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. He owned the rule of his master even in the act of burying the talent, and in appearing before him to give an account. 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 several ability. 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 demurred. Notice, first, that this unprofitable person was a servant. He did not faithfully discharge the trust reposed in him as his fellow servants did. He did not bring his master interest for his money nor render him any sincere service. The man is here styled an “unprofitable servant” because he was slothful, useless, worthless. In this our first text we have THE VERDICT OF JUSTICE upon the man who did not use his talent. “And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” 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. My desire is that the Spirit of God may guide our minds into the golden mean where holy graces blend, and the contending vices, equally natural to our evil hearts, are all excluded. Blessed is that man who finds the strait and narrow way between high thoughts of self and hard thoughts of God, between self-esteem and a timid shrinking from all effort. 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. 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. The danger of being puffed up can hardly be overestimated: a dizzy head soon brings a fall. 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. There is a sacred way which runs between self-congratulation and despondency, a very difficult track to find, and very hard to keep. The right way usually lies between two extremes: it is the narrow channel between the rock and the whirlpool. 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 alike from carelessness and from bondage, and consists in a sense of responsibility bravely borne by the help of the Holy Spirit. 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. 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. THERE is a narrow path between indifference and morbid sensibility. “His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”- Matthew xxv. “So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.”- Luke xvii. “And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”- Matthew xxv.
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