On August 1, 2026, TPC hosted a mini-conference for men on work. All the talks and panel discussions were excellent. Here is the audio and a transcription of my talk below.
This has been a great conference. Thank you, Malcolm, for getting this together. It’s been really helpful. Thanks to our other speakers. The panels have been excellent. Thank you for hosting, Caleb.
I want to start with a question: Say you were given $750,000 — what would you do with it? (You would give it to the “Building on the Promises” campaign, right?!)
There is a man in the Bible who is condemned as a wicked and worthless man. He didn’t commit adultery or murder or idolatry. He was given $750,000 and he didn’t waste it on prostitutes or gambling or drugs. He wasn’t a prodigal son.
And yet he is called wicked by Jesus.
What did he do? Absolutely nothing. And that’s the problem.
I’m talking, of course, about one of the servants in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14-30. In this parable, the master gives each of his servants a sum of money before he goes away on a journey. He gave one servant five talents, one servant two talents, and another servant one talent.
What’s a talent? A talent in this context is a huge sum of money. It’s really a fortune—about twenty years’ worth of wages for a common laborer. So I have pegged it at $750,000 in today’s money.
What happens in the parable? The man who was given five talents goes out and makes five more. The man who was given two talents goes out and makes two more. These men took what they had been given and they multiplied it.
But the third servant took his talent and buried it in the ground.
When the master returns to settle accounts and evaluate the work of each of his servants, the first two servants hear those words that every man should want to hear at the end of his life: “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master.”
But with the last servant it’s different. The last servant says to the master, “Master, I knew you were a hard man; I was afraid, so I hid your talent in the ground. Here is what is yours.” And that’s when the master says, “You wicked and slothful servant, you ought to have at least invested my money with the bankers so that at my coming I would have received what is my own with interest.” Then he takes that third servant’s talent and gives it to the first servant, and that third servant is cast into outer darkness.
The first two servants were productive. They took what they were given and they multiplied it. They extended their dominion, and they were rewarded accordingly.
The third servant was sterile. He produced nothing, he multiplied nothing, he increased nothing. He committed the sin of playing it safe.
I think that third servant represents a lot of modern Christian men who have been emasculated—who are too timid, too risk-averse, too lacking in ambition, too slothful to do anything meaningful for God. He is condemned not for what he did, but for what he didn’t do. He was so afraid of failure that he failed to do anything. He was so afraid of failure that he failed to try, and therefore he was a failure. By fearing failure, he failed. By burying his talent, he really buried his life.
We all probably have a pretty good idea of what this parable is about. It’s pretty easy to understand how the analogy Jesus is using here works. So apply this to your own life.
God has entrusted each of us with varying degrees of talents. And of course this isn’t just money. The talent really stands for everything God has given to you—your time, your innate abilities, your mind and your body, your relationships, your network, your influence, even things like the family where you came from and the country where you live and the kind of economic system of which you are a part. Your talent includes all who have poured into to you to shape you in positive ways, under God’s providence.
God expects you to take what He has given you and use it for good—to do something useful, something that fulfills the creation mandate, and thus furthers God’s kingdom. In a word, the parable is about how we go about taking dominion. That’s what the parable of the talents is really about — it’s about dominion. And of course we’ve heard about dominion already today.
This concept of dominion traces back to Genesis 1, where God, in the beginning, commissions man to rule and subdue the earth and to have dominion over the creation. Dominion can be defined in a lot of different ways. I think if you are looking for the simplest definition, you could just say: Dominion is work. It’s the work that we do within and upon God’s creation. As we work on God’s creation, we take the raw materials he put within the creation and transform them into civilization. That’s a perfectly good definition.
Dominion can be understood as culture-making or culture-building or civilization-building. It’s bringing wise order to bear upon the creation. Men are especially given to this work of dominion, since we are the primary protectors and providers. Men are the innovators, the inventors, the explorers, the builders. Men are the infrastructure of civilization. Men build and maintain civilization. That’s our main role in the creation mandate.
But here’s another way to think about dominion—this may be a little bit outside of the box, and maybe you haven’t thought about it this way before. Dominion means making the world a better place. Dominion means that you take that corner of the world that God has given you, and over the course of your life, you make that corner of the world better than it was when you were given it. That part of God’s creation that He has entrusted to you is better when you leave this world than when you came into it. That’s what it means to take dominion.
The difference your life has made for good on the day you die, compared to how it was on the day you were born, is the measure of your dominion. In other words, dominion is really a lifetime project for the Christian man.
Dominion is your life-assignment and life-goal. It is a form of stewardship, directed to the growth of God’s kingdom in the most comprehensive sense. Dominion is as broad as creation itself. Dominion is the mark you make on the world.
Think about it this way: If you started a business and you built that business up and you provided goods and services to your customers and you created jobs for other people, that’s a form of dominion. It’s making the world a better place. If you started a ministry that blessed people and helped them in various ways, we would say that’s a form of dominion, and it certainly makes the world a better place. If you take something ugly like an old building and you fix it up so that now it’s beautiful, that’s a form of dominion. It’s a form of dominion because beauty makes the world a better place. So by taking what was ugly and making it beautiful, you have improved the culture, and improved the creation—you have exercised dominion.
Caleb is exercising dominion over this property. It’s going to be more ordered, more beautiful, more productive when he has done developing it.
The creation was made to be stewarded by man. The radical environmentalists will tell you that man interferes with and corrupts nature. That can happen. But when man exercises dominion faithfully and wisely, he makes creation better. Creation was designed for human stewardship and dominion. When God finished creating the world on day 6 of the creation week, the creation was flawless but unfinished. Man’s calling is to finish it, to take creation from degree of glory to another.
You can even apply this to relationships. I don’t think it works in quite the same way, because other people aren’t under our dominion in the same way that the lower creation is, but the same principle applies. Ask yourself this: Is my wife a better woman today than she was the day I met her? What kind of difference have I made in her life? Are your friends better for having known you? As you interact with your friends, and as you get to know them and they get to know you, and you have influence on one another, are you making them better? Are you making the world a better place through your friendships?
You can think of dominion as the measure of all the ways you transform the creation and the culture. The problem we have—the challenge before us—is taking the talents God has given us and multiplying them. And of course that’s what the third servant failed to do. He failed to carry out his assigned task in life. He lived a dominionless life. He made no mark, he built nothing, he left no legacy.
What’s going on with the third servant? My guess is that he disguised his sloth as virtue. Thus, a lack of ambition gets redescribed as humility. Risk-aversion gets baptized as discernment or wisdom. Cowardice gets renamed contentment. Timidity is recast as being reasonable or responsible. I think that’s what the third servant in the parable did, because I think that’s what a lot of men do today, inside the church and outside the church. But it’s acceptable. Jesus calls this wickedness.
The master in the parable says that this third servant is slothful. Sloth is the sin of the sluggard in the book of Proverbs. The sluggard is lazy—and he’s not just physically lazy; that’s certainly part of it, but he is morally and spiritually lazy as well. His whole life is characterized by sloth.
This third servant in the parable makes excuses. He understood neither the master nor the mission. And those two things go together. How you understand the master will determine how you understand the mission. He misunderstands the master; therefore he misunderstands the mission.
To this servant the master is a hard man, and that’s part of his excuse-making. He says to the master, “You are a hard man — that’s why I buried my talent.” The master is not viewed as good, gracious, or glorious; he is viewed as hard, tyrannical, and difficult. One thing you have to understand is that the way you view the Master—let’s just say the way you view God/Jesus because that’s who the master represents in the parable—is going to determine how you understand your mission in life and how you go about fulfilling that mission in life.
To put it another way, the gospel has to shape how we pursue employing our talents. The foundation of your work is the work Jesus has done for you. The foundation of your work for God is God’s work for you. What Jesus has done for you—His work on your behalf—forms the basis on which you do work for Him. That’s how we should understand this. We don’t work for acceptance with God; we work from acceptance with God. Everything is grace. We are surrounded and enveloped by grace.
Think about this in terms of the sixteenth-century Reformation with Martin Luther and the other great Reformers. What happened after Martin Luther and the other Reformers rediscovered the doctrine of justification by faith alone through grace alone in Christ alone? What did that lead to? What did that produce?
The medieval Roman Catholics who opposed Luther and the Reformation thought that this doctrine—telling men they don’t have to earn their salvation by doing good works—would make men lazy. Tell people they don’t have to earn their salvation by doing good works and they won’t do good works at all. Tell them they’re saved entirely by God’s grace and they’re going to become listless. That was the claim, the accusation.
But what actually happened when this doctrine of grace was rediscovered? It unleashed the greatest civilization-building force in world history. That’s really what the Reformation was—a world-changing, culture-transforming force. Here’s a simple way to think about it: first-world nations are mostly nations shaped by the Reformation. The most prosperous nations in the world are the nations most influenced and most shaped by the Protestant Reformation. The nations that have been the hardest working and the most innovative are nations that deeply rooted in the Protestant Reformation. Those are the first-world nations.
By contrast, pagan nations are third-world nations. And why are they third-world nations? Why do pagan nations bury their talents? It’s not that they don’t have resources; it’s that they don’t use those resources. They bury their talents. Why? Because pagan masters, pagan idols, really are hard masters. Pagans serve tyrannical gods. They misunderstand the master, so they misunderstand the mission, and nothing really happens. They bury their talents.
With the Reformation, it’s entirely different. The master is seen as good and gracious and glorious. He freely gives us talents. And so what do we do with them? Knowing we have this gracious master fills our sails with wind. And so Protestants went out and created the greatest civilization the world has ever known. The scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the birth of America, the explosion in education and literacy and prosperity—all of these trace back to the Protestant Reformation and the Protestant work ethic, a work ethic grounded in justification by the work of Christ. That’s where that work ethic comes from. When you know your master is gracious, you work differently and you work with joy.
I love the way the book of Ecclesiastes describes this in Ecclesiastes 9:7: “Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved of your works.” Go do these things because God has already accepted you and has already accepted your works. God approves of your works in Christ because of Christ’s work for you. That’s really what’s bound up in that passage.
Because the third servant misunderstood the master, he misunderstood the mission. And this really brings me to the most important thing that I will say in this talk this morning: The mission is not “Do not fail.” You won’t find a single command in the Bible to not fail. You’ll find commands to not fear, but you won’t find a command to not fail. And this is because the reality is that learning anything and doing anything is going to involve failure. And fear of failure, perhaps more than any other fear, holds men back—because when you fear failure, you won’t even try.
Has anyone ever learned how to ride a bike without failure, without falling? I doubt it. Has anyone learned how to hit a baseball without failure, without a lot of swings and misses? The reality in baseball is that even after you learn how to hit a baseball, and even if you do it really well, you’re still going to have a lot of swings and misses. That’s just how it is. Faulure is built into the game. Everyone knows the story of Thomas Edison—he failed countless times before finally inventing the light bulb. He figured out what would work by trial and error.
Failure can be forgiven. Failing to try will not be. And that’s really the sin of the third servant in the parable. I would put it this way: you are free to try things and fail because you are free from condemnation in Christ Jesus. Because you have been set free from condemnation, you are free to fail.
Now, don’t take me the wrong way. I don’t mean for anyone to go out and be reckless. Not all risks are worth taking. What I mean is this: Even in the face of an uncertain (short-term) future, even in the face of the possibility of failure, we should be confident, we should be courageous, we should be ambitious. We should certainly not be too risk-averse, as so many men are today.
Or to put it another way: Don’t cling to safety; cling to Christ. Safety isn’t your hope; Christ is your hope. You don’t have to play it safe all the time. The old saying is true: Boats are safest in the harbor, but they weren’t made for the harbor. They were made for the open sea.
You have been entrusted with talents. Jesus expects you to take your talents and do something with them—something useful, something fruitful, something wise, something that makes the creation and the culture better. Leave the world better than it was when you entered it. Make your mark on the creation.
You have agency. Right now there is a propaganda war being waged on agency — there are powerful people who want you to think of yourself as powerless. But this simply isn’t true. As a Christian man, you have to understand that life doesn’t just happen to you. You are called to make things happen in your life. Life doesn’t just happen to you. You’re not just along for the ride, just being carried along by the current, drifting, going with the flow wherever it takes you. No, you have agency over your life. What you do really does matter.
We often talk about how God’s in control and we’re not—that’s absolutely true—but it’s also true that God has entrusted us with a certain degree of agency. There are certain things in your life that, under God, are under your control, that you can actually do something about. Not everything in life is a “controllable” but many things are. Control the controllables and leave the rest to God. Do what God has given you to do and let God decide where the chips will fall. But never approach life passively. You really do have agency. You are called to make things happen in your life. Your life is the product of your choices, and you are responsible for those choices.
You really aren’t a man until you get to that point in life where you can take full responsibility for yourself and say, “This is my life. It’s the product of my choices, and I own it.” That’s the mark of manhood. You are living the life you chose. Think about that. You are living the life you chose. Even if there are a lot of things about your life that you don’t like, you’re still living the life you chose. You might say, “Well, what about my circumstances? I didn’t choose those circumstances.” Well, it’s true—you didn’t get to choose all your circumstances. But you did choose how to respond to those circumstances. And your choices in response to those circumstances have produced this outcome — the life you are living right now. If you don’t like it, that’s on you to do something about it.
We probably all know Teddy Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena” speech. It’s one of my favorites. It’s so good. I’m not going to read it to you here, but I’ll give you the gist of it. You are to be the man in the arena—the man who has entered the fight, who has skin in the game. As Roosevelt describes it, the man in the arena stumbles; his face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; he strives valiantly; he errs; he comes up short again and again. If he falls, he falls while daring greatly. And so Roosevelt says, the man in the arena is not like those cold, timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
As always, Proverbs gives us wisdom about all of this. Proverbs 24:16 says, “The righteous man falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumble in times of calamity.” Suppose you say, “Okay, well, I tried something, and I failed. I tried to do something, and I got knocked down.” What would Proverbs say to you? What does the righteous man do when he gets knocked down? You get back up. You fall off your horse, you get back on it. You do it seven times if you have to. Failure is neither final nor fatal for the Christian. You are free to attempt great things for God because you serve a gracious master. And that’s your hope. You’re not putting your hope in your own work, but in Jesus’ work on your behalf. That’s the foundation of everything. And building on that foundation, you’re free to fail.
I grew up in Chicago during the Michael Jordan era. Jordan is remembered for making a lot of clutch game-winning shots, and no doubt he did. But the reality is he missed more of those potential game-winning shots than he made. People forget that part of it — how many times Jordan failed. Of course, the great shooters forget about their misses too. They want the ball in crunch time. They are confident they will make the next shot even if they missed the last one — or the last seven. They get knocked down; they get back up. That resilient mentality is what we need.
And by the way, what I’m saying here isn’t just true for you as an individual. This is also true for institutions and even for nations. They have to take this same kind of posture. Institutions have been entrusted with talents—what do they do with them? Nations have been entrusted with talents. What are they doing corporately, collectively with those talents?
A local church has to steward the talents, such as financial resources and Spiritual gifts, found in the congregation. Pastors and elders should seek to cultivate and multiply those gifts. A lot of talents in the church can be wasted by leadership that fails to recognize them or encourage their use.
The most successful businesses find talented people and then find ways to maximize their growth and effectiveness. A good manager gets the most out of the talents by those under his oversight.
Think about this in terms of our own nation. We just celebrated America’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. It’s easy to look back at the American Revolution and think, “Yeah, we fought the British and we won. We’re America, so of course we were going to win, right?” Well, the reality is that it just wasn’t that way at the time. America was a tiny, fragile band of colonies taking on the world’s greatest superpower. American farmers were going against professional soldiers and trained mercenaries. America was a huge underdog. To think American victory in the War for Independence was a lock overlooks what our founding fathers actually did when they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to this cause of independence and of forming a new nation under God. It overlooks how daring, how bold, how ambitious the whole thing was. It overlooks the incredibly long odds, the very real risk of failure (which for them would have meant death). It overlooks the number of times the cause of independence was hanging by a thread—and there were many times when it really did hang by a thread. It overlooks the fact that George Washington lost more battles than he won.
Washington is a great case study in this kind of mentality. We hail George Washington as the hero of our nation, the founder and father of America. But George Washington lost more battles than he won. There were several times when many wanted to replace him as commander-in-chief. He was doubted, he was challenged, he was criticized. His best quality as a general was knowing how to retreat—because he often had to retreat to keep his ragtag army intact so he could live to fight another day. You might say that Washington won the war mainly by not losing it. And that’s really how it played out. He lost most of his battles, but he still won the war. And there’s a lesson in that: you don’t have to win most of the battles you face in order to win the war. Washington won because he didn’t give up. He took a handful of calculated risks that surprised his opponent because the risks were so crazy that no general in his right mind would have tried them. But Washington did, and he got just enough of them to work out to win the war. It’s an amazing thing when you really look at the history.
Or think about this from our own perspective at TPC. Why would a relatively small church with relatively limited resources start a school and build a sanctuary, and do both those things at the same time? That sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it? Some might say we’ve bitten off more than we can handle. We’ve taken a big risk. But ask this question: Why are we doing this? It’s because we want to multiply our talents. Is this project—this “Building on the Promises” campaign—a lot of work? Yes. Does it please the master? Yes. Will it extend our dominion? Yes. Yes to all of those things.
Consider where God has you in life—the opportunities God has set before you. Your talents really include those providential opportunities that God puts in your path. The problem with opportunities is that they show up disguised as work. Every opportunity to do something is going to require more work. You get into grad school–that’s more work. You grow your business—that’s more work. You get a promotion–that’s more work. You grow your church—that’s more work. You grow your family—that’s more work. But that work is good. We have to wisely seize the opportunities God places before us. But remember that opportunity always shows up disguised as work.
People used to know this. When they called America “the land of opportunity,” they didn’t mean we were the land of welfare and free stuff for anybody that can get across the border. No. What they meant when they called America “the land of opportunity” is that America is the land of work. This is a place where you could come and you could work hard and you could build something and then have something to show for your life when it comes to an end. America as the land of opportunity meant America was the kind of place where hard work could pay off. We need to keep it that way. But, of course, keeping it that way requires — you guessed it! — more work.
Doug Wilson has said “The reward for a job well done is usually more work.” So that being the case, don’t pray for a lighter load; pray for a stronger back. Wilson says, “Baskets of fruit are heavy.” That’s true. The fruit is good—that’s what you want—but baskets of fruit are heavy. Nothing is doing is easy. Nothing worth doing happens without risk and ambition. But remember that providence favors the bold.
One last thought here as I wrap this up. I’m sure you all know the story from Matthew 14 about Peter—the famous story where Peter walks on water. Usually when you hear this story talked about, what people will focus on, what pastors like myself will tend to focus on, is Peter’s failure. “Oh, see, Peter took his eyes off Jesus and started to sink. Peter failed, so don’t do that.” That’s usually how we look at this story — the point of the story is “Don’t be like Peter.” But I want to give you a different focus here; I’m going to turn that around. I want to show you why you should be exactly like Peter.
What happens in the story of Matthew 14? The disciples are in a boat. Jesus sends them off in a boat to cross the sea while He goes off to pray. During the night, as they are crossing the sea, a storm arises. But in the midst of the storm and darkness, Jesus comes to them walking on water. At first they think this might be a ghost; they’re terrified. But Jesus speaks to them and says, “Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid.” Peter says, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” And next thing you know, Peter is walking on water toward Jesus. How amazing is that? Peter is walking on the waves toward Jesus.
But then what happened? Peter saw the wind, he saw the storm, and he was afraid. He began to sink. And so he cries out, “Lord, save me!” And then Jesus came and took hold of him and rescued him. If we just say, “Well, Peter should have kept his eyes on Jesus despite the storm,” that’s true enough, but it misses the larger point.
Consider this: who failed that night? Who was the failure? It’s Peter, right? He’s the only one who failed. The other eleven disciples didn’t fail. Not a single one of the other eleven disciples ever started to sink. But why didn’t they fail? They didn’t fail because they didn’t even try. They were too afraid to even get out of the boat. Sure, they didn’t sink — but that’s only because they never left the boat. We should be a lot harder on the 11 disciples who didn’t sink than the one who did.
Peter is like the man in “Man in the Arena” speech—the man who fails, who falls, but he falls while daring greatly, while seeking to achieve something great. Peter failed that night for sure. But Peter is also the only human besides Jesus to ever walk on water. Think about that.
You can stay in the boat if you want, like the eleven disciples. It’s certainly safer there. You can make excuses and you can say you’re just exercising discernment or just being reasonable. You can play it safe. You can live a safe life, free of risk, free of failure. But if you do, you will have buried your talents, and you will certainly never walk on water.
So here’s my final charge to you: Put your hand to the plow. Get to work. And do something with what God has given you.
Amen.
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