Matthew 20:1-6 • Laboring for the Lord
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Transcript
(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
Welcome to January's Covenant Tape of the Month. I'm John Gullett, a second year Master Divinity student from Burlington, North Carolina. Please let me extend to you my personal thanks for your friendship with Covenant Seminary and also express my own word of thanks for how God is using Covenant Seminary to mold me for service in His kingdom. I'm pleased that through this January tape, you can glimpse into part of God's work here at Covenant as you listen to two grace-focused messages by our Seminary President, Dr. Brian Chappell. The first message, "Laboring for the Lord," was delivered earlier this year at McLean Presbyterian Church in McLean, Virginia. From the parable of the tenant workers, this sermon explores the motives and heart behind the labor we are called to do for the Lord. God's word shows us that God is not only a fair master, but one who is abundantly gracious in His dealings with us. May you now be refreshed in hearing the Lord's word as it is preached by Dr. Chappell. As you're thinking about the parable that begins Matthew chapter 20, the context is not hard, the parable is.
The context is this.
A rich young ruler has just approached Jesus and asked, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?"
When Jesus says to him, "Well, if you're really trying to get eternal life by what you do, there's just one little thing you have to do.
Give up your whole self.
Give up everything if you're trying to merit it."
It's when the young ruler determines that he cannot give everything that he gives up
And Jesus answers with this parable, saying this, "For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius"--that's a day's wage--"for the day and sent them into his vineyard.
About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, "You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right." So they went. He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing. About the eleventh hour he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, "Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?"
"Because no one has hired us," they answered. So he said to them, "You also go and work in my vineyard." When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, "Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first."
The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius.
So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more.
But each one of them also received a denarius.
When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. "These men who were hired last worked only one hour," they said. "And you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day."
But he answered one of them, "Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn't you agree to work for a denarius?
Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don't I have a right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?"
So the last will be first, and the first will be last.
Well that's not fair.
I mean I know Jesus said it, but it's still not fair.
You know it's not.
After all, if I were to say to one of my children, "Listen, this Saturday morning I want you to clean out the garage and I'll pay you a certain amount," and he started about eight in the morning. Wait a second, one of my children, Saturday morning. He started about ten-thirty. And then you know about three-thirty, another child joined him for about twenty minutes.
And when the job was done then, I paid them both the same. I don't imagine that both children are going to be happy.
One of them is going to say to me, "That's not fair." And he's right.
You know it's that sense of offense that the child feels that Jesus wants you to feel. I mean we are to be troubled by the fact that here Jesus isn't fair.
And that's to trouble us because we expect God to be fair and we expect the kingdom of God to be fair.
But Jesus seems to be at pains to let us know that fairness is really the last thing we should really want from God.
I mean if we really think that we should be rewarded according to our labor, we don't understand at all how much greater is our need for His generosity, His mercy.
And that is what Jesus wants us to know. The generosity of God's heart is expressed in this parable in a number of ways.
It's simply by letting us know the value the Master places upon all labor.
I mean the first part of the parable we well understand is the Master is going to reward the work that starts early, verses 1 and 2. The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them out into his vineyard. And by the tenth verse, they get their denarius.
I recognized them and I was able to say some nice things about the work that these men did sacrificially often when there was not pay, not even hours.
The student without any prompting stood up in one great explosive standing ovation of appreciation for these men who had given so much of their lives to God's work. And it was such a special moment to me because I thought this ovation is reflection I trust of God's own attitude that he who will say well done, good and faithful servant is also echoing through the ovation.
But you see it's not just the early work that the Lord here is showing that he appreciates.
It's the late work too, isn't it? I mean I think you know the pattern that begins in verse three and following.
Those who were hired last get paid first. Now those who were hired first you must know at this point are wondering what's going on, but they're not too upset yet because they see what happens. Those who were hired last get paid for a full day's work, so they only worked about an hour. Now you know their eyes are wide open thinking, all right. You only work an hour and you get a full day. Now if you worked a full day, what are you going to get? What do they get?
Still only a denarius.
We don't know why this is. All different commentators will speculate about why the master so values the late work. I mean some people will say there must have been a weather system coming in. You know it was going to freeze that night and all the grapes would have been ruined, so they had to get them all picked and that's why. Or maybe it was one of those varieties of grapes that has the sugar content that is just so fragile that there's only a few hours of picking time. It was just important that it all be gathered in so the late workers were just as important as the... Well, maybe.
We really don't know.
All we know is that for the master's purposes, the late work was just as important as the early work. And we need to know that. Maybe it even makes sense to us more than we think in spiritual terms.
I just a few days ago returned from a first ever trip to Germany where Covenant Seminary had sponsored a study tour of the sites of Martin Luther. Many of them had been in East Germany for so many years that most Americans have not been to those sites.
But one of our professors is a native German. And so he started working early on this tour, planning all the sites, doing the research, doing the history, setting the itinerary, arranging all the schedules. I mean it was a great deal of early work.
And it was really at the end of the tour where we were in Berlin, where there is not a Luther site. It was just where we were catching our airplanes, and we stayed in a hotel the night before catching our planes.
And as we were there in the lobby, the whole bus group waiting for our room keys,
the professor who was leading us took his violin that he had been using to play the hymns for us while we were on the bus. And he went over to where there was a little jazz combo playing in the lobby of the hotel in Berlin. It was a group of Turks playing sonatras, "I did it my way." And he said to them, "Could I join you?" And they said, "Yes." And he got up on the stage, and he took out his violin, and he said, "Follow me." And he played "Amazing Grace."
And then he played "A Mighty Fortress is Our God."
Now, it was at the end of the tour, the end of the day, totally unplanned.
But if you were to ask most of the people on that tour what made the greatest spiritual impression upon them in that tour, they will tell you it was that moment where we entered a secular, urbane, sophisticated, unspiritual world and took the light of the gospel in a real way, where the whole tour gathered around in this place where no one cared and began to present the gospel of Jesus Christ. It was the spiritual late work just as important as anything that had proceeded. It's when we begin to recognize that the Master has his purposes for our labor that we cannot anticipate. We only know that he has called us to his purposes for his reasons, that we are willing to serve God without despairing, that we weren't there soon enough. I recognize that when we honor professors and those who have given great service to the Kingdom, while there's a joy in that, there's a sadness too, because people always think, "Well, I wasn't there for that. I missed out on the important work. There's nothing really good to do still." And God is saying, "Every person has a purpose, the early work and the late work." There are those people who even now begin to be in this church and they're entering at some stage of their life, that they're thinking, "There are all these people who know so much more than I do. They're spiritualized. They're so much further along. I just kind of enter late, either in spirituality or in knowledge base or in age, and, you know, I just can't do it." And God is saying, "Do not despair. It is never too late to serve me."
There may have been a besetting sin that has grabbed you and held you for years,
and you're tempted to give up even by thinking, "I've been this way for so long. It would make no difference to change now."
God says, "It is not too late."
There are those of you who have served in positions where your testimony of Jesus Christ has been because of fear or fear of ridicule kept under wraps.
And you think, "For me now, at this late stage of working at this place to profess Jesus Christ, to make my testimony vivid and live before other people, they would view it as hypocrisy, if not silliness. Why do it now?"
God says, "It's not too late."
There are those of you who have been in a marriage where a spouse has not supported you in your faith,
and you have in some ways lost the support of your own.
And you say, "It's not worth it now."
And God says, "I value the late work too."
Devotional's haven't happened for five years in this family.
They'll think, "I'm silly to start again."
"I value the late work too," says God. "It is valuable to me."
The reason ultimately we understand as we read the parable is not because the labor itself is so valuable, but ultimately the laborers are what is precious to the Master.
After all, consider what ultimately is being said here. The Master is giving value. He's giving a denarius. He is giving more than that, even to those who add much to his kingdom. It makes so easy sense to us when the Master comes, and he gives to those who have started early their full day's wage. They get their reward. But he is giving some estimation of the value of those persons from God's perspective by a more subtle message in this passage. You begin to see it at the end of verse 3.
I read with emphasis before, but let me do it again. About the third hour, the Master went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing.
They're in the marketplace. They're in the world. They're there. They're living. But they're really doing nothing. As is to emphasize the point, the words in the Master's mouth at the end of verse 6 are the same. About the eleventh hour, he went out and found others still standing around. He asked them, "Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?"
Maybe you capture a sense of what is being said when you listen to the same Peter that is being answered in his own epistle later in the New Testament where he says that God has redeemed us from an empty way of life.
Some of you know precisely what I'm talking about. You have been in a business or in a career, and you have worked for years for something, for some financial goal or some position.
And you get it. And you begin to discover the emptiness of it, the hollowness of what you have given yourself to. Perhaps it's not a position. It's not even wealth. Maybe it's a person that you finally found, finally get, finally capture, finally what? Whatever it is. And then you find that if you were looking for meaning in life from that person, that it never quite comes. There's an emptiness still there. And what God says to those of us who are part of his purposes is part of the blessing upon those who have lived long for me is I give you this rescue. I have pulled you from an empty way of life. You're not doing nothing anymore. It may seem that way to you. You may be in a business where you have lived for the Lord, and yet you see no impact upon your life. All you feel is that you're perpetually at risk of others, perhaps not being promoted as others have because they view you as some religious fanatic.
And yet God has said for all that you have given, even if you feel no results from it, it does not count for nothing.
We are doing vital spiritual work. Stand firm, the Apostle Paul says, wavering in nothing, knowing that your labor is not in vain.
You may feel not just alone at work, you may feel alone in a marriage.
Lord, everything I've done all this time, it seems for nothing.
God says it is not. Your life counts.
I have rescued you from doing nothing.
You are not anymore a part of an empty way of life. The purposes of God will be fulfilled in you, even if only in heaven will you see how.
But it's not just those who have given much that the master values because they are doing something for him.
The parable is perhaps more precious for those of us who think we're not adding much of anything to the kingdom of God. We're just adding little for such persons. How precious this parable. I want you to think of the notion of those people who think even though they know the Lord, they don't have much to give.
I as a pastor recognize that some of the people who often feel worst about being in the church are those who came to know the Lord late in life.
And they may not have raised their children in the faith and they may not have had a testimony for years before others. And even though they rejoice in God's salvation of their souls, they carry about them this level of guilt or even shame about an earlier segment of life in which they did not live for God.
And sometimes when those people come to me even pastorally and they feel this huge weight upon them, I want them virtually to see me take that bird and just take it away from them and say to them, "Listen, it is precious what God has done in your life. In some ways I must recognize something about my own. It is that your decision, humanly speaking, has been more difficult than my own.
Everyone has a purpose in the grand and glorious kingdom of God in ways that we cannot measure, but God has. And He says everyone He calls whenever He calls is precious to His purposes.
You know, a couple of weeks ago in St. Louis, I was invited with my wife to a couple's house in our church, younger than us, but people very precious and dear to us. But when we got to that couple's house, we discovered that they had had a great deal of reservation about inviting us. Because the husband said at some point, he said, "You know, the way we kind of view it in our house is spiritually, the chapel family is way up here and our family is way down here. And you know, we just really wondered what it'd be like to have you in our house. Now, I must tell you, there's a part of me that really likes that analysis.
But then I have to think spiritually. This is the man. I've known his family background and I recognize how difficult it is for him to name the name of Jesus given the background He has come from. He's in a business that I know there is constant assault upon His integrity.
And yet He lives for the Lord. He is raising wonderful daughters who love the Lord Jesus and have knowledge of Him. And I think He has a greater struggle to live for God daily than I do. And yet He is doing beautifully, wonderfully. And I think, "Well, how is God going to measure all of this?"
And I begin to sense the foolishness of my trying to measure it for Him or for me when during the course of our conversation that night we talked about someone else in our church.
He faces, in human terms, certain death, sinning. His face is radiant with the love of Jesus.
And in our church, that child speaks of Christ in such a way that adults are humbled before God.
And I think those who add a lot are those who seem to have to add only a little, each precious to God in the way that He measures His work.
And the reason I need to know that ultimately, not that God just values those who add a little or those who add a lot, is because I have to face in myself sometimes I don't add anything.
Sometimes I subtract. And this parable is for those who subtract too.
Do you remember again who asked the question, who got the parable rolling? Who said, "Lord, what do we get who have given up everything?" Who asked the question?
and he will die, but not before Peter has denied him three times.
Peter has worked against the purposes of God. And what now will be God's attitude toward him?
Consider the way Jesus answered in the Master's voice. Verse 11, "When they received their wages, those who began early, they began to grumble against the landowner. These men who were hired the last only worth one hour, they said, and you have made them equal to us who had borne the burden of the day. They spoke against the landowner. And how does the landowner answer them?" Verse 13, "He answered one of them, friend."
Not hostility here, but still the heart of love, and ultimately saying, "Are you envious to the actual language? Do you have an evil eye toward me, because I am generous?"
Oh, how we hope Peter will remember that when he has been evil toward his Lord, when he has abandoned his own resolution and causes for goodness, when he has subtracted from the work of the kingdom, that in that very moment we trust he will hear echoing now the voice of the Savior, "My friend, don't be upset that I am generous in mercy, because it will be the very thing that will break his heart and bring him back to the Savior.
So it must be for us, for when we gather in such a place as this, when we begin to recognize that we make such wonderful resolutions to live worthy of our worship, to put on the veneer of goodness, to say that we will live better in marriage, at work, at home, that we will do all this now for the Savior, that we love so, we recognize nonetheless how easily we portray our own resolutions, if not our Savior. The unbridled anger against loved ones and little ones that still come so easily to us, the lust that we do not get rid of, the ministry that we cannot even consider without our ambitions in place as well, how all of these things haunt us. It's when we see that despite the goodness of the veneer, the monster within still requires the Savior's work, that we understand how good it is, that he is not fair, but great in mercy.
On our tour of Germany at one point, we passed one of the death camps of World War II, Buchenwald.
And when we did, I was surprised. It was actually in a fairly open spot beside the highway between two fairly sizable villages. And I asked the bus guide at that point. I said, "I don't understand this. I thought these were far more remote, these concentration camps."
"They were people going in and not coming out." "I do not understand it," he said, "my father and my father's generation, with their Prussian spirit, they would get the death orders to kill a thousand people that way." "And with their Prussian spirit, they would do precisely that, not 998, not 999, not a thousand and one, a thousand people precisely they would kill." "And then they would go home and have their schnitzel and beer, play with their children, listen to Schubert and go to bed, get up the next day and do precisely the same thing." "Such goodness, they were monsters within."
It was rank, vile, anger and hatred.
But then when we got to Berlin and went to that hotel that I told you about, not in the nicest part of town, where outside the doors were the drug dealers and the prostitutes and the street people, in an unguarded moment this same guide said to us, pointing outside, how I wish we had a government strong enough to get rid of that riff-raff.
It is not too late. Let us pray.
Father, teach us of the wideness of your mercy, so that we will not appeal to the justice that would condemn us, but would cry for the wonderful grace that you delight to give.
May your mercy flow upon us yet anew this day, so that as we have sensed its wonderful riches, we would be so humbled that we would now delight to serve you for the sake of Jesus.
Grant us this gratitude service, we pray, in Jesus' name. Amen.