, I'd give.

And that's a hard thing because God's economy works the opposite.

Or we tend to think if I had more, I'd give more.

God says in Luke 6.38, give and you will receive.

Your gift will return to you in full, pressed down, shaken together to make room for more, running over, and poured into your lap.

The amount you give will determine the amount you get back.

So God says, no, no, it's the opposite.

Give and show me that you value what you have and see that it can actually be a value to other people besides you.

And if you do that, I'll trust you with more and I'll bless you with more.

Whatever God has given us financially, that might be our talent.

That might be the amount that God gives us in this opportunity.

To show him that we're ready for more.

Both of the other servants that took what they were giving and used it, he said, Well done, my good and faithful servant.

You've been faithful with a little.

And just as a side note, I think this is really interesting.

To this master, five talents was a little.

Because he gave one of them five talents, and he said, You've been faithful with a little, now you'll be trusted with more.

So if 7.3 million is a little to God, I can only imagine what more is.

But he says, You've been faithful with a little, I will now give you more.

That's how God works.

So if we find ourselves looking at our bank account dissatisfied and frustrated, you know, the answer might be for us to say, whatever I have, however many or however few zeros are at the end of that first number, that's my talent.

That's what God has given me.

That's what I have to manage, and I'm gonna make the most of it, and I'm gonna do it in a way that's gonna honor him so that he can look at me and say, You're ready for more.

We can do that with our time.

You know, the the servants in this story have no idea when their master is gonna come back.

But he gave them the perfect amount of time to do something great.

We talked about this last week.

We have no idea how much time we have on this earth.

We just don't know.

But whatever time we have, it's the time God has given us.

And it is the right amount of time to do something important, to do something good.

And so we can have that same approach, not valuing our time.

We can say, Oh, I just don't have time to do that.

I don't have time to help out, I don't have time to serve, I don't have time to spend with my family, I'm just too busy right now to spend that kind of time.

The hard thing about statements like I don't have time or I didn't have time is that they're very dangerous because they're rarely accurate.

When we really examine ourselves and when we're saying something like I don't have time, especially if it's for something really important, something really good, something we know that God would be for us doing.

At least for me, it's not too hard to find things I have spent time on that are far less important.

That's like a personal challenge for myself.

Benjamin Franklin said that if you want something done, ask a busy person.

If you want something done, ask a busy person.

I've seen that here at his hands so many times.

So many of you that I've got to know that help out are incredibly busy.

You have important jobs, you're high up in your jobs, executives and managers, and some of you own your own businesses, and yet a lot of the times it's it's those of you that I've noticed spend the most time serving and volunteering.

So we do have time.

And it's not just about serving here.

This isn't a plea for more volunteers.

You guys are awesome.

It's about giving time to whatever we see that's important, whatever God brings in front of us, whatever opportunities that we know are for his kingdom.

It might be here at the church, it might be in our community, it might be with our family, it might be at work, but wherever it is, we do have time.

We have whatever time God's given us, just like this servant had time.

Well, maybe the issue wasn't that he didn't value his time or his money or whatever it was.

Maybe it was that he was afraid to take a risk.

He was afraid to lose it.

You get a little bit of that from what he said at the beginning when he talked to his master.

He's afraid to have lost this money.

I think Jesus teaches us a really cool principle here in this story that the greatest risk is doing nothing.

In this life, there is actually nothing riskier than not doing anything at all.

You know, and it works that way in our jobs and our marriages.

If our marriage is struggling, the riskiest thing we can do is just not do anything.

It's actually more risky to do that than to have a fight and bring some of the stuff out in the open.

The riskiest thing is to do nothing.

I've talked to people before that are having a hard time with that, and I've suggested counseling and had them say, I just don't know if that'll work.

I don't want to go down that path and have it all fail.

And it's like if you do nothing, the same thing will happen.

The riskiest thing is doing nothing.

The world is full of people who have risked big and lost.

But it's also full of people who have risked big and won.

Life in a lot of ways is meant to be risked.

You have stories of that in our world today.

Fred Smith is the founder of FedEx.

And some of you may know the story because it's kind of a famous one.

But early in the FedEx days, before FedEx was the company we know now, Fred Smith did not have enough money to meet payroll.

He had about a fourth of what he needed to meet payroll that was upcoming, so he was looking at the company going bankrupt.

So he took every dollar that FedEx had, got on a plane to Vegas, and put it all on roulette.

Now please understand that I am not suggesting that you put it all on roulette.

You go and do that with your finances and you tell your wife or something like that, hey, well, Justin, he was Fred Smith.

You know?

No.

Sometimes are stupid, but even stupid risks pay off sometimes.

But he put it all in roulette and he lucked out because it landed on the right color and he had enough to make payroll, FedEx went on to become the FedEx that we know today.

And that might seem like a stupid risk, but you know what?

If he had done nothing, the same thing would have happened as if he had lost that game of roulette.

The company would have gone under.

Doing nothing would have been just as risky.

James Dyson.

We all know James Dyson because he invented those, you know, those vacuum cleaners that make you feel terrible about the vacuum cleaner you own?

He's got the British accent, and you're like, oh, my vacuum doesn't have Cyclone technology, I guess.

I need one of them.

How much do they cost?

Wow.

Um that's Fred Dyson, or James Dyson rather.

James Dyson spent over$4 million, went into incredible amounts of debt, and had to go through 5,000 prototypes of his original vacuum design before he got one to work right.

He risked everything.

He had three mortgages against his house, was in$4 million of debt, but when the first Dyson hit the market, it only took him four months to pay off those loans because it became such a huge success.

Again, that might not be the wisest financial path to that, but the point is this: if you don't do anything, it is just as risky as doing something like that.

Doing nothing is the riskiest thing we can do in our lives.

We're called to be people of action because that's who Jesus is.

No one risked more than Jesus.

He risked everything.

He risked everything.

When you see Jesus rise from the dead and then give that great commission that we read earlier to his disciples, I mean, they're fresh off the heels of their greatest failure ever.

They've abandoned him in his darkest hour.

And then he's like, hey, I'm leaving, and by the way, it's all in your hands.

And if you were someone just looking from the outside in, you'd be like, Jesus, are you sure?

I mean, it seems a little bit like a game of roulette.

It's 50-50 odds at best, but these guys do not seem like they're ready for this responsibility.

Jesus risked everything.

Religion likes to take away all the risky, crazy things that Jesus did and leave us with this very, very nice, kind, respectable person.

But Jesus risked everything.

You know, the aim of religion is for us to be able to rattle off all the things we don't do.

To live a really religious life means to one day be able to say, I didn't do this and I didn't do that, and I never did that, and I never did that.

But the question we see in the word is, what have you done?

Jesus was a man of action.

And so, as his followers, we're also called to be people of action, to risk some things.

Teddy Roosevelt has a really famous quote.

He said, It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

In other words, do something.

Be a person of action.

Because God tells us that if we're faithful with what we have, with our time, with our money, with our talent, with our families, our relationships, everything, he will bless us with more.

If the worship team wants to come up, we'll wrap up.

Jesus said something really amazing a lot.

This is one of my favorite, my favorite statements that Jesus ever made, and it's really perplexing at first read.

It's in Mark chapter 8.

Mark 8 · chapter mention

He said, If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it.

But if you give up your life for my sake and for the sake of the good news, you will save it.

I read a quote on that verse in a book by a man named William Barclay a few years ago, and I underlined it.

I've probably read it about ten times in the last two years because it impacted me greatly.

And here's what he said about it.

He said, There are certain things which are lost by being kept and saved by being used.

In other words, there are certain things that if we do nothing, they go away.

That's what this man in this parable experienced.

He did nothing and he lost what he had.

But there are things that are saved by being used.

God gave us life to spend and not to keep.

If we live carefully, always thinking first of our own profit, ease, comfort, and security, if our sole aim is to make life as long and as trouble-free as possible.

If we will make no effort except for ourselves, we are losing life all the time.

But if we spend life for others, if we forget health and time and wealth and comfort and our desire to do something for Jesus and for those for whom Jesus died, we are winning life all the time.

The very essence of life is in risking life and spending life, not in saving it and hoarding it.

It is better any day to burn out than to rust out.

So the opportunity all of us have is to be people of action.

I don't want to go through and give you a bunch of suggestions on exactly what to do, because that'll just take time away from the time you could be doing it.

But all I want to finish on is this if each of us looked at our life and looked at one thing that we undervalue.

It's so easy to do that.

It could be our jobs.

You know, years ago we got this job, we were blessed and excited to have it, but it has all these negatives, and now we're looking at it, and all we can see is the bad stuff, and we complain about it and we're frustrated by it constantly.

It could be that we need a new job, it could be that we need to value that job and see it for that talent that it is, that thing God has given us to work with, and know that if we do it right and value it and be a person of action at it, he'll either bless us with a new job or promote us, he will give us more.

Maybe it's our marriage.

So many of us know what it's like.

You get married, and at first the person is wonderful, they're the answer to every dream you've ever had, but people aren't perfect.

And over time, we can we can get to where we focus on all the negatives about our spouse and eventually feel like we're not in love anymore, like we'd be happier somewhere else.

Because we're so focused on all the all the negatives.

We've forgotten how to value the person that we love.

And if we would step back and see the value in this person that God has given us, this is the person that He's blessed us with.

It's a talent.

He's given us this to manage, to use rightly.

If we treat our marriage that way, He will bless it.

He will.

And we can do that with our kids, we can do that with our family, our friends.

Everything we have, every possession, every ability, every gift, every dollar, every minute.

If we value it like that, and we we say, I'm a person of action, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do something.

It doesn't even matter what we do, as long as we're doing something, we're we're headed in the right direction.

God will bless it.

So we can't be fearful of doing something wrong, and we can't afford to not do anything.

But if we value what we have and do something, God will bless us.

We will show Him that we are ready for more.

We just need to remember sometimes that whatever we have might just be a big bag of gold.

And thank him for it.

Let's let's pray.

Jesus, thank you for giving us everything that you have.

Even if we feel like we need more, if we feel like there are things lacking in our lives, help us focus on what we do have and realize the value in it.

Help us be like the five-talent servant and the two-talent servant to realize that we've been given something incredibly valuable, more valuable than we realize.

And help us just act, be people of action, do something, show you that we're ready for more.

God, we love you.

And we thank you, first of all, that you gave us everything.

Thank you that you value us like you do.

You value us so much more than we value ourselves most of the time.

Just pray that you bless all of our weeks, give us great time with our family.

Bless us in our jobs, in our homes, and our finances, in every area, so we can just turn around and be a blessing to others and to you.

And we pray all this in your name, Jesus.

Amen.