Talent

FROM SUCCESS TO SIGNIFICANCE
TALENT
DR. JIM DIXON
MATTHEW 25:14-30
NOVEMBER 19, 2006

Numismatics is the study of coins, the collecting of coins. A numismatist is a coin collector. When I was a very young boy, my brothers and I were numismatics. We were coin collectors. We had those little blue books some of you might remember, and they had slots for coins. We collected American coins and so we had a blue book that was for dimes with the appropriate slots, a blue book for nickels, a blue book for quarters, half-dollars, and silver dollars. We had all the blue books.

A few years ago, I was rummaging through the basement, and I came upon all of my blue books in a stack and I was excited. I took them out to see what I had and as I opened each blue book, there was nothing in them. They were completely empty. Apparently, I didn’t really collect coins. I collected coin books. Or perhaps what I did was take all the money out of the books because there was something I really wanted to buy. I don’t remember, but I do know this: There’s not a coin collector in the world who has a coin called a talent. There’s not a coin collector in the world who has a coin called a talent because, you see, the biblical talent was not a coin. It was a unit of weight equal to approximately 80 pounds.

There are some scholars who think the talent might be equal in weight to 120 pounds. The problem is that there were Roman talents, Greek talents, Babylonian talents, and Hebrew talents and they all varied in terms of the unit of weight. In Israel, the talent was the highest monetary unit and generally equal to about 80 pounds weight. The value of a talent varied on whether you’re talking about a gold talent or a silver talent or a bronze or copper talent. Obviously 80 pounds of gold is worth more than 80 pounds of silver.

In the Bible in the Parable of the Talents, we’re probably talking about a silver talent because when a talent is not further defined, it normally refers to a silver talent. A silver talent had great value. It’s hard for us to even comprehend or even imagine today. In your NIV Bible, in the margin, it says that the talent was equal to approximately $1,000. You can’t find a dumber comment in any margin of any translation of the Bible. The new RSV is far closer to the mark, far closer to the truth, when it has a footnote which says that the silver talent was equal to approximately 15 years’ wages. So, to understand this, you have to understand that the silver talent was the equal of 3,000 Hebrew shekels. It was the equal of 6,000 denarii if it was a Roman talent translated to Roman denarii, and equal to 12,000 denarii if it was a Hebrew talent translated to Roman denary—6 to 12 thousand denarii to one talent. To understand that you’ve got to understand that throughout the Roman Empire and throughout Israel a day laborer at the end of the day was given one denarius. That was a day’s wage for a day laborer, one denarius. If a talent is equal to 6,000 to 12,000 denarii, that would mean that a talent was equal to 20 years’ to 40 years; wages for an average day laborer. We’re talking about a lot of value here.

In the Parable of the Talents, Jesus tells us that the master entrusted to his servants five talents, two talents, and one talent to each according to his ability. The Parable of the Talents is not simply about money. If it were simply about money, then I would be dealing with it next week when we’re talking about treasure instead of this week when we’re talking about talent and ability. The parable has everything to do with talents in the sense of abilities. These talents were given to each according to their abilities. In fact, philologists—linguists, those who study words—would tell us that the English word talent actually comes from the Parable of the Talents because the understanding was that the talents in the parable were not simply literal money but they were metaphors for a broader use. Anything that God has entrusted to you, anything that God has entrusted to us, we may think of as a talent. Our talents vary. Our abilities vary. So today we’re looking at moving from success to significance and we want to see what significance means in the context of our varying talents and abilities.

I have two teachings this morning and the first teaching is this: Significance is not about ability but availability. In the sight of God, biblically, your significance is not about your ability but it’s about your availability.

Of course, everything is different in the world. In this world, in this culture, it’s not about availability. It’s about ability. We live in a world that almost worships ability. Tonight at 6:15 the Denver Broncos are going to play the San Diego Chargers. They’re going to play on NBC. The game was scheduled for this afternoon at 2:15 on CBS. And so what happened? Well, you see, NBC, which broadcasts Sunday night football, which is kind of the new primetime deal, bigger than Monday night football… John Madden has moved from Monday to Sunday night… NBC, which broadcasts Sunday night football, has a contract with the NFL which gives them power to pick the best game of the weekend and they can move a game, even robbing a game from CBS, and they can move it into that primetime slot. They picked the Bronco/Chargers game because they think it’s the best game of the week. What’s it about? It’s all about ability. Denver and San Diego are both 7 to 2. They co-lead the AFC West. They’re considered the most able teams.

Detroit plays Arizona today and they’re available. Detroit plays Arizona. They could play tonight. They’d like to play in primetime but nobody in Detroit or Arizona wants to see them play. Buffalo plays Houston today and they’re available. The Buffalo/Houston game is available for primetime tonight but they’re lousy teams. They don’t have the abilities of the Chargers and the Broncos. We live in a world that’s all about ability. It’s not about availability and it’s that way in the corporate world. When employers hire employees, they’re not just looking for availability. They’re looking for ability. That’s how it is in the workplace.

Even in the church of Jesus Christ it is true that we deal with these realities. Even here at this church, we don’t just look for availability. We look for abilities. We hire people with particular abilities. This is the reality of life, but we shouldn’t confuse this with significance in the sight of God because, you see, in the sight of God it’s not really about ability. It’s about availability. In the sight of God, significance has to do with availability. We all differ in our abilities. God knows that, but God’s looking for availability.

You look at the Parable of the Talents and you see the man with the least ability was given one talent because he was the least able. He went and he dug in the earth and he buried the talent. Perhaps he was afraid. He said he was afraid—too afraid to be available for the master’s service, too afraid to make his abilities and gifts useful—so he buried the talent. Perhaps he was just lazy. The master said he was slothful so maybe he was just too lazy to be available, to make his abilities available to the master’s use. Of course, the master also said that this man was wicked. Perhaps this servant really didn’t care about the domain of the master. Maybe he only cared about himself. Maybe he just was trying to protect himself, but he didn’t care about the master—the master’s empire, the master’s domain, the master’s profits—so he wasn’t available to the master.

You look at the other two, the one who received the two talents and the one who received the five talents. Their gifts varied, but they were equally pleasing to the master because they were available. The one who received the five talents made five talents more. The one who received the two talents made two talents more. One had ten talents and one had four talents. It didn’t matter. The master was equally pleased and so to both the master said, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You’ve been faithful over little. I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.” They were both available, willing to take their differing gifts and abilities and use them. So how about you? Are you available? Are we available to the Master and to His service?

You look at the Parable of the Good Samaritan and it’s really all about availability, not about ability. Why did Jesus call the Good Samaritan good? Just because he was available. We don’t know whether he was talented. We don’t know how able he was, but he was available, willing to take whatever abilities he had and help a wounded man. He was available. Of course, the problem with the priest and the Levite is that they weren’t available. They might have been very talented. They might have had a lot of abilities. They might have been more talented than the Good Samaritan, but they weren’t available. They just walked right on by.

So, are you available? Are you available to teach Sunday school? Are you available to sing in the choir? Are you available to tutor a child? Are you available to help Valor High School or Colorado Christian University or Young Life or Youth for Christ or anything that belongs to the Master? Are you available? Are you willing to take whatever abilities you DO have and just make them available? Because that’s what significance is in the sight of the Master. That’s significance in the sight of the Christ. And understand that this Parable of the Talents was told by Jesus during His Olivet Discourse, His sermon given on top of the Mount of Olives, and it was an eschatological sermon. It was a sermon dealing with the last things and it was dealing with the final judgement. Jesus wants us to understand when the day is done, when the Master comes back, this is what He’s looking for. This is what’s significant in His sight. Are you available to serve Him?

I think most of you have been baptized. Certainly, if you’re a Christian you’ve probably been baptized. If you’re a Christian and you haven’t been baptized, you need to be baptized in obedience to the scriptures. What does baptism mean? What does it represent? What does it mean to you? What do you think of when you think of baptism? Do you think of forgiveness of sins and the washing of regeneration? Certainly, baptism symbolizes purification from sins. Or maybe when you think of baptism you think of salvation, new life. Certainly, this is part of the symbol of baptism. Maybe when you think of baptism you think of death and resurrection. As you go under the water, the Bible says you are dying to self. As you come out of the water, you’re rising to Christ. You should also think, when you think about baptism, about ownership. That’s what the early church believed and that’s what the Bible tells us. When you think of baptism you need to think of ownership so that when you go under the water you’re saying, “Everything under the water belongs to Christ now.” That’s why you want to go completely under because everything that goes under the water belongs to Christ.

Of course, you know the stories of Charlemagne, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, so crowned in the year 800 AD by the Pope, Leo III. He drove opposing armies into the sea, into lakes and into rivers and forced barbarians to receive Christian baptism. What did those opposing armies do? Some historians tell us they didn’t go completely under the water. They held their fighting arms out. They held their battle axes out. They held their swords out. They didn’t want to surrender everything to Christ.

Similar stories are told about Frederick Barbarossa, another Holy Roman Emperor in the 12th century. How about you? Do you hold back? Have you held anything back? Is anything not available or is it all available to Christ? Is it all available to His church? Is it all available to His cause? Is it all available to His kingdom? This is significance in the sight of God.

A second and final teaching this morning concerning significance is this: Significance is not primarily about your personal growth. Significance is primarily about the growth of the kingdom of Christ. We need to understand this. It is desperately important and it’s very contrary to what the world tells you. Significance is not primarily about your personal growth. Your personal growth is important. I’m not knocking that. I think God cares about your personal growth and my personal growth and I think that’s part of spiritual formation, but significance is not as much about your personal growth as it is the growth of the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

In the year 1964, Hollywood made a movie called “My Fair Lady.” It debuted at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, California, and I was there. I was 18 years old. The movie starred Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. It was a great movie. It won eight Academy Awards including the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture that year. Of course, “My Fair Lady” was the story of a cockney impoverished London bag lady who seemingly was destined for insignificance. She was kind of adopted, mentored, and tutored by a British Professor of Phonetics and she was transformed. She was transformed and she reached unbelievable potentiality and she was passed off as British aristocracy.

It. was a fun story, and it was based loosely on George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion,” which was even based more loosely on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” If you were to read the scripts of Metamorphoses and Pygmalion and My Fair Lady you would see a lot of differences, but they would all have this in common: Human potential. This is the glory. Human potential. That’s what the world tells us. And certainly we do have potential and it’s important, I think, to cultivate potential in your life and in my life. Of course, our potentials vary.

I love the story about Casey Stengel. Casey Stengel was the Manager of the New York Yankees. He was asked by a newspaper reporter how much difference there really was between young players with regard to their potential. If they all worked hard, couldn’t they all succeed? Casey Stengel said, “You know, there’s a huge difference when it comes to potential. You see that young man over there? He’s 20 years old. Ten years from now, he has the potential to be a star.” He said, “Do you see that other young man over there? He’s also 20 years old and ten years from now he has the potential to be 30.” Obviously, that’s the kind of world we live in, isn’t it? We vary in abilities and we vary in potential. But understand that in the sight of God significance is mostly tied to this: Whether or not you’re using your abilities to help the kingdom of heaven reach its potential. It’s not about you reaching your potential so much as it’s about the kingdom of heaven reaching its potential.

You look at the Parable of the Talents and there’s no denying this. Everything belongs to the Master. You look at the three servants and the issue is not whether they became all that they could be. That’s not the issue in the parable at all. The issue is whether they are enhancing the domain of the Master, because it all belongs to the Master. When the Master comes back, have you enhanced His turf? Have you enhanced His kingdom? Have you done anything to serve Him, to increase the potential of His church and kingdom and world? Has His cause become your cause? Do you understand significance? It’s tied to whether or not you’re serving the potential of the kingdom of Heaven on earth.

In the year 2000, Barb and I went with some of you to Egypt. We took about a hundred of you with us. Some of you went with us down to Aswan Dam on the Nile. It was said to be 133 degrees when we were there. I don’t know how hot it was, but it felt like hell on earth. We went to Luxor to the Valley of the Kings and saw the Temple of Karnak and it was about 120 degrees when we were there. We went to Cairo and it was only 110 in Cairo, kind of refreshing. There in Cairo we went to Giza. Giza is a suburb of Cairo. There on the plains of Giza we saw the pyramids. There are 10 of them. There are three very large pyramids, wonderfully preserved, including the Great Pyramid. The Great Pyramid was the pyramid of Khufu, who the Greeks called Cheops.

Many of you have seen the Great Pyramid. I think all of you at least have seen a picture of the Great Pyramid. It rises 500 feet above the Plains of Giza. It’s equal to a 50-story building in height and yet it was built 4,500 years ago. The base of the Great Pyramid covers 13 acres. There is the king’s chamber and the queen’s chamber and the great gallery that is 163 feet long and 28 feet high leading to the king’s chamber. The pyramid itself consists of 2,300,000 blocks of stone, each stone weighing an average of 2.5 tons. Someone figured out that if you took all of the stone in the Great Pyramid and you used it to make blocks one foot square, you could make a contiguous line that would cover 2/3rds of the earth.

I don’t know why people figure out stuff like that, but I do know that there’s a great debate today, a great debate about who built the pyramids, the Great Pyramid. Who built them? Were they built by slave labor like all the old Hollywood movies would lead us to believe? Were they really built by slave labor? Some historians think no, that they were built by free men. They were built by citizens of the kingdom who were devoted to the cause and the glory of Egypt. Farmers even gave three to four months a year to build these great edifices because they wanted their kingdom to be great. The debate continues. Some say slaves. Some say citizens. Some say a combination of both. But I know this. I know that no kingdom in history can become great without the passion of its people. No kingdom can become great without its servants and citizens seeking its greatness.

This is true of the kingdom of heaven. This is true of the kingdom of heaven, which has invaded this world, has come into our world like a mustard seed. It’s destined to grow but its greatness is tied to you. Its greatness is tied to your passion to see it reach its potentiality. Jesus said, “I will build My church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” Are you committed to this? Is it your passion? Understand that this is eternally significant. Significance itself is tied to this and so we seek to serve this greater cause than ourselves. It’s not primarily about our potential but the kingdom’s potential.

Are your days lived accordingly? Do you actually think about this ever? Do you wake in the morning and ever think about the call of Christ? Do you wake in the morning and ever think about the kingdom of heaven? Do you wake in the morning and ever think about the church? Do you think about the parachurch? Do you think about anything that has to do with the cause of heaven on earth? Do you think daily about these things? Do you seek the growth of the cause of Christ? That’s significant.

Well, the movie Drumline is about the Atlanta A&T University Marching Band. It’s about beautiful music which cannot happen without teamwork unless there’s one band and one sound. Of course, in a band of varying abilities, whether you play the trumpet or the tuba, the talent level is not equal. Somebody plays the first trumpet, somebody second, somebody third. Same thing with the tuba. Same thing with every other instrument. The talents and abilities vary but it’s all about the team. One band. One sound. Great music.

The church of Jesus Christ is called to make a great sound. We’re supposed to create beautiful music. We vary in terms of abilities and talents but we’re to make them available and we’re to seek His cause on earth. It’s teamwork and it’s kind of one band, one sound. It’s what we’re called to. I know in a band maybe each section thinks they’re the most important part but really it all has to come together to create the beautiful music and that’s how it is at church. Teaching Sunday school is important but so is singing in the choir or leading a small group or helping people park in the parking lot. It all goes together to make beautiful music. That’s the call of Christ if we would find significance in His sight.

I think all of you have heard the word stewardship. You know something about the background of the word steward. The word steward etymologically comes from the old English. It come from the word “stigwearden.” “Wearden” in the old English meant “to guard,” and “stig” meant an enclosure, an enclosed area, a fenced area. So stigwearden was to guard an enclosure and everything within it. The word stigwearden eventually became stigwarden and “ward” meant “to guard” and of course “stig” still meant an enclosure. Then stigwarden became stigward, became styward, and styward, became steward. And that is the way it all evolved. But it has to do with guarding what is in an enclosure. That’s stewardship.

What’s in the enclosure doesn’t belong to the steward. It belongs to the master. Nothing within the fence belongs to the servant or to the steward. It all belongs to the master and the servants were evaluated on whether or not they were enhancing what was in the enclosure—not just protecting it and guarding it but enhancing it. Whether there are chickens within the enclosure or pigs or cattle, it’s meant to grow and be blessed. That’s what the master is looking for.

So, you see, I’m a steward and I have an enclosure. God has put stuff into it. It’s not about me. It’s not about my enhancement. It’s about the enhancement of what He’s entrusted in the enclosure. A church in a sense is a larger enclosure and we’re all stewards. It’s kind of in one big enclosure. We’re working together to enhance what belongs to the Master. We all have a part and we’ve all got to live for this. The church of Jesus Christ is going to be great.

You look at this passage in the Bible, a story in the Bible, as we close. It’s the story about the cursing of the fig tree. It’s a strange story. You find it in Matthew, chapter 21. You find it in Mark’s Gospel, the 12th chapter. You read about Jesus and the disciples and they’re moving on the road from Jerusalem to Bethany. Jesus sees a fig tree and the disciples watch him as he walks over to the fig tree. The fig tree is barren and the disciples kind of look and listen and they’re stunned because they hear Jesus curse the fig tree. Of course, later the disciples, on that same road, look at the fig tree and they see that it has withered to the ground by the power of the Son of God.

What a weird passage. Jesus wasn’t into cursing stuff. You don’t see Jesus cursing trees or even people. Jesus wasn’t into cursing so much as blessing. It’s a strange little passage but you understand when you look at it biblically and you see that the fig tree was a symbol of Israel. When you understand contextually that Israel was barren and Jesus was saying, by means of this example, Israel is about to be cursed. Israel had been blessed to be a blessing, but they weren’t available. They didn’t bring their abilities to God’s use and they didn’t seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness and they were about to be cursed.

So here we are, the church. We’ve been blessed, so blessed. We’ve been called to bear fruit. We’ve not been called to barrenness. We’ve been called to bear fruit lest we be cursed. God wants us to understand this as we leave this place. This is His call upon us. Jesus said, “You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you. I have appointed you to go and bear fruit that your fruit might abide forever.” This is what is significant, eternal. Time and talent are joined together. We need to make ourselves available and we seek the significance and the potential of His kingdom. Let’s close with a word of prayer.