Matthew 25:24

And he also that had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art a hard man, reaping where thou didst not sow, and gathering where thou did not scatter; and I was afraid, and went away and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, thou hast thine own.

The failure of the one-talent man is the burden of the parable. It should not be supposed, however, that failure is invariably associated with one-talent individuals. True, in the case before us, it was the least able of the group that failed; but had the causes of his failure been in any of the others, they too would have failed. His failure was not in the size of his gift but in his failure to use it. History records many tragic failures of the gifted; and failure is always sad when it comes to the high and mighty, and just as sad when it comes to the poor and lowly. God condemns failure in the realm of things spiritual. There is no excuse for failure in those eternal exercises of the soul in communion with God. The reception of but a single talent was no license for failure. No man will be excused merely on the basis that he does not have much ability, or that his gifts are less than the gifts of others. The least able of God's servants, no less than the most able, must do their best to be approved.

Since this man's failure is the great point of the parable, we shall particularly note the ingredients of it and mark the antecedent attitudes that caused it.

First, he failed in his attitude toward God. He had none of that attitude of Abraham who said, "Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?" (Genesis 18:25). All around us are people who have a low opinion of God. That in itself is damnation. H. Leo Boles noted that:

We attribute to others what we find in ourselves. Very few people excuse their own sin without blaming God or someone else for it. He (the one-talent man) gave back all that he had received; he had done no harm, but he had done no good with that which was entrusted to him. He had been in possession of his master's money for a long time; if he had been a free man, he would have owed interest on it; but he had been too slothful to use the talent to any gain for his master. His master had really lost by the indolence of his servant.[5]

Chappell remarked that this unfaithful servant did not believe that his lord would give him a square deal.

He thought that his close-fisted lord was going to require as much of him with his one talent as he did of those who had two or five. And there are those who think thus meanly of God. They virtually tell him frankly and to his face that his demands are greater than they are able to meet. Milton once had to fight this temptation. He wondered after he had lost his sight if God was going to expect as much of him as if he could see. "Doth God exact day labour, light denied?" he asked. But he refused to think thus meanly of God. He reached the wise conclusion that God is not going to judge us by the way we use what we do not possess, but by the use we make of the gifts that are actually our own.[6]

Certainly, the low opinion the one-talent servant had of his lord was a vital factor in his failure.

Another cause was his sloth. Plain indolence and laziness are at the bottom of widespread neglect of Christian duty. How many are absent, and how frequently, from the worship of God, only because a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep, robs them of the energy to serve God. Whatever the unfaithful servant said about his failure, the lord put the finger of analytical truth on the seat of the problem when he said, "Thou wicked and slothful servant!"

Note that his failure did not consist of theft, rebellion, or arson. G. Campbell Morgan wrote:

When he (Christ) comes, the slothful and unprofitable will be cast out, not because they did not believe, or because they had rebelled, but because they had neglected the opportunities which he had committed to them.[7]

[5] H. Leo Boles, Commentary on Matthew (Nashville: Gospel Advocate Publishing Company, 1936), p. 483.

[6] Clovis G. Chappell, Sermons from the Parables (Nashville: Cokesbury Press, 1933), p. 215.

[7] G. Campbell Morgan, An Exposition of the Whole Bible (Westwood, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1959), p. 421.