“Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?” – Matthew 20:14-15
The Kingdom of God isn’t about fairness. Praise God for that!!! If it were about fairness, we’d never make it in. The accumulated weight of a lifetime of thoughts, words, actions, silences, and inactions that fall far short of God’s standard, expectation, design, and requirement would keep all of us out. Thankfully, God’s Kingdom isn’t about giving us what we deserve or have earned. It’s about giving us extravagantly, wondrously, and graciously beyond anything we could ever deserve.
God’s Kingdom is built on His overflowing, abundant grace. He’s gracious by nature and loves to give us far better than we deserve. This parable illustrates that grace as the master pays workers the same wage, regardless of how long they worked in his field that day. This is a parable of salvation – everyone who believes in Christ is equally saved regardless of when in our life we believed in the Lord Jesus and called on Him for salvation. We’re equally saved regardless of how awful, ugly, broken, messy, deprived, or depraved we were when we believed.
As the parable illustrates, God’s amazing grace doesn’t always sit well with everyone. In particular, those who’ve been religious for a very long time. As we spend years in church we can begin to forget just how much we needed grace when we were saved. We can begin to give ourselves a bit too much credit for the changes in our lives, the good that we’ve done, the people we’ve become. We start imagining that since we’ve worked really hard, we deserve something better in God’s Kingdom. We forget that we never deserved His Kingdom in the first place!
Take time to reflect on God’s grace in your life. Are you aware of how much God has blessed you beyond anything you deserved? Do you know how much He loves you despite the mistakes and rebellion in your life? Do you see how your salvation flows not from your good habits but from the blood of Jesus shed for you on the cross? Do you sometimes resent new believers who don’t yet know how to act amongst God’s people? Are you occasionally frustrated by God’s extravagant grace toward others? Renew your mind’s appreciation and awareness of grace. Celebrate grace for it’s part of God’s fundamental nature. Rejoice in His grace toward you and others who don’t deserve it. #FollowJesus