“Jesus’ Priority is for your Faithfulness!”

Key Verses:  Matthew 25:14-30; John 17:4

September 6, 2020

Today, we are going to end our sermon series entitled “Responding to the Priorities of Jesus!” by looking at how we should respond to the priority of Jesus to be on mission with Him—to “Go!” as He commands us His disciples in Matthew 28:18-20 and empowers His Church in Acts 1:8. It is the heart of this message to call you to a faithful life as measured by the only true comparison of successful living: Jesus’ life. Truly, how we define success has great power over our daily lives and how we feel about the lives we are living.

Jesus prayed in John 17:4, “I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do.” We are to seek Him first (Matthew 6:33) and pray for with our whole hearts to be found faithful in Him! Faithfulness to the God who has chosen and called each of us to walk in the good works He has prepared us (Ephesians 2:10). This, ultimately, is the way to mission fulfillment—your and my faithful living is found through abiding in Him and bearing His fruit (John 15:1-17)!

Jesus was faithful with what God asked Him to do. Please remember that Jesus didn’t do everything He could have done, but He did everything that was asked of Him. He did not heal every person, feed every person, or respond to every human need or societal injustice of His time, but Jesus, without equivocation, did all that was asked of Him by His Father. This biblical reality of Jesus’ life is the heartbeat of this sermon. To emphasize that the call to “Go!” is first and foremost a call to be faithful to God, not successful in your own endeavors or goals.

How quickly and easily we make it all about us and our goals when faithfulness to the mission is all about Him!

Please turn with me to Matthew 25:14-30 and let us learn from Jesus’ Parable of the Talents.

Jesus’ words of praise for each disciple who stewarded his or her talents wisely was, “Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master [italics added]” (Matthew 25:21, 23).

It is critical to note that the word Jesus used was “faithful” and not successful. The Greek word translated “faithful” is πιστός; Jesus not only used it in the Parable of the Talents, but Paul also used it to describe his disciple Timothy in 1 Corinthians 4:17, “For this reason I have sent to you Timothy, who is my beloved and faithful [italics added] child in the Lord, and he will remind you of my ways which are in Christ, just as I teach everywhere in every church.”

Both Jesus and Paul made it overt and clear that “faithful” is what is desired of God’s chosen servants.

Faithfulness is the covenant priority of Jesus Christ for each of His follower’s lives. This is where so much tension exists in the hearts and minds of Christians today: What does it mean to be faithful? One of the most dangerous questions that Christians and church leaders ask alike is What does a successful church look like?

People ask this question constantly, but not always consciously, when they are deciding to attend, or remain, at a church. We apply a rubric of success to determine if such and such a place is worthy of our presence and time and financial support. Forgetting, the entire time, that God is measuring us by the plumb line of His Son.

Christians and church leaders must return to the priority of faithfulness because for far too long the local church has reaped what it has sown by forgetting that what God is looking for, in word and deed, is our faithfulness to Him, not the multiplicity of definitions of success by the people of God.

Jesus’ last words to Peter in John 21:15-22 were neither “tend My Lambs,” “shepherd My sheep,” nor “tend My sheep,” but rather the very direct, “You Follow Me!” Jesus finished with Peter in the same exact place He started with Him: “Follow Me”. In order for Peter to accomplish all that God intended for him to accomplish, what mattered most was that he was in a discipleship relationship with Jesus Christ. The same is true for members and leaders of churches today. Many churches are struggling today because the leaders have lived out of the mistaken idea that Jesus’ desire for His church leaders is their successful accomplishment of a mission, rather than their faithful commitment to His clear invitation to relationship (“Follow Me!”).

I am not saying the church does not have a mission, but I am saying that the church can only accomplish the mission of God when it prioritizes union with the God of mission. Apart from Christ, I can do nothing! Apart from the presence of God, the church can accomplish nothing of missional value, no matter how much it grows in worldly success. The presence of God is everything to accomplish the mission; it always has been.

A heavy yoke has been passed down to twenty-first century church leaders who are striving to be accountable to the myriad of ideas of what a church should look like and what it should be doing in order to be successful. As a beloved pastor to pastors stated to his fellow American pastors in the late twentieth century:

American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches… But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. … The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper’s concerns… .[1]

When a pastor tries to make your church successful, that pastor is making a decision to have hundreds of opinions attempt to define his or her job description and the focus of that church’s energies and resources. That is slavery and a recipe for failure at every level.

Church researchers passionate about returning the church to its intended mission state that “most Christian churches today need to undertake a radical re-evaluation of what Christian ministry really is—what its aims and goals are, how it proceeds, and what part we all play in its exercise. This may require some radical, and possibly painful, changes of mindset.”[2]

What do we learn from the Parable of the Talents? We learn that in order to be found faithful by God we must take what He has entrusted to us and multiply it for His glory. To put it very succinctly, Jesus said in Matthew 5:14-16, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”

The mission of God is about not hiding your light or burying your talent. It’s about believing God for what He has given you and investing it or shining it forth. If you pay attention closely, the only person in the parable who was worried about success was the one whose fear bound him up to hide his talent (Matthew 25:24-25). I extrapolate from this that when you know the character of God, you have no reason to worry about success!

Pastor Kent Hughes and his wife Barbara concluded, “we found no place where it says that God’s servants are called to be successful. Rather, we discovered our call is to be faithful.”[3]

Paul stated in 1 Corinthians 4:1-2, “Let a man regard us in this manner, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. In this case, moreover, it is required of stewards that one be found trustworthy [italics added].” Not surprisingly, the same word πιστός is translated “trustworthy” in this passage. This is the calling of all Christians, above any model of church growth or job description of missional living: our entire lives are to be conduits and testimonies of God’s grace working in and through us. We invest our talents! We SHINE!

Sadly, faithfulness to God is not the twenty-first century American Church’s driving expectation for themselves, nor is it most church’s definition of success for their pastors or church leaders. Listen to Pastor Kent Hughes and what he learned from his pastoral “dark night of the soul,”

When success in the ministry becomes the same as success in the world, the servant of God evaluates his success like a businessman or an athlete or a politician. Subconsciously I was evaluating nearly everything from the perspective of how it would effect church growth. I realized that I had been subtly seduced by the secular thinking that places a number on everything. Instead of evaluating myself and the ministry from God’s point of view, I was using the world’s standards of quantitative analysis.[4]

When this ministry couple finally learned this lesson, there was tangible transformation in Kent as a person and pastor. His wife, Barbara, testifies,

The presence of the success syndrome has been lifted from [Kent], and it seemed he had eased back into freedom we all have in Christ. We had discovered that the miserable yoke of worldly success is so crushing, because it is a burden that God’s servants were never meant to bear.[5]

It is only in the easy yoke of Jesus that a pastor can be transformed from the inside out and start leading the church forward with a new mindset—faithfulness! There must be a return to the heart of Christian ministry:

The great message that we have to carry, as ministers of God’s Word and followers of Jesus, is that God loves us not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love and has chosen us to proclaim that love as the true source of all human life.[6]

This is God’s mission! This is how we are to respond to Jesus’ invitation to participate in His mission.

The journey to faithfulness is a transformative one that must begin in the heart of each person. The Greek word μεταμορφόω, translated “transformed” in Romans 12:2, is where we get the English word metamorphosis. Metamorphosis is described as “the process by which a caterpillar enters into the darkness of the cocoon in order to emerge, eventually, changed almost beyond recognition.”[7] Jesus made it very clear that this was an impossibility apart from God, intentionally, because it is our stories being transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ that lifts up the name of Jesus Christ to a world that so desperately needs to see and experience God.

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] Eugene H. Peterson, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1987), 1-2.

[2] Colin Marshall and Tony Payne, The Trellis and the Vine: The Ministry Mind-Shift that Changes Everything (Youngstown, OH: Matthias Media, 2009), 17.

[3] Kent & Barbara Hughes, Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome, 35.

[4] Ibid., 29-20.

[5] Ibid., 106.

[6] Henri J. M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership (New York, NY: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989), 30.

[7] Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms, 12.