[Transcript of a midweek message published by Horley Baptist Church on YouTube[1], July 2020]
Are you feeling it difficult to find any get up and go? Has lockdown left you feeling listless and unsure of your purpose? Are you being honest about the reasons why?
A few years ago now myself and a bunch of other teachers took a group of school children on a coach trip to Austria. It was going to involve a 24 hour coach journey which I was dreading so I splashed out the cash and I bought myself a portable DVD player. This is in the days before smartphones so I turned up at the coach and I got on with my portable DVD player and a bunch of DVDs, and I found a space at the back of the coach and got myself comfortable. The weird thing was was that in all of those 24 hours not once did I manage to switch the DVD player on; I was too comfortable, I was just felt unable to pluck up the energy to push that button and set myself up with a film.
I think that we are finding ourselves in a similar sort of situation. We’ve been in lockdown for a while now and although restrictions are easing, although we are able to do more than we were able to before, I sense and I sense it in myself, this reluctance to actually do anything. There’s a dormancy, there’s an inertia that has kicked in. We’ve become settled, we’ve become comfortable and we’re feeling it really difficult to actually get up and do anything now.
In Matthew’s Gospel in chapter 25 we’re told of an occasion when Jesus told one of his most famous parables. Parables are stories about earthly things but which have a heavenly, a Godly meaning. He tells a story of a master who goes away on a journey and he summons three of his servants to him and he gives each servant a different sum of money. To one he gives five bags of gold, to another he gives two bags of gold and to the final one he gives one bag of gold. The master sets off on his journey and the guys with the five bags of gold and two bags of gold straightaway go off and invest the money and they double what they have got but the last servant, instead of investing, instead of maybe taking a bit of a risk, he goes away and buries the money in the ground.
When the master returns he calls these three servants to him. The first two come along and said “Look, I’ve doubled your money” and he says to them “good and faithful servants I’ve entrusted you with a few things; I’m going to give you even more things to look after”. But when it comes to the final servant the servant says “look, I know you’re a hard master master, you reap what you don’t sow and I was a scared so I buried the money and here’s your money back” The Master’s reply was “You wicked and lazy servant!”. He wasn’t very impressed and ended up taking the money that that servant had and gave it to the other two servants instead.
You see, we need to ask ourself the questions “what is stopping us from stepping out of our comfort zones? What’s stopping us from doing what God has called us to do? What has created this inertia in our life?” We seem to have lost momentum and at this time of a virus it’s very easy to come up with the excuse of fear – we’re fearful, we’re scared of what might happen, we’re scared of catching the virus. Well actually, maybe our fear is fear of the unknown. Perhaps you’ve always been used to being on church rotas and doing things within the church context and suddenly find yourself out of that context and unsure of how you are supposed to serve God in these circumstances.
It’s very easy to blame fear but we’ve got to ask ourselves the question “Is that really the reason?” The master saw past the servant’s claim of fear and instead saw the real reason behind his inability to do what he had been asked to do and that was laziness.
You see, you have a purpose, you have a task, you are God’s workmanship and you have been created for a reason – to do good works. This isn’t about salvation, this isn’t about earning your way into heaven because we know that’s just not possible and it’s been done by Jesus already. No, this is about you being who you have been designed to be, who you have been called to be. There are many things that stop us but when I come to the end of my life I want to be able to stand before God and hear him say the words “good and faithful servant” because I’ve stepped out, I’ve taken risks and I have used the gifts and the opportunities given to me by God. I certainly don’t want to hear the words “you wicked and lazy servant”.
[1] YouTube link: Have You Lost Momentum?
Bible references: Matthew 25 v14-30
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Contributed by Martin Shorey; © the Author
