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Title: Don’t Bury Your Talent
Theme:Using our God-given gifts – Proper 28 (33)
Object: A Frisbee
Scripture:For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. Matthew 25:29 (NIV)
As I am sure you know, this is a Frisbee. In a few minutes, this Frisbee will help us to learn more about what God expects from you and me, but first, a word from God’s Word.
This morning, our Bible story is a familiar story that Jesus told. It is called the Parable of the Talents. In the Parable of the Talents, a very wealthy man was going to go on a trip. He called his three servants together and told them that he would be gone for a long time and that he was leaving them in charge of all of his wealth. He divided up his wealth and gave it to the three servants.
To the first servant, he gave five talents. Now, that might not sound like much to you, but in Jesus’ day, that was a lot of money. To the second servant, he gave two talents. Not as much as the first servant received, but still a large sum of money. To the third servant, he gave one talent. Even one talent was worth quite a lot!
The first servant took the five talents his master had given him and put it to work and earned five more talents. The second also invested his two talents wisely and earned two more talents. The third servant took his one talent and buried it in the ground for safe keeping.
When the master returned, he was very pleased when the first two servants told him that they had doubled his money. “Well done,” he said. “Because you had been faithful with what I have given you, I will give you much more.”
“How about you?” he asked the third servant. “What did you do with the money that I left with you?”
The third servant said to the master, “I knew that you were a hard man and I was afraid, so I went out and hid your treasure in the ground so that it would be safe. See, here it is.”
The master was angry. “You are a wicked and lazy servant. You could have at least put my money in the bank where it would earn more.” He then took the one talent from the lazy servant and gave it to the one who had ten talents.
In this Parable of the Talents, God is the Master and you and I are his servants. The talents that the master gave to his servants in this story was a form of money. But God has given us talents too, hasn’t he? God created each of us with special gifts and he expects us to use those gifts for the purpose for which he gave them to us.
You all know what this is, it is a Frisbee, but pretend for a moment that you do not know what it is and that you have never seen one before. You might think it was a dinner plate… or a hat… or perhaps a tool for digging in the sand. It could be just about anything, but it isn’t. It is a Frisbee and the person who created the Frisbee created it for a purpose. The purpose of a Frisbee is to fly!
The Frisbee isn’t very impressive to look at, is it? In a world full of high-tech electronic toys, it is pretty low on the totem pole. But boy, can it fly!
Sometimes you and I may look at the talents that God has given to others and think that God hasn’t given us very much talent. We might even be tempted to hide our talent. But when we use our God-given talent to be all that God intended for us to be… boy, can we fly!
Dear Father, help us to use the talents that you have given us to be what you intended for us to be. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen. |
