03.13. THE TALENTS

THE TALENTS Matthew 25:14-30 This parable illustrates the great principle which regulates the distribution of rewards and punishments in the kingdom of God — the principle that men shall be judged according to the means at their disposal. The “talents” represent everything over and above natural ability, by which men can advance the interests of the kingdom; position, opportunities, and especially the measure of grace given to each man. All the interests of Christ upon earth are entrusted to His people. He has distributed among us all that He values upon earth. Destroy from earth what men have and enjoy, and all that Christ prizes is gone. There is no interest of His carried forward without human labor; if His servants all cease to work, His cause on earth is at an end. And every servant of His is endowed with means enough to accomplish his own share in Christ’s work. He may not have as much as others. But to be fair, there must be little put in the hands of the servant who can only make use of a little, and much put at the disposal of him who can manage a large amount. It is as easy — you may say — to make ten talents out of five, as to make four out of two; perhaps easier. Yes, if you choose the right man, but many a man who could make a small business pay, would ruin himself in a big one. Each gets what each can conveniently and effectively handle; and no one is expected to produce results which are quite out of proportion to his ability and his means. And in order that the judgment may be fair, the reckoning is not made until “after a long time.” We are not called upon to show fruit before autumn. The servants are not summoned to the reckoning while yet embarrassed by the novelty of their position; time is allowed them to consider, to calculate, to wait opportunities, to make experiments. The Lord does not quickly return in a captious spirit, but delays till the wise have had time to lay up great gains, and even the foolish to have learnt wisdom. So with ourselves: we cannot complain if strict account be taken at the end, because we really have time to learn how to serve our Lord. We have time to repair bad beginnings, to take thought, to make up in some degree for lost time. We are not hurried into mistakes and snatched to judgment, as if life were an ordeal we were passing through, where the slightest failure finishes our chances and is relentlessly watched for and insisted upon. We see well enough that with God it is quite otherwise; that He wishes us to succeed, will not observe our failures, winks at our shortcomings, and often repairs the ill we have done.

It is not without significance that the servant who did nothing at all for his master, was he who had received but one talent. No doubt those who have great ability are liable to temptations of their own; they may be more ambitious, and may find it difficult to serve their master with means which they see would bring in to themselves profits of a kind they covet. But such men are at all events not tempted to bury their talent. This is the peculiar temptation of the man who has little ability, and sullenly retires from a service in which he cannot shine and play a conspicuous part. His ambition outruns his ability, and while he envies the position of others, he neglects the duties of his own. Because he cannot do as much as he would, he will not do as much as he can. By showing no interest in that situation in life that God has seen fit he should fill, he would have us believe he is qualified for a higher.

There are many to whom this hint of the parable applies. You are in the same condemnation as this servant when you shrink from exercising your talent; because it is only one and a small one; when you refuse to do anything, because you cannot do a great deal; when you refuse to help, where you cannot lead; when you hesitate about aiding in some work, because those with whom you would be associated in it do it better, and show better in the doing of it than yourself; when you refuse to speak a word in behalf of Christ, because you could not satisfy your own taste, because you could not do it so well as some other person could; when you refuse to take some position, engage in some duty, be of some use in a certain department in which you would not excel, and would be recognized as surpassed by some others. This miserable fear of being mediocre, how many a good work has it prevented or crippled. If we wait till we are fully qualified to serve Christ, we shall never serve Him at all. If we cannot stoop to learn to do great things by doing very little things, we shall never do great things. The only known way to become a strong and full-grown man is to be first a little child.

It is a true proverb that “the sluggard is wiser in his own eyes than seven men that can render a reason.” He can always justify his conduct. The insolence of this man’s words is not intentional. He reads off correctly his own state of mind, and fancies that his conduct was appropriate and innocent. It was not his fault that his master was a man who struck terror into the hearts of his servants, and whom it was useless trying to please. And probably this man’s account of the reason of his inactivity was accurate. All wrongness of conduct is at bottom based on a wrong view of God. Nothing so conduces to right action as right thoughts about God. If we think with this servant that God is hard, grudging to give and greedy to get, taking note of all shortcomings, but making no acknowledgment of sincere service, exacting the utmost farthing and making no abatement or allowance — if we one way or other virtually come to think that God never really delights in our efforts after good, and that whatever we attempt in our life He will coldly weigh and scorn, then manifestly we shall have no heart to labor for Him. But this view of God is unpardonably narrow, and the action flowing from it is after all inconsistent. It is unpardonably wrong, and the very heartiness with which these other servants were greeted refutes it. You hear the hearty “well done” ringing through the whole palace — there is no hesitating scrutiny, no reminding them they had after all merely done what it was their duty to do — not at all — it is the genial, generous outburst of a man who likes to praise and hates to find people at fault; he has been hoping to get a good account of his servants, and it is far more joy in them than gratification in his increased property that prompts this exclamation of surprise and delight and approval. He feels himself much richer in the fidelity of his servants than in their gains. He has pleasure in promoting them, in bringing them up more nearly to his own rank and person, and in making them thus share in his own plans and arrangements and rule and joy.

Moreover, not only is the view of the master wrong, but the consequent action, as the master points out, is inconsistent. If the master is so slow to recognize sincere effort, so oppressive in his exactions, demanding bricks where he has given no straw, requiring impossible performances, and measuring all work by an impossible standard, is this a reason for making no effort to conciliate him? If you feared that, in the necessary hazard of business, you might lose your lord’s talent, yet surely his anger would be as much aroused by inactivity as by unsuccessful efforts to serve him? Why did you not at least put his money into the hands of men who would have found a use for it, and would have paid you a good interest? If you were too timid to use the trust your lord left you, if you knew too little of business and the world’s ways to venture on any self-devised investment, there were plenty of substantial genuine undertakings into which you might have put your means. You could work under the guidance of some more masculine nature, who could direct and shelter you.

There are numberless ways in which the most slenderly equipped among us can fulfil the suggestion here given, and put our talent to the exchangers, into the hands of men who can use it. There is no lack of great works going on for our Lord to which we may safely attach ourselves, and in which our talent is rather used by the leaders of the work, invested for us, than left to our own discretion. Just as in the world there is such an endless variety of work needing to be done, that every one finds his niche, so there is no kind of ability that cannot be made use of in the kingdom i of Christ. The parable does not acknowledge any servants who have absolutely nothing; some I have little as compared with others, but all have some capacity to forward the interests of the absent master. Is every one of us practically recognizing this — that there is a part of the work he is expected to do? He may seem to himself to have only one talent that is not worth speaking about, but that one talent was given that it might be used, and if it be not used, there will be something lacking when reckoning is made which might and ought to have been forthcoming. Certainly there is something you can do, that is unquestionable; there is something that needs to be done which precisely you can do, something by doing which you will please Him whose pleasure in you will fill your nature with gladness. It is given to you to increase your Lord’s goods. But the law which is exhibited in this parabolic representation is also explicitly announced in the words: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” This may be called the law of Spiritual Capital. It is a law with the operation of which we are familiar in nature, and in the commercial world. It is he who has even a little capital to begin with, and who makes a right use of it, who soon leaves far behind the man who has none, or who neglects to invest what he has. And the more this capital grows, the more rapidly and the more easily is it increased. After a certain point, it seems to increase by virtue of its own momentum. So in certain sicknesses, as soon as the crisis of the disease is past and a little health has been funded again in the patient’s constitution, this rapidly grows to complete recovery. So with popularity, it begins one scarce knows how; but once begun, the tide flows apace. You may scarcely be able to say why one statesman or one author should be so immeasurably more popular than others; but so it is, that when once a beginning is made, tribute flows in naturally, as waters from all sides settle in a hollow. It is the same with the acquirement of knowledge: the difficulty is to get past a certain point, it is all up-hill till then; but that point once gained, you reach the table lands and high levels of knowledge where you begin to see all round you, and information that has been fragmentary, and therefore useless before, now pieces itself together and rapidly grows to complete attainment. Everything your hear or see now seems by a law of nature to contribute to the fund you have already acquired. It claims kindred with it, and unites itself to it. “ ’Tis the taught already that profits by teaching.”

It is this same law which regulates our attainment in the service of Christ. However little grace we seem to have to begin with, it is this we must invest, and so nurse it into size and strength. Each time we use the grace we have by responding: to the demands made upon it, it returns to us increased. Our capital grows by an inevitable law. The efforts of young or inexperienced Christians to give utterance to the life that is in them may often be awkward, like the movements of most young animals. They may be able to begin only in a very small way, so small a way that sensitive persons are frequently ashamed to begin at all. Having received Christ, they are conscious of new desires and of a new strength; they have a regard for Christ, and were they to assert this regard in the circumstances which call for its assertion, their regard would be deepened. They have a desire to serve Him, and were they to do so in those small matters with which they have daily concern, their desire and ability would be increased. Grace of any kind invested in the actual opportunities of life cannot come back to us as small as it was, but enlarged and strengthened.

Such grace then as we have, such knowledge as we have of what is due to others, to ourselves, and to God, let us give free expression to. Such investments of Christian principle as are within our reach let us make; such manifestations of a Christian temper and mind as our circumstances daily demand let us exhibit, and it must come to pass that we increase in grace. There is no other way whatever of becoming richly endowed in spirit than by trading with whatever we have to begin with. We cannot leap into a fortune in spiritual things; rich saints cannot bequeath us what their life-long toil has won; they cannot even lend us so that we may begin on borrowed capital. In the spiritual life all must be genuine;; we must work our own way upwards, and by I humbly and wisely laying out whatever we now possess, make it more or be forever poor. And yet how few avail themselves of this law, and lay up treasure in heaven. How few make great fortunes in the spiritual life. The mass of Christians never get even fairly started in a career which is at all likely to end in great saintliness of character and serviceableness. They act as if they had no capital of grace to begin with, no fund to trade upon; and they never make any more of it than they made the first week of their profession. They are not traders, every year increasing their stock and enlarging their gains, but they resemble men who receive a weekly wage, which is no more to-day than it was years ago. Is it not worthy of remark that after years of prayer and of concernment with the fountain of all spiritual life, there should be so small a fund of it laid up within ourselves? Is it not the fact that we seem to be living from hand to mouth, on the verge of bankruptcy, with no more between us and spiritual starvation than the day we believed? Are we conscious that our Christian principle has been deepening year by year? Can we count over our spiritual gains this day, and reckon up solid accumulations of grace in our character? Or are we still merely keeping the wolf from the door, and not always that? Are we making a bare shift to get through without absolutely breaking down? Is it all we can do to make ends meet, and to keep up in our own souls the idea that we are servants of Christ? Do we feel as if they were the thinnest partition between us and great sin? In a word, are we enriched with the “more abundance “of the well-doing servant, and do we find ourselves every way better equipped for all good work; or does even that which we once persuaded ourselves we had seem to be vanishing away? But the parable reminds us that it is not only the careless who fail to use their talents to advantage, but that the same result sometimes follows from a deliberate but false conception of the service of Christ. As in the world, there are many who prefer comfort to wealth, and have no ambition to rank as millionaires, so in the Christian life many prefer what they conceive to be security to eminent saintliness. They do not care about greatly increasing the godliness they already have. They would like to have so much grace as would set them on the right hand, not on the left; on the winning and not on the losing side; but they are not concerned to have an abundant entrance if only they get into the kingdom at all. They therefore make no thoroughgoing effort to keep moving forwards, but rather avoid whatever would effectually commit them to a more devoted and self-sacrificing life. They rather repress the gracious feelings they have than seek to secure for them an increasing expression in their life. They see customs in business which they cannot approve, but they make no remonstrance. They recognize circumstances in which a word of Christian advice might be beneficial, but they do not speak it. They decline to appeal to the highest motives of those around them. They do not pray in their families. They avoid all action which might give them a character for zeal. They seek to live a moderate, decent life. They seek to hit the mean and to be neither obviously godless nor to be righteous over much. They have some grace, but they do not circulate it and seek to make it more; they have a talent, but they bury it. Of such a method of dealing with our connection with Christ, there is only one possible result. The unused talent passes from the servant who would not use it to the man who will. A landlord has two farms lying together: the one is admirably managed, the other is left almost to itself, with the least possible management, and becomes the talk of the whole country-side for poor crops and untidiness. No one asks what the landlord will do when the leases are out. It is a matter of course that he dismisses the careless tenant, and puts his farm into the hands of the skilful and diligent farmer. He enforces the great law: “To him that hath shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken even that he hath.” In the kingdom of Christ this law is self-acting. To bury our talent and so keep it as originally given is an impossibility. To have just so much grace and no more is an impossibility. It must either be circulating and so multiplying, or it! ceases to be. It must grow, or it will die. You might as well try to keep your child always a child: he must either grow or die. In the physical world the law has become familiar. The unused muscle dwindles and disappears: no one needs to come and remove it; want of use removes it. The ants whose habits of life enabled them to find food without the aid of sight have gradually lost the organ of sight itself. And so is it in the spiritual world also. The unused faculty becomes extinct. Hence it is that you see some old persons absolutely callous: the time was when they had at least a capacity for believing in divine things and for choosing God as their portion, but now you would say that the very capacity is destroyed; no Godward emotion can find a place in their heart, nothing can stir a penitent thought in them. Hence it is that in your own souls you perhaps are finding that, no matter what effort you make, you cannot enter as heartily into holy services and occupations as once you did, but are finding your old joy and assurance honey-combed by unbelieving thoughts. Hence it is that the susceptibility to right feeling you had in boyhood has gone from you. You did not mean to become unfeeling, but only shrank from acting as feeling dictated. But he who blows out the flame, finds that the heat and the glow die out of themselves. The teaching of this side of the parable, then, is alarming in the extreme. The warning it conveys proceeds not from an external voice we can defy or which may be mistaken, but from the laws of our nature; and it speaks not of an arbitrary infliction of punishment, but of results which these laws render inevitable. The unused faculty dies out. The capacities we have for loving and serving God are taken from us. That which was once possible becomes forever impossible. The future once open to us is closed. We are permanently crippled, limited, paralyzed, deadened. Had we followed the openings given to us, had we used the talent committed to us, endless expansion and fulness of joy would have been ours, but now our chances are past. We have had our opportunity, we have for years been on probation, but now it is over for us. How gladly would a man renounce all that sin has brought him, if only he could stand again with his talent in his hand, and all life’s opportunities before him. If there is one truth more than another on which the young may begin to build their life, it is this: that each time you decline a duty to which your better selfs prompts you, you become less capable of doing it; and on the other hand, that each resistance to temptation, each humble and painful effort after what is good, is real growth in character, growth as real and as permanent as the growth in stature which, once attained, can never again dwindle to the size of the child.

Let us then give ear to the parable, and if we are conscious that even now we are very poor in spiritual things, let us make the most of the grace we have lest we become altogether destitute. If we are now stammering in prayer, the likelihood is we shall soon be dumb, unable to pray. If we are more frequently questioning the reality of God’s interference in human affairs, and if we more freely admit doubts regarding cardinal truths, the likelihood is we shall soon disbelieve, and have the very faculty of faith paralyzed so as to be unable to perceive evidence the most weighty and conclusive. If we are letting go one by one our Christian connections, and involving ourselves more and more with worldly matters, the probability is that shortly we shall be hardened and eager worldlings. We have seen the process going on in many; why is it not to go on in ourselves? If good works and charitable employments are more a burden to us than they were, let us beware lest we wither and become fit only for the axe and the fire. As the cramped and numbed arm warms and wakens the sleeper, so let this creeping hardness that comes over our spirits awaken us, while yet there is time to chafe the dead limb to life. If yet we can summon into active life one self-denying resolution, if yet we can feel at all the constraining power of Christ’s love, and can obey His voice in any one particular, if yet we can prevail upon ourselves to give up worldly and carnal ideas of life, and entertain humble and chastened desires; then let us most anxiously cherish such feelings, let us fan every good disposition into flame lest it die, let us at once circulate and invest our little remaining capital in the good works we are daily called to, that the very faculty of doing anything for God and our fellow-men may not forever perish out of us. In closing, it may be well to give special prominence to a truth which has throughout been implied that increased grace is its own reward; or at any rate, an essential part of it. The servant who had multiplied his talents is rewarded by the possession and use of these multiplied talents. He does not now get the burden of business lifted off his shoulders, and a life of ease appointed to him. This would be to reward the successful officer by depriving him of his command, as if an ample pension would compensate to a martial spirit for the want of active service and fresh opportunities of using richer experience and ampler powers. The talents gained are left in the hands, that gained them, and wider opportunities for their use are afforded. This is the reward of the faithful servant of Christ; the grace he has diligently used is increased, and his opportunities continually multiply. He is always entering upon; his reward; and entrance into heaven only marks the point at which his Lord expresses His approval, and raises him from a position in which his fidelity is tested to a position of rule, that is. of acknowledged trustworthiness and self-control, the position of one who has acquired an interest in the work, and who so manifestly lives for it that it is impossible any interest of his own should divert him from this. He has no other interest. His joy is his Lord’s joy, joy in successfully advancing the best interests of men, joy in the sight of others made righteously happy.

This, then, is the reward Christ offers to us, a reward consisting mainly in increased ability to serve Him and forward what is good. There can be no reward more certain, for it begins here and now. Your increasing grace is your heaven begun. This is the earnest of the Spirit, the dawning of eternal day. No one need tell you that there is no heaven: the kingdom of heaven is within you. And this reward is also the best you can imagine. All other rewards would be external to yourself and separable from yourself, but this reward is within you, in your own growth in character. Not your condition alone, but you yourself are to be good. What can be better than this? What is the reward the sick man receives for his attention to every prescription of his physician and his avoidance of everything that would throw him back? His reward is that he becomes healthy. . What reward has the boy for obedience and diligence and purity? His reward is that he becomes a vigorous and capable man, fit for the ampler enjoyments which the nobler activities of life bring. So says our Lord, “I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly.” If it be asked, what is the great inducement? what is that which makes life worth living? what is that which we can set before us as our sufficient reward and aim? the answer can only be: the inducement is that we have the sure hope of becoming satisfactory persons, of: growing up to the stature and energies of perfect men, of becoming perfect as our Father is perfect, who needs no reward but delights evermore in being and doing good; who loves and is therein blessed.