“I am so proud of each one of you” he said smiling as they
waited on their entrees to show up. “I
feel as if you three run this insurance company and make it thrive. I am so proud to call you my agents! I have something I need to entrust to you and
I know you will do the right thing with it.
I have three envelopes here, one for each of you. Inside each envelope is a list with names and
contact information on potential big money clients. I need you to do whatever you can to get
their business. These are going to be
highly profitable clients if we can get them to buy our insurance. Your incentive is this, I will boost your
commission on each one of these that you seal a deal on by 10%”
He distributed the envelopes to the three men; they finished
their meals and parted ways.
Later that
afternoon, the men eagerly tore into their envelopes to begin calculating their
future bonuses. One man looked at his
list and saw he was given 10 possible clients.
Among them were some large restaurant owners, a local car dealership, a
wealthy CFO of a hospital, and other reputable men. He knew that he would have a large return on
his money so he went straight to work on getting their business. He set up lunch meetings, reserved seats at
the local baseball game, and mailed hand written letters to all of them
thanking them for their service to the community in their field of work. The second man did the same thing. He looked at his list and saw five
names. These names were of five wealthy reputable
individuals. This agent also went
straight to work, investing into these future clients. The third man, without knowing what the other
two agents list said, opened his envelope in eager expectation. As he looked at his envelope, his countenance
dropped as he saw the name of only one person, Sally. This agent knew Sally and was rather disappointed
because Sally was his neighbor who had recently lost her husband due to old
age, and spent everything they had to bury him.
He knew Sally’s poor financial estate because he had a conversation
about life insurance with her several years ago when she initially moved in.
As the three men left for work that day, the one agent with
the one name overheard the two other agents comparing names a dollar
amounts. When they inquired of the one
agent about his list, he lied to them, making up the names of several
individuals, and a bogus compensation amount in order to save face.
This agent became very angry at his boss who gave him the
one name and thought to himself, “Why didn’t my boss trust me with more? This isn’t fair? I got only one name, and to boot, this is
someone that is not even worth my time.”
With that, he took his list and set it on the rather large stack of
papers on his desk and went back to his other work, this time feeling bitter at
his boss, forgetting the boss’s compliments of him earlier that day at lunch.
This is a modern day story of the 3 managers given the
different number of talents in Matthew 25:14-30 (you should read that version
of the story, it’s much better than mine; it came from God!)
Did the owner value the one agent any less because he gave
him only 1 name? No, the agent with the 1 name was valued the
same as the other two agents. In our
world today, we equate the amount of trust someone gives us with the amount of
value someone has for us. This is
because we live in a fallen world and judge people by their outward appearances
and performances.
Some of you can relate to that agent. You look around and you see so many people
with so much more ability than you who have
acquired a large pile of stuff and a great reputation because they are good at
what they do. Yet you may have a hard
time reading and learning, your attention span doesn’t span more than 5 minutes,
and the natural skill sets that you have are limited, to say the least.
When we compare our self to others we can become frustrated
with God and wonder why he has trusted us with so little. In return, we conclude that he loves us less
than those other people and we become depressed or angry about that. The ultimate outcome is, we begin to live for
our self, because our view of how much God values us is broken and we try to
find our own value through our self, giving our self what we want because we
think we deserve it. When we focus on what we want, we often times forget about what the Sallies of our world need, Jesus.
God doesn’t look upon your abilities and casts value upon you
based on what you can or cannot do. Rather,
God looks to see if your heart is holy because you love his son, Jesus
Christ. If so, then God has given you an
envelope with a list inside. Your list
might be short, but this is not because you are not valued, rather it may be a
test to see how much you value God.
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Facebook @ Midtownchurchfl or Twitter @ Midtownchurchfl
