by Ramesh Richard

Over 50 clocks dot the walls of RREACH. Given by international hosts as appreciation gifts, they invoke memories of places been and people served.

In tiny Montenegro, at the end of GPA Balkan States, my hosts presented me with a beautiful clock set to 11:55. “Five minutes to midnight,” the pastor said, “to focus our lives on the Lord’s soon coming.”

The slaves in Jesus’ parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14–30) lacked the timing of their master’s return. Still, the multi-talented ones urgently, energetically and single-mindedly invested their entrustment.

Multi-talent investment is hard. “To whom any talent is given, something more is expected” is the “simple” point of the parable. But for those to whom much is given, balancing stewardship with ignorance of the Master’s return becomes complex. Multi-talented slaves face discernment and deployment challenges.

Am I “trading with” (v. 16) my talent cluster in the best possible way? Am I using all God has given me to use for all He wants me to do?

Having encountered this multi-talent tension, I offer seven suggestions to better serve our soon-coming Master.

1. Receive your calling and gifting in honor and humility. Slaves never consider these entrustments theirs! In fact, we ourselves are not our own. The master called his own slaves and gifted them with his possessions (v. 14).

2. Acknowledge you are complete in giftedness and limitations. The two-talent guy got more than one but was limited to two. He could not do what fiver did. Because of vast human need, we will always have more to do than what we have to do. We are limited in what we must accomplish by the gifts we have. We also realize we always lack some knowledge, skills and experience for what God has assigned to us.

So we ask God for discernment for what is right for us to do and for how to do it well.

3. Rejoice in the privilege of ministry amid the tension. Since we own no entitlement to ministry opportunities, we must meet them as wonderful privileges. If at all possible, I say yes to them. The quietest, humblest opportunity to minister is as much a privilege as the large, public and powerful responsibility.

4. Process and stack God’s calling and gifting by strategy and season in concentric circles. They are all connected and grow out of the multi-talent entrustment. Sometimes I feel the non-use of talent when His personal proclamation gifts to me seem marginalized by His global proclamation call on me. So I expand capacity for personal ministry by resourcing more delivery platforms. I sometimes employ my talents concurrently, sometimes sequentially, but I always view my gifting as bigger than I, my calling as bigger than my gifting, and God as bigger than it all.

5. Avoid confusing needs with opportunities. Every idea is not a need to meet; every need is not an opportunity to pursue; and my mentor Fred Smith went one better, “Every opportunity is not a mandate.” Some opportunities can be set aside in view of other priorities as to time and manner of obedience. While we immediately (v. 14) begin deploying the Master’s entrustment, we seek maximum utility of those assets in diverse arenas of performance and timing.

6. Identify, clarify and purify motives before the Lord constantly. The master distributed talents to each slave “according to his own ability” (v. 15). I want to avoid over-serving by trespassing on someone else’s assignment just as much as I want to avoid self-service or non-service. Motive-identification, clarification and purification take extended, regular times reading God’s Word and prayerfully listening to Him and to fellow-leaders. After confession, unless providentially stopped, I begin implementation. When facing formidable circumstances that oppose or delay my profitability to the Master, I keep returning to His original leading about the matter. Or else, like the third slave, I would be paralyzed into doing nothing.

7. Recognize that God shares your interest in your best usefulness for Him. The One who entrusted us with His talents can be trusted to create opportunities appropriate in fit and timing. Until He returns, let’s focus on readying talents to deploy when He brings opportunities our way.

When I shared this inner tension with another mentor, my father, he comforted me with 2 Corinthians 8:12: “Give from what you have, not from what you don’t.” My 90-year-old dad then reeled off a paraphrase of C.S. Lewis: “It is part of the courtesy of heaven to treat the desire you have as the fulfillment thereof.” Wow—both for my dad and the litterateur’s relevance to this ministry tension.

Of course those given much and who deploy the talents well are “rewarded” with more talents…for more responsibility (vv. 21, 23)! Therein lies another dimension to the tension. The Master matches our eagerness with more responsibility to reveal our further limitations. His expectations are clear: Use all of what we have received for all we need to do. He provides. Neither the ministry calling nor its gifting nor its opportunities are ours. When He returns to “settle accounts” (v. 19), we will receive the “well-done” affirmation and an invitation to enter into His joy (vv. 21-23).

Last week I requested our focused, single-minded and energetic staff to set all 50 clocks in the office to 11:55. One well-meaning soul wondered if this meant five minutes to the noon-hour lunch!

If our daily goal is merely the lunch hour, we will wind down our work towards lunch break. If our motivation is the last five minutes before the midnight hour of Jesus’ coming, we shall daily set up, step up, scale up and serve up with focus, energy and urgency.

What hour approaches on your life-clock?