Do you ever wonder if you’re really making any kind of difference?
Or do you ever wonder if, if your life would suddenly disappear, if anyone would really miss you?
Or if anyone’s, if anyone else’s life
would be all that different if you were suddenly gone?
Apparently, a lot of people are feeling that way these days. If, um,
if you just look at calls to the National Suicide Hotline,
if you just compare April 2020 to April 2019,
April 2020 is when the pandemic was getting really, really hard, and
people were shut off from a lot of different places, and they’re
losing their jobs, and life was just changing rapidly. And if you compare the
number of calls that came into the National Suicide Hotline
from April 2020 and compared to just one year previously, in the same month,
calls to the National Suicide Hotline were up by almost 900%.
That’s a lot of people who are thinking pretty seriously that
the world wouldn’t be all that different if I suddenly weren’t here.
They’re kind of looking for something that we hear about the Levites, one more
thing with the Levites, at the end of chapter four in the book
of Numbers where it says once again that they were counted.
They were counted. And we’ve talked previously about how you count to God. He
counts you as a member of his family but, but in particular, it was talking about
their work; their work as the people who are going to oversee the tabernacle.
Their work counted. Their work made a difference. If they weren’t there,
somebody’s life was going to be different.
And I bet that felt good to hear that,
because man it feels
it feels crummy to hear or believe the opposite;
when somebody looks at you and says you don’t matter.
Looks at a job that you tried to do and let you know that,
boy, in their eyes, you failed pretty miserably.
Or maybe you’re all alone, cut off from the places where you used to be able to
make a difference, not able to work in the ways that you
once did, and nobody says anything to you because
it doesn’t feel like you’re doing anything.
Not to mention the number of people in the world today who are saying that if
you don’t if you don’t do something about this thing happening over here, or
that thing happening over there, if you don’t do something about it, then
you’re not all that valuable of a human being. If you don’t care about what’s
going on in this part of the country or in that part of the world, or in this
part of your own state. And if you don’t do something about it, and if you don’t
do the particular thing that I’m asking you or demanding that you do about it,
then, then you don’t count.
But that’s not how it works. Not in God’s kingdom.
He doesn't expect you to be the one who does everything,
or even exactly as much as the next person.
In Matthew 25, Jesus told a story. It used to be called “the parable of the talents.”
Some translations say it’s called “the parable of the money bags,” but
a master, he tells a story in which a master gives out different amounts of
money to his servants and tells them to go and do something with it.
And to one, to one guy he gives five bags of money, to another guy he gives two
bags of money, and the third guy he gives one bag of money. And they go out and do
different things. And then they come back and they give a report
on what they did with it. And the guy who was given five bags, he says, “Well,
I used it to earn five more.” And the master
says, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” And the one
who was given two bags of money, he comes back and the master said, “Well done
good and faithful servant,” not because he earned five, you know, not because he did
exactly the same thing the other guy did.
He brought back two more. But the master
knew he did what he could he did.
He did something good.
And he was faithful with what he gave him.
He did something good and he was faithful.
Did you do something good today?
Did you smile at someone?
Encourage someone?
Spend time with someone?
Pray for someone that you don’t have the ability to see right now?
Were you faithful with the talents that
God gave you?
Did you use them to the best of your ability?
Well then, God says, “Well done good and
faithful servant.” If, if every single person on earth did good
things and were faithful with the abilities
that God gave them, well, we wouldn’t eliminate sin,
but man, we’d see a whole lot less of it in the world if everybody did that.
And if you did today,
you made a difference.
And God says, “Well done.”
But it’s never been your responsibility
to save the world with what you do, or any even anything close to it.
That was the responsibility of the one
who told that parable, the one who was good in every way, the
one who was faithful with the one thing that,
that his Father told him to do,
and that was to love you.
To love you.
To allow you, even on the days when you
haven’t been so good and even on the days when you haven’t been so faithful,
to know that you get a fresh start in Christ
who hung on a cross and was faithful to loving you even until it killed him.
And you were forgiven for all the times that we were
less than what we knew we needed to be.
But if you’re forgiven, it means that God
doesn’t hold anything against you.
And if he doesn’t hold anything against you,
you don’t need to hold anything against yourself either.
You get to look at yourself in the same way that God does—
as someone who, in Christ,
has never really failed him.
And if you’ve never failed him,
which is a tremendous gift of grace that God gives us in Christ,
you can rest well tonight.
Rest well tonight, my friends, knowing that
your work counts, your life counts.
Your Father in heaven is smiling right now in your direction.