Sermon

							Wealth & Possessions (5) There’s a bumper sticker doing the rounds in the States, which says “Jesus is coming, look busy”. And while it sounds pretty flippant, there’s a grain of truth in it. Nobody knows when Jesus will return, but if He did suddenly appear, I think we’d all prefer to be in the middle of doing something holy as opposed to lounging on the sofa watching TV. “Oh hi Jesus, I was just in the middle of making the soup for the homeless outreach tonight – do want to come with us?” The Parable of the Talents comes right in the middle of a whole block of teaching about the Second Coming of Christ. Chapter 24 is all about the Signs of the end of the Age, and the need to keep watch and be prepared. Then at the beginning of Chapter 25 we have the parable of the ten virgins and five of them were caught out by the unexpected arrival of the bridegroom. At the end of Chapter 25, we have that very challenging story of the Sheep and the Goats and right in the middle between the 10 virgins and the Sheep and the Goats, we have this parable of the Talents. And the whole tone of these 2 long chapters (97 verses) is that you should go about your business as if Jesus will return in your lifetime. And that’s maybe why the Bible doesn’t give the exact date, because if you knew that Jesus was coming back in 200 years time, you might slacken off and think, well I’ll sort my life out when I’m older, there’s plenty of time left, at least Jesus isn’t going to come back tomorrow and catch me out. But these passages give us some fairly stark warnings about having this attitude. Just listen to a few verses from Chapter 24: ”Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom the master has put in charge of the servants in his household to give them their food at the proper time? It will be good for that servant whose master finds him doing so when he returns. I tell you the truth, he will put him in charge of all his possessions. But suppose that servant is wicked and says to himself, 'My master is staying away a long time,' and he then begins to beat his fellow-servants and to eat and drink with drunkards. The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Pretty strong stuff! And of course the same fate awaits the guy who buried his Talent in the ground. Now, it’s hard to say how much a Talent was worth, but it could have been anything up to 20 years wages. The normal interpretation of this parable is that the Talents are symbolic of our God-given abilities, our time, our resources and our opportunities to serve God while we’re here on the earth. The moral of the story is of course to make the best use that we can of what God has entrusted to us. We are to be responsible and faithful stewards. This morning I want to focus in on the use of our resources, as part of my series on money and possessions. What’s interesting about this story is that the “bad guy” doesn’t seem to be that bad at all. If you gave somebody a sum of money and they put it, for arguments sake, in a safe in their constituency office and returned it to you in a few years time, you wouldn’t be that disappointed – you might be glad to get it back at all! The servant wasn’t dishonest. He didn’t lie about what happened the money. He didn’t embezzle it. He didn’t even spend it foolishly or selfishly. The accusation against him was that he was lazy. He was entrusted with a large sum of money and for one reason or another, he buried it. Maybe he felt he was too busy managing his own money or maybe he just couldn’t be bothered. He was entrusted with something but he turned out to be untrustworthy and as a result, not only was he labelled as “lazy” but also “wicked”. I feel a bit sorry for him, because it looks like the reason for his inaction was fear of failure. He was afraid of the Master. He was afraid that if he invested the money, he might lose some of it. Even if he put it with the bankers, who knows, the bankers might get into trouble with their sub-

prime mortgages and go bust he could lose it all! How could he face the Master then? And it seems to me that this fear of failure was unfounded. He describes the Master as “a hard man, harvesting where he has not sown and gathering where he has not scattered seed.” It is generally assumed that the Master stands for God, but if you had to write a definition of what God was like, is that how you would describe Him, even if you only had the Old Testament? I certainly wouldn’t. This man was suffering from a distorted image of his Master and it seriously affected his relationship with him and his service on behalf of him. Likewise, we need to make sure that we have an accurate view of God’s true nature so that fear doesn’t hold us back from serving Him out of love. I remember when Blackrock church closed its services and the Dun Laoghaire Circuit had to take all sorts of risks in transforming it into a Youth Outreach centre. And when Ken Wilson had to explain to the various committees what we were doing, he often said: “I’d rather stand before God and say I blew it, but at least I tried, than have to say I didn’t bother”. Personally, I think the Master would have been more sympathetic if the servant had tried his best to put the money to work, even if He had lost some of it. So what does this parable have to say to us about the money and possessions that God has entrusted to us? How can we avoid being a wicked and lazy servant? How can we “put our money to work” like the faithful servants did? I’m going to look at Income first and then Assets. Let’s say you’ve prepared a budget and you’ve allocated money for giving and holidays and whatever else, and you’ve a bit left over. How can you make the most of it? Just before Christmas, I showed you how you could €50 a week to create €6,300 worth of stuff, by borrowing. It’s called financial leveraging. The problem with this is that you have to pay it all off with interest, and it ends up costing you €7,800 in the end. So that’s not to be recommended! Instead I’m going to show you another way of leveraging by investing instead of spending. If you decide to invest the €50 a week instead of spending it and let’s say you get 5% return per annum in a bank. After 3 years you’ll have €8,400, which is €600 more than you put in, so it’s a modest return on your investment, but it’s low risk and requires little or no work. Now let’s look at something which is higher risk and requires more work but has the potential to produce a much higher return. Let’s say you invest in property. Your €50 a week doesn’t sound like much, however, you can leverage it to borrow €100,000 worth of property. If you get a loan for €100,000 at 5% interest and you get a rental income of €300 a month on the property, then the difference between the loan repayment and the rent is about €50 a week. Except now you have an appreciating asset and this is where things start to diverge from putting it in the bank. After 3 years, if the value of your property went up by 5% a year, and you sold up and paid off the loan, then you’d have €20,000 in your pocket instead of €8,400 from putting it in the bank. And it gets better. After 12 years, the rent is covering the mortgage repayment entirely so you can start investing your €50 a week in another property. Now of course it’s not that easy. You can’t find a property for €100,000 today – however you could team up with one or two others. There are solicitor’s fees and stamp duty and you have to buy furniture etc. And of course you have to find good tenants and keep the property maintained. Interest rates could go against you. It’s risky and time consuming, but “putting your money to work” is always going to involve work and risk. That’s why the 2 servants were commended for their efforts. They were willing to put in the work and take the risk. Now what’s the point of it all? Whether you invest in property or bouncy castles, the purpose of “putting your money to work” is not so that you have more money to spend on yourself but so that you are in a better position to be a blessing to others. If you are up to your eyes in debt, then you’re going to find it difficult to give to the church or to respond to the latest disaster, or to help someone in need. In fact, you may well end up becoming that someone in need! On the other hand, if you manage your income well, then you will always be a blessing and never a burden.

So that’s your income, what about your assets? We build up assets by putting our income to work, or by inheriting them. Either way, we have a responsibility to manage them on behalf of God, who is the real owner, despite what it might say on the ownership deeds. I think the key point here is to make your assets available to God. The money that was buried in the ground was unavailable to anyone! He should really have given it to one of the other servants to manage it for him. If had given it to the bankers then as well as getting interest, the bankers could have used it to create loans and stimulate economic activity in the community. But as long as that money lay buried in the ground, it was of no use to anyone. It was unavailable. My grandfather used to rent cottages in Connemara and one day he was on his holidays and he got a toothache. And so everyone went out for a walk and he stayed behind. Someone knocked on the door and wanted to look around the cottage and it turned out that it was for sale. So afterwards he talked to the lady he rented it off and they agreed a price and he arranged a loan and bought it. But he didn’t keep it all for himself. He made it available to the family and others. We spent many wonderful holidays in it. I still get people coming up to me saying: “we spent a lovely week in Harry’s cottage”. When my Grandad had to move out of his apartment in Dublin, I was asked would I look after it and I lived there for 3 years or so. There were 2 bedrooms and I was at a Christian meeting one evening and there was a South African couple who I didn’t know, but I felt God telling me to offer them the other bedroom. And that was exactly what they needed. And we got on well and they were good company. Now you do have to be very careful who you allow to stay in your own home, because the wrong people can cause all sorts of problems (one minister used his manse as a half-way house for ex-convicts and got robbed), but in general, our property should be available to be a blessing to others, as God leads us. The same can be said of your car. It’s not your car, of course, it’s God’s car and He’s giving you the use of it for the time being. And so you have to ask yourself, in what ways is God calling me to use my car to be a blessing to others. Is there someone who needs a lift to church, or help with their shopping? We have to constantly remind ourselves that everything we have is given to us in trust. I remember buying a computer with Windows 95 and there was an Icon called “My Computer”. And I renamed it to “God’s Computer” as a daily reminder that everything I had really belonged to God. Folks, there is an eternal dimension to all this as well as a temporal one. When you get to heaven, it won’t be all about sitting on clouds playing harps. The Master said: '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!' This parable strongly suggests that there is not just a place in heaven for you, but a role. If this is true, then our time on earth is a training ground for future eternal responsibilities. If we are faithful with the few things that God has given us now, He will put us in charge of many things in the life to come, and we will share in His happiness. Remember, Jesus is coming, look busy! Let’s Pray: Heavenly Father, we thank you for your Word and in particular the Parables of Jesus. We can read them at so many levels and we pray for insight into this parable of the Talents. We thank you for the many things that you have entrusted to us – our time, our abilities, our money and our possessions. Show us how we can make the best use of our income, finding the right balance between giving and spending and saving and investing. Give us wisdom to recognise good investment opportunities and to avoid bad ones. Father we thank you for our Assets – our properties and cars and all our possessions. Show us practical ways in which we can make them available to You, so that You can prompt us to make them a blessing to others.