2020: A Year of Celebration!

Stewarding the Image of God!

Key Verses:  Matthew 25:14-30

At the heart of so much anxiety and unhappiness is comparison. Comparing oneself with what others have—their abilities, their resources or possessions, their jobs or service to the community… Comparison can just as easily lead to a false sense of accomplishment and the sin of pride (that I am better than someone else by whatever measurement you choose to make), just like comparison can lead to a loss of you living up to your God-given potential because of disappointment and anxiety.

Let me be direct with you: to compare yourself to another person is to miss the whole point! It is a distraction from the real purpose of your life, which is to be an Image Bearer of God.

Image Bearers of God were not meant to be a regular mirror, like someone would use when they are combing their hair, reflecting their own image back to them. We are not designed to reflect ourselves. That would lead to distraction and destruction, which we see all around us because that’s the human bent, called sin. A similar danger is how sometimes people reflect the people they associate, the people that influence their character. Trying to be like someone else is not being God’s Image Bearers… Remember, we reflect the god we serve.

Last week, we learned that as Image Bearers we are like angled or rounded mirrors. God has put humans into His Creation as an angled mirror so that He can reflect His love and care and stewardship of the world through us humans and get this, so that the rest of the creation can see God’s glory through us humans and praise God. We reflect God and His glory through our love, care, and stewardship of the world! Our lives point to the God who created us and then rescued us (freed us!) through Jesus Christ!

It was God’s plan to put humans in the world as His Image Bearers. We distorted His Image through sin! Jesus Christ came to restore us as His image bearers through forgiveness of sin, and to call us into mission with Him as agents of God’s Kingdom. Our response is to reflect God’s love, care, and stewardship of the world! The church is God’s Plan A for putting His glory on display through our love and good works, as restored Image Bearers. That leads us to the big point in today’s teaching: We are not owners of our lives, we are stewards! We are stewards of the Image of God! We reflect God to people when we steward His image in us…

Our scripture lesson for this week is found in Matthew 25:14-30 and it is famously called, “The Parable of the Talents.” Please listen to Jesus teach about the kingdom of Heaven in Matthew 25:14-30,

For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master’s money. Now after a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. And he who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five talents more, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me five talents; here, I have made five talents more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ And he also who had the two talents came forward, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me two talents; here, I have made two talents more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.’ But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

A primary lesson of Jesus’ Parable of the Talents is that we are not owners of our lives, but stewards—household managers of what God has given us! You may have a five-talent life, two-talent life or a one-talent life, but that is not the point, so don’t it make it the point! 

The point is to use the life God has given you for His glory! That’s what He designed you to do from the beginning! So, don’t try to own your own life for yourself because that goes against God’s design for your life. We are stewards of the life that God has given us, not owners! As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 6;19-20, “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

God has given us “talents” and primarily, that points to the entirety of our lives as Image Bearers of God. Yes, there are specific ways He has called each of us uniquely to reflect Him, like the moon reflects the sun, but the point isn’t whether you are a new moon or a full moon or somewhere in between. What matters is that you were designed to reflect the Son and not reflect yourself.

The moon can work it’s entire life on figuring out how to make itself the best moon it can be, but it’s all vanity if it inhibits its created design to reflect the sun![1] As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:41, “There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.” The point of every talent you have is how you develop and use it to glorify God. That’s the plan!

God created humans to uniquely be His Image Bearers to reflect His glory to this created realm (Genesis 1:1) through our love, care, and stewardship of it as His people. God gave us a sacred status as humans from the very beginning. Listen to Genesis 1:27-30,

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.

This is who we are; being an Image Bearer is about your status with God and having your identity in Him. It’s not about what we can or cannot specifically do, but what we have been created to do from the beginning.  

The Image of God is not about any capabilities we have, at all, because it is from the moment of our conception that each of us is an Image Bearer of God! God formed us from the dirt and then He breathed His breath into us and declared us His image. If you remember from last’s week sermon, that is why God forbade humanity from making any other image of God (called idols), because He has already given the world His image—in humans!

We are the Image Bearers—we are the ones who are called to reflect God’s love, care, and stewardship to His creation so that His creation would then see God’s glory!

“Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life.”

How are you stewarding what God has entrusted to you? How are you reflecting the light of the Son?

We are to shine like the moon shines at night. The moon does not compare itself with others, it simply reflects the light and glory of the sun as it was designed to—it doesn’t compare itself to Saturn’s 82 moons, feel socially distanced because earth only has 1 moon, or desire to be a star instead of a moon. It doesn’t get distracted by seasons—new moon to full moon. Nor does it focus on what has been or what will be—it simply reflects the light of the sun! And the light from the sun is so perfectly assimilated with the “face” of the moon that the two are inseparable in the mind’s eye. This is our potential as God’s Image Bearers—to reflect God’s glory so that the light of the Son is so perfectly assimilated with our lives that the two are inseparable to people.

Like with Jesus. Listen to Jesus’s prayer to His Father for us, His disciples, in John 17:22-26,

The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

It’s our being that matters, but our doings are what demonstrate our being! You are redeemed and restored to be an Image Bearer and as an Image Bearer to make HIM known.

We are not defined by the temporary things of this life, but we are to steward them well to shine God’s light. As evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem states, “When we are responsible stewards, whether taking care of our toys at the age of four or managing the entire factory at the age of forty, if we do this work ‘as unto the Lord,’ God looks at our imitations of his sovereignty and his other attributes, and he is pleased. In this way we are his image-bearers, people who are like God and who represent God on the earth.”

We are to steward all that we have been given to reflect His glory:

Stewardship is the call of our lives, now and always, to become like God and represent God on the earth in order to fulfill His original mandate to us from Genesis. That is the foundation of Jesus’ Great Commission to His restored Image Bearers in Mark 16:15, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.” What is the gospel? It is the Good News that the Son has come to make all things right in God’s creation and to bring God’s children Home to the Father. He has made the way and He is the way! And we are now invited to respond to the plan of God by becoming a part of the rescue effort.

Seize the moment and steward the gift of your life well by growing in your relationship with Jesus! Learn from Him how to be generous with what God has given you. Don’t compare yourself to others, but rather invest what you have into others. Christians steward their talents to rescue people and bring them Home to the Father through our love, care, and stewardship of the gospel!

The world teaches us to use people to get things, but we are called by God to steward all that we have to win people. We are invited to invest all that we have been given and watch the multiplication happen… along with our own peace and happiness, which are byproducts of right stewardship.

What are you doing with the gifts God has given you?

We are not owners of our lives, we are stewards! We are stewards of the Image of God for the glory of God!

Listen to the Message here:

To watch the video click HERE

FOOTNOTES:

[1] As one early reader reflected to me, “Such an interesting thought. I think many Christ followers, probably myself included, will often indulge in self-improvement and self-preservation measures and believe that becoming a “better” person is the next step in following closer to Jesus. But, in reality, unless that self-improvement is focused on and prompted by Holy Spirit transformation, the efforts may be more motivated by comparison and pride, as you mentioned at the beginning of the message.