God's Mission and Our Talent

Something occurred to me as I was preparing my sermon this week. God's mission is accomplished (saving people from their sins) largely through our time, talents, and treasure. God uses us as His instruments with the time, talent, (skills, abilities, and gifts) and treasure that He has given us. We do not have the ability to do any of this apart from Christ. He is the one who gives us all this according to our abilities and expects us to multiple them accordingly.

These gifts that He gives us are bigger than we can imagine or think. In the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), Jesus uses the talent (a unit of money in those days worth about $400,000) to make a point that He is far more generous than we can think or imagine. He gives one fellow 5 talents ($2M), another 2 talents ($800k) and the last one, one talent ($400K). Metaphorically, He is communicating that He give us an amazing amount of stuff (desires, intelligence, gifts, abilities, skills, critical thinking, etc.) far more than what we think we have to do His work.

He expects us to increase what He has given to us through effort, perseverance, and passion for what we are doing, anything less doesn't cut the mustard. For there will come a day when He will ask each of us what we did with all the stuff He that has given us. How will you answer Him?