Stewardship of Resources · Stewardship of Life
What Fear Buries: Matthew 25 on the Bags of Gold and the Master We Imagine
Qunetin Robinson
One servant in Jesus' parable buried what he was given because of what he believed about his master. Here is what Matthew 25 teaches about fear, the false picture of God behind it, and what you may have put in the ground.
The Safest Man in the Story
He did not steal anything. That is worth saying first, because the man who buried his master's money is one of the most condemned figures in the teaching of Jesus, and his record looks clean. He did not gamble the gold or spend it on himself. He did not lose a coin. When the master came home, every bit of what he had been given was there, and he handed it back with something like relief.
Most of us would have called him careful. Some of us would have promoted him.
Jesus calls him wicked.
That word ought to stop us, because the fear that drove this man is the most respectable sin there is. It wears the clothes of prudence. It talks about being realistic, about not getting ahead of God, about waiting for a better time. It can run a person's whole life and never once look like disobedience.
What He Thought of Him
This is a parable about resources, and it is also a parable about theology. Everything the third servant did with the gold came out of what he believed about the man who gave it to him.
He tells us so himself. He does not say he was busy or confused. He says, in effect, I knew what you were like, and so I dug. What we do with what God has placed in our hands will always follow what we believe about God. If you want to know what someone actually thinks of the Lord, skip the statement of faith and look at what they have buried.
Lesson One: The Word We Have Misread
Jesus starts with a departure and a handover. "Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them." (Matthew 25:14, NIV).
Then comes the detail that has been misread for centuries. "To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey." (Matthew 25:15, NIV).
Older English translations call these talents, and that has caused some confusion. In the first century a talent was a sum of money, a large weight of precious metal. The NIV's own footnote puts one talent at about twenty years of a day laborer's wage. Our modern word for a natural gift comes from this very parable, read back into the text. Jesus was not talking about a singing voice.
Look at how the verse actually reads. The bags are one thing and the ability is another. The master sized the gift to the person, so the gold was something added to what each servant already was. That widens the parable well beyond gifts and skills. Money, a business, a family, a pulpit, a body in good health, forty years of experience, an open door in your city: all of it is the master's wealth in your hands.
Notice too the size of the smallest gift. We tend to picture the one-bag man as the poor fellow who got almost nothing. He received twenty years of wages. Nobody in this story was shortchanged, and the man who felt least had been trusted with a fortune.
Lesson Two: At Once, and a Hole
The story moves quickly from there. "The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more. So also, the one with two bags of gold gained two more. But the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money." (Matthew 25:16-18, NIV).
The words at once matter. The first servant did not wait for a clearer word or a better market. He had what he needed to begin, so he began.
Now look closely at the third man, because he was not idle. Digging is work. He went somewhere, he chose a spot, he broke ground and covered it over. Fear rarely makes people lazy in the way we imagine. It makes them busy with protection. Some of the hardest-working people you know are working hard to keep from being exposed.
His choice also had a logic that any listener would have recognized. In that world, burying valuables was an ordinary way to keep them safe. Later rabbinic teaching even treated a man who buried money held in trust as having guarded it properly, free of liability if it was stolen. So the servant could defend what he did.
Most of what we bury, we bury defensibly. The reasons would hold up in a meeting. The question Jesus raises is whether we were trying to serve the master or to get ourselves off the hook.
Lesson Three: The Master He Invented
After a long silence the man finally speaks, and his words are the center of the story. "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.'" (Matthew 25:24-25, NIV).
I knew that you are a hard man. He is sure of it. Yet everything we have just watched says otherwise. This master handed a fortune to his servants and left without supervising them. When the first man reports back, this is what he hears. "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!'" (Matthew 25:21, NIV).
Five bags of gold, and he calls it a few things. He does not take the profit and send the man back to work. He invites him into his own joy. The second servant, with less to show, hears the same words exactly. There is no trace in these verses of the hard man the third servant described.
So where did that man come from? He was invented, and the fear did the inventing. It is one of the oldest moves in Scripture. "He answered, 'I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.'" (Genesis 3:10, NIV). Adam was the first person to hear God coming and reach for cover, and the sequence has not changed: afraid, then hidden.
A false picture of God rarely announces itself. We may sing about His grace on Sunday and still live as though He is waiting to catch us out. The test is simple. When you think about Him looking at what you have done with your life, what do you expect to see on His face?
Lesson Four: Here Is What Belongs to You
The last sentence of his speech is quietly devastating. See, here is what belongs to you.
He means it as a defense. He has kept the books clean, and nothing is missing. Listen to it again, though, and you hear something colder. He is giving the bag back as a way of ending the relationship. Take it. We are even. I owe you nothing.
Compare that with the other two. Each of them came saying you entrusted me. They were speaking to someone they knew, and they had plainly enjoyed the arrangement. Their report is full of the master. The third man's report is full of the third man: I knew, I was afraid, I went, I hid. Even his obedience is about himself.
This is what fear does to stewardship. It reduces a relationship to an accounting. A son who is loved will take risks with his father's business, because he knows who he is dealing with. A hired hand, worried about his standing, keeps a careful record and takes no chances. Paul drew the same line for believers. "The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, 'Abba, Father.'" (Romans 8:15, NIV).
Plenty of Christians are living the third servant's goal without realizing it. They hope to get to the end with nothing obviously wrong. They hope to hand God back the life He gave them, undamaged and unspent. The parable tells us that an unspent life is a loss in itself, however clean it looks.
Lesson Five: Judged by His Own Words
The master's answer is the hardest line in the story. "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.'" (Matthew 25:26-27, NIV).
Notice that he does not agree with the description. He is turning it around. If you really believed that about me, he says, then your actions make even less sense. A man truly afraid of a demanding owner would have done the one thing that carried almost no risk and required almost no courage. He would have walked to the bank.
That is the part that exposes everything. The bankers were the smallest available step. It took no gift for trade and no great exposure. The servant skipped even that, which shows his fear had grown into something else. The master's two words name it. Wicked, because his heart had turned against the one who trusted him. Lazy, because beneath all that digging he had refused the actual work.
We should linger on that word lazy. We usually save it for people who sit around. Jesus applies it to a man who dug a hole. You can be exhausted, overcommitted and respected in your field, and still be refusing the one thing God actually gave you to do.
This also answers the person who says, "I could never do what they do." The master never asked him to match the five-bag man. There was a bank in town. There is always a smaller obedience available than the one we are afraid of.
Lesson Six: What Happens to the Bag
The ending is sobering, and Jesus does not soften it. "'So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.'" (Matthew 25:28-29, NIV).
At first that sounds backward, even unjust. Why would the richest servant get the extra bag? Jesus had used the same saying when He explained His parables to the disciples, there about receiving what God reveals (Matthew 13:12).
The principle is a law of the kingdom. What we use grows. What we hoard shrinks. The gift you refuse to exercise does not stay where you left it. The conviction you kept silencing grows quiet. The door you would not walk through closes, and someone else gets sent.
Then comes the last word. "'And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'" (Matthew 25:30, NIV).
We should not make this a story about earning salvation through productivity. The first two servants were invited into joy by a master who gave them everything they started with. Nor should we shrink it. The third man's trouble ran deeper than a poor return. He stood before his lord without trust, love or any real connection to him, and his buried bag showed it. Faith that never touches what we do with our lives is no comfort at the end. Jesus tells us this while there is still time to go and get a shovel.
For Business Leaders: The Risk You Keep Calling Prudence
Wise leaders count the cost, and nothing here excuses recklessness. But you know the difference between a decision you have studied and a decision you are hiding behind. Every company has a project that has been waiting on one more quarter of data for three years. Often the data has nothing to do with it. The person with the authority is afraid of being seen to fail.
Ask yourself what you would do with your position this year if you believed God were generous rather than watching for mistakes.
"Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap." (Ecclesiastes 11:4, NIV).
Your Obedience Step
Name the one decision you have delayed the longest because you are afraid of being wrong. Write down what the smallest real step would be, the equivalent of walking to the bank. Take that step before Friday and tell one trusted person you did.
For Community Leaders: Stop Guarding the Ministry
Those who lead churches and nonprofits can bury things with great sincerity. We protect the program, the reputation and the way we have always done it. We keep the budget in reserve for a rainy day while the people God sent us go without.
Scarcity can sound like stewardship in a board meeting. Ask whether your caution comes from wisdom or from a belief that God will not come through. A leader with a timid spirit produces a timid community.
"For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline." (2 Timothy 1:7, NIV).
Your Obedience Step
At your next leadership meeting, ask each person one question: "What are we protecting that God may have given us to spend?" Choose one answer and set a date to put it to work.
For Home Leaders: Your Children Are Learning Which God You Serve
Children pick up our theology faster than our words. If a home is ruled by what might go wrong, children learn that God is a hard man to be careful around. They learn it from how you talk about money and how you respond to their failures.
The healthy fear of the Lord does something very different from the third servant's terror. It makes a household a place of shelter, where a child can try something and fall short and still be safe.
"Whoever fears the Lord has a secure fortress, and for their children it will be a refuge." (Proverbs 14:26, NIV).
Your Obedience Step
Tell your family about one time you failed and God met you there. Then give each child something real to steward this week, such as a small amount of money or a household responsibility, and let them make their own decisions with it. When they stumble, respond the way you hope God would respond to you.
For the Everyday Believer: Go Back to the Spot
You may know exactly where it is. There was a calling you stepped back from after someone laughed. There is the class you never signed up for, the apology you rehearsed, the thing you felt God say to you years ago that you have not mentioned since.
Underneath it, more often than not, lies a picture of God who is waiting for you to fail. That picture is the thing that has to go, and Scripture says what drives it out.
"There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." (1 John 4:18, NIV).
Your Obedience Step
Write down one thing you have buried and finish this sentence honestly: "I hid this because I believed God was..." Bring that sentence to Him in prayer, and then take the smallest step you can toward digging it up this week.
After a Long Time
There is a small phrase in the middle of this story that belongs to all of us. "After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them." (Matthew 25:19, NIV).
A long time means plenty of opportunity, and a reckoning still ahead. If you are reading this, the master has not yet come home. The gold is still where you left it, and the ground is not as hard as you remember.
Whatever you have buried, the God you are afraid of is not the God who gave it to you. He is the one who calls a fortune a few things and invites His servants into His own happiness. You will not get a better reason to pick up a shovel.
Questions for Reflection
- What has God entrusted to me that I have been treating as mine, or as too small to matter?
- If someone looked only at what I have buried, what would they conclude I believe about God?
- Where has my caution been wisdom, and where has it been fear wearing a respectable coat?
- What is the smallest real step, my own walk to the bank, that I have been refusing to take?
- When I imagine God reviewing my life, what do I expect to see on His face, and where did that picture come from?
Closing Prayer
Father, I confess that I have often lived as though you were a hard master. I have called my fear wisdom, and I have kept busy digging when you asked me to trust you. Forgive me for what I have believed about you. Show me what I have put in the ground. Give me courage to go back to the spot, and grace to take the small step in front of me. Drive out my fear with your love, and remind me that I am your child and no hired hand. When you settle accounts, let me be glad to see you. Let me share in your happiness. In Jesus' name, Amen.
Twelve Thousand Even
The summer Nathan Greer turned nineteen, Mrs. Odessa Vance sent word through the church secretary that she wanted to see him.
Everyone on the south side knew about Mrs. Vance. She had buried a husband, run his lumberyard for thirty years and sat on the deacon board of a church that had not previously allowed a woman to sit on anything. Grown men straightened their ties when she came in. It was said she had once made a banker cry. Nathan's father said she counted the offering twice and the ushers three times.
She received him at her kitchen table and came right to it. She had seen the chairs he built in the high school shop. She slid an envelope across the table.
"Twelve thousand dollars," she said. "That's a start on a shop of your own. I don't want a partnership, and I don't want a lot of talk."
He tried to thank her. She looked at him over her glasses until he stopped.
"You've got good hands," she said. "Go on and use them."
He walked home with the envelope inside his shirt and his stomach in a knot. He knew what happened to men who disappointed Mrs. Vance.
He opened a savings account the next morning. He told himself it was temporary. He would learn the business first, find the right building and save a little of his own, so that nobody could say he had been careless with her money. He took a job in the claims department at an insurance company, just for a year.
He stayed thirty-one.
He was good at it. His specialty was estimating what could go wrong. He married, raised two girls and made deacon. Every few years he drove past an empty garage on Delmar Avenue with a good north light and slowed down. Then he thought of the kitchen table and kept driving. At night, in the basement, he still built a chair now and then, and gave it away, and never signed it.
He kept the statements in a folder. He had never touched the principal. Not once, not when the transmission went, not the year of the layoffs. It was the thing he was proudest of.
When he heard she had moved to the care home on Fifteenth, ninety-three and failing, he went to the bank and had a cashier's check drawn. He put on a tie.
She was smaller than he had ever imagined she could be, propped up by the window. The eyes were the same.
"Nathan Greer," she said. "Where's my chair?"
He sat down. He had practiced this. He said he knew she had always been exacting, and he had wanted to be sure nothing was lost, and here it was, all of it, every cent. He laid the check on the blanket, with the folder beside it.
She held the check up close to her face for a long time.
"Twelve thousand," she said. "Even."
"Yes, ma'am."
She let it fall. She pointed at the drawer of the nightstand, and he took out an old green ledger and handed it to her. It took her a while to find the page. Names ran down the column, forty or fifty of them, in her square hand. A nursing student. A barber. A boy who wanted to fly crop dusters. Beside each one was an amount, and nowhere on any page was a line for what had been paid back.
Next to his name it said, in ink gone brown: "Will fail once or twice. Do not collect. Go see the shop."
"I went to see every one of them," she said. "I got my hair cut by that barber till he died. I had a place picked out in my front room for your chair." She looked at him without any heat at all, and that was the worst of it. "What on earth did you think I was going to do to you?"
He could not answer. He was fifty years old and he was crying in a necktie.
She pushed the check back toward him with two fingers.
"I can't use that," she said. "I wanted to see the shop."
She died in April. He signed the lease on Delmar in May, and it was a poor business for a good while. His first eleven chairs did not sell. The north light was everything he had thought it would be.
The first chair he finished in that shop he carried over to the church and set against the back wall of the fellowship hall, where nobody in particular would notice it. He had signed it underneath, where she would have looked.
Go Deeper
Ready to put this teaching into practice? What Fear Buries is a guided workbook drawn from Matthew 25 and Genesis 1 and 2. Work through four movements at your own pace and finish with one page you build for yourself: Your Talent Inventory.
One servant in Jesus' parable buried what he was given because of what he believed about his master. Here is what Matthew 25 teaches about fear, the false picture of God behind it, and what you may have put in the ground.
The Safest Man in the Story
He did not steal anything. That is worth saying first, because the man who buried his master's money is one of the most condemned figures in the teaching of Jesus, and his record looks clean. He did not gamble the gold or spend it on himself. He did not lose a coin. When the master came home, every bit of what he had been given was there, and he handed it back with something like relief.
Most of us would have called him careful. Some of us would have promoted him.
Jesus calls him wicked.
That word ought to stop us, because the fear that drove this man is the most respectable sin there is. It wears the clothes of prudence. It talks about being realistic, about not getting ahead of God, about waiting for a better time. It can run a person's whole life and never once look like disobedience.
What He Thought of Him
This is a parable about resources, and it is also a parable about theology. Everything the third servant did with the gold came out of what he believed about the man who gave it to him.
He tells us so himself. He does not say he was busy or confused. He says, in effect, I knew what you were like, and so I dug. What we do with what God has placed in our hands will always follow what we believe about God. If you want to know what someone actually thinks of the Lord, skip the statement of faith and look at what they have buried.
Lesson One: The Word We Have Misread
Jesus starts with a departure and a handover. "Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them." (Matthew 25:14, NIV).
Then comes the detail that has been misread for centuries. "To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey." (Matthew 25:15, NIV).
Older English translations call these talents, and that has caused some confusion. In the first century a talent was a sum of money, a large weight of precious metal. The NIV's own footnote puts one talent at about twenty years of a day laborer's wage. Our modern word for a natural gift comes from this very parable, read back into the text. Jesus was not talking about a singing voice.
Look at how the verse actually reads. The bags are one thing and the ability is another. The master sized the gift to the person, so the gold was something added to what each servant already was. That widens the parable well beyond gifts and skills. Money, a business, a family, a pulpit, a body in good health, forty years of experience, an open door in your city: all of it is the master's wealth in your hands.
Notice too the size of the smallest gift. We tend to picture the one-bag man as the poor fellow who got almost nothing. He received twenty years of wages. Nobody in this story was shortchanged, and the man who felt least had been trusted with a fortune.
Lesson Two: At Once, and a Hole
The story moves quickly from there. "The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more. So also, the one with two bags of gold gained two more. But the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money." (Matthew 25:16-18, NIV).
The words at once matter. The first servant did not wait for a clearer word or a better market. He had what he needed to begin, so he began.
Now look closely at the third man, because he was not idle. Digging is work. He went somewhere, he chose a spot, he broke ground and covered it over. Fear rarely makes people lazy in the way we imagine. It makes them busy with protection. Some of the hardest-working people you know are working hard to keep from being exposed.
His choice also had a logic that any listener would have recognized. In that world, burying valuables was an ordinary way to keep them safe. Later rabbinic teaching even treated a man who buried money held in trust as having guarded it properly, free of liability if it was stolen. So the servant could defend what he did.
Most of what we bury, we bury defensibly. The reasons would hold up in a meeting. The question Jesus raises is whether we were trying to serve the master or to get ourselves off the hook.
Lesson Three: The Master He Invented
After a long silence the man finally speaks, and his words are the center of the story. "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.'" (Matthew 25:24-25, NIV).
I knew that you are a hard man. He is sure of it. Yet everything we have just watched says otherwise. This master handed a fortune to his servants and left without supervising them. When the first man reports back, this is what he hears. "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!'" (Matthew 25:21, NIV).
Five bags of gold, and he calls it a few things. He does not take the profit and send the man back to work. He invites him into his own joy. The second servant, with less to show, hears the same words exactly. There is no trace in these verses of the hard man the third servant described.
So where did that man come from? He was invented, and the fear did the inventing. It is one of the oldest moves in Scripture. "He answered, 'I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.'" (Genesis 3:10, NIV). Adam was the first person to hear God coming and reach for cover, and the sequence has not changed: afraid, then hidden.
A false picture of God rarely announces itself. We may sing about His grace on Sunday and still live as though He is waiting to catch us out. The test is simple. When you think about Him looking at what you have done with your life, what do you expect to see on His face?
Lesson Four: Here Is What Belongs to You
The last sentence of his speech is quietly devastating. See, here is what belongs to you.
He means it as a defense. He has kept the books clean, and nothing is missing. Listen to it again, though, and you hear something colder. He is giving the bag back as a way of ending the relationship. Take it. We are even. I owe you nothing.
Compare that with the other two. Each of them came saying you entrusted me. They were speaking to someone they knew, and they had plainly enjoyed the arrangement. Their report is full of the master. The third man's report is full of the third man: I knew, I was afraid, I went, I hid. Even his obedience is about himself.
This is what fear does to stewardship. It reduces a relationship to an accounting. A son who is loved will take risks with his father's business, because he knows who he is dealing with. A hired hand, worried about his standing, keeps a careful record and takes no chances. Paul drew the same line for believers. "The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, 'Abba, Father.'" (Romans 8:15, NIV).
Plenty of Christians are living the third servant's goal without realizing it. They hope to get to the end with nothing obviously wrong. They hope to hand God back the life He gave them, undamaged and unspent. The parable tells us that an unspent life is a loss in itself, however clean it looks.
Lesson Five: Judged by His Own Words
The master's answer is the hardest line in the story. "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.'" (Matthew 25:26-27, NIV).
Notice that he does not agree with the description. He is turning it around. If you really believed that about me, he says, then your actions make even less sense. A man truly afraid of a demanding owner would have done the one thing that carried almost no risk and required almost no courage. He would have walked to the bank.
That is the part that exposes everything. The bankers were the smallest available step. It took no gift for trade and no great exposure. The servant skipped even that, which shows his fear had grown into something else. The master's two words name it. Wicked, because his heart had turned against the one who trusted him. Lazy, because beneath all that digging he had refused the actual work.
We should linger on that word lazy. We usually save it for people who sit around. Jesus applies it to a man who dug a hole. You can be exhausted, overcommitted and respected in your field, and still be refusing the one thing God actually gave you to do.
This also answers the person who says, "I could never do what they do." The master never asked him to match the five-bag man. There was a bank in town. There is always a smaller obedience available than the one we are afraid of.
Lesson Six: What Happens to the Bag
The ending is sobering, and Jesus does not soften it. "'So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.'" (Matthew 25:28-29, NIV).
At first that sounds backward, even unjust. Why would the richest servant get the extra bag? Jesus had used the same saying when He explained His parables to the disciples, there about receiving what God reveals (Matthew 13:12).
The principle is a law of the kingdom. What we use grows. What we hoard shrinks. The gift you refuse to exercise does not stay where you left it. The conviction you kept silencing grows quiet. The door you would not walk through closes, and someone else gets sent.
Then comes the last word. "'And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'" (Matthew 25:30, NIV).
We should not make this a story about earning salvation through productivity. The first two servants were invited into joy by a master who gave them everything they started with. Nor should we shrink it. The third man's trouble ran deeper than a poor return. He stood before his lord without trust, love or any real connection to him, and his buried bag showed it. Faith that never touches what we do with our lives is no comfort at the end. Jesus tells us this while there is still time to go and get a shovel.
For Business Leaders: The Risk You Keep Calling Prudence
Wise leaders count the cost, and nothing here excuses recklessness. But you know the difference between a decision you have studied and a decision you are hiding behind. Every company has a project that has been waiting on one more quarter of data for three years. Often the data has nothing to do with it. The person with the authority is afraid of being seen to fail.
Ask yourself what you would do with your position this year if you believed God were generous rather than watching for mistakes.
"Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap." (Ecclesiastes 11:4, NIV).
Your Obedience Step
Name the one decision you have delayed the longest because you are afraid of being wrong. Write down what the smallest real step would be, the equivalent of walking to the bank. Take that step before Friday and tell one trusted person you did.
For Community Leaders: Stop Guarding the Ministry
Those who lead churches and nonprofits can bury things with great sincerity. We protect the program, the reputation and the way we have always done it. We keep the budget in reserve for a rainy day while the people God sent us go without.
Scarcity can sound like stewardship in a board meeting. Ask whether your caution comes from wisdom or from a belief that God will not come through. A leader with a timid spirit produces a timid community.
"For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline." (2 Timothy 1:7, NIV).
Your Obedience Step
At your next leadership meeting, ask each person one question: "What are we protecting that God may have given us to spend?" Choose one answer and set a date to put it to work.
For Home Leaders: Your Children Are Learning Which God You Serve
Children pick up our theology faster than our words. If a home is ruled by what might go wrong, children learn that God is a hard man to be careful around. They learn it from how you talk about money and how you respond to their failures.
The healthy fear of the Lord does something very different from the third servant's terror. It makes a household a place of shelter, where a child can try something and fall short and still be safe.
"Whoever fears the Lord has a secure fortress, and for their children it will be a refuge." (Proverbs 14:26, NIV).
Your Obedience Step
Tell your family about one time you failed and God met you there. Then give each child something real to steward this week, such as a small amount of money or a household responsibility, and let them make their own decisions with it. When they stumble, respond the way you hope God would respond to you.
For the Everyday Believer: Go Back to the Spot
You may know exactly where it is. There was a calling you stepped back from after someone laughed. There is the class you never signed up for, the apology you rehearsed, the thing you felt God say to you years ago that you have not mentioned since.
Underneath it, more often than not, lies a picture of God who is waiting for you to fail. That picture is the thing that has to go, and Scripture says what drives it out.
"There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." (1 John 4:18, NIV).
Your Obedience Step
Write down one thing you have buried and finish this sentence honestly: "I hid this because I believed God was..." Bring that sentence to Him in prayer, and then take the smallest step you can toward digging it up this week.
After a Long Time
There is a small phrase in the middle of this story that belongs to all of us. "After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them." (Matthew 25:19, NIV).
A long time means plenty of opportunity, and a reckoning still ahead. If you are reading this, the master has not yet come home. The gold is still where you left it, and the ground is not as hard as you remember.
Whatever you have buried, the God you are afraid of is not the God who gave it to you. He is the one who calls a fortune a few things and invites His servants into His own happiness. You will not get a better reason to pick up a shovel.
Questions for Reflection
- What has God entrusted to me that I have been treating as mine, or as too small to matter?
- If someone looked only at what I have buried, what would they conclude I believe about God?
- Where has my caution been wisdom, and where has it been fear wearing a respectable coat?
- What is the smallest real step, my own walk to the bank, that I have been refusing to take?
- When I imagine God reviewing my life, what do I expect to see on His face, and where did that picture come from?
Closing Prayer
Father, I confess that I have often lived as though you were a hard master. I have called my fear wisdom, and I have kept busy digging when you asked me to trust you. Forgive me for what I have believed about you. Show me what I have put in the ground. Give me courage to go back to the spot, and grace to take the small step in front of me. Drive out my fear with your love, and remind me that I am your child and no hired hand. When you settle accounts, let me be glad to see you. Let me share in your happiness. In Jesus' name, Amen.
Twelve Thousand Even
The summer Nathan Greer turned nineteen, Mrs. Odessa Vance sent word through the church secretary that she wanted to see him.
Everyone on the south side knew about Mrs. Vance. She had buried a husband, run his lumberyard for thirty years and sat on the deacon board of a church that had not previously allowed a woman to sit on anything. Grown men straightened their ties when she came in. It was said she had once made a banker cry. Nathan's father said she counted the offering twice and the ushers three times.
She received him at her kitchen table and came right to it. She had seen the chairs he built in the high school shop. She slid an envelope across the table.
"Twelve thousand dollars," she said. "That's a start on a shop of your own. I don't want a partnership, and I don't want a lot of talk."
He tried to thank her. She looked at him over her glasses until he stopped.
"You've got good hands," she said. "Go on and use them."
He walked home with the envelope inside his shirt and his stomach in a knot. He knew what happened to men who disappointed Mrs. Vance.
He opened a savings account the next morning. He told himself it was temporary. He would learn the business first, find the right building and save a little of his own, so that nobody could say he had been careless with her money. He took a job in the claims department at an insurance company, just for a year.
He stayed thirty-one.
He was good at it. His specialty was estimating what could go wrong. He married, raised two girls and made deacon. Every few years he drove past an empty garage on Delmar Avenue with a good north light and slowed down. Then he thought of the kitchen table and kept driving. At night, in the basement, he still built a chair now and then, and gave it away, and never signed it.
He kept the statements in a folder. He had never touched the principal. Not once, not when the transmission went, not the year of the layoffs. It was the thing he was proudest of.
When he heard she had moved to the care home on Fifteenth, ninety-three and failing, he went to the bank and had a cashier's check drawn. He put on a tie.
She was smaller than he had ever imagined she could be, propped up by the window. The eyes were the same.
"Nathan Greer," she said. "Where's my chair?"
He sat down. He had practiced this. He said he knew she had always been exacting, and he had wanted to be sure nothing was lost, and here it was, all of it, every cent. He laid the check on the blanket, with the folder beside it.
She held the check up close to her face for a long time.
"Twelve thousand," she said. "Even."
"Yes, ma'am."
She let it fall. She pointed at the drawer of the nightstand, and he took out an old green ledger and handed it to her. It took her a while to find the page. Names ran down the column, forty or fifty of them, in her square hand. A nursing student. A barber. A boy who wanted to fly crop dusters. Beside each one was an amount, and nowhere on any page was a line for what had been paid back.
Next to his name it said, in ink gone brown: "Will fail once or twice. Do not collect. Go see the shop."
"I went to see every one of them," she said. "I got my hair cut by that barber till he died. I had a place picked out in my front room for your chair." She looked at him without any heat at all, and that was the worst of it. "What on earth did you think I was going to do to you?"
He could not answer. He was fifty years old and he was crying in a necktie.
She pushed the check back toward him with two fingers.
"I can't use that," she said. "I wanted to see the shop."
She died in April. He signed the lease on Delmar in May, and it was a poor business for a good while. His first eleven chairs did not sell. The north light was everything he had thought it would be.
The first chair he finished in that shop he carried over to the church and set against the back wall of the fellowship hall, where nobody in particular would notice it. He had signed it underneath, where she would have looked.
Go Deeper
Ready to put this teaching into practice? What Fear Buries is a guided workbook drawn from Matthew 25 and Genesis 1 and 2. Work through four movements at your own pace and finish with one page you build for yourself: Your Talent Inventory.
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