Final Hours #2 - 3 Stories
Message Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the message series "Final Hours" teaching on the final hours of Jesus's life from the New Testament book of Matthew. Jesus tells three parables to encourage followers to live their daily lives with the future in mind.
Message Transcript
Good morning. Great to see everybody on a snowy March day. Glad to be together. Just one quick thing. Thank you for your generosity to the Food Bank and Eleos. Over the last month, we were able to literally fill the local food banks with food, and that is just great generosity. And as a congregation, we do four or five things a year that we just say are ways to invest in our local community or Haiti as extra ways to participate. And your response to that has been just outstanding. And one of the reasons we don't jump into every different project, there are a lot of other worthy things that we can say, here's something, here's something, is we don't want to overwhelm you with 20 things during a year so that every time you come, it's like, oh, there's a new need, there's a thing. But your response to the things that we have done has been great and certainly individually I know that you feel free to say, and I'm glad that you do, here's something else I care about, and I can participate in. And so, we're thankful to be able to help the food banks and the people in our own community who are dealing with food insecurity. That's a great thing.
Let's pray together. God, we ask today, as we are gathered that you would speak into each of our lives. God, wherever we're coming from, whatever has been our week or month, I pray that you would speak that my words reflect your word in emphasis, tone, and content. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
We started a series last week that we called Final Hours, and we're looking at Jesus' Final Hours. And the question that we asked is really this, and that is if you knew that you were facing your final hours, the last days of your life, what would you choose to do? What conversations would you have? Where would you go? What things would you make sure to experience one last time? And we actually have a record of Jesus’ final hours, the conversations that he had, the stories that he told, the places he went, the people that interacted with him. And so, we're looking at this in Matthew's version of Matthew 24 through 28 that talks about this issue as we consider where Jesus is.
And this is part of this Matthew 24 through 28, it's called the Olivet Discourse, in part because Jesus said it on the Mount of Olives, part of it, the beginning verse, chapter 24 and 25. And today we're going to look at the three stories told in chapter 25. And in order to have the context for them correct, we need to understand that chapter 24 begins with Jesus making this bold statement about the end of the world. In a sense, He said that the stones of the temple wouldn't be left standing, and the disciples took that immediately and said, when will these things be? What will be the end of the age? And last week we looked at chapter 24 and those two questions and Jesus' response, which was certainly a challenging section of the Bible because it's talking about something that's future to Jesus. Maybe some of it was past, some of it’s future, but at a minimum, when you read through that section of the Bible, you say, this is talking about some grand day when Jesus will return to Earth. And that is a striking event.
So now we come to these three stories in chapter 25, and what I would like to say is that these three stories are Jesus' way of emphasizing a single point, and this is why we're taking them together. Each of these could be their own consideration, but by looking at them together, why are they told together, why does Jesus tell these three stories right here? And what I would say is that his main encouragement is to say, I want you to live this day, your current day, in light of the day that's coming. I want you to live today in light of that day, the day that Jesus Christ returns.
So, the first story is the story of the Ten Virgins. This is in chapter 25 verses 1 through 13. And I'm just going to simply say that his point here is don't miss the party. Then his second story is the story of the talents or the bags of gold, depending on your translation. This is Matthew 25 verse 14 and following. And here his point is don't waste your life. And then at the end of the chapter, he tells the story of the sheep and the goats. And this is what I'm going to say is just simply don't assume that activity precedes identity in your life. And I'm borrowing some of the wording of this from a man named Joby Martin and some of the ideas that I'm going to share. But what I'd like to do is very quickly talk through these three stories, give a high overview, and why they tell us to live this day in light of that day.
Let's start with the story of the Ten Virgins. This is, as I said, chapter 25 verses 1 through 13. And this is a wedding story. And what it is, is that Jesus says at that time, this is verse one, the kingdom of Heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet a bridegroom. When you and I read that today, it doesn't jump at us the way that it may have at listeners of that day, because the wedding culture of that day is different than the wedding culture of our day. Now, our wedding culture is plenty big. If you go to a wedding today, it is a huge affair, with lots of detail, lots of planning, but in those days, a wedding, at least in that culture, was generally multi-day affairs, if not longer.
And so, there were three stages typically that would take place in the wedding. And what is being referred to here is that there was a time when they would wait for the bridegroom to come with the bride for the party, and they didn't know exactly when it would be. It would be sometime in a week. So instead of getting an invitation to a wedding that would say Saturday, at 4:00, there's this wedding, then there's this reception, and knowing that everything's going according to a schedule, you know, the bouquet will be tossed at a certain moment, and here's when the best man speech is or something like that. It was just this unknown thing. And whenever the bridegroom showed up, you were expected to be ready.
So, you have these ten virgins. And the point of that is probably just that they were in attendance to the bride, and they were there and five of them had oil and five of them didn't for their lamps. And the bridegroom came in the middle of the night to start the party. And what you get is you get some of the young women who miss the party. Here's what we read in verse 11. It says later, “Later the others also came. ‘Lord, Lord,’ they said, ‘open the door for us!’ “But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I don’t know you.’ “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.”
And certainly, some have looked at this and said, well, the point of this is that the oil represents the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit was one who understood who would be present in somebody who's a true believer. So, five weren't true believers, five were true believers, and that's the point of it. Others have read this and said, no, this is talking about a time when Jesus will come back, and there's the rapture of the church and this whole idea that some are not ready and so only some will be raptured. And you could go into all of these kinds of interpretations. But here's what I think the real point is, and that is at the end of revelation when we read about what's coming, there's a picture there of a wedding feast. In other words, the Kingdom of God is a party. That's what it's showing here.
And the point of this story I think, Jesus invoking this same image, is basically saying that there is an opportunity for you in this life to be rightly related to Jesus Christ, to God. And if you are, then you won't miss the party. But if you're not, if you live this day only for this day with no thought about that day, then you won't necessarily embrace Jesus Christ. And if you don't embrace Jesus Christ, there will come a day when you'll say I want into the party and you won't be allowed into the party. And this is where we get the concept of saying that we need to respond to the message of Jesus Christ and Him crucified with our own faith, in a place where we don't just say I'm part of a group. Because notice group identity didn't move people into the party and that it wasn't transferable from one person to another. The five without the oil say, give us some oil, and they were refused because it wasn't transferable. And although all of the women looked the same, some were ready and some were not. And so, Jesus' point here, I believe, is really simple, and that is don't miss the party.
Maybe you're here this weekend and your thought has always been one day I'll get serious about God and Jesus, but right now I need to get my career established. I need to get my family moving. One day I'll think about these things. But right now, I just want to do whatever it is. And Jesus' story is to say there's a day coming when Jesus will return and when he is, if you aren't ready, you can miss the party. And so the first thing is to say, I'm ready because I've trusted Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior.
I don't know if you've ever been invited somewhere that you didn't go. And then you look back later and say, I wish I had gone. Maybe some friends went out to dinner and you thought it's been a busy week; I'm not going to go. Then later, the friends talk about their dinner, and it's an epic, fun time and inside jokes are all part of the dinner and you think, I wish I had gone to the dinner. This is not that. Just to be clear, that's important. That's a good thing. But this is not just, well, I missed out a little bit and it was a party. The party here is the kingdom of God and the wedding of the church and the groom, Jesus Christ. And what he's doing, Jesus is doing as he's saying, that you don't want to miss the ultimate party. It's not just a little regret because I missed an inside joke or two or a nice meal, but something much greater. So, that's the first story.
Here's the second story. And this is the story that has been traditionally called the story of the talents. And the reason it's been traditionally called that is because what's translated in our version that we read from here, the NIV, bags of gold used to be the word talent. And so, a lot of people know this is talent. The reason the NIV translates it as bags of gold is it was a denomination of money more than it was your physical talents. And what a talent was, was typically what it would take a wage earner twenty years to earn. So, think about whatever is an average income in the United States today and say multiply that by twenty. That's how much money a talent is. That's how much money the bags of gold represent here. So, if we were to say that $50,000 was the average income of an average American full-time worker, that would mean it's $1,000,000 that's given to each of these individuals here.
And in verse 14, here's how it starts. He says, “Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them.” So, the wealth belongs to the master. It's entrusted to the people. And what happens in this story is one person gets five talents or five bags of gold, another gets two and another gets one, and the person who gets five takes it and invests it. And then when the master comes back says, your five has earned five more, and the master says, well done, good and faithful servant, you used what you were given in this opportunity for good. Then the person who is offered two does the same thing. Then the person who is offered one takes it, and they bury it because, in their words, they knew that the master was a hard man. And when the master comes back, he said, well, you should have at least put it on reserve somewhere so it could have earned interest, and the man basically responds without any real sense of what he could have done. And the response of the master is to say, you missed your opportunity. And that's why I say this is ultimately a story of don't waste your life.
And certainly, you could read this and say this is for the already believing individuals. And I think that's true. But it's also true that if you don't name Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you're not sure where God fits into your life, that the life he's given you is still something he's given you, and he's still the master and therefore, there is a sense in which you and I will one day have to give an account to God for what it is we've done with what God has given us. And His story here says, don't waste what God has given you. Sometimes what happens is we get so concerned about what God has given us that all we do is we look around and compare what God has given us, and we say, well, if God had given me that talent, if God had given me that husband or wife, if God had given me that kind of job opportunity, if God had given me, and we end up comparing and we get frustrated by the comparison.
And so, notice, here again, the five, the two, the one in the Bible. Fairness is not a value. That may shock you. But God's value isn’t everybody gets exactly the same opportunity. Its God gives each of us unique opportunities, unique resources, and unique talents. And the question isn't, what did I get? It's what did I do with what God has given me? And one of the reasons that comparison is hard, I think has been hard in every age, but in our age, in some ways, it's even getting more challenging. And one of the reasons that it's more challenging is social media. And here's why we tend to compare our unfiltered lives to other people's filtered lives. We compare other people's highlights to our B-roll. And what I mean when I say that is what we tend to do is we tend to say, well, here's my real experience. And then when we go on social media and we see what other people's lives are like, we go, wow, look at that, those people have it all together.
I mentioned that I got some of the ideas for this talk from Joby Martin. Joby was talking about this in his family. He said he took his family to Disney. And he said Disney is the “happiest” place on earth. And he said I don't think it's happy at all because he says you pay way big high prices to stand in line for hours while your kids are ornery. But he said, we went to Disney and he said when he was there, his kids were certain ages, and he said it was an awful trip. He said, my kids were fighting. My wife and I were not really getting along because we were disagreeing about how to spend the money. My kind of internal temperature got raised, and I got tweaked by my kids, and I wasn't very nice to my kids.
And he said, right before we left, we took a picture, and the picture ended up being a really good picture because everybody looked at the camera and smiled. And he said, we posted it on social media and it was like, boom, best family ever that just had the worst moment in history. And he said, so everybody else looks at our picture and says, you just had an awesome week at Disney. Your life is so good. He said I lived the trip to Disney, and it was not good.
And what we tend to do, is we tend to compare our lives to other people's filtered highlight reels, and then we say God, why haven't you given me this opportunity? And what we end up doing is we end up saying, God, what haven't you given to me? And here's how Jesus talks about this. This is verse 19. He says, “’After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five bags of gold. 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. Come and share your master’s happiness!’” So, let me just ask you, are you taking what God has given you and using it for something more than just your own ends or are you using what God has given you just for yourself?
Verse 24, “’Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’ ‘His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! 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.’”
Again, Joby Martin just put it this way. He said, here's what a lot of us do in life, and that is we go to school, we get a degree, and then we decide we need another degree. So, when we go and get a second degree, then we move in with our mother, and we get a job, these are his words, send him the email, and the job that we get has nothing to do with the two degrees that we got. And then we get a better job. Then we get married. We have some kids, we save up a little money, we go on a nice vacation, and we hope to go on a better vacation. And our hope is that one day we can retire so we can walk along the seashore and pick seashells up and if we live a life that we hope is pleasing enough to God, we hope that one day we can go to heaven too. And the challenge that some of us have is God has given us and created us for more. And what we've done is we've so adopted the Americanized version of this that we hope we can just live our lives this way and get heaven thrown in.
I remember when my kids were younger, we lived in a different town, and the town we lived in had this Christian YMCA kind of thing. And they used to do Noah's Ark Fun Festival in lieu of Halloween because evidently, Christians can’t do Halloween. So, they do Noah's Ark Fun Festival. And what they did is the kids dressed up as animals, and then they would go and they would get candy in the thing. Candy because it's okay if it's Noah's Ark, but not if you go out in the neighborhood. But anyway, I digress.
And so, my kids were at Noah's Ark Fun Festival. And the reason I remember this so well is they were both dressed up as little animals. We only had two at the time, and it was a fun event, but they would give you tickets when you do the little activities, and then you would take the tickets and cash them in for other things during the evening. And I still remember one of my boys was really good at getting his tickets and using them and leveraging them to get the best stuff before the night was done. And the other kid kept his tickets and he was just keeping them because he wanted to save them for the best thing. And I said to him at one point, I said, listen, this night is going to end and we're going to leave, and they're going to shut everything down in about half an hour. And your tickets will do you no good if you don't use them. And in his little mind, he did not want to part with his tickets because they represented some future opportunity.
How many tickets are you holding on to rather than saying, I'm investing this in the here and now and not wasting the life and the opportunity that God has given me? To live this day in light of that day means that you know there's a day coming when all of your tickets, figuratively speaking, will be gone. So, are you going to use them for something that lives beyond the end of the evening, the end of the age, or are you going to simply say, I'm going to keep amassing tickets because the more tickets I have, the better I feel about my chances for the next 30 minutes or the next 30 years? Or are you going to say, I was given this life for a moment for a reason?
And so, Jesus tells the story of the ten virgins. Don't miss the party. He tells the story about the talents. Don't waste your life. And then there's the story of the sheep and goats. And this isn't maybe as much a story or a parable in the same vein as the first two. But in verse 31, he begins and it says this. It says, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.”
And when you read on through this, what you find is that the sheep are the ones who cared for people, and the goats are the ones who did not. But what's striking about this is not just simply that because people have taken this and they've said, so if you want to be really Christian, then you need to care for people the least. And let me just read this so that I'm not just quoting it. If you're not familiar with it, verse 34, “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’”
And so, people have read these and they've said so if you want to act Christian, you need to do all these things. And there's truth to that. But what I want you to see is that we sometimes assume that activity precedes identity. And what this is actually saying is that our identity precedes our activity, and that's a huge difference. Let me explain this for a moment just to make sure that we get this. When we live in a place where our activity precedes our identity, what we tend to do and what most religious people do is say, I'll do these things so that God is pleased with me, and I get an identity as one of the sheep. But if you read this, what you actually see is that it's the sheep and the goats and neither of them really knew entirely what they were doing.
They were surprised. They said, Lord, when did I do these things? And he says, well, you did it when you did it to the least of these. And the point isn't go do these things so that at Judgment you're okay. It's that if you're a follower of Jesus, you can't help but live out of the overflow of what Jesus has done, and you will naturally do the things that it talks about here.
But I also want you to notice this, and that is this isn't about large things like building an irrigation system, going to your government, and making sure that they have irrigation so that everybody gets water. It's giving somebody in front of you a cup of water. It's giving somebody in front of you food. And visit the prisoners around you. This was the outworking of the gospel. The truth about the message of Jesus Christ is you and I are saved by good works, just not ours. We're saved by the good works of Jesus Christ. But we're saved to good works, not by good works, but to good works. And what that means is that when we understand that we become something because now God has come to live in us and we have a new identity. And our new identity means that we say, this is what I do, and I don't even think about the implications of it.
And it may be a way to think about this is in life there are probably two kinds of people. I love those kinds of statements. There's obviously more, but there are those who pack light and there are women. Now, what I mean is, that sometimes that's true, sometimes it's the other way around, but if you're a person who packs light and you're with somebody who doesn't pack light, which God in his sense of humor, always puts those two together, whether it's the man or the woman. And what happens is one person is more or less a planner. They plan for every eventuality. They work at everything. The other person says I can go with the flow. I'll wear the same shirt three times. I don't care. It'll all work out. And the other person says, no, I must have a shirt for every possible temperature, every possible application, every possible scenario. So, I need all of it in my bag. If you're that kind of person, then your identity is as a planner, packer. The other kind of person can try to pack, but you'll never pack like the person who's like that. It just is who they are. And if you're on the other side of the continuum, this person can't understand how you could go on a trip with like three things in your bag. They say, no, I couldn't possibly.
And here's my point. And that is you can say, I'm going to try to do different things, but the sheep and the goats and the whole point of I separate them is he's saying your identity is actually preceding your activity in terms of how you live. And why this matters is because when we talk about living this day for that day, it isn't, try to live this day so that you get credit with God, and one day God will say, you're part of the sheep. It's so that you say, I'm actually living out of the overflow of what God has already done for me through Jesus Christ.
Now, in this passage, there are some troubling statements. Verse 41 says this. It says, “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’”
Again, activity comes after identity. Identity precedes activity. But sometimes people are troubled by this idea of eternal punishment. And this is actually one of the things that sometimes people say is one of the reasons I have a hard time believing in God or the version of God that's talked about in churches like Orchard Hill. But what hell is in many ways is hell is the outworking of what we have chosen all the way along, and it's the outworking of the identity that we have rooted ourselves in. But when we root ourselves in the identity of Jesus Christ, then what happens is we can say, I'm living this day ultimately for that day. I'm not living today just for today.
Certainly, there's a chance that many of us can hear this differently. So, some of us have been around the church a long time. And when we talk about this, you know that you have been like my boys holding onto your tickets saying this is all about kind of myself, and I'm hoping to tip God enough along the way that one day whenever I get to eternity, whatever that's like, I'll be okay. And maybe for you, just the reminder that this world, this life isn't going to last forever. Not to waste your life is a word you needed.
Maybe today you're here and you've been in a place where you've been thinking if I could just get some things squared away, then one day I'll get serious about God. But Jesus' story about the wedding reminds us not to miss the party by putting off dealing with Jesus Christ. And maybe today you started to believe that if you do the right things, then it will gain you some points with God somehow. But the reality that you need to remember from this story is that your identity will lead you to go, when did I do those things? And so instead of focusing on the things, you need to focus on the identity and then live it where you are. Because as you do that, then one day you'll stand before God and He'll say, welcome to my kingdom. But either way, the three stories are set in this context of the coming return of Jesus Christ, and the overall statement of saying, live this day in light of that day. Live your life today in light of what day is coming.
Let's take a moment and pray together. And I want to just for a moment before we end our time together today, just say if you're here, you're in Butler, you're in the Strip District, the Chapel, online, and you have been thinking about spiritual things at least a little, but saying one day I'll get to it. Jesus' point here was to say you can't put it off and know for certain that you'll get to it. And so, maybe today it's just your day to say, God, I know that my own activity will never lead to me being enough so I thank you for the good works of Jesus Christ done for me so that I can share in the party. Maybe you just acknowledge that, right now where you are, and pray. Maybe again you're here, one of the campuses, and you have become increasingly focused on your bag of gold and preservation, your talent. Maybe today is just your day to say, God, again, I'm not wanting to live my life without taking what you've given me and using it for something more. Father, we pray today that these three stories would help each one of us to live this day, in light of that day, the day that Jesus Christ returns. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Thanks for being here.
