Live Free with Josh Howerton - Passionate Ministry | Ep. 323 | Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Jesus told a story about a generous master who entrusted servants with wealth, and they had to decide what to do with it. God has given us so much, and He wants us to use it in a way that honors Him and blesses others. Don’t miss the unique circumstances He has placed you in. What has God given you and how are you using it for Him today? For more information, visit lakepointe.church/dailydrive

Thanks for tuning in to today's Daily Drive with Lake Point Church, a daily dose of God's Word for your morning drive. When the word, not the world, becomes the majority of your week, your life will start to change. For that reason, our prayer is that God will speak to you through today's devotional. For more digital content to feed your faith, visit lakepoint.comit. And now let's dive in to today's devotional. Hey, it is officially May, and you know what that means. The Kentucky Derby, Mother's Day, proms, graduations, and everything is in full bloom right now. We've been talking about how God causes things to bloom, how he loves growing things, especially you and me. We've already talked about how God uses pivotal circumstances and practical teaching to do that. The last couple of days we've talked about those providential relationships, the people that God intersects our life with. that can help us grow. And today I want to talk about how God uses passionate ministry. You know, I like to work hard, especially outside. Always have just something about getting dirty that I like.

I was recently helping my son build a deck, and there's just a great feeling at the close of the day when you're covered in sawdust and sweat. I love it. And I don't know, maybe I never evolved from my big yellow Tonka truck days in the backyard sandbox, but I think it may have to do something with a sense of accomplishment, or that feeling of being absolutely spent or perhaps the promise of a cold gatorade and a long shower and a great night's sleep when you're done. I don't know, but I love working hard. Now, I know the value of taking breaks and slowing down. In fact, I'm getting ready to do that just a few weeks, and hope you'll find some time to do that as well.

But you need to know I love working hard, and I absolutely love my primary job. Now, I don't sweat. I don't get dirty on a regular basis doing my primary job, and things like hammers and picks and concrete and mitersaws are just an occasional distraction. My tools are usually a Bible, a laptop, and a mind that won't stop swirling with all kinds of ideas. But when I am creating, when I'm teaching, when I'm leading, when I'm working with a team on ways to engage the hearts and minds of people with the good news of God's love, when I roll up my sleeves and I work hard with the gifts that God has given me, I feel fully alive.

In fact, I feel like the most blessed guy on the planet. To get to do what I get to do and to do it with a group of awesome people is an absolute rush for me. and I constantly want to get better at what I get to do. I want to, as the Apostle Paul told a young pastor named Timothy, I want to fan into flame the gift that God has given you. I want to keep doing that. I've been doing ministry for a long time now. I'm not a young guy like Timothy was,

but I want to constantly get better at clearly communicating God's love to a world that desperately needs to know it. And what I may lack an ability, I hopefully will make up in passion, because I love Jesus Christ with all my heart. I'm grateful for the way that he's changed my life. I love the way I've watched God transform thousands of other people's lives, and I feel so privileged to be a tiny part of what he wants to do in the lives of thousands, millions, and billions more.

And I have experienced that every time I use my gifts and spend my days in passionate ministry, God grows me a little more. Have you experienced that? It's the way he made us. I mean, to live beyond ourselves, using whatever he's given us for his glory. and man, he has given us so much, every one of us. In Matthew chapter 25, Jesus tells a great story about three guys who were challenged to live beyond themselves, to plant, cultivate water, and grow what they had been given, and produce

some lasting fruit with their lives. It says this in the story, Jesus says, again, it'll be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them, to one, he gave five talents of money to another two talents and to another one talent, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. The man who received five talents went at once and put his money to work and gained five more. So also the one with the two talents gained two more. But the man who had received the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground, and hid his master's money.

Now Jesus here is talking about vast sums of money. It's hard to translate this sort of thing, but you might think of the talent as worth essentially 15 years of a worker's wages. Now in those days, people basically live from day to day. To have accumulated just one year's worth of wages was an enormous amount of cash. So the figures that Jesus is thrown around here are just staggering, illustrating that God, the master, is an amazingly generous God. So the master entrusts his wealth of these servants, and then he goes away. And it dawns on them that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

This is the chance for them to be able to exercise initiative, creativity, passion, develop their gifts, and rise to positions at greater responsibility, if they do a good job. Now, most likely, Jesus listeners would have understood this. It's the way things generally would have worked on the job those days. So vocationally, organizationally, financially, the master has given these guys the chance of a lifetime. Did you catch verse 16 that said,

the one who had received the five talents went off at once? And the key phrasing this verse is, went off at once. He got after it right away. He wasn't wasting time. He realized that he would be crazy to let this opportunity of a lifetime pass him by. And gang, God has entrusted this life to us. All the things that you have, your mind, your talents, or relationships, your body, your money, your will, the church to be a part of, the gift of Scripture, the power of the Holy Spirit that is in work inside of you, has been given to you

by the master. None of it belongs to you. You didn't earn any of them. All of your life is a gift from God, and he wonders, so what are you going to do with it now? You know what hit me that there are no, no talent people in this story. There are people with a very very good. numbers of talents, but there are no, no talent people in this story. And there are no, no talent people listening to this podcast either. Let me point out a little side note here. You must come to prize and value what the master has given you. It's interesting in this story. Of the varying amounts of gifts, it's the one talent guy who buries his. I don't know, maybe he thinks that his talent's so small that doesn't matter, or maybe he wishes that he was one of the other servants.

There's this universal tendency to compare our talents with other people. We compare ourselves and wish that we have what belongs to somebody else. Their physical attractiveness or their success or their achievement or their marriage or their car or their house or their hair or their body type or their ministry. And part of the lesson of this story is I must ruthlessly refuse to compare my talents with anybody else because it will make me absolutely miserable. And what is worse, if I spend my life wishing I had the talents that belong to somebody else, I will discount my gift and bury the irreplaceable treasure that the Lord of these gifts is given to only me.

So I must come to identify and cultivate and plant and invest the gifts that have been given to me, not somebody else, and so do you. Now, Lord of the Gift has given every one of us an opportunity to uniquely make a difference in this world. He has created each one of us with a unique shape. That's the acrostic I heard Rick Warren used years ago in describing how God is uniquely shaped, us for passionate ministry. And I want to spend tomorrow's episode unpacking that. So come on back. But today, I want to encourage you like Paul encouraged Timothy, fan in the flame the gifts he is given you and then passionately burned for his glory today. I'll see you back tomorrow. Have a great day. Thanks for tuning in today. For more biblical teaching and worship, join us for our church online

live weekend services on Saturdays at 5 p.m. and Sundays at 9.30 and 11 a.m. Central Standard Time. For more information, visit lakepoint.com. Church slash daily drive.