God's Glory Church

Last time we started talking about how God has placed special gifts and talents in you and me, and also about how the best endeavors always require preparation on our part. Therefore, I would like to continue the topic I started and understand more about what the Lord has given us and how to handle these gifts – this is the parable that we will look at today:

“For [He will act] like a man who, going to a foreign country, called his servants and entrusted them with his property: and to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his strength; and immediately he departed…”(Matthew 25:14-30)

This parable, like the previous one, contains a specific lesson for those who heard it then, but also several lessons for us today. It is known as the Parable of the Talents. Talent was a monetary unit, not a coin, but a weight, and accordingly its value depended on whether it was gold, silver or copper. Most often, it was silver.

In the original version of the parable, all attention was undoubtedly focused on the lazy slave.

There is no doubt that it symbolizes the scribes and Pharisees and their attitude towards the law and truth of God. The lazy slave buried his talent in the ground, so that later he could hand it over to his master in exactly the same form. The whole purpose of the scribes and Pharisees was to keep the law exactly as it was. In their own words, they were “looking for opportunities to build a fence around the law.” Any change, any improvement, anything new was a curse for them. All this led to stagnation and impotence of religious life.

Like a man with one talent, they wanted to keep everything as it was and for this they were condemned. In this parable, Jesus tells us that there can be no faith without striving for new things, and that God cannot receive any benefit from someone who has shut himself off from everything.

The mention of merchants in v. 27 suggests that if we do not know how to use what we have for the Lord, then we should give it to others who do. The marketers in this case could be your group or church ministry leader, missionaries, evangelists, Bible societies, Christian publishing houses, evangelistic television and radio programs, etc. In a world like ours, there is no excuse why our talents are not put to use.

The worthless slave was thrown out, expelled from the Kingdom. He shared the painful fate of sinners. It was not his failure to invest his talent that brought him into condemnation, but rather his lack of good works showed that he lacked saving faith. But there is much more to this parable.

1. God gives people various gifts and talentss. One person receives five talents, another two, and a third one. It’s not a person’s talent that matters, it’s how he uses it that matters. God never demands from a person what he does not have, but He does require that a person make full use of the abilities he does have. People’s talents are not the same, but in their zeal, in the efforts they make, they can be equal. The parable tells us that no matter what talent we have, whether small or great, we must use it to serve God.

2. The reward for diligent work is even more work. Two slaves who had done their job well were not told to rest on their laurels. They were given even greater tasks and responsibilities in the affairs of their master.

3. The person who does not want to try will be punished. The man with one talent did not lose his money – he simply did nothing. It would be even better if he tried to do something with them and lost them than to do nothing. A person who has only one talent is always tempted to say: “I have such a small talent and I can do so little with it. There’s no point in even trying for what I can do.” Condemned is the person who, having even one talent, does not bother to use it and does not risk it for the common good.

4. He who has will be given more, and he who does not have will lose even what he has. The meaning of this rule is this: if a person has talent and uses it, he will be able to do more and more all the time. But if he has a talent and fails to use it, he will inevitably lose it. If we have the ability to play or to some kind of art, if we have a talent in something, the more we practice this ability, the more we work, the more difficult tasks we will be able to overcome. Conversely, if we don’t use them, we will lose them. This is equally true for playing football and playing the piano, for singing songs and preparing sermons, for carving wood and creating new ideas. Christ teaches us that there is only one way to preserve the gift – to use it in the Service of God and people!