The Faithful and Wise Servant

For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”  Romans 10:13-15

My friend recently told me that, when she was just sixteen, her life came crashing down.  First her father died and five months later her maternal grandfather passed away.  She and her mother were alone, and reeling.  They had been very active in their church, but these twin tragedies had taken such a toll that their faith in God suffered as well and they had stopped going to church.  My friend went to a Christian high school and one day the pastor of her church came to the school and pulled her out of class.  Instead of offering her words of comfort and hope, he told her that, if she did not begin attending services again immediately she would be removed from fellowship with the church—in other words, she would be kicked out.  She never went back.

I have another friend who is trying desperately to understand the concept of grace, but legalism has a stranglehold on her that is hard to break.  Her parents and the church she has gone to all her life taught her that her works are being judged and will be the determining factor as to whether or not she will be worthy of entering heaven. On one hand, she fears that if she falls for grace and it is a lie, she will be lost; on the other hand, she fears that, if grace is true, her parents who died without fully understanding it are lost. She teeters back and forth between those two fears.

I spoke with a young man this week that does not plan to take his sons to church regularly, primarily because of the way he was treated when he went off the rails as a teenager while his father was dying of cancer.  His youth pastor loved him, but it was painfully obvious that the other adults in the church, including the senior pastor, viewed him as a threat to their children’s spiritual well-being, and he felt unwelcome, shunned as though he had a contagious disease. He told me that he doesn’t want to expose his children to people who will make them feel the way he felt.  I suggested that maybe he just needed to find a “good” church, meaning one that taught grace.  He responded that, even if the church “taught grace”, he was sure there would still be people who would be “ungracious” in the name of God.

My three previous blog posts have tackled the parables found in Matthew 25.  Their central theme is what it means to “be ready” for Jesus’ return.  The question is: What is the criterion for a passing grade on Judgment Day in order to gain entrance to heaven? The unequivocal answer, found in each parable, is:  Faith in Christ, plus nothing. The problem is: The majority of our churches are not teaching that unequivocal answer.

In the first blog post of this trilogy, This Little Light of Mine, I said that the parable found at the end of Matthew 24, of the faithful and wise servant, actually laid the foundation for the parables which followed. In the story the master, representing Jesus, puts a servant in charge of the other servants to “give them their food at the proper time.” The food is the good news about who Jesus was, what he did and why he did it.  It is the gospel.  It is the story of grace.  Jesus said, “Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes.”  The preachers and teachers who have been entrusted with the solemn responsibility of feeding the gospel to those under their care, and have been faithful to that task, will be blessed when Jesus returns. 

But a very different fate awaits the preachers and teachers who have become power hungry and have beaten those in their care with a false ‘gospel’ of works, shaming and shunning their fellow servants, while they were the worst sinners of all. Jesus says they will be cut in pieces and placed with the hypocrites in a place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

We humans are all Action/Consequence beings by default.  We do not naturally know anything other than, ‘if I do this, I will get that; if you do that, you will get this.’ We compete, we compare, we strive for our own glory at the expense of others. We demand our rights. We work for what we get; we expect to get what we work for; and we apply this to God.  If we are good he will reward us, if we are bad he will punish us.  What we are unable to see on our own is that, by God’s standard of goodness, we can never be good enough to deserve a reward; therefore, by our own Action/Consequence thinking, we are all deserving of nothing but punishment. We are all doomed to be punished, unable to meet the standard, yet blind to our situation. We are dead men walking.

Our only hope is to be shown the truth of Death/Resurrection, something that is alien to us and can only be known through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.  We need to have revealed to us the fact that our condition is hopeless. We cannot dig our way out of our deadness by our own efforts; we must be resurrected by a power apart from us.  We can never be worthy of God’s blessing no matter how hard we try.  But God, in his mercy has provided a way apart from our pitiful efforts; he sent his own Son to meet every standard on our behalf and gives us the credit. And, he allowed his Son to be charged with all of our failures and to suffer the punishment in our place.  We cannot, however, comprehend this glorious truth unless those who have been entrusted with the blessed task of communicating it to us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, actually do their jobs.

Those who do their jobs well have clung to their own faith in the all sufficiency of Christ in the face of their own helplessness. They will be blessed. Those who have abused their positions have allowed themselves to sink back into the delusions of Action/Consequence, separating themselves and those in their care from their only hope. Their fate awaits them. 

Those who have been set apart as Ministers of the Gospel must, above all else, know the Gospel with which they have been entrusted so that they are able to feed it to others.  Many do not.  The results look like the stories at the beginning of this blog. The Church is in desperate need of faithful and wise servants.

So, what do I have to say to those in the stories above who were wounded by what scripture calls "wicked servants"?  

Thankfully, after a very long journey, my friend who was so ungraciously kicked out of church has been given the grace to forgive that so-called pastor and has recently found a church that feels like home.  To her, I say, I am so grateful that God showed you how precious you are and how much he loves you, by calling you back to him. God is always faithful when others are not!

To my friend who still lives in fear, I say, just keep saturating yourself with the news that seems too good to be true; God’s Holy Spirit will continue to free your heart and mind from that stranglehold of legalism. And remember, the degree to which we understand grace is not some new standard we must reach to earn salvation. Both of your parents loved and trusted in Jesus; even though they missed out on the peace that should have been theirs, that is enough.

To the young man who does not want to expose his children to those who might be ungracious in the name of God, I say, your sons still need to be exposed to the truth of Death/Resurrection which they will not hear anywhere else in this world.  Find a church with a faithful and wise servant, where grace is taught.  Then, if Action/Consequence rears its familiar head through someone who is ungracious, they will have a foundation to recognize it for what it is. Don’t leave them without God and without hope because of what happened to you!