Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1541
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, June 6, 1880
“And cast you the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Matthew 25:30.
“So likewise you, when you shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we ha ve done that which was our duty to do.”
Luke 17:10.
“His lord said unto him, Well done, you good and faithful servant.”
Matthew 25:21.
THERE is a narrow path between indifference and morbid sensibility. Some men seem to feel no holy anxiety—they place their Master’s talent in the earth, leave it there and take their pleasure and their ease without a moment’s compunction. Others profess to be so anxious to be right that they come to the conclusion that they can never be so and fall under a horror of God, viewing His service as a drudgery and Himself as a hard master—though probably they never say so. Between these two lines there is a path, narrow as a razor’s edge, which only the Grace of God can enable us to trace. It is free from carelessness and from bondage and consists in a sense of responsibility bravely borne by the help of the Holy Spirit.
The right way usually lies between two extremes—it is the narrow channel between the rock and the whirlpool. There is a sacred way which runs between self-congratulation and despondency which is a very difficult track to find and very hard to keep. There are great perils in the consciousness that you have done well and that you are serving God with all your might, for you may come to think that you are a deserving person, worthy to rank among the princes of Israel. The danger of being puffed up can hardly be overestimated—a dizzy head soon brings a fall. But perhaps equally to be dreaded, on the other side, is that sense of unworthiness which paralyzes all exertion making you feel that you are incapable of anything that is great or good.
Under this impulse have men fled from the service of God into a life of solitude. They felt that they could not behave valiantly in the battle of life and, therefore, they fled from the field before the fight began—to become hermits or monks—as if it were possible to do the Lord’s perfect will by doing nothing at all and to discharge the duties to which they were born by an unnatural mode of existence! Blessed is that man who finds the straight and narrow way between high thoughts of self and hard thoughts of God, between self-esteem and a timid shrinking from all effort. My desire is that the Spirit of God may guide our minds into the golden median where holy Graces blend and the contending vices, equally natural to our evil hearts, are all excluded.
May the Spirit of God bless our three texts and the three subjects suggested by them, so that we may be put right and then, by infinite mercy, may be kept right until the great day of account. Let us read Matthew 25:30. “And cast you the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
I. In this, our first text, we have THE VERDICT OF JUSTICE upon the man who did not use his talent. The man is here styled an “unprofitable servant ” because he was slothful, useless, worthless. He did not bring his master interest for his money nor render him any sincere service. He did not faithfully discharge the trust reposed in him as his fellow servants did. Notice, first, that this unprofitable person was a servant. He never denied that he was a servant. In fact, it was by his position as a servant that he became possessed of his one talent and to that possession he never objected.
If He had been capable of receiving more, there is no reason why he should not have had two talents, or five, for the Scripture tells us that the master gave to every man according to his ability. He acknowledged the rule of his master even
in the act of burying the talent and in appearing before him to give an account. This makes the subject the more heart-searching for you and for me, for we, too, profess to be servants—servants of the Lord our God. Judgment must begin at the house of God, that is, with those who are in the house of the Lord as children and servants. Let us, therefore, look well to our actions.
If judgment first begins with us, “what shall be the end of them that obey not the Gospel of God?” “If the righteous are scarcely saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?” If this in our text is judgment upon servants, what will be the judgment upon enemies? This man acknowledged that he was a servant even to the last. And though he was impertinent and impudent enough to express a most wicked and slanderous opinion about his master, yet he neither denied his own position as a servant, nor the fact that his talent was his lord’s, for he said, “Lo, there you have what is yours.”