Who’s In Control?
Matthew 25:1 - 26
 
Daniel Webster was asked one time, “What is the most important thought you’ve ever had?” He replied by saying,  “The most important thought I ever had was that of my individual responsibility to God.”
 
When Daniel Webster made that statement, he was one of the top American statesman in our country. In fact, he made that statement at a banquet. Presidents were there. Heads of State from around the world were there to honor Daniel Webster. During that banquet, someone asked him, “Mr. Webster, what is the most profound thought that ever entered your mind?” and that’s what he replied with. His responsibility to God.
 
In fact, when he made that statement, he became so emotionally involved that he had to excuse himself and went out and came back. And then for 30 minutes he talked to those great men and women of that day about the responsibility he felt of managing the resources that God has given to him.
 
That is the reason we have begun this very timely and important emphasis on stewardship. I know there are always the cynics who want to gripe and complain that the church is asking for more money. 
 
This emphasis is far from that. In fact the primary focus is not so the church can get more money; it is so that you might know the blessing of God on your life and your finances as a faithful steward of God’s resources. Whether we realize it or not, money and finances affect virtually every relationship and decision in our lives. Consider just in regard to marriage and family:
 
According to surveys, tension in the home over money is one of the most common causes of divorce.
 
• The average duration of a marriage in the United States has slipped to just 9.4 years. Every 27
seconds a couple divorces, totaling approximately 7,000 divorces per day affecting some 10,000
children.
• Divorce rates have doubled since 1965 and demographers predict that half of all first marriages
will end in divorce as well as 60 percent of all second marriages.
• While divorce rates have skyrocketed, the marriage rate is in a 50-year decline with people waiting
longer and longer to get married.
• The number of American children living in single parent families has escalated.… A third of all
babies are now born to unmarried women…and the percentage is rising.
• Do you realize that in 1960, the total number of children living in fatherless families was fewer
than eight million? Today, that total has risen to over 24 million—many are the result of failed marriages.
• Amazingly, this year between 1.1 and 1.3 million U.S. couples will divorce—and, sadly, the latest
research shows more than 50 percent of those couples will profess to be Christians.
 
Bankruptcy, foreclosures, decline in charitable giving, and increased dependence on credit are additional indicators. 
 
Jesus had much to say about money: 
2300 verses on money
39 parables – ½ about money
 
In a moment, we’re going to go over to Matthew, chapter 25 to one of those stories. It’s the story of the talents. It’s the classic story. I have probably preached at least a dozen messages from that passage itself. It’s a classic story of God’s expectation to you and me in the management of the resources that He has given to us.
 
And in the little phrase I just used lies much of the problem.  Part of the problem of stewardship is that many of us do not yet recognize God as the owner of everything in our life. That’s the whole issue.
The moment that you and I can cross the threshold and understand that everything that you have and everything I have right now is God’s, not mine, I don’t own it, all I do is manage it.
 
 
The moment that I can understand that mentally, and begin to embrace it emotionally, and act it out physically, that’s the moment that things will begin to really change spiritually. And then I will truly be a steward of everything that God has given to me.
We make a major mistake in life when we assume just because we’re walking through life and God has given us things like cars to drive, houses to live in we assume that somehow we have become the owner of all of those things.
 
Let me ask you a question. If you earned $400 last week, how much of it belongs to God? Now, if this morning you’re saying, “Okay, I made $400 last week, $40 belongs to God,” then somehow as your pastor I’m not doing the job I need to in teaching you stewardship. You see if you made $400 last week, $400 belongs to God. The steward understands that everything we have, we just manage. God owns it all.
 
Now this morning if you were in Sunday School, you’ve already seen that God has much to say about money. I am constantly amazed at those who believe the church shouldn’t talk about money when the Bible says so much in regard to it. And as you saw, the primary competitor with God for control of your life is money. So God gives us a blueprint for managing our money; clear principles for spending, saving, investing, giving, getting out of debt and teaching our families how to handle their money according to God’s instruction. 
And as you saw in Sunday School, there are two distinct responsibilities in the handling of money. There is God’s part and our part. So with that in mind, let me direct your attention to this very well know story in Matthew 25.
 
Verses 1-26
 
There are four principles of money management given to us in the story of the talents. Biblical principles of money management. And they are not complicated.:
 
1. God owns it all.
 
God owns everything. He just allows me to manage it. God owns it, I manage it. He gives me things of which He requires of me, and this is where my responsibility comes in to do the best job of managing that I possibly can.
 
As I began to look at this story, there are two implications that begin to arise out of it.
First of all I see that God has a right to do whatever He wants with the possessions that He’s given me.
 
The first thing I have to understand is that if God is the owner, then He has that right, no matter what He has given to me; as Job said, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”
The Lord has a right to enter into my life at any time because the possessions that I have, what I have today is not mine. I am handling them for Him, but He has the right to walk in.
 
Notice how that is expressed in the story: The owner has the rights and the steward has the responsibilities. The owner is the one that decided that he would give five to one, and two to one, and one to the other. We kind of look back and say that’s not fair. My goodness, that shouldn’t happen. That doesn’t seem right to me. Why didn’t he give everybody equal talents? Why didn’t he give everybody an equal chance? I don’t know. That’s God. He has all the rights. I have all the responsibilities.
 
Then we discover there came a time, after a long time, when he came back and called those stewards of his that were to manage those resources, and he asked them what they had done with them. It’s God’s right. He has the rights, I have the responsibilities.
I’m afraid too many of us are like Dennis the Menace who was walking out of church one Sunday, shook the pastor’s hand and looked at the pastor and said, “Hey pastor, just what are you going to do with that dollar my dad gave you this morning?” Unfold the story of the talents, and if you get nothing else, you can’t miss the fact that God owns everything.
 
Now if it’s all God’s, then why does He entrust it to us? God gives His resources to His servants to accomplish His goals. That is the definition of stewardship. Stewardship is the use of God-given resources for the accomplishment of God-given goals. I have to understand that. God gives me the resources and I am to use those for the accomplishment and the glory of the Kingdom of God.
 
Now what happens is this: When I truly begin to believe that God owns everything, when I lose possession just as when I gain possessions, I can keep a steady course.  Why? Because if I truly believe God owns everything and I have some financial setbacks or if I lose a job or all of a sudden, I get into the valley of dark financial times, if I truly believe that God owns everything, my anxiety and my attitude towards what I have lost will be much different than if I thought I owned it.
 
If I think I own everything and then I get more and God blesses and I make more money; all of a sudden, if I’m not careful, I believe I own everything and my attitude is pride and arrogance. That’s when there is a tendency to get greedy and hold on to all of those possessions because I don’t understand something. I still think that they are mine.
You see it’s only when we understand that God owns it that we can have the spiritual sense to not only handle the blessings of faithfulness, but also the setbacks of materialism.
And the day that we begin to understand this is the day that we go down a long road in our maturity. Not only in responding as a good steward, but in our maturity of understanding balance in the ups and downs, in the economic turns and twists of our own life.
 
So first of all: this passage tells us we have God has given to us, and that God has a right to hold us accountable for what He’s given. That means every spending decision is a spiritual decision.  It’s not only what we give to the Lord, but what we do with the rest of our checkbook that shows where our values are.
 
Listen to this quote from a guy named Ron Blue:
 
 “You can’t fake stewardship. Your checkbook reveals all that you really believe about stewardship. A life story could be written from a checkbook.
It reflects your goals, priorities, convictions, relationships and even the use of your time.
 
A person who has been a Christian even for a short while can fake prayer, Bible study, evangelism, and going to church and so on but he can’t fake what his checkbook reveals.”  Think about the practicality of that. When a business or government suspects fraud, you know what they do? They follow what they call the money trail.
 
They begin to look at the money and what it’s been spent on, and they begin to follow the money trail, and the money trail leads them usually back to intent and motives and decisions, whether they were made right or wrong. They don’t follow the verbal trail. They don’t bring in the person, and the person says well I know I haven’t been doing anything wrong. They don’t follow the verbal trail; they follow the money trail.
 
That is exactly what God is teaching us in this area of stewardship. God doesn’t follow the verbal trail. Why? Because talk is cheap.  It’s easy to sing “I Surrender All” and surrender very little in our life. It’s very easy to look at Romans 12:1-2 where Paul says, “I urge you therefore, by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto Him which, is your reasonable service” and say “amen”. 
 
It’s easy for us to assent and nod and sing and even come to church. It’s easy for us to do all those things, but Jesus knows where the money trail is. Jesus is the one Who said, “Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is.” Jesus knew that He could literally find out the heart of you and me by opening our checkbook. He could find out what our priority was. He could find out what was important: what we loved, what we didn’t love, what we lived for, what we didn’t live for. He said, all you’ve got to do is follow the money trail.
 
Therefore, every spending decision is a spiritual decision. In fact, I’ll go a step further and add this: As a child of God, every decision of your life is a spiritual decision. We don’t compartmentalize our lives by secular and spiritual. We are instructed in the book of Colossians that everything we do, and every word we say is to be done or said for the glory of God.  So God owns everything, and gives us what He wants us to have, and we are responsible to Him for what we do with it.
 
Here’s the second thing:
 
2. God uses money and possessions to prepare us for His coming Kingdom.
 
I think we neglect this thought the most. What we do here on earth impacts our life there in eternity.  
Let that thought settle in for a little bit: God, in dealing with us concerning possessions, here and now, is preparing us for a larger eternal Kingdom. And how we handle what we have now will determine what we receive in that eternal Kingdom. That’s powerful stuff folks.
 
Notice again verse 20, he looked at the man who had five talents and the man said, “I’ve gained five more talents” and in verse 21, the master said to him “Well done good and faithful servant. You are faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Enter in the joy of the master.”
 
You see, this is a story of living on a temporal earth and then getting ready for a kingdom and the master said, “Since you did good on the temporal earth with what I gave you. As you enter in the joy of the Lord, I’m going to give you more than what you had there, because you’re a steward and I can trust you.”
 
Then comes the guy with two talents. The one that received two talents in verse 22 came up and said, “Master, you entrusted me two talents, see I’ve gained two more talents.” And the master said to him, “Well done good and faithful servant. You were faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Enter in the joy of your master.”
 
He said, “Since you handled the temporary things on this earth well, I have more responsibility and more blessings for you as you enter into my Kingdom.”
 
What an incredible, powerful point. I think this is starting to settle in on me, I’m starting now to understand the words of Jesus. I think this is one of the most powerful statements our Lord has ever said. And it’s amazing that we read by it so quickly and forget about it.
 
Jesus said, “So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches. If you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?”
 
Now if God uses money and possessions to prepare us, how does He use them? Let me suggest three ways:
 
Sometimes He uses them as tools in our lives.  
 
In other words, they have a tendency to get our attention. And when we have a financial setback, we kind of look around and say, “What happened to me?” God uses possessions many times to teach us things, to process us as a Christian and the mature believer says, “What do I need to learn from this?” The immature Christian, by the way, they look and say, “God what are you doing to me?” God uses possessions and money as a tool to shape us in our Christian life.
 
Sometimes He uses them as tests in our lives
 
It’s a very effective test in our life to see if He can trust us with more. What is very insightful in this passage is both of the men who took what the master had given them and utilized it as a good steward were given more and the one who did not take it and utilize it had to give up what he had. It becomes a test of the future Kingdom.
Remember, we’re on the principle that how I handle today’s possessions will determine, when I’m with the Lord forever, the resource of the blessings God’s going to give me there.
 
Sometimes they are tools; sometimes they are tests, and
 
Sometimes He uses them as a testimony
 
You see, we’re to be a light in this world. This should be the distinction of a Christian. The distinction of a Christian on the block isn’t that that person has more money or less money than anybody else on the block. They may have more money. They may be the richest person on the block. They may be the poorest person on block. That is not the distinction of a Christian.
 
It’s not prosperity gospel or poverty gospel that distinguishes us as God’s child. You see what distinguishes us as God’s children is not how much money we have, whether we have a lot or a little but our attitude toward it. Whether we handle it lightly or we grasp and hold on and hang on to it
tenaciously tells what Kingdom we live for.
 
So it’s all God’s; He entrusts a portion of it to us to get His work done on earth; we are responsible for how we administer it, and in fact, God will evaluate our service here on earth to determine our responsibilities there in eternity.
What else do we discover in this story?
 
3. The amount is not important.
 
In God’s sight, what is important is not the amount of possessions that I handle. What is important is how I handle those possessions, whether it is a little or a lot. Now, I know that because look at verse 21. This is the person who had five talents who doubled them to 10. Look what the master said in verse 21. “Well done good and faithful servant, you were faithful in a few things I will put you in charge of many things. Enter in the joy of your master.”
 
Now, there was one who went from two to four. The one who went from two to four, look what the master said in verse 23, the very same words he said in verse 21, exactly. “Well done good and faithful servant. You were faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Enter in the joy of our Lord.”
It’s obvious to me that it doesn’t matter to God whether we have a lot or a little. That is totally immaterial. To the master, the one that had two that went to four was in his sight as blessed and wonderful and as important as the guy who had five and went to ten.
 
You see, I run into people all the time who say,
“Well, you know I just don’t have a lot to give to God,” or “I can’t tithe because I don’t have a very big income.” You see, interestingly enough, the guy who strikes it rich can’t tithe because he has too much and it would be just an exorbitant amount. And the one who has too little can’t tithe because they can’t meet their bills.
God’s not interested whether you’ve got too much or too little. God’s interested in only one thing. That is what we are doing with what we have right now. Are you a faithful steward of what you have?
 
If you are faithful to God with the very little that has been entrusted to you, in God’s sight that is as important as the person who has a whole bunch. In fact, if you have very little and your are faithful with what God has entrusted to you and the person who has a bunch is unfaithful with what God has entrusted to him, then you are going to be rewarded and the one who has much will not be rewarded. That’s a fact of life. That’s a biblical principle.
 
The one who had five, when he went to ten, God said, “great.” The guy that had two, when he went to four, God said, “great.” There’s only one person who God didn’t say great to and that’s the one who thought that what he had was his and decided not use it and not to give it and not to pass it on.
 
In fact, read the story, and you’ll discover one of the things that tics God off. The thing that made Him mad was the fact that the person who had something that belonged to Him held on to it like it was his own and didn’t use it.
 
I listen to people all the time who say “Well, I’m excused from service. God didn’t give me very much. I can’t sing; I can’t teach; I don’t have much money. I don’t have a lot anyway and so it’s not important that I tithe. It’s not important that I put God first in all these areas. I can’t afford to.”
 
Put yourself in the story. God’s ticked off! God wants us to realize whether it is a little or a lot, we’ve got to treat life with an open hand. These are convicting words. This is not the kind of sermon where we get warm fuzzy feelings and walk out humming “Something Good is Going to Happen to You Today.” These are the words of the Lord.
 
These are just good biblical words of stewardship. And when we understand the Bible says that the way that we handle possessions is the number one priority teaching, when we realize that God gives us four times as much time to that as He does with prayer, all of a sudden it helps us to understand what really is important in God’s life concerning us. It’s easy for us to talk about loving Him. Oh, yeah, sing another song. God says, “No, no don’t sing another song. Are you putting Me first in your possessions?”
Here’s the final thing: 
 
4. Stewardship requires action.
 
What’s interesting about this story of money management is that it requires action from you and it requires action from me.
 
You see, this fellow who had one talent, he knew what he should do. This is very significant, he understood.
 
Look at verse 24. “And the one who had received the one talent came up and said ‘Master I knew.’” He knew. What did he do in verse 25? He hid his talent. Look at verse 26, “...but the master answered and said, ‘You wicked lazy servant, you knew.’”
 
We know the rest of the story. The rest of the story is the guy that had one talent and buried it, God took it away from him and gave it to the one who had five and multiplied it to ten.
 
Now think about that: The wicked servant knew what to do but he did nothing. Many of us know what to do but we either disobey or delay and today we have a chance to change all of this. Ben Haden in his book “Changed Lives” said, “I want to tell you something from observation. I never met anyone who tithed that did not tend to be happy about the fact that he did. He was not just happy about tithing but about a lot of other things.
 
I never met anybody that tithed very long who gave it up. I never met anyone who tithed who did not say at some time it had become extremely difficult. Generous people seem to be the happy ones and miserly people seem to be the unhappy ones. And the critical spirit is with those who are not giving people. Just look around you and you can tell.”
I want to give you an opportunity to be a steward and to act upon what God’s Word teaches us. This is that day.
 
It may be that today you need to begin by acknowledging that it’s all God’s and not yours. It might be that you need to begin by giving or moving up to the tithe. Here’s the deal: 
 
If God owns it all, what am I doing with it? Today, we have learned that God owns everything.  He entrusts it to me to get His work done, and I’m responsible for what I do with it. Not only that, God gives me the privilege of preparing for eternity right here and now. The amount is not the main thing, but I’ve got to respond in some way. 
 
Let’s pray.