This week, as you’ll gather near the end, I’m preaching at another church in my circuit – not one of ‘my’ churches. To that end, longstanding readers may recognise the reappearance of one or two stories I have used in the past.
The word ‘faith’ does a lot of heavy lifting in Christianity. It has a number of meanings. They include:
- ‘Saving faith’, which is the faith by which we come to believe in Jesus Christ and receive salvation
- ‘The faith’, which is the central set of doctrines we believe to be true
- ‘The gift of faith’, where we have special faith to trust that God will do something exceptional
- ‘Living by faith’ whereby we trust God with the direction of our lives and that he will provide all we need.
So if I say this morning that I want to preach about faith, I want to be clear what I mean. I am not going to talk about ‘saving faith’: I am going to assume that we are a group of people who have repented of our sins and trusted in Jesus Christ and his death on the Cross for our salvation.
Nor am I going to talk about ‘the faith’, in the sense of talking about essential Christian doctrines.
I am going to talk about ‘living by faith’, which at times also requires us to exercise ‘the gift of faith.’
For this is what I see as central to the Parable of the Bags of Gold, or the Parable of the Talents, as it is more commonly known. I think ‘bags of gold’ is better, because it gets us around the confusion caused by different Hebrew and English understandings of the word ‘talents.’
We have three main characters or groups of characters in the parable. The master stands for the Lord. Then we have the faithful servants, including both those who received five bags of gold and those who received two bags of gold. Finally, we have the unfaithful servant.
This boils down to my wanting to make two points about living by faith from the parable. Firstly, we’ll consider the challenge to us from the example of the faithful servants. Then secondly, we’ll examine the warning that arises from the unfaithful servant.
Firstly, then, the challenge of the faithful servants:
These servants take what is entrusted to them, double what they have, and when the master returns there is a note of joy. The servants are pleased to report the outcome to the master, and each time the master replies,
“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!”
Surely investing the money, or whatever they did with it, was a risk? Could it not have gone wrong? Think of those adverts we see for financial products where the small print includes the statutory warning that the value of investments can go down as well as up. Were they not taking a chance?
It was the late John Wimber who said that the word ‘faith’ was spelt R-I-S-K. But the faithful servants had heard their master’s instruction, and acted, despite the risk. That was living by faith in the master. It was rewarded, first in the outcome, and then at the final reckoning when the master granted them even greater responsibility and a share in his joy.
Living by faith is to hear our Lord speak to us and show us a way forward, and respond positively to it. What God tells us to do may seem unlikely, but living by faith acts, because God has spoken, and we entrust the outcome to him.
Note that faith doesn’t involve inventing some barmy scheme and running with it: the initial step is to hear the voice of the Lord. It assumes we are listening to God and are willing to do his will.
There are many stories I could tell to illustrate this. If I had more time, I would tell you the lengthy story about how God provided the money for me to go to a theological college and explore his call on my life, before I concluded it was to ordained ministry. It’s really quite dramatic and involves thousands and thousands of pounds.
But let me instead tell you about something that happened during my first appointment in the ministry. I became involved with some laypeople from several churches in the town in helping to run some monthly youth worship events. We began taking over regular evening services. Then, we wanted to do something more attuned to the teenagers, and we used an empty shop. But we got too big for that, and one of the churches allowed us to use their hall, which could accommodate more than the pews in their sanctuary could.
However, even that became too cramped. We realised there was only one venue in this small town which would be big enough to take the numbers. It was the local night club.
One of our team was a local businessman, and he knew the owner of the night club. This man was willing to rent out the club to us for one Sunday evening a month. He was also willing for his bar staff only to serve non-alcoholic drinks on those evenings. There was just one problem: the fee he needed to charge us was beyond our budget.
We met as a team to discuss this. We believed God was in this. We also observed how at every stage of expansion, God had stretched us beyond what we had previously believed. It looked like he was doing the same again.
And so, in an act of faith, we said yes to the night club owner’s offer.
After we did so, another local Christian businessman came forward with the funds for us to meet the hiring costs of the night club.
We filled that place, month after month, with teenagers worshipping God in a way relevant to them. And because it wasn’t in a church, they had something they could talk about more easily with their schoolfriends on Monday morning.
‘What did you do at the weekend?’
‘I went to the night club.’
‘What was on there?’
And this meant they could sometimes invite their friends to hear our band, experience worship, and hear the Gospel. Would that have happened if we had said no to the night club owner’s offer?
Secondly, the warning of the unfaithful servant:
Long ago, I was taught a very helpful principle for understanding the parables of Jesus: look for the shock in the story.
I suggest that the shock in this parable is in the way the unfaithful servant depicts the master, and in how the master treats the unfaithful servant. For here is a hard man. It’s as shocking as the parable in Luke’s Gospel about the widow and the unjust judge. God is not an unjust judge!
And neither is he a hard man. But the point here is that the unfaithful servant has not acted in faith, following the trust that the master put in him. In fact, he couldn’t be bothered. By doing nothing, he is condemned as wicked and lazy.
What has happened? He has been motivated not by faith but by fear. He is too afraid to take the R-I-S-K of faith.
I wonder whether that is uncomfortably like us in the church today. We would rather play it safe. The culture of our society doesn’t help. We have to undertake risk assessments, because we mustn’t take certain risks. Charity law pushes us in the direction of cautious financial decisions.
At heart, those policies are about preventing us from being rash, negligent, and irresponsible, but perhaps we end up not only avoiding foolish risks but also walking away from the risks we should take in faith.
If I’m honest, this sometimes appeals to me. By nature, I’m a cautious person. I take my time to make my best decisions. I want to be sure before I act.
But we can’t always do that. And if God has spoken to us, then it’s incumbent upon us to step out in faith. The unfaithful servant didn’t. Neither do we sometimes.
One of my former churches was pondering its future, and we engaged the services of a Christian architect. It was important that the architect be a Christian, so that he understood the mission and ministry of a church from the inside.
After a lot of research and interviews, he came one Sunday morning, sat in the service, and then made his presentation afterwards. He described the opportunities we had where we were located. He talked about the problems we would have meeting them with the building we had. He showed us images of a remodelled church building that could be a great centre for worship and mission in our community. People were excited.
Then he revealed the cost.
And at that point, I felt the air sucked out of the room.
Everyone panicked and said ‘no’ to the proposal. They couldn’t raise that sum of money.
But nobody asked whether this was God speaking to us.
In telling you this story, I’m not even necessarily saying that God was definitely speaking to that church. But in their fear, no-one was willing to consider the possibility. Like the unfaithful servant, they buried their bag of gold. I believe that church began to die at that moment.
They were, in the main, lovely people. But we’re called to be more than just nice people in the church. We’re called to be people of faith. However, when the challenge came, they didn’t rise to it. And you know what? The books stopped balancing. Their bag of gold was taken and given elsewhere.
Conclusion
I know very little about the challenges your church is facing. I hear odd snippets occasionally from your minister at circuit staff meetings, but I couldn’t tell you what the key issues here were. Still less do I know about challenges of faith that individuals among you may be encountering.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I don’t know where God may be challenging you to take the R-I-S-K of stepping out in faith.
But what I do know is this. It’s vital that we listen for the voice of the Lord, and when we hear it, to step out in faith with him. That is the way to the joy of the Lord.
The alternative, of choosing fear and pulling back from living by faith, leads only to the desolation of eternal regret, to ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
What will we do with the bags of gold our master Jesus has given to us?
What Do You Think?