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The truths of our faith are valuable, and the more of them we have, the more spiritually wealthy we are. But the truths do not belong to us, for they are on loan from the Lord. Using "The Parable of the Talents", the Lord has taught us that He expects us to invest this spiritual wealth for the sake of the world. If we accumulate truth without putting our faith to work in the world, it is as if we are burying the Lord's wealth in a hole in the ground. If we are good stewards over the Lord's riches and practice what He teaches, we will enter into the joy of heaven.

That's the essence of the sermon I preached in Erie, Pennsylvania, today. Read Matthew 25:14-30 and Secrets of Heaven 5291:4 to see the truth of this. Then, you can either listen to the sermon the way it was preached in Erie, or read the following text version—or both!

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What would you do with half a million dollars? If, right here today, as you walked out of this church, you were each handed a check. Maybe some people only get checks for a hundred thousand, others for only two hundred thousand. If everyone walking out of here today received an unexpected sum of money, what would we do?

Now here’s a wrinkle: what if you were told that this is not your money, but the church’s. Let’s say we announced here that all the assets of the church were going to be distributed among everyone, so that each person had their own portion to manage, for the duration of their life. What would you do with the money then?

It’s interesting to think about, isn’t it?

Now ask yourself another question. Ask yourself this: “What have I learned, from the Lord?” Ask yourself. Try to think of everything you’ve ever learned from the Lord. Now you may say, “Wait, He’s taught me so much, how could I possibly list it all in my head right here and right now.” Maybe I’ve even already lost you to your own thoughts because of this question.

Then again, maybe you find yourself saying, “No, I really don’t know that much. I know a few things. They are each precious, but they boil down to this, this and this.” That’s okay, too. One way or another, though, we each of us here, all of us, have learned things from the Lord and from His holy Word, and those things are precious. They’re valuable. They make us rich, don’t they?

Actually, when you come to think of it, that kind of makes you feel good, doesn’t it? It can be nice for us to reflect back on all the truths we’ve accumulated over our lives. It’s comforting. We feel good about ourselves, proud of all we know.

But let’s be careful. Every truth we learn is most certainly precious, but what good is wealth if you horde it? Right? A treasure is only valuable because of what you can do with it. Those checks for a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, for a half a million dollars—they might as well be scrap paper if you just stick them in a drawer and forget about them.

This, of course, is one of the things the Lord was saying to His followers when he told the parable of the talents we read here today. Let’s take a close look at what He really means by this story.

“For [the kingdom of heaven] is like a man traveling to a far country, [who] called his own servants and delivered his goods to them.

That’s what the New King James Version says, “the kingdom of heaven is like”. Actually, though, the original Greek doesn’t say that at all. It just says “it is like”, or, “he is like”. There’s just a preposition there, and the translator has taken the liberty to indicate that this story is about the kingdom of heaven. Now, theologically, that’s not far off, but linguistically, it doesn’t look right. If you go back to the text just before our reading, you will see, though, that the Lord had just been talking about “the Son of Man”. So really, when the Greek says “He/it is like” we should probably understand it to mean “the Son of Man is like”.

And that fits in just right with the internal sense of this story, for the man most certainly is the Lord. Even people who have never learned correspondences can see that with only a little enlightenment.

And to one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one, to each according to his own ability; and immediately he went on a journey.

So here we have different numbers of talents. What does each sum mean? What’s a talent?

Well, first off, don’t think in the literal sense of a talent as being any small thing. Depending on which Biblical scholar you listen to and what sort of metal, gold or silver, was being weighed, a single talent could be worth a thousand dollars or as much as thirty thousand dollars. That’s as much as a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, maybe, for the one given five talents.

But what about the internal sense, here? Well, to begin with, we are to understand these talents as the things the Lord teaches us from His Word. They are truths, and as with the servants in the story, they are not from ourselves but from the Lord.

Now, we know from the Writings that the number five, here, has to do with what we sometimes call “remains” or “remnants”. These are those good things stored up in us by the Lord since earliest childhood. So a servant given five talents is someone who has accepted these things from the Lord and receives the wealth entrusted to Him by the Lord in a state of innocence, in a mindset that is willing to be led.

The number two, in the Word, always has to do with marriage. So the servant given charge over two talents is the person who, later in life, has made a marriage in his own living of faith with charity, and so has put truths and goods together in life.

The number one, in the Word, we usually associate with the Lord Himself: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord…is One.” But from the context, here, we know that in this case the servant with one talent stands for something opposite, something negative. And so, we are taught, the single talent servant is the person who receives truths of faith from the Lord, but leaves it at that. This talent is a single talent, all alone. It is faith alone, without the charity found with the servant of two talents.

Now, before we go forward, it’s useful to recognize that while each of these servants represents a kind of person, in another way they each represent a part of oneself. Yes, we all have good and faithful servants within us, and we also each have a lazy and wicked servant inside us. The purpose of the Lord’s parable is not to tell us which people around us are condemned, but to show us each what parts of ourselves we need to be on the lookout for.

Then he who had received the five talents went and traded with them, and made another five talents.

So what is trading? Well, think about it. How do you make money in this world? If you had some money to invest in some sort of business, how would you go about deciding what to do? If you’re smart, you’ll ask yourself, “How can I be useful?” All truly successful businesses work because they provide some sort of use to people. You can’t make a lot of money doing something nobody finds any value in, right? It’s the same thing in the internal sense: trading here means putting to good use.

And what happens when we put the treasures we’ve received from the Lord to good use? Yep, we get back more. In fact, the more we put into use, the more we get back altogether.

And likewise he who [had received] two gained two more also.

So when we receive the Lord’s bounty, whether as five talents or as two talents, and put truths together with good, when we join the teachings of faith with good and so make good use of them, there is a commensurate gain.

But he who had received one went and dug in the ground, and hid his lord’s money.

And here’s what not to do. If we take a faith alone attitude, if we ignore the love for the neighbor that is charity, if we keep truth separate from good and so spurn the doing of good and useful works, we are digging in the ground and hiding the Lord’s money. This is inevitable. Faith without charity cannot bear fruit, and cannot multiply. Instead of investing what belongs to the Lord, we just horde it away where no one will ever benefit from it.

After a long time the lord of those servants came and settled accounts with them.

It’s not hard to see what this means, is it? We all face a “settling of accounts” at the end of our lives, however long they are. And this is the point, isn’t it? The phrase is becoming overused, but I’ll use it here anyway: the question is, at the end of the day, what do you have to show for what you’ve been given?

So he who had received five talents came and brought five other talents, saying, ‘Lord, you delivered to me five talents; look, I have gained five more talents besides them.’

Remember, this is talking about what we have received from the Lord since earliest childhood. These remains, stored up in our internal selves, are of no good to us until we put our externals in order.

His lord said to him, ‘Well [done], good and faithful servant; you were faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.’

So what is the joy of the Lord? Think about it. The Lord is Love Itself. As such, He desires nothing more than to do for each of us every good and so to make us happy and draw us near to Him. And we love Him when we love His servants, our neighbors. This is the joy of the Lord. This is the joy of heaven.

He also who had received two talents came and said, ‘Lord, you delivered to me two talents; look, I have gained two more talents besides them.’

Remember, this is talking about the joining together of faith and charity later in our lives.

His lord said to him, ‘Well [done], good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.’

It’s not enough to be faithful, we have to be good as well. The two are inseparable. And here again, we enter the joy of heaven when we put good and truth together in our lives and so become useful.

Okay, so that’s the good path put before us. But what of the alternative? Let’s listen here to the rest of the parable:

Then he who had received the one talent came and said, ‘Lord, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you have not sown, and gathering where you have not scattered seed. And I was afraid, and went and hid your talent in the ground. Look, [there] you have [what] is yours.’ But his lord answered and said to him, ‘You wicked and lazy servant, you knew that I reap where I have not sown, and gather where I have not scattered seed. So you ought to have deposited my money with the bankers, and at my coming I would have received back my own with interest. Therefore take the talent from him, and give [it] to him who has ten talents. For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”

Wow. That sounds pretty harsh, doesn’t it? What was it the servant said about his master? He said, “I knew you to be a hard man.” Does this describe the Lord? Is the Lord a hard man?

The Lord is Love. His yoke is easy and His burden light. He tenderly loves every one of us, even the worst of us, even when we are at our worst. But. But, to a person who does not live the truth, to us when we do not put His teachings to good use in our lives, He can certainly appear hard. To the evil, the Lord indeed appears a hard master, for what He asks of us is contrary to what an evil person wants to hear.

You have to admit that accumulating truths on their own is a bit easier to do than actually being a good person. There’s a part of each one of us that would rather go dig a hole to store up our faith in than actually do the work required to bring the truth alive. Some truths are hard to follow when we first see them. But this is an appearance.

Finally, what is this business about the one talent being taken away? Well, this is what we inevitably bring upon ourselves when we don’t invest what the Lord teaches us. When we die, we take with us all the truths we have ever received from the Lord, but in short order, those truths that we did not conjoin to good, that we did not put to use, that we did not actually live—they fall away. If you don’t use it, you lose it, quite literally. From an external viewpoint, this can look like the Lord taking away, but really it was never ours in the first place, right?

So what are you going to do with what the Lord has taught you? However much or however little you have gained from Him and His Word so far, every little bit of truth is of great value. Just remember that the truths you have gathered in are not yours. We are stewards of faith, and must invest it to bring about good in the world, and so enter the joy of the Lord.

Amen.