The Parable of the Faithful Servant

1:16The focus of this study is not on eschatology or the study of the end times, the study of the last things. Though we will dabble In a few eschatological matters, particularly in identifying and standing up the context of where these three parables are found. Rather, the focus is going to be on these three parables that are designed to teach about the imminent, that is, impending, near, at hand return of Christ. This return could occur today, or it could be a long way off. But in either case, these three parables teach us this: first, we need to live and work like the master is going to return at any time, and that is the parable of the faithful servant.

2:28Second, we need to live our lives but stay prepared. That is the parable of the ten bridesmaids. And last, we need to be faithful because we're going to be rewarded based upon our stewardship, and that is the parable of the talents: readiness, preparedness, and faithfulness. This week we're going to focus on our need to be ready for. Christ's return. We'll structure the sermon into three areas. We'll first of all look at the background or the setting. We'll then exposit the actual first parable. And then I will conclude with several application points. The context or the setting of this parable is found at the very beginning of Matthew 24, and it's worth turning there. Matthew 24.

3:28Beginning in verse 1, as the disciples and Jesus exit the temple, the disciples look back and they are amazed at the grandeur, the beauty, the size of the temple, and comment to Jesus about its greatness. But look in verse 2. Jesus says, You see all of these, do you not? Truly I say to you, there will not be left one, be not left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down. This statement concerns the disciples. And you see this because in verse 3, they ask Jesus two questions.

4:28When is the Going to happen, and what are going to be the signs of this event? But there's a problem. The disciples presuppose that the destruction of the temple and Jesus' second coming will occur at the exact same time. And in the following verses, he will correct this misunderstanding. He will instruct them that there are two separate events: the destruction of the temple and his second coming or his return. And he answers these questions in his back and forth manner.

5:18Every seven years or so, my birthday falls on Thanksgiving. If I were to ask my wife two questions, what are we going to do for my birthday? And what are we going to do for Thanksgiving? I would have no problem distinguishing what my wife means if she chooses to answer the question in a back and forth manner. Let me give you an example. For example, using this, we are going to Dallas for Thanksgiving. Second question. We will celebrate your birthday after dinner.

6:00Question. We will arrive in Dallas around 11 a.m. in the morning, go to Jordan's house and eat a light lunch. See, that's really answering the second question because that's not Thanksgiving dinner, that's a light lunch. We will open your presence around 5:30. First question: after eating Cajun turkey, sweet potatoes, corn casserole, green beans, and pie. Second question. In Matthew 24, Jesus answers the disciples two questions in a similar back and forth manner. Notice behind me how he does this.

6:42Beginning in verse 4 of chapter 24, he is now addressing the second question. What are the signs of your second coming? There will be false messiahs, verse 5, wars and rumors of war, verse 6, famines and earthquakes, verse 7. Believers are going to be tested, persecuted, verse 9. Many believers are going to fall away and betray others, verse 10. There will be false prophets in the church, verse 11, and the gospel will be proclaimed to all the nations, verse 14.

7:21But in verse 15, he pivots and he now addresses the first question: when is this temple going to be destroyed? He provides specific instructions for the audience at that time that they need to know about. Look in verse 15. He warns of an upcoming Roman siege of Jerusalem and how it's a fulfillment of Daniel's prophecy about the abomination of desolation. In verses 16 through 18, he says, When you see these Roman battle banners, don't do like the Jews do. What did the Jews do?

8:01They went into Jerusalem, trying to get behind those massive walls, thinking they would be safe. You Jewish Christians do the opposite. Get out of Jerusalem. And that was critical because in 70 AD, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem utterly. And every virtually every single person in there was slaughtered. In verses 19 through 21, Jesus tells these believers in Jerusalem to brace themselves for the hardship to come. Because after that Roman siege, they're going to be dispersed to every other geographic area. And in verse 22, for comfort for them, he reminds them that at this time we will be protected for the sake of the elections. Those days will be cut short.

9:04Now, in verse 26, he gets back to his second question. What about his second coming? He's now helped out the people in Jerusalem. Now, let's get back to the second coming. You can't miss this second coming. Verse 27, it'll be visible. Verse 29, it will be preceded by the setting aside of the rule of the sun and the moon to show that all things are under his authority. And in fact, in verse 31, you're going to hear a trumpet.

9:33But to finish off his answer to help them out, he now tells a parable, beginning in verse 32, to remind them about the destruction of the temple. And he uses this story of the fig tree, saying that all of the events leading up to and connected with the destruction of Jerusalem will be fulfilled in this generation. Verse 34. And then he goes back to finish off his answer to the second question in verse 36. The second coming will occur on a day that no one knows, including the Son. It will be unexpected by unbelievers, and it will bring about a final and eternal distinction between believers and unbelievers. I hope that eschatological background helps you, because as we now focus on these three parables, these three parables are. Addressing the second coming and not the destruction of Jerusalem. We don't really care about the destruction of Jerusalem. It was destroyed in 70 AD.

10:43We are concerned about the second coming of Jesus Christ. So, with that background behind us, let's exposit this parable in this series: the parable of faithful servant. Matthew 24, 45 through 51, tells the story of a wealthy landowner or a householder who is going on a long journey. And prior to his departure, he is going to appoint a chief servant to manage his household. We saw that, of course, in the Old Testament when Joseph was appointed to manage the household.

11:24And then, when that wealthy landowner returns, that chief servant expected to have to give an accounting of his management of the master's possessions. So, the central point of this sermon is simply this: we need to be ready for his return, Christ, by living and working like the master is going to return at any minute. This parable can be simply broken down into two parts: the characteristics and rewards of the master. The faithful servant, the characteristics and reward of the wicked servant. What are the characteristics of the faithful servant? Verse 45. The faithful servant is wise.

12:18His feet are on the ground. He is sensible. He does not speculate. It just so happens that that is the very quality of the Christian who is ready for Christ's return. The Christian who is ready for Christ's return is wise. Second, the faithful servant is a good steward. He knows that his master may not return for some time, so he gets about the work of caring for the fellow servants. He uses the time of his master's absence to fulfill his mission.

13:04Third, the faithful servant is actively obedient. He is the one who the master finds doing what the master told him to do when he went away. Verse 46. And this reminds us of the true believer who will be doing what Jesus told us to do when he went away. Which is making disciples, witnessing, loving the brethren, walking in the light, praising God. The faithful servant is ready. And the question for all of us is: are we equally as ready?

13:54What are the rewards of the faithful servant? He is given more responsibility. Verse 47. No vacation, no day at the beach, no cabin in the mountain. While we can't argue dogmatically, I do believe this hints, and we see this other places in Scripture, to the truth that what we are doing now is in preparation for additional labor in heaven. Now, that labor will be without toil, but we aren't going to be rewarded with no work. We are going to be rewarded with greater work and more responsibility.

14:40Those are the characteristics and rewards of the faithful servant. What are the characteristics and rewards of the wicked, or unforgiving, or ungrateful, or unmerciful servant, depending on which translation you have? Now, I will comment: don't get hung. Up on the word wicked because just it's probably just as easily, not in terms of grammar, but in terms of the context of this argument, that we could use the word unfaithful. What are the characteristics of the unfaithful servant? First, the wicked servant is deceived, verse 48. He believes that his master is delayed, and as a result, he is careless, lazy, and presumptuous.

15:34The wicked servant is actually a proxy for the unbeliever and for those that are called nominal Christians. These are the ones who profess to be Christians, but really don't bear the fruits of a Christian. These individuals, the unbeliever, the nominal Christian, are spiritually careless. They don't take the gospel seriously. They are spiritually lazy. They invest in the treasures of this world, not in the treasures in heaven. And they are spiritually presumptuous because they assume that their master's return is yet delayed. And they actually believe that they have time to clean up their act before Christ comes.

16:30Habitual habits in the dark and the secret can be pushed aside because I'll be able to prepare for Christ's return. Second, the wicked servant is a poor steward. The wicked servant misappropriates the master's resources and ignores the master's instructions. Instead of caring for the fellow servants, the wicked servant cares for himself and his cronies. He feeds himself and his cronies and not the fellow servants he was given responsible to. Likewise, the unbeliever and the nominal Christian will place their needs and the needs of their cronies above the needs of those who they were called to serve. They will indulge in the fleshly pursuits of immorality, drunkenness, and gluttony.

17:34And third, the wicked servant will be taken by surprise at the master's return, if you notice in verse 50. They will be taken by surprise. And just like that servant, the unbeliever and the nominal Christian will be taken by the surprise of Jesus' second coming, and they will be found in their Unbelief, and they will be found not being ready. So, what are the rewards of this wicked servant? They're pretty stark. The wicked servant will be cut in pieces, verse 51, assigned the place with the hypocrites, verse 51, and will be sent to a place where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, verse 52. Likewise, unbelievers and nominal Christians will spend eternity apart from God. So, those are the characteristics and rewards of the wicked servant. So, now having completed our brief exposition of this parable, what can we additionally take away from this parable this morning? And I want to suggest three things this morning, amongst what could be many others.

18:57First, being ready does not mean knowing the exact time of Christ's return. Although we are meant to know the season of his return, we are not ever expected to know the exact time. And this is consistent with God's dealings in the past. Noah spent many years building the ark, and it even appears that the ark was completed before. God one day came and said, Get on the ark, I'll close the door, and the rain will start. He knew the season, but he did not know the exact hour. And this is going to be exactly the same thing in the last days in verse 39. There will be no dramatic indications that the day or the hour of the judgment has come. Like Noah and his family when they entered the ark, people will be going about their normal routines because there's going to be no sign of the imminent danger of the return of Jesus Christ.

20:13Brothers and sisters, this truth calls into question all who attempt to predict the timing of the return of Christ. Such prophets were wrong in the past. I'm sorry, Hal Lindsay, Tim LaHaye. Such prophets are wrong today. I'm sorry, John Hagee. And these prophets will be wrong in the future. This is because being ready means not knowing the exact time of Christ's return. Second, being ready means redefining our definition of retirement. Now, as I look around this room, there are a handful of Us who are retirees or near retirement. Most of you are young, but I want you to stay with me because this is important for what you look at. Adam and Eve were placed in the garden and given responsibility to care for it, to maintain it. Heaven is described in terms of work, not play, of activity, not passivity. From the beginning of time to eternity future, mankind is going to be given work to do.

21:41So, what does this say about retirement? Two quick thoughts. If we are to be at work until he comes, look at verse 46, blessed is that slave whom the master finds at work when he comes. Then, why do we think that reaching a certain age entitles us to cease our labors for him? What passage of scripture justifies a cessation of service? Now, while I am not suggesting a litmus test for Christian retirement, I am suggesting that the way some of you in this room and some Christians Look forward to retirement, or those that may be practicing retirement, is a form of burying your talent. That's my first thought. My second thought is not an argument against retirement in an economic sense. I am not saying that you can never cease your employment or cease your career.

22:59I am saying that retirement should be that period of life when you are no longer distracted by work or to work for a livelihood. It's a time where you have the wisdom of age, potentially the financial freedom, and the flexibility to increase your labors for the master. In Apollo 13, because we don't see it very often, you'll remember that you have the large rocket that gets the rocket ship and the pod up in the air, and then it breaks off in the orbit. Why? There's a need for a second booster rocket to push it into orbit. You need to think of retirement as that booster. It's the second stage in your ministry.

23:51We should become more active in evangelism, more active at church, more active in mission. And more active in service. While I'm an embarrassed one in the audience, I want to give you three examples of individuals who are examples to me and mentors. I served with Monty Brewer, who in his early 70s spends 20 to 25 weeks a year overseas going into Vietnam, Ariteaus, sleeping on mats, and he has to have someone with him because he can't drive a car. He's got glaucoma.

24:41We celebrated David Cordell's birthday just last year. I won't embarrass him. David's not retiring. David is still serving cadets at Texas AM, evangelizing and discipling. Tom Steller at age 68 sent me a letter to tell me that he's stepping down as the provost of Bethlehem College and Seminary. And he had to step down from Training Leaders International Board upon which I serve as the chairman. Why? He's getting ready to raise funds to become a full-time trainer overseas in Africa for pastors.

25:22These are the individuals who are the examples that I would put forth to you of what retirement should look like. Being ready requires redefining our definition of retirement. And finally, being ready means understanding, finishing the task. Those of you who are missionaries, soon-to-be missionaries, involved in missions, I challenge you to listen extra carefully. We read in Matthew 24:14, and this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, pantata ethni, in the Greek, and then the end will come.

26:15There is an active debate today whether pata ethni refers to people groups or to nations. People groups being an ethnolinguistic group that speaks a particular language, you know, a tribe that's different from six other tribes in the same country. Or does it mean nations? Recently, many of our Reformed brethren and our reformed ministries have emphasized the need of the gospel to go to these unreached peoples, appealing in part to this passage. But such an interpretation has shaped our missionary enterprise so much that we are now focused. On what? Finishing the task.

27:07There's a problem, though, with this people group-centric interpretation. First, it doesn't have a real solid theological grounding. While the authors of the scripture could conceive of nations in terms of geographic, cultural, or linguistic categories, the first-century biblical authors and the Jewish followers of Jesus would have primarily understood a biblical theological understanding of nations or ethnic. What do I mean? When Jesus and Paul and Peter, the authors of the New Testament, spoke of the nations, their Jewish hearers would have understood them to refer to every other nation not named Israel. Every other non-Jewish nation. In essence, we call them, or Paul calls them, the Gentiles.

28:10The ethni were the nations. They weren't people groups. Is it necessary to take the gospel to the nations? Yes. Is it important even to break it into different tribes within a particular nation? To take the gospel to them, absolutely. But to define finishing the task as having to go to every single ethno-group is not correct. And I'll explain that here in two seconds. Second, there are practical problems with this interpretation. Many ethno-linguistic groups have already gone extinct before the gospel ever got to them.

29:03Some tongues in the first century are no longer heard in this century. And there are new tongues in this century that didn't exist in the old century. Do we have to ensure that both medieval people that speak medieval English and modern English are both represented at the final throne? All of these issues and others account for why virtually every mission agency and research group disagree on how to define the world's people groups. Thus, there are practical problems with using this people-centric interpretation of Pantatan ethnic. So, Mark, why did you waste my time in the last three to five minutes discussing this?

29:54First, the emphasis upon people groups. The last 50 years has resulted in a course correction at the expense of our mission. Specifically, the new focus hasn't been on making disciples of all nations: evangelizing, baptizing, teaching, establishing churches, training leaders. No, no, no. We have to finish the task. We got to get the gospel to every last people group. That's the task. Or stated differently. The Great Commission isn't fulfilled, and our task isn't finished when we've identified every single ethno-linguistic people group and merely exposed them to the gospel. We're called to do much more.

30:52We are to send others to become disciple makers and to make disciples of all nations, teaching them to obey everything that Jesus commanded. Second, understanding Pata ethnic in a biblical theological sense is very relevant to this lesson. Let me ask you a question: How many of you believe that Jesus could not come back this very day? Because every ethno-linguistic people group has not been exposed to the gospel. If you believe that, then Christ cannot return today, and you have no need to be ready for his return because there's something else that has to be accomplished.

31:52It also means the whole central point of this sermon is erroneous. I want you to chew on that. Is it important to finish the task? Yes, because that's Matthew 24. But it's more important to make disciples of all nations. And that means, brothers and sisters, that just because the gospel has gone forth to India doesn't mean that we can't send missionaries to India to make disciples. Just because Europe had the gospel decades or a century ago doesn't mean we can't send disciples to Europe.

32:35Matthew 28 says, go to all nations. And he can return at any moment because the gospel has gone forth to all of the nations. Because all the nations, biblical, theologically, is those that were not Israel and not Jewish. J.C. Ryle, one of the great preachers in the 19th century, he pastored in Liverpool, England. He used to get up every morning and look out his window and say, Perhaps today, perhaps today. And before he went to bed at night, he would look out the same window and say, Perhaps tonight, Lord, perhaps tonight.

33:27As we close, I want to remind some in the audience of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We are born into sin and are incapable of pleasing a holy God. Our actions, our works, our good deeds are simply not enough. The only solution to our problem is the perfect work of Jesus Christ. If you place your faith in Jesus' work on the cross, his death, and his resurrection, and believe that to be payment for your sin, then you can be saved.

34:12And the proof of your salvation will be a hateful struggle with sin, a life producing the fruits of the Spirit, and being found doing the work that Jesus is. Jesus called us to do. Brothers and sisters, remember, we need to be ready for his return by living and working like the master is going to return at any minute. Let us pray. Father, we thank you that you are the sovereign ruler of the universe. You have a plan.

35:13This pandemic is part of your plan. And you have a long-term plan of when your Son will return to once and for all to judge between those who believe and those who do not. We are grateful that you do not ask us to know the date of your return. We are thankful that you have given a very basic instruction to us. You can return at any minute. We need to be but faithful to do what you have called us to do until you return.

36:14It is my prayer this morning that each of us will not grow weary in doing that which is correct. That we will not fail in being good stewards. And most importantly, we will have an eager desire to see you return sooner versus later. And when you do, may we joyfully be able to stay and be seen doing that which you called us to do. For it's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen. Thank you for listening to the sermon audio from New Life Baptist Church in College Station, Texas. For more information or to support our ministry, visit us online at newlifecs.net.