By Beatrice Ofwona

Masha Mapenzi sings

With no set goals, we direct our loyalty to trivial matters. Yet these goals must be aligned with the talents that the Lord, our God has given to us. In the parable of talents in Mathew 25:14-30, we see a man entrusting his property to his servants and at the end of it all asking for the proceeds. To the one that had more, a lot more was expected. Similarly, God has given us talents that He expects us to make use of for the glory of His name. We are the custodians of these talents but we are meant to do more with them than just keeping them; we are meant to use them. In the aforementioned parable we learn several lessons.


Firstly, that a talent gives us an external opportunity to do something for the one that has entrusted it to us: our God. In the parable, the master entrusted the talents to the servants for a purpose. We too have been given talents by our God for a reason and we will all give an account of the way in which we have used them.

Secondly, a talent is a divine assignment that God entrusts to us. Psalm 139:16 says that all the days ordained for us were written in His book before even one of them came to be. We are all on earth for a divine assignment that God foresaw before He created us. Each and every one of us has a unique assignment that God completed and which we are to start because God works from the end to the beginning. Employers take their employees through appraisals and we too will have a day of reckoning with our Lord to see how we will have utilized the talents that He has given us.

Thirdly, in our talent lies our treasure. Our talent is our goldmine and our secret brilliance because there does not exist on earth any other person who can do what we do in the way that we do it. What each and every one of us can do with our talent is not even examinable for it has no standards to measure it. It is perfect as it is and does not need further training to improve it. This however does not mean that we cannot go for study to sharpen it if we want to, what it means is that it is divinely imparted to us and can stand on its own. Since the grace of God is attached to the talent, a special anointing goes with it. And God is Almighty. Isaiah 55:8-9 says, 'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than yours and my thoughts than your thoughts'.

Some of the richest men on earth like Bill Gates actually dropped out of school and went on to become wealthy men by doing that which felt right for them- that which God had divinely implanted in them. Most of us are caught up in jobs for the sake of paying bills. Yet the natural talent that God has given us is more than able to take care of our bills if only we could identify and tap into it. Almost all of us are pursuing careers that have nothing to do with what God created us for. Unfortunately life has taught us to go to school and find ourselves trained and eventually being skilled at things we do not care about.

Fourthly, our talent is something we love doing. It is something that preoccupies our spirit and our minds. It is something we go to bed inspired about and get up in the morning smiling about. Because talent is loaded with creativity and no two days are alike. God Himself is infinite and if He has given us a piece of Himself in this way, then there is nothing that we cannot do with what we have. Some of us are depressed and discouraged about life because we are in the wrong places or vocations and this is sad.

In the talent of the parable we see the least that the man would have expected was some kind of returns, no matter how minimal. In Mathew 25:27 the master says, 'Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest'. God will yet have a day with us, when we will account for all that we did with the talents that He entrusted us. Whatever returns there will be, He will be glad that we made something of these talents because we will all be rewarded equally for having proportionately used the measure of talent that was given unto us. Mathew 25:29 expounds, 'For everyone who has will be given more and he will have in abundance. Whoever does not have even what he has will be taken from him'.

We must therefore discover what our talents are. We must align ourselves with God through Christ that he may show us what He created us for. What is it that makes us happy? What is it that we enjoy doing? Our talent may actually lie there. Similarly we must guide our children towards their talents by listening more to them and not trying to enforce our own desires for their lives on them.

The book of Proverbs talks of getting an understanding of who we are, this is only possible through prayer and fasting. Necessary also is the need to ask Our Lord for the Spirit of wisdom who will not only tell us when we are wrong but will guide us away from things that our Lord did not create us for and into those that He wanted us to be engaged in. Talent matters very much in the kingdom of God.

(adapted from sermon given by Irene Mureithi)

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My writing is my calling and I use it to honor God. More on:-
http://expertscolumn.com/content/you-are-salt-earth
http://expertscolumn.com/content/you-are-light-world-where-are-you
http://expertscolumn.com/content/replicating-nature-sin
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