The following Sermon was given by Robert Borgersen on February 10th, 2019 at the Winnipeg Church of Christ (www.wpgcc.org).
Speaker: All right, Good Morning everybody
Congregation: Good Morning
Speaker: Hope you can hear me okay. I am using a microphone today for multiple reasons one of which I lost my voice just a couple days ago. I am one of the many that has been sick, so if you’ve been sick, I feel you it’s been a hard week. Of course, I’d like to get started with a little flash of cuteness I think everybody here knows me, so I got rid of the information about myself just for the sake of cuteness, I love my family I hope you do too. So, we as Christians have all been given a job to do and Dave has done a great job at sharing and repeating that job. Does anybody know what’s the phrase he’s been using for that? “It’s to know God and to make God known” This is our job as Christians, this is what we are meant to do, this is what we are here for and this is what I’m going to talk about today, but along the lines of two different things.
So, let’s start off with jumping over to the scripture Matthew 25, Matthew 25, please open your Bibles if you got one. Let’s start off in verse 14, now I’m reading this from the NIV 1984 and so this is the parable of the talents, but when the word talent is used there it sorts of obscures the original meaning here. The word talent is just a large sum of money, okay and in fact I think the new NIV if you look, doesn’t use the word talent ‘if you’ve got a bag of gold’ or something like this okay. So here we go starting in verse 14 “Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servant and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents”, or and in the footnote, it actually says a talent is worth more than a thousand dollars, so a large sum of money five of them to the first servant. To another two large sums of money and to another one large sum of money each according to his ability, then he went on his journey. The man who had received the five the five talents went at once and put his money to work and gained five more, so also the one with two talents gained two more but the one who received the one talent went off dug a hole on the ground and hid his master’s money.
It doesn’t sound good, after a long time the master of those servants returned and settle the accounts with them. The man who had received the five talents brought the other five master he said ‘you entrusted me with five talents see I have gained five more’ his master replied ‘well done good and faithful servant you have been faithful with a few things I will put you in charge of many things’ and when you start realizing that five talents is a few things to this master he is incredibly wealthy. The man with the two talents also came master he said ‘you entrusted me with two talents see I have gained two more’ his master replied ‘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 masters happiness’. Then the man who had received the one talent came master he said ‘I knew that you’re a hard man, harvesting where you’ve not sown and gathering where you’d not scattered seed so I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground see here’s what belongs to you’ well his master replied ‘you wicked lazy servants so you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed, well then you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest’ take the talent from him and give it to the one who has ten talents. For everyone who has will be given more and he will have in abundance, whoever does not have even what he has will be taken from him and throw out that worthless servant outside into the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing teeth.
Crazy story and I know as somebody who did not grow up reading the Bible when I read this the first time you threw me off. It was something that it was not ‘huh’ it was not the natural response I expected to see here. We are talking today as Dave mentioned “The Discipline of Simplicity”, simplicity and this is the thing about the gospel it’s not complicated but it’s certainly not easy. It’s not complicated but it’s certainly not easy and the thing with religiousness that we love to do as religious people is make it complicated, right and this is one of the one of the problems, this is why the disciplined simplicity needs to be talked about. Well, there is some simplicity in this passage, there’s a particular layout here that is laid out as, here’s what a disciples life should be like. They are somebody who is to work for our master, clearly in this in this parable the master would be God, right?
The master infinite riches in charge this is God, we are to do it with the resources he provides, he was the one that gave the goal we are to produce real results, right? I mean, think about what they actually did with five bags of gold he produced five more. Like how many of us would love to see that happen to our investments, or our savings, your bank account that’s doubling your bank account that’d be nice right? So, consistently and it turns out if you read the chapters around it this is actually the emphasis of the passage. So consistently that when he returns he finds us working, this is actually the emphasis of these two chapters this whole section of Matthew is that the author Matthew or Jesus is telling a story about you need to be busy, we need to be working, we need to be working even though we don’t know when Jesus is coming back.
So, the simplistic vision that I present to you from this story is that stewardship with imminent accountability. This is the picture of that Jesus is painting here of what the Christian life is meant to be like. All throughout these passages and I would encourage you to read Matthew 24 all the way to the end of 25, it’s all about stewardship, taking care of a responsibility and knowing and keeping in mind that there is imminent as in very, very soon accountability. We will be brought to account for the way we spend our time, the way we spend our energy, the way we spend our resources, all the resources that God has given us.
What I’m going to talk about today is specifically one very particular resource that’s meant a lot to us in the last few years is our money, simplicity in our finances. So, first I’ll talk about people who don’t know us or don’t know bit of our story, we had a massive paradigm shift just in the way of how we viewed our money about three years ago. We discovered a guy named Dave Ramsey, for those who don’t know him he’s a radio personality in the States and he has a show that he runs. We watch or we listened and the things he was saying on there, they made sense, but they were very, like there was there was a big disconnect between what I did and what he talked about. One of the things that as we started going, we started listening and started seeing what he’s talking about and I started getting more and more excited. I’m like you know, geez this is like people are having results following what he’s doing, and people are seeing… The thing with us was we had been for a long time just maintaining. I don’t know if you know that feeling of just trying to stay afloat, right and where you’ve got that money coming in and you know you’re getting good money, you’ve you know you’ve gotten, you’ve seen your paycheck and you’re like that’s not as big as I wanted it to, but it’s pretty good and it’s gone like it’s been three months, three years, three decades, where has it been? where is it gone? I make too much money to feel this broke, you ever feel that?
We thought like we were trying so hard to just attack one debt line of credit we had, and we were saying it was such a focus and we were seeing so little progress that I was honestly at a point of saying I guess this is just the way life works right now. I guess this is just the lot that is our life right now. Looking back, it was just completely unacceptable stewardship, we were not living out the command that God gives us in Scripture to be good stewards of the resources we’ve been given. I think we all have resources, financially we all have jobs and we all have some sort of situation where money is coming into our possession and if it’s not even money, it’s time and it’s stuff and it’s people it’s everything all the resources that we are given in any kind of way. We’re expected to be good stewards with these things, we’re expected to actually use them wisely and make a return.
Now in the parable he’s actually talking about money so the return is money, what’s our return? Well I came up with a few here:
- Studying the Bible with people;
- Building friendships;
- Serving the poor;
- Meeting needs of the people around us;
- Helping those around us see the love of God by showing them love;
- Helping our teens see the love of God inspiring them to want it;
- Being a light to Canada and bringing people in from the darkness of selfishness; and
- Inspiring other disciples here and abroad to great things and help more people.
These are all returns that we could expect or want to see happen in our lives, and so the big, big question is how? This is the question how? and I’ve put I put a puzzle there because what I’m going to present to you is a little bit of the Bible’s sort of the Bible’s understanding of here are the corner pieces. Because what do you do when you get a puzzle you dump it out and you look for the corner pieces. It’s where you start, it’s what you’re going to work with, it’s going to give you some sort of guidance for the rest of it. Because every one of you has very, very complicated financial situations, there’s lots going on from the person who just started working, to the person who has been working their entire lives. There are tons and tons of financial issues and they’re all interconnected, and they all work in different ways. I can’t possibly hope to offer anything in the real details, the real meat of it for anyone so what I can do is I’m going to give you the corner points. The corner pieces to say here are the starting steps here are the points that the Bible says we can start from. Let’s start with:
Have a plan
This is something we were absolutely awful with for many, many years. The guy I am, I love school, I was always good at school in grade 11 or somewhere in that range we were taught how to make a budget. I remember that and I remember doing it, I remember being good at it, I remember getting a good grade in making a budget. One of the things I found as I actually started trying to do it in our adult lives, the hardest thing about it was just tracking the stupid thing. Am I actually doing it, because anybody can sit down and throw out some numbers, here’s what I’m going to do but if you don’t do it then what’s the point? It’s just like just like Christianity, in general if you know all this great stuff that’s great, but if you’re not living the Christian life then what’s the point? So, that was a struggle that we dealt with for a long, long time, we would make a budget and then how are we doing I don’t know? For a while I would try saving receipts and I would just start stuffing receipts into big envelopes and then after a month I would sit down, okay now let’s sit down for three hours and try to figure out if it was any good and then then of course you got this, which is the locations been ripped off and I have $27.32, what is that? All I know it was from 13 days ago and that was garbage that didn’t work.
There was actually something even more fundamental that was issued, the way I was taught to do a budget was all about making the average month and I realized in in this whole journey of our minds is that that’s actually not going to help, because there’s no such thing as an average month. I mean if you check like January you’re paying from Christmas, February’s Valentine’s, March if you don’t know it’s my wife’s birthday, so I just like they’re all special right, so it doesn’t make sense to have an average budget that’s always purposely going to be wrong because it’s not an average month, like does it make sense.
So, in the process I discovered this idea of every dollar budget where you’re actually saying no for this month where’s the money going to go. The Bible actually has some things to say about this and Luke 14 is a great example it’s actually not Jesus’s point. So, I’m not going to get you to turn there anything, but it’s just a small thing he says, ‘and who of you if you’re building a tower wouldn’t actually check do you have enough money to complete it’. He’s using it as an analogy to count the cost and being a disciple, but he just mentions like wouldn’t that be dumb to not think through building some large situation, well yeah that would be pretty dumb. Okay, now how much money do you make a year? That’s a pretty large sum and you just don’t try it, you don’t even write down where it’s going, you don’t even think about, oh well that’s pretty stupid isn’t it. It’s exactly what I did, and I was just so foolish it’s letting the money [funny sound] fly away right and hoping, this is my financial plan. Proverbs 21:5 very short just says the ‘plans of the diligent lead to profit but haste leads to poverty’ and that’s what we did.
We were hasty with everything, everything that came up we just dealt with it. So, our car broke down okay fix it, let’s hope it works. What else would come up? The laundry, the dryer broke, dishwasher broke, dishwasher leaks, pipes leaking, we got water in the basement, oh better call the plumber. Oh it costs that much, okay sure it’s got to be done. Not a plan, so here’s some questions for you as you’re thinking about this for your own lives. Now I’m sure you guys are all better planners than me so:
Where are you going to put your money that will make a real difference?
Because I love the analogy of the tower here in Luke 14, because when you think about the passage we read, those guys who went out and made money for their master they produced something serious it wasn’t like a penny or two. On top of their bag of bags of gold they actually doubled their money, like wow that’s big so it’s like they were doing something really important, they were making something that was very valuable. Where are you going to put your money that will make a real difference? and one thing Dave brought up is a great point is this amazing trip coming up in 2020 now let me make it a little real for you I was talking with Hamilton just before service and he was mentioning he looked up the some plane prices, for just a family of four family five sorry with Hamilton it could be as much as $3,000, and I said to him, I’m like okay well lucky it’s like 36 months away or something. I’m the mathematician I can’t add, it’s 18 months away. It’s not even, it’s a little less than eighteen months and so I was like whoa that’s coming soon, so I pulled out my phone divided it out, 6th grade math $3,000 divided by 18 months that’s a hundred and its a $166 a month to start putting away and that’s just the flights. You’re like, yeah seriously and you start realizing this is a lot of money like how in the world and then oh yeah life doesn’t stop at the same time. Don’t we have teen camp this year? that’s an awesome thing right, a lot of us we really want our teens to be encouraged and sing and go to camp. It’s like did you notice that the registration is higher than usual, they raised the price of the registration and it’s American oh it’s not cheap oh my God. I’m not sending anybody yet, but I’m like a year away maybe two years away. I got to start saving now that’s the thing yeah, I don’t worry mine will come just in time for 2020 or something right. It’s a lot and you’re like jeez if you’re just hoping it’s going to show up next year, this is your financial plan. It doesn’t work right, so many of us want to make these kinds of investments alright, so many of us want to be able to send our kids to camp or be able to go to 2020 early but if this is all you do it’s not going to get you anywhere right. Amen.
Moving towards freedom
Freedom absolutely, we all go off track, we all go off track but it’s not over yet, which is awesome Jesus hasn’t come back yet alright, we’ve screwed up we’ve gone off track and we’ve done stupid thing but Jesus isn’t back yet so we have a chance to repent, we have a chance to be working when he comes. Unfortunately, [this is where the visual aids come in] too many of us look like this and we’re trapped, and we’re stuck with this walking around. You know in a certain point I mean it’s not so bad, but you know if the more tangled up you get the harder it is to actually do anything that you need to do. If you’re stuck like this and you’re trying to survive and do other things, I mean yeah everything in life still needs to be done, but you should probably spend some time taking the chain off too.
Yes, yes you should save money to be able to go to 2020 or go to send your kid to camp all these things that actually need to happen, but it’d be good to actually drop the chain. Be able to be a little more free, to not have to worry about it. So, go ahead and turn over to proverbs 22 you’re probably going to beat me there because I got a paper Bible here. My Android is probably dead right dude, proverbs 22:7 if you don’t know this one, proverbs 22:7 very short it says in my again 1984 NIV ‘the rich rule over the poor and the borrower is slave to the lender’ If you’ve ever had debt, the bible is comparing debt to slavery and that’s and that’s the point is that you are actually held back from being able to do things you want to do because you can’t. It’s slavery and those with debt are less free to do God’s will. Another way to say that, when God asks you to do something and you have no debt you know what you do, you do it. When you have debt, its I can’t I got to pay this bill. You guys are with me.
Preparing for rain
Good old-fashioned umbrella, why do I need an umbrella? Because it’s going to rain. It looks cool, in the stats say that in any given year 34 percent of people will experience a major unexpected expense. So, how unlucky are you? or put it this way, how many years has it been where you haven’t had a major unexpected expense? You start adding those up right. So, the thing is we know this, we know it’s going to rain, I mean this is the grandmas thing right the grandma would always say make sure you have a rainy-day fund. It’s not new knowledge, but what we did, and this was our stupidity again we use debt, we said we have this line of credit available and so if something ever came up, we just do that. Well, what happened was, just when stuff would come up, we’d be stuck in bondage now for years trying to get out of it and so we took the problem and we prolonged it for years it just makes things harder. Plus of course when we use that we used it for non-emergencies again, I know all for all you guys probably just use your credit card when something major, major happens, but yeah, those McDonald’s burgers are really delicious. So, we know this is going to happen and yet we just we cross our fingers and just hope.
Going back to the passage we read, think about these guys who saved up had all these bags of gold all this money to be able to go out and invest, life happened to them too, hey. You don’t really like to think about that but they’re real people, people in the Bible are real people and so when you start to put that in context it’s like wow. So, they had this money to live off of as well and they went out and still made five bags more, two bags more. They still had to live, they still have things going on and I bet you things didn’t go perfect, I bet you some of the things they invested in went wrong, I bet you some of the businesses they did deals they did went bad right and yet they still at the end of at the end of this long period of time they had made it to double their money. This is the thing is we know rains going to happen we just need to prepare for it. So, if you’re not in a good number, we go with a three to six months of expenses, just take whatever the expenses you have in your household to run your household if you know both of your jobs just stop for a while. How long can you survive three to six months? The aim for that that’s usually a pretty good number but some people say six some people even say a year it’s a lot of money though.
Dare to Make a Difference
The last point is actually going back to the first one, I mentioned the story where these guys were actually seriously making money. It wasn’t five cents here and five cents there, the guy who started with five bags made five bags, the guys start with two bags made two bags. Thousands of dollars uh and so if you aim to only help a few people, guess what you’ll be more comfortable. I mean that makes sense, but the slave will bury his money, this is a really, really cool point I was doing some reading on this in a commentary and somebody point this out. It’s like because you remember how the master said hey you should have at least put it on with the bank right and we all get that we’re like yeah that makes sense you can put in a savings account make 3% right, no this is a couple thousand years ago. In fact, we know from archeology and studies of the history there was that rudimentary banking system barely starting in the Jewish community. So, there was no bank so the question what do they mean? He’s probably referencing guys like Jesus threw out of the temple, money changers remember them? Guys like that he probably was referencing business owners, entrepreneurs people who are going out and you’re saying I will give you this money in exchange you give me a small percentage.
Well, you think about Jesus’s words and what Jesus out Jesus treated some of these guys not all these guys were reputable, shocking right? and so you got to think about this guy who has five bags of money, a massive amount of money and he’s going to do that. In fact, so what the story the masters are saying to the last servant there, the guy who didn’t do that what he’s saying to him is that you should have taken some risk. He’s like what? Is that to us a bank is not risky at all, that’s the safest way to do it, but to him know that the master is actually saying no you should have with that one whole bag of gold you got gone out and risk something with it. Wow, that’s weird, that’s so different, so one thing when I was on the board or not on the board on the I was a treasurer we were talking about investing and investing the church’s money it’s like well the only thing we even considered as an investment was anything guaranteed and that makes sense. We don’t was to lose your money, is that more strict than what even the master saying here? What? What? Risk, but then you start realizing we take risk every day.
How many of us are homeowners here? So, more than half, I think. If you’re a homeowner you’ve got risk because just talk to the people who bought a house in 2007 in the States. Surprised it’s now still were you know still 50 percent of your income in the mortgage payment, but oh yeah you’re just paying interest and the house is worth nothing now and five years from now you’re going to own it. We’re going to own our house, the bank’s saying. There’s a ton of risk there we just don’t think about it, why because we actually know our area, we trust the area around us in fact discipleship is risky just a few verses before in Matthew 10 and Matthew 16 it says twice be willing to give up your life. We are called to be risk takers, it’s faith it really is that willingness to say I’m going to do this because it’s so important. Maybe you’ve never thought that with 2020, I don’t know how important you going to 2020 is, but maybe you’ve thought that with teen camp as you’re looking at your kids struggling and not becoming Christians or whatever you’re like maybe I should send him or her to teen camp, maybe it’s that important.
Now again, the team camp thing is the luxury cruise, maybe it’s a matter of, you know what I should be doing some Debose with them, I should be willing to have a spend the money to go out with other families so my teens can connect with their teens and build relationships with even with young disciples or youth and family ministry workers. You start asking those questions, what can I do because it’s so important. We want to help our kids badly, so that’s the four points that I see is the four corners of a biblical finance layout is;
First:
- Have a plan
- Do things on purpose
- Actually, choose where are you going to put your money
- Where are you going to put your resources it’s all resources
Secondly, if you’re trapped by debt do something to get out of it all. Work hard. I mean the Bible even says stuff like ‘give yours give everything you’ve got to get out if you’ve been trapped by your word’ in Proverbs.
Third, admit that you know it’s going to rain with all these other stuffs going on, have an emergency fund, and
Lastly dare to make a difference, so in your life today if you’re seeing some things that need to change, I challenge you open up. Finances are one of these things that oh my gosh nobody wants to talk about. It is the most uncomfortable thing to talk about, there are huge percentages of pastors their stats say like something like 85% of pastors never even preach on money, when in fact it was the number one thing Jesus spoke about. He spoke about it more than heaven and hell combined like it is biblical. It is everything and it’s something we need to be willing to talk about as family, because you talk with your mom about it. Some of us have to, because my mom is retired now, I have to talk to her about her money.
Reach out to somebody here for advice, somebody in your life group, somebody you know, somebody whose one of those people in the book, who are the seven people are going to get to heaven. Reach out to somebody, somebody that you want to be like, somebody that you’re looking at their finances and you’re like how are they making it? I don’t know, let’s talk to them and find out.
The expectation is clear, we need to hold everything with open hands I’m going to finish off with a quote here out of the book at a Foster’s book it’s a story about a guy named John Wesley. John Wesley was a reformer he was one of the first before going back to Luther’s time and things like that, one of the first reformers and the story goes like this now who knows how accurate the story is but this is how the story goes it says “A distraught man frantically rode his horse up to John Wesley, shouting “Mr. Wesley, Mr. Wesley something terrible has happened. Your house has burned to the ground”. Weighing the news for a moment Wesley replied, “No the Lord’s house has burned to the ground. That means one less responsibility for me.” I have no idea how true that is but are we like this with our stuff? Are we like this? Are we willing to hold it with an open hand and say this is your stuff God I’m just managing it for you, so with that we’ll close off with a prayer.