419: Time and Talent | Tim Henderson

How are you guys doing? Sorry that I have a cold and I'm unpleasant in those ways, but pretty benign as far as things go.

Now, it is very likely that you guys have heard of what we could call the stewardship triad. There are three things that you have, that are scarce and they're valuable, and the way that you allocate them makes a difference to people. It makes a difference in the world around you.

One of them is probably your scarcest, most precious resource. And you don't actually know how much you have of this one, but you have less than you did when you woke up this morning. The second is something that you acquired in two ways. First, by nature and then by practice. And the third is valuable because it can be exchanged for almost anything, especially if you have enough of it. And they all start with t. What are they? Time. Yes. Time, talent, and treasure.

Time, Talent, and Treasure

Time, you guys get a hundred and sixty eight hours every week, and you can spend them any way you want, but you can only spend them once. Once they're gone, baby, they're gone. And it's not just that your hours are numbered, but your weeks are numbered as well. And the day is coming when you will not get the full one sixty eight. Time is precious.

Talents vary, but everybody in this room is good at something. Probably good at many things. By birth and by gifting, by training, and by practice, there are things that you can do more quickly, with less effort, and to a better end than anybody else in this room. I engage with so many talented people all the time who can do stuff that I can't do, or at least not with anywhere near the ease that you can do it with the quality result. You are each specialized. You're honed to some particular end.

And then some of you have well, all of you have some amount of treasure. Right? Some of you have an enormous amount of treasure. Some of you have earned your treasure. Some of you are given your treasure. It might be that your talent is making money. It might be that you choose to exchange your time for somebody else's money. But the reality is that everyone in this room has acquired, and probably will acquire more, stored economic value. And now that you have it, you're accountable for how you use it.

Alright? And that line there about you being accountable is not just relevant to your money, your treasure, but for your talents and your time as well. You are not your own. Your time is not your own. God cares how you spend your 168 hours. Your talents, even those are not simply to be spent on your passing fancies, but your capacities are meant to be discharged for the good of others, and then likewise with your money. Your money's not your money, it belongs to the Lord. Everything belongs to him.

In the next two weeks, we want to talk about how we spend, how we use, how we allocate our time, our talent, and our treasure. Next week, Slip's gonna talk about treasure, and today, I'm just gonna talk almost exclusively about time and talent. But I'm gonna put a very particular lens on it. I want to talk with you about how you have shared your time and your talent with me.

This message is gonna be a little more personal. Along the way, I'll try to make some observations from the scriptures, some principles that'll be relevant to all of you. But many of you know that Kelly and I, my wife, we run a program called Blue Ridge Fellows. And this summer, another couple joined our team, Cody and Megan Buchan joined us, and together, we disciple young professionals. We invite recent college grads to move to Roanoke and to spend their first year of their career with us.

Every year, it's incredibly fun, and we get fellows that work in all sorts of different fields. We'll have fellows, of course, in Roanoke. We have a lot of medical fellows or engineers, journalists, teachers. This year, we have an audio engineer. That was new. We have somebody who's doing web development. I don't think we ever had a fellow in that career before.

And when the fellows aren't at work, it's my privilege, my great pleasure in life to teach them all sorts of things. We study theology, we study the scriptures, we study culture. I teach them how to invest, how to pay taxes, and how to drive a stick shift. And it is glorious.

Every year, we do all kinds of really fun things. But when they're not at work, or when they're not in my home, they're oftentimes in your homes because you host them and you guys welcome them into your homes in an outrageous act of generous hospitality. It's incredible every year that we see that you open your home to these strangers.

But that's about to shift a little bit, not entirely, but a little bit. Because this summer, Blue Ridge Fellows was given a house, an entire house for some of the fellows, maybe half of the fellows to live in. So we got the house, it's on Mountain Avenue in the Southwest, and it is beyond question the most lavish gift that we have ever been given.

Just this extravagant, outrageous gift, and we love it and we're grateful for it. It looks like this at the present moment, and it is not only the most lavish gift we've ever been given, but it's also the most expensive gift we've ever been given. Cody and Kelly and myself and many of you have spent hundreds of hours renovating this house. It needs a lot of work, and it has gotten a lot of work, and it is going to be amazing. The first floor in any case is on the cusp of being amazing. But the upstairs still needs a lot of work. It also needs a lot of money. And some of you have given generously. Somebody paid for that whole paint job—outrageous. One person paid for all the painting of the house. And the whole thing has been extraordinary. The generosity we've received, financial generosity, has been incredible. But that is outside my topic today. Sloop's gonna talk about treasure next week. But today, I really want to narrow the focus and talk about how many of you have spent your time and your talent on that house.

We have, Kelly and I have, never had an experience that is so manna-like as this house has been. Or rather, not the house so much as you are. I don't know if you know what I mean when I say manna-like, but if you might be familiar, in Exodus 16, you can begin to read this whole story of the Israelites who are in the wilderness, cutting through the desert. They're basically—there's nothing to eat in the desert, and they fear that God has abandoned them. And so he begins to provide for them this honey wafer-like food. They didn't know what it was, so they literally called it "whatchamacallit." The word manna means "what is it?" Right? And what it is, is this bread thing that either falls from heaven or it emerges out of the dew. But in any case, every day they could go out and collect up the manna and then take it home and eat it or grind it up and make flour out of it and use it in a variety of different ways.

In Exodus 16...

The thing was, it would rot overnight. And so they couldn't keep it. They couldn't store it. Instead, what would happen is every day they would go out and collect the daily bread. And every day, God faithfully provided for them the manna that they needed. That is what has been happening for us with this house.

You guys, the gift of the house is incredible, but it is a 100-year-old house. And if you know anything about a 100-year-old house, if you go to fix something, you're gonna end up fixing five things, right? Everything that you do reveals something else that you need to fix. And there were many times over the summer and fall that we would be despairing. Like, I just don't know what to do. I don't know how to fix this. I don't know what to do. And every time we would despair, somebody would enter the story and they would say, "Well, I know how to do that. I have the talent to fix that." Or someone else would show up and say, "Well, sure. I'd be happy to help with that. I have time, and I'd be happy to donate my time." And this happened over and over and over again.

One of you basically just said, "Listen, the porch—never think of it again. I'm just gonna fix the porch. I'll power wash it. I'll stain it. The porch will be great." And it was manna. We wanted, in our sweet naivete, we wanted to replace the kitchen cabinets. And that turned into replacing the kitchen floor, which turned into replacing the kitchen subfloor, which revealed the rotten joists and beams, and the whole thing just got pretty structural and well beyond my skills. And so I had a friend over. "Okay, would you come just look at this for me?" And he walks through—we spent like twenty minutes walking through the house. And when the whole thing is done, he's like, "Yeah, no problem." He runs a company. He's like, "I got people that work for me, they can do all this for you. Nothing. It's fine. I'll pay for it. It's fine. I'll just take care of it." And he just—this thing that was like, "We might need to burn the house down," you know—like, I don't know what to do. He's just like, "Easy, we got it, right?" And then the same guy, he's like, "We need to put in a bathroom." He's like, "Yeah, man, got all kinds of leftover bathroom stuff. We'll just—we got people that can do that. We'll just build your bathroom, they plumb it out, they do everything." So now there's an extra bathroom, which is really helpful.

We had to replace a ton of rotten siding, right? So you can see all this up here, all the stuff that looks like wood instead of paint. That is the super ridiculously pricey siding. You guys, that siding is $48 for a 12-foot board. And we put up a lot of 12-foot boards—just like, way dozens and dozens, scores and scores. It's ridiculous.

And somebody paid for the boards, and a friend of mine showed up, and he basically spent weeks and weeks and weeks tearing them all down. You tear one down, you're like, that one next to it's pretty bad too. Tear that one down, and we just did it. Somebody else took care of refinishing the floors in the master bedroom. We took up somebody, first of all, ripped up like three layers of vinyl. That was a nightmare. They were stapled down. That was terrible. We got all that down, and then it was wood, but it was ugly. So somebody's like, yeah, fine. I'll refinish that.

Another guy repaired windows and he did the supremely thankless job of tearing up all the tile in the existing bathroom, which is an absolutely miserable job. You just gotta chip it all up bit by bit. But he did it cheerfully, and it was manna, and it was manna, and it was manna.

Somebody else kept coming to clean the house. And we can make that house dirty like you can't imagine. Just constantly dust filled in there. And they just kept coming. We would make a disaster. They'd come up and reset it so we can work at it again. So helpful.

People painted and fixed this stupid sprayer that—who knew you can't put thick paint in a sprayer, and that just ruined everything. So we got that fixed. We worked on the yard. We had a ton of trees in the backyard that we had to cut down. And I want you to just admire this picture for a minute, okay? Just how sketchy is that? Can you tell what's going on there? We got this ladder that is so cockeyed, and some kid up there with his elbow hooked around a tree, working with a chainsaw one handed. God bless 22-year-old men whose amygdalas have not finished forming. Right? Like, you can get stuff done with a former fellow like that.

We have had electricians show up to do the electrical work. God bless him. One guy would come—he works all day long doing electrical work. What he wants to do is go home and see his wife and have dinner, but instead he swings by the house and just extends his day doing stuff that I don't even know how to do. And he's good at it, I'm terrible at it, and so he does it.

We had one particular man who was a plumber, and my gosh, we invited him to come to the house because I needed to install a spigot in the backyard. That would have taken him about an hour. It would have taken me like six hours and it would have leaked. Right? But he comes in, he's like, that's easy. Right? And he'd been a plumber for forty years. He's a craftsman. He's good at his task. And while he was there to help with the spigot, he noticed some things that he didn't like. And he basically hasn't left the house in three months. He has given us—I mean, forty, fifty, sixty, eighty, I don't even know—like hours and hours and hours of super high quality plumbing work, just redoing everything that could possibly be redone and things that I was too stupid to know were not okay. And he's just made everything better, and it's unbelievable. It's just incredible.

Another craftsman joined the team, and he's been helping us drywall things, and fix the trim, and just he knows how to do everything. And so many people have been in this house cheerfully doing excellent work. And we would just be sunk without each one of them.

There were guys that helped me rip out the rotten siding, guys that installed lattice on the porch, people that repaired the toilet. Another friend—every time I call him, he shows up with his truck and just hauls away giant piles of debris. He's literally done it so many times that he's not allowed to go to the dump anymore. Like, they're like, you're done. You can't come anymore? Stop. And he just—every time I call him though, up until now—he's just gonna take everything away and it's absolutely incredible because we have produced so much stuff.

Another friend comes, it doesn't really matter what we're doing. He might show up and help us cut down trees or help us haul stuff away. Just do whatever the task requires. Because there's such a spirit of generosity and kindness and partnership. And it is manna, manna, manna.

We get expert advice, gross labor, cheerful help. Manna, manna, manna, manna, manna, every day. Every day, we receive what we need from this right here. This ridiculous, talented, generous body, many of whom own trucks. God bless you. Right? It has been incredible, and we're just so grateful to you.

Four Points

So I wanna point out—I got four points that I wanna just kind of drop on you, things that I've noticed as I've just watched this thing unfold over summer and fall. Four things that I think are all grounded in the scriptures that we've learned that might be applicable for you, not only just with our house, but with whatever's going on.

Here's number one.

There's an enormous amount of diversity in the body of Christ, in this particular body as well. You guys are all good at different things, and you're good at things that I am terrible at, which is what Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 12. He says this:

The body is a unit, though it's made up of many parts. And though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we are all baptized by one spirit into one body, whether Jews or Greeks or slaves or free, and we were all given the one spirit to drink. Now the body is not made up of one part, but of many. And if the foot should say, because I'm not a hand, I don't belong to the body, it would not, for that reason, cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, because I'm not an eye, I don't belong to the body, it would not, for that reason, cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? — 1 Corinthians 12

I'm so glad that this body has plumbers and electricians, people who are good at cleaning, and painting, and chipping up thankless tile, or fixing janky windows. Right? You are problem solvers, and you are courageous tree climbers, and you can carry heavy loads, and you're not afraid of the genuinely scary things that we have found in the basement. You know how to do things safely so that nobody dies from lead poisoning. Because 100-year-old houses are painted with lead. Right? There's just diversity. And we have benefited so much from each one who has contributed in all sorts of different ways. And we're just so grateful to you.

Number two: you're happy when you're serving others. You guys, I have to work on this house. You don't. But so many of you have done it anyway. Right? I am not paying you people. But when we are there, you are nevertheless working, coming together, and it's fun every day. It's just we have fun. There's satisfaction in the work. And I think it's because there's just something good about giving yourself to something bigger than yourself. There's something about being involved in a project and sacrificing—and it is a sacrifice—your weekends or your evenings to help someone else. And we have just been so grateful for your cheerful, happy labor as we slug away at this thing. I've just not had any sense, not one drop of begrudging, fine. I have to be here. Because, of course, you don't have to be here. Right? You're just coming, and you're gracious, and you're kind.

God loves a cheerful giver. — 2 Corinthians 9

And I think the secret to that is that, to a large extent, it is actually the giving that produces the cheerfulness. We're designed in such a way that when we take our eyes off ourselves and concern ourselves with the needs of others, our happiness increases. It's when we're inwardly focused and selfishly focused that our joy tends to dissipate, which I think is all part of this divine conspiracy as God would teach us about the eternal life that exists within the Godhead. Persons of the Godhead have constantly, from the beginning of time, before time, loved and honored and deferred to each other. When he invites us to do the same, he's simply inviting us into the life and the manner of being that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit manifest for one another. And it works. It's fun to do things when you're serving others.

Number three: when you use your time and your talent for the kingdom, you are representing the Lord himself. And in case that feels too strong, it's not. What has happened over and over and over again is that we would face some obstacle, and we didn't know what to do. And so we would pray to God about it, and he wouldn't show up, but you would. And you were the answer to our prayer. You were Ephesians 2:10-ing. Right?

We are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. — Ephesians 2:10

You are his representative. You are his hands and feet. Whether it's the checks that you have written, whether it's the work that you have done, whether it's how you are choosing to spend some portion of your 1.68 on others in the kingdom, you're living out the kingdom and you are his representative. God almost never does anything in the world that he doesn't do through the agency of human beings. There's this random, super rare moment where he rained down bread from heaven. But overwhelmingly, all the bread that we eat was made by bakers. Right? We are the image of God. We are how he accomplishes things in the world.

Alright? Here's the fourth and final thing. And this one is admittedly a little bit of a cheat. These first three things are things that I've directly observed this summer and this fall. But the fourth is one that I have not yet observed, but I will, and you will too. So far, we've only just read about it.

And it is this: you will be rewarded for how you use your time and your talent. A few minutes ago, I said that your time is not your own. You'll be called to account for how you spend it. Your talents are not your own, but are to be spent for the good of others. That might have sounded like a threat, but it was actually a promise, for the accounting will bring rewards. It's not about punishment. It's about rewards.

This is really important, but it could be theologically like, make people cock their heads. So give me a minute on this.

Grace and Rewards

Christianity is a story of grace. The gospel is a gift. In Christ, what we have is this outrageous promise that God would give us better than we deserve. He would show us mercy. He would forgive us. He would give us his very self despite the fact that we have rebelled against him and rejected him. He does not treat us as our sins deserve. Instead, he gives us credit for Jesus' perfect life and he takes the blame for all the unworthy things that we have loved. He restores that relationship so that we can have him and none of that is based on what we do. It is a gift given by grace and received through faith. And that would be enough. It would be more than enough.

But in addition to all that, there will also be rewards based on what we do. There's a zillion passages in the Bible that talk about this. I'm just going to read you a couple.

Love your enemies and do good to them and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the most high because he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. — Luke 6

If anyone gives even a cup of cold water to any of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward. — Matthew 10

For the Son of Man is going to come in his father's glory with his angels, and he will reward each person according to what he has done. — Matthew 16

Command them to be good, to be rich in good deeds, to be generous and willing to share. In this way, they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life. — 1 Timothy 6

None of those passages are about salvation. Salvation is a gift offered as a grace and received by faith, but rewards are a compensation. They are paid by the Lord for how we use our time and our talent and our treasure.

I want you to think about this. To us, who owe him everything, God will grant rewards. Compensation, which is completely insane, but absolutely true. How you spend your time, how you spend your talents, how you spend your treasure will matter for all of eternity.

Next week, Luke's going to talk about the treasure side of this—give some thoughts about how you use your treasure determining perhaps rewards in the world to come. I think there is something about our capacity for joy that is being determined here in this age right now by your generosity of time and talent and treasure.

I want you to imagine. Imagine that instead of having the Fellows house, I have some 20,000 square foot mansion, and it's at Smith Mountain Lake. And despite the fact that there's been animosity between us, rebellion, rejection, unkindness, and cruelty from you to me, I forgive it all, and I invite you to come stay at my house. All that I have is yours. It's my boat. You can ride my boat. Go out. Just anything in the fridge is all there for the taking. Everything that I have is yours.

And I need somebody to sweep the leaves off the dock. And if you're willing to do it, I'll pay you a hundred dollars an hour for your trouble. Wouldn't that be ludicrous? That is our situation. He has given us everything. It is gracious in a billion ways. And though we could not possibly be indebted to him, he promises that he will reward us for our faithful labor, for how we spend our time and our talents.

God sees all of it, and he will reward you when you spend your time and your talent doing things in his name for his purposes.

Kelly and I, we see just a little bit, just ever so little, and we're so grateful. We are so richly blessed to be in this church and in this community. We just love you. We pinch ourselves that we get to be your friends and enjoy your kindness in so many ways, and we thank you for your work on the house. We're almost done with the first floor. We're getting ready. We just started really this weekend in earnest working on the second floor.

And we are already, finally, many of you have come to us and said, "Hey, we've got extra furniture. Do you need any furniture?" And we've said over and over again, "Yeah, but not yet because I have nowhere to put it." But we almost have a place to put it. So if you're interested, if there are things that you wanted to donate, you got furniture, you got plates, you got—I don't know. Who knows what? We need a million things.

We built a website and we have a registry. It's blueridgefellows.org/house. So if you're like, you know, it's not the time or the talent, but you've got stuff that you think would be useful in this house, you can go there. That'll QR code it or just go to blueridgefellows.org/house if there's something that you'd like to participate in and cooperate in that.

But whether you do that or not, we just want you to know, my goodness, how generous you have been to us, how grateful we are for your time and your talent. And I know that some of you that didn't do anything on the Blue Ridge Fellows house are nevertheless volunteering your time and your talent in countless other ways, for there's no shortage of needs and ways that God is contributing. So we honor you. We thank you for your generosity to us and to others as you labor for the kingdom.

Invitation to Prayer

As you come, we invite you to come and to pray. There might be something that I've said that provoked something in your mind, or maybe there's just something going on in your life that has nothing to do with this, but you need others to serve you. You need the Lord to show up. You need someone else to be the answer to your prayers. Come before him. The body of Christ stands ready to love and to serve. We might not only be the ones who are making requests, but who are answering those prayers as God moves in us. If you want somebody to pray with you, they'll be at the back by that kind of sign. If you wanna pray alone, come on up front.

Father, I thank you for this body, for these friends, for their generosity, for the gifts that you've dispersed widely, different abilities. Lord, how blessed we are when the body of Christ, when the ears do eerie things and the hands do handy things. Lord, we thank you for these that are just so generous to us. Would you bless them? Lord, we long for the day that you come to restore all things. And we know that among the outrageous blessings of that time is that you will reward your people for faithful service. Would you give these people hope and expectation that the time they spend in your service is not wasted, but it is stored up as treasure for the world to come. We love you. Amen.