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We've all got a part of ourselves we refuse to hand over—the place that says, You don't get this, Lord. Heading toward Jerusalem, Jesus told a parable about a nobleman whose citizens hated him and sent word: We do not want this man to reign over us. The question is whether that refusal still has the last word.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor discusses how parables disarm our defensive shields by telling stories rather than making direct arguments. Can you think of a time when a story changed your perspective more effectively than a direct statement would have? How does this technique relate to Jesus's teaching method?
The sermon emphasizes that how we see Jesus determines how we receive him. What are some ways that cultural messages, personal experiences, or false teachings might distort how people perceive Jesus, and how can we correct those misperceptions?
The pastor uses his personal struggle with alcohol as an example of falling into sin even after becoming a Christian. Why do you think Christians continue to struggle with sin after conversion, and what does this tell us about the nature of Christian growth and God's mercy?
The sermon contrasts the servants who invested the master's money with the one who buried it, suggesting that fear or a distorted view of God prevented the third servant from acting. What are ways that incorrect beliefs about God's character might prevent people from using their gifts and talents as God intends?
The pastor emphasizes urgency about accepting Christ, saying “time is running out” and we don't know when we'll die. How should Christians balance this sense of urgency in evangelism with avoiding fear-based manipulation, and what does healthy Christian motivation look like?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
So we have been privileged these last few weeks in Luke 18 and 19, as we are privileged every time we turn to the four Gospels to encounter Jesus. I mean, that shouldn't be news. But if it is news, that's good news, that every time we open, especially the four Gospels, we're going to meet Jesus.
And the thing is, he's met us with opportunities to be excited at his coming, to humble ourselves at his coming, to have faith like a child, and this week is going to be different because here comes the challenge. A lot of times when we get up here and we preach, we want to bring comfort, we want to bring invitation, and the invitation is still there. The invitation's always there as long as we live, but it's time to bring some urgency.
So one of the things that Luke is doing as he writes these accounts of Jesus that we are seeing is he's trying to indicate to the audience that time is running out. It's time to encounter Jesus and receive him.
Because we can go back to John's Gospel, we've gone there a couple times at the beginning of John's Gospel, where it says, “His own people received him not, but to all who did receive him, he gave them the right to become children of God, not born of man's will or of human decision, but born of God.”
So when we talk about this urgency here in the Gospel of Luke, Luke is picking up that theme from John and echoing it, which it's his privilege to do, and saying, listen, time is running out. It's time to receive Jesus.
Let's look at our text a little bit. Let's read through it, and then we'll pray.
“As they heard these things, he proceeded to tell a parable because he was near to Jerusalem and because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately. He said, therefore, a nobleman went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom and then return. Calling 10 of his servants, he gave them 10 minas and said to them, engage in business until I come. But his citizens hated him and sent a delegation after him saying, we do not want this man to reign over us.
When he returned, having received the kingdom, he ordered these servants to whom he had given the money to be called to him that he might know what they had gained by doing business. The first came before him saying, Lord, your mina has made 10 minas more. And he said to him, well done, good servant. Because you have been faithful in a very little, you shall have authority over 10 cities.
And the second came saying, Lord, your mina has made 5 minas. And he said to him, and you are to be over 5 cities. Then another came saying, Lord, here is your mina, which I kept laid away in a handkerchief. For I was afraid of you, because you are a severe man. You take what you did not deposit and reap what you did not sow.
He said to him, I will condemn you with your own words, you wicked servant. You knew that I was a severe man, taking what I did not deposit and reaping what I did not sow. Why did you not put my money in the bank? And at my coming, I might have collected it with interest. And he said to those who stood by, take the mina from him and give it to the one who has 10 minas. And they said to him, Lord, he has 10 minas.
I tell you that to everyone who has, more will be given. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. But as for these enemies of mine who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”
So that's a big one. Let's pray over this.
Lord, you are the author of all of scripture, and you have made it all to rhyme. And you have made it all for us. It is for us. Open our hearts to receive what you have. Holy Spirit, take from the things that belong to Christ and declare them to us. We echo the prayers earlier for peace and security and some sort of assurance in our land. Draw close to us, Lord, and help us. We pray all this through Jesus, our Lord. Amen.
Okay, so this was a big passage. And there's a parallel passage in the parable of the talents, which is in Matthew 25, beginning in verse 14 and going all the way to like 30, I think. But we don't have to go there. But just know, there is a parallel passage. Jesus, I have to say that or else it'll pop up right in front of me and I'll have to preach another sermon. And you don't need that in your life.
So Jesus talks about giving gifts often. And what the gift is, we might stop and think, well, listen, man, I'm not a Bible scholar. What is this gift? And it's the gift of his grace and fellowship. The gift of his grace and fellowship, firstly, and also the talents that we have, our gifts and talents and abilities that only come from God.
And he's telling us, partially, we know we've heard some of us have at least heard the parable of the talents before. We've even read this passage here in Luke before. We know, let's not waste our life if God is giving it to us. That's fairly basic. But there's deeper things going on here.
Because at the beginning of our passage, and let's go back to the beginning. He told them a parable. Look at the next verse. “As they heard these things, he proceeded to tell a parable because he was near to Jerusalem and because they supposed the kingdom of God was to appear immediately.”
There were, in the context, there were a lot of uprisings against the Roman government at the time. This was not a new thing. Even one of the apostles himself was a zealot, joining with a group of other zealots to try to overthrow the Roman government at the time. So the very opposite of the peace that we're praying for today, and that we've been praying for since yesterday.
But there were people coming and saying, literally saying, I'm your Messiah, I'll lead you, we'll conquer the Romans. And so Jesus is aware that he's heading toward Jerusalem, where the true victory will take place. And he says, I got to tell you a parable.
And you might be thinking, well, Jason, what is a parable anyway? What's the big idea? And the thing about a parable is, it's a little story that kind of catches you off guard. Because you know, I don't know if you're ever watching a show or a movie. And you get, you start to understand when you're watching the show or movie, that whoever created this has a viewpoint. And maybe you don't share the viewpoint. So the shields are up, as it were, the Trekkies in the audience, you've got the shields up, the guard is up. And you're not taking any of this nonsense, you're like, just entertain me, I don't want a philosophical discussion. You know, I don't want a political discussion, you got the shields up.
What a parable does, is it disarms those shields. So what Jesus is doing is like saying, okay, I won't deal directly with the things that I know bother you, but I'll tell you a little story. And then by the time you realize what's going on with the story, you get hit with it, you get blindsided before you even know what's coming.
I'm gesturing a lot today. See, this is why I couldn't hold things in my hands before. You get blindsided with what Jesus really wants to talk about. Like fairy tales. You know, y'all remember, we're not going to talk about the new one, but y'all remember Beauty and the Beast from '91? Who remembers, and who has little nieces and grandnieces and all that?
'91, and what was wrong, what was wrong with the prince, do you remember that? He turned into a beast, but why did he turn into a beast? Yeah, he was arrogant. So the poor lady came to the door and he was like, I'm too good to serve that lady, get out of here. And she turned into a beautiful maiden and, you know, young men, we love beautiful maidens, don't we? And so he was like, oh dear, that was a mistake. I'm sorry. Let me, let me do it again. And she goes, no, it's too late. If you wouldn't serve me as I look like before, you're not going to serve me now.
And cursed him and all that. And we know the story, Belle came and a little creepy, probably couldn't get the movie made today, but that's all right. And you know, he didn't, but it's a parable. It's a parable about humility and about serving others and a fairy tale. So what we're supposed to learn from it as children is don't judge by appearances. Don't look at the world and think that you understand because you may not.
Jesus is doing the same thing. So he starts to tell this story about these guys who've been put in charge of the land owner's land and the son is the prince and he leaves them in authority. And they hated him. It says in our passage that he hated this man who they hated this man who was in authority.
So let's look at the text again.
He said, therefore, a nobleman went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom and then return calling 10 of his servants. He gave them 10 minas and said to them, engage in business until I come. But his citizens hated him and sent a delegation after him saying, we do not want this man to reign over us.
So one of the things that we're faced with when we're faced with Jesus is we've got those parts of ourselves that do not want to submit. We sang about surrender earlier. We have those parts of ourselves. We're like, you don't get that part, Lord. This is my part that I keep for myself. And that's the part of us that we can find in the passage with the servants who didn't want the landowner and the prince to reign over them.
That's the part of us that's rebelling. So when we engage in sin and we make no attempt to repent and even if we stay there a long time, we're acting just like them because we're saying it's harsh, but we're saying Jesus, we hate you, Jesus. I hate you. I don't want you to reign over me. We probably never thought of it like that. And surely in his mercy, he doesn't hold that against us. But that's what we do in our sinfulness. We hate that which we should love and we love that which we should hate.
And I know that better than anybody. That's our part of that is when we stay entrenched in sin, we're just like those guys. And so he gave them money and told them to go invest. There's a couple of guys that did that. There's the guy, he got the 10 and he made 10 more, just like in the parable of the talents. That guy made 10. And then there's the guy that had five or I think it was two and he made two more. And then the one guy buried it in the ground and told him he was a hard man and all that.
Notice how we see God, how we see Jesus our Lord is going to be how we decide to receive him or not to receive him. Notice how what changes in us to make us accept the Lord or to give us that grace to do that is how we see the Lord. How we see the Lord is how we're going to receive him. If we see him as hateful and that he does not desire our good, we will not receive him. We cannot.
That's why in another parable, he talks about the soil. You've got the good soil and you got the rocky soil and you've got the seed that was scorched out by the sun. It grows fast in the beginning, but it doesn't grow roots and so it doesn't endure.
And often what we're facing, if we've already received Jesus, then our mission, our task, our goal that we've been given from God is to persevere in that gift. And if we haven't received him yet, then our goal, our task is to open the door. He says later, “Behold, I knock. Anyone who opens the door, I will go into him,” and basically he'll be part of my kingdom.
That's the Jason version of all these different verses. You know, it's a new translation. It's not out yet, but maybe one day. Got to update the message sooner or later, right?
So if we've never received Jesus, our mission is to open the door, open the door. And it doesn't matter how many times you've shut the door and it doesn't matter how many times you've gotten yourself into the worst mess possibly ever.
I'm going to open up here in the pulpit that they always say, don't do that. I'm going to do that today so that I can illustrate what we're talking about here.
Tim and I both do not drink alcohol. But there was a time when that was not true. And I've made some mistakes with alcohol and I've drunk way too much and done way too many stupid things.
And I remember there were times when that was after my faith in Christ and after my baptism in front of the whole church and after, you know, confirmation and after going to Sunday school for three years and after, and you would think, man, how could you like, how could you fall into drunkenness after you've heard the gospel and how could you fall into drunkenness after you've been to seminary and, and we could go on and the accuser could go on and on, you know, the accuser's voice.
And even we've spoken with the accuser's voice toward other people sometimes even, how can we, how can we do this? Even if we've heard the gospel and heard the good news, well, cause we're weak and we're sinners and we're not angels. We're just people.
Why is the enemy, the enemy, the eternal enemy of God? Because he and all the bad angels that he took with them are enemy. They know everything. They know everything from the beginning. Their choice is final and irrevocable and unrepentable because they knew everything.
Our blessing is not only does God want to have mercy on us, but we are stupid. The blessing is we don't know anything. We don't know what the future holds. We don't know the gifts that God wants us, wants to give us in the future.
So we have, you know, in the old days they used to talk about sins of the flesh and drinking is one of those sins of the flesh because you give in to the sensual, the sensory part of yourself and you please those senses rather than, you know, pride touches the mind and other sins touch other, other human gifts and it twists, sin twists those gifts.
And so the sins of the flesh, especially they, they bring us shame. They bring us special shame. But the irony is there in some ways they're the easiest to fall into because our senses are the ones that we're aware of every single day.
And so I don't know about you. I'm a big fan of pleasure generally. I'm not a big fan of pain, anybody else? Pleasure and pain, not, not really everyone's favorite. So we can fall into stuff like that and alcohol is one of those things where it gives you a release from that pain, whatever you're suffering. You can drink too much and forget about it all.
We've got songs about it, you know, Billy Joel is singing piano man for the last 45 years, all about singing while guys are getting drunk in a bar and don't even turn on country radio. It's all about guys getting drunk in bars.
So anyway, we know that's familiar to us. People think, people think it's funny and people think it's great, but there's lots of people that, you know, they get addicted and they can't stop and they lose their lives.
And so we know the risks and we know as Christians what we're trying to do if we're using a substance to escape our reason, to escape our difficulties and that sort of thing.
So I've been one of those people before. We got any sinners here, any sinners? So that's familiar to us, but the mercy of God should also be familiar.
This is the mercy of God.
But what's happening when he tells us about these guys that a couple of the guys bring back the money and they double the money and they give it to their master because they saw him rightly and they saw the task rightly.
But what does the other guy do? Nothing. Says you're a hard man, you've reaped where you do not sow. I don't even like you, so I hid your money in the ground.
There's the Jason translation again. I don't even like you dude, so whatever. I'm taking your money and doing whatever I want with it.
And what happens? Take that money from that guy, give it to the one who has most of the money and bring that guy here and execute him.
Now, listen, father is not waiting to execute us, but the reality is we live in this world and we die in this world. That is the penalty of the sin that we've been under from the beginning is death.
As it says in Romans, the wages of sin is death.
So we know that at the end of our lives, there's no more time. That's our executioner. It's not God. It's the result of our sin and of the first sin.
So we know that death is coming for us. And after that, you know, I leave it all to the mercy of God. But after death, there's no more deciding. There's no more choosing. So when you die, that's it.
And I'll just say to you, as it's given to me from the Lord, it's time to decide because we don't know anything.
We don't know when will be the last moment of our lives.
We could be at a Trump rally minding our own business and a bullet could come and that's it. Now I found out that guy's a believer. We'll probably see him in heaven and there you go. But we don't know.
We don't know anything.
Your unbelieving friends and neighbors, you could lose them in the next five minutes.
What would you, if someone said to you, okay, Kayla, next week, you're going to come up here and you're going to give a sermon and unbeknownst to everybody in your audience, everybody in that audience, everybody in that congregation is going to die tonight.
What would you say if you knew everybody you were going to talk to is going to die tonight?
My message is always the same. It's kind of annoying. Not good in that way.
Jesus has come for you and for me and he's died on the cross for you and for me. If you don't know that he's died for you and trusted and surrendered to him today, right now you should because you don't know. You don't know what's coming.
I don't say that just to make you afraid, but I don't know about anyone else, but absent the grace of God, death should make everybody afraid.
If we didn't have the hope of the resurrection as Christians, we have nothing.
If Jesus didn't rise from the dead, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, our faith is useless.
So it starts with Jesus' resurrection from the dead and then it transitions to our resurrection, hoping in him, trusting in him.
But either way, the only way that death, people say, passed away. They say, oh, he went on to a better place.
The only way that that is true is in Christ.
The only way.
It's just words.
If you don't have Christ, it's just words.
Maybe pleasant sounding words, but truly just words.
Do you want your life to just be words?
I've noticed also in the last couple of days that we've lost some celebrities and people I even like.
You know, Shannon Doherty from 90210.
Brenda was not a pleasant character, anybody that watched that show, but Shannon was much better later than the character she played and she was battling breast cancer.
I don't want my life, and no disrespect to Shannon at all, but I don't want my life to just be one of the footnotes in one of those celebrity magazines, like People magazine.
Oh, he was wonderful and when he did that acting part in such and such and somewhere, when he was on this TV show.
Like, so what?
So you were on TV once.
I was on TV once.
I met the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders once.
But that was weird when I was 10, but anyway.
But who cares?
I've met Ozzie Smith.
No offense to Ozzie, but I'm happier that I met Jesus than I met Ozzie, and so is Ozzie.
That's the great thing. Ozzie understands, but we're nothing if we don't have Jesus.
We have nothing if we don't have Jesus. We will go nowhere if we don't have Jesus.
The absence, everybody, you know, I guess this is fire and brimstone today. Oh, well, Lord, it's your words, not mine.
We talk about hell and people get hung up on, well, what's the punishment like? Is it eternal torment?
Some people get all stressed out because maybe it is because that's the traditional teaching of Christians all the way back that it is conscious torment if you're in hell.
But the biggest part of hell that we don't talk about is the absence of God.
The absence of God.
Would you want to die and then not die because your soul is eternal and experience no semblance of love ever again?
You don't even have the ability from what some of the mystics tell us in those things.
You don't even have the ability to experience love at that point because love is gone.
So Jesus is the one who loves our souls.
He loves us, body and soul.
No one else has ever loved us quite like that.
And the Father sent him and the Holy Spirit is the one who seals the message in our hearts so that we can receive it.
Now is the time.
That's what St. Luke is doing.
And that's what he's doing with the Greek words that he uses when he is there. I won't take you on that journey, but he's trying to say time is running out.
And that's why, you know, that St. Luke was also the one that he wrote the book of Acts as well.
So when we had the call to confession from last week that popped up accidentally when Tim was doing that earlier, for Max too, when everybody gets baptized, what shall we do?
And he says, repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
And it says, if you keep reading, it says three thousand people were added to their number that day, three thousand.
And I had to do a whole paper on it once because I'm a lunatic.
Like what was the urgency about?
And the urgency was Luke is saying time's running out.
Now I'm not saying that you should go home afraid of really anything, but if you sense in your heart through the grace of God that now is the time to trust in Jesus, then go with that.
It will never be a mistake.
It might be a challenge to get hooked up with a good church community and find people that you can trust and spend your life with.
And there's lots of problems in churches everywhere. We know that we've been there, done that.
But you will never, ever, ever regret turning your life over to Jesus.
Because who else is there?
Who and I, who have I in heaven but you, O Lord, it says in the Psalms.
Those questions, especially in the Psalms, expect a negative answer.
They expect you to say nobody, nobody, nowhere.
I have nobody. You're the one Lord. You're the one who loves me. You've loved me from the very beginning.
Maybe we've been trying to not notice God who's knocking on the door of our heart. Maybe we're those people we get lost in those sensations I was talking about earlier, those pleasures of sense.
Maybe there's an arrogance. Maybe you have an intellectual pride. Maybe you think that you're smarter than all the believers out there.
Well, he chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise.
And he has appointed little children to speak praises for him.
So our God has a habit of turning over the ways of the world and saying it's going to be different.
Heck, he might be out there saying, OK, this weird guy in a wheelchair is going to proclaim my destiny. He's going to tell me who I am.
Well, yeah, because it's God who exalts and God who humbles and God who makes the way, not us.
We mentioned John 1 earlier.
It's not of a husband's will or human decision, but we're born of God by grace, by recognizing that grace when it knocks on the door of our hearts and opening our hearts to receive him.
There's nothing else. It is the greatest thing you will ever do.
It's probably the most challenging thing you will also ever do.
But this is the secret nobody tells you about.
The secret is you get the strength as you go.
You don't notice, believers tell me if this is true, you don't notice what a heavy load you're carrying if you're letting Jesus carry it for you.
Have you noticed that ever?
You might, like from a human perspective, people will see an amazing example of forgiveness, like when the kid shot those people in the church in South Carolina.
And how were they able to forgive?
Well, Jesus gave them that grace.
Jesus carried them all the way to be able to offer that forgiveness.
Anything difficult that he asks us to do, he gives us the grace to do it.
Saint Augustine, aside from the scripture teaching us that, but Saint Augustine taught us that like 1,600 years ago.
We just forget.
We just forget that Jesus said, without me you can do nothing.
So I've been finding 35 different ways just to say that.
But it's all to say we are loved, we are blessed, we are powerful because Christ who loved us and blessed us and has given everything for us is powerful.
Christ who loves us and has given us everything, including himself, is powerful.
Let's pray.
Lord Jesus, we come to you in these troubled times and we lift up our hearts for that is all we have to offer up.
We join our prayers of peace to these prayers again and we offer them to you, knowing that you will perfect them and offer them to the Father for we know you still minister for us in the temple made without hands.
Bring us all the way to heavenly glory, even through this temporary valley of challenge and death.
We ask all this through Christ. Amen.
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