If God has already given you more margin than you had a year ago, what is that margin actually for — and how would you know if you were quietly burying it instead of putting it to work?
Session 6 introduced a parable it deliberately didn’t finish. You met a servant who buried what he’d been given, and you saw why fear made him do it. That was enough, at that point in the course, to answer “why plan at all” — a plan is what keeps fear from making your decisions for you. But the parable Jesus told has two other servants in it, and this course has been holding their story back on purpose, because their story doesn’t make sense until there’s actual margin to talk about. Session 2 promised you this moment directly: once Mile Marker 4 is in view — saving toward something rather than piling money up because stopping feels risky — “this course will come back to that exact distinction in far more depth in Session 11.” This is that session. Every margin you’ve built across the last ten sessions has been aimed at a single question this session finally asks outright: now that you have something, what are you actually doing with it?
Opening Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, You’ve entrusted me with more than I sometimes act like I believe. Show me anywhere I’ve been quietly burying what You gave me to put to work — out of fear, out of habit, or just because I never stopped to ask the question. I don’t want to hoard, and I don’t want to chase more for its own sake either. I want to invest what You’ve entrusted the way You actually intended. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Session 6 read the opening of this parable as a caution against planning nothing at all. Read the whole thing now, start to finish, because the caution was never the point Jesus was building toward — it’s the contrast Jesus needed in place before He got to His actual point.
“For it is like a man going on a journey, who summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one, each according to his ability. The one who had received five talents went off right away and put his money to work (ἐργάζομαι) and gained five more. In the same way, the one who had two gained two more. But the one who had received one talent went out and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money in it.”
Matthew 25:14-18, NET
A talent wasn’t small change — it represented roughly twenty years of a laborer’s wages, so even the servant given “only” one talent had been handed a genuinely large sum. Notice the master’s distribution method first: “each according to his ability.” Nobody in this parable is set up to fail by being handed more than they could responsibly manage. The unevenness isn’t the injustice some readers assume it is — it’s calibration. Then notice what the two faithful servants actually did, and what word Jesus reached for to describe it.
Word Study
ἐργάζομαι ergazomai G2038
“put to work” · Matthew 25:16
Range. A verb built directly from ergon, the ordinary Greek word for work, appearing 41 times across the New Testament. It spans manual labor, business transactions, and spiritual service — Paul uses the same root for “working” a trade (Acts 18:3) and for the “work” of ministry itself (1 Corinthians 16:10). It’s a workaday word, not a specialized financial term.
The sense here. Matthew doesn’t tell us the mechanics — whether the first two servants bought and resold goods, invested in a venture, or something else entirely. What the verb tells us is the posture: active, ongoing, risk-bearing engagement with what they’d been given. It’s the same category of word you’d use for a farmer working a field or a merchant working a trade route, not a banker passively collecting interest on a deposit that sits untouched.
Why it carries the argument. Set this verb next to what the third servant did with the exact same opportunity: he “dug a hole in the ground and hid” his talent — ὤρυξεν (ōryxen), from ὀρύσσω (oryssō, G3736), a plain, physical word for digging that appears only twice more in the New Testament, both times for literally digging a hole (Matthew 21:33; Mark 12:1). Two servants worked their opportunity. One buried his. The gap between those two responses — not the size of the talent each one started with — is the entire hinge the parable turns on.
Source. Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament; Strong’s Concordance via Bible Hub.
The master’s response to the two who worked confirms it plainly:
“His master answered, ‘Well done, good and faithful slave! You have been faithful in a few things. I will put you in charge of many things.’”
Matthew 25:21, NET
Session 2 already quoted this exact verse and told you why: “The Mile Markers are the ‘few things’ this verse mentions. Managing them faithfully is practice for the ‘many things’ still to come.” That promise comes due now. If you’ve built margin — a life fund that actually exists, debt that’s shrinking or gone, giving that flows out consistently — you have been faithful “in a few things,” in this parable’s own language. The question this session exists to ask is whether that faithfulness stops at management or moves into the “many things”: multiplication. Not because a bigger number is the goal. Because burying what you’ve been faithful with is its own kind of unfaithfulness, and this parable is about to say so in the bluntest terms it has.
It’s tempting to read the third servant sympathetically — he didn’t steal anything, didn’t lose anything, didn’t spend a cent of what wasn’t his. He gave every bit of it back. Surely that counts for something. Listen to how he explains himself, and then listen to how the master actually receives the explanation.
“Then the one who had received the one talent came and said, ‘Sir, I knew that you were a hard man, harvesting where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed. So I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. See, you have what is yours.’ But his master answered, ‘Evil and lazy slave! So you knew that I harvest where I didn’t sow and gather where I didn’t scatter? Then you should have deposited my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received my money back with interest!’”
Matthew 25:24-27, NET
Read the master’s rebuke carefully, because it quietly demolishes the most common misreading of this whole passage. This is not a parable demanding aggressive risk-taking from everyone who hears it. The master’s minimum expectation, stated in his own words, was depositing the money with a banker — the single most passive, low-effort, low-risk option available in the first century, something closer to a modern savings account than an investment portfolio. He wasn’t disappointed that the servant failed to become a venture capitalist. He was furious that the servant did nothing at all with what he’d been given, and then had the nerve to call his own paralysis wisdom. “I was afraid” is the servant’s own explanation, offered as a defense. The master doesn’t accept fear as a legitimate excuse for inaction — he calls it what it actually was: laziness wearing fear’s clothing. That’s the diagnosis this session needs you to sit with. Burying isn’t caution. It’s the specific failure the master names and condemns, and the bar he sets for avoiding it is remarkably low: not brilliance, just engagement.
“Here is a misfortune on earth that I have seen: Wealth hoarded by its owner to his own misery.”
Ecclesiastes 5:13, NET
Session 2 already put this verse in front of you, back when the only margin you had was a plan for one. Solomon’s diagnosis matches the parable exactly: the danger was never having wealth. It was wealth that stops moving — hoarded, dug in, held for its own sake until it becomes, in Solomon’s own word, its owner’s misery rather than his security. The buried talent and the hoarded wealth are the same failure described twice, a thousand years apart, by two different writers who’d both watched what happens when resources go still.
If burying is one failure this session has to name, there’s a second one sitting directly across from it, and Solomon names that one too, in the same chapter, a few verses earlier:
“The one who loves money will never be satisfied with money, he who loves wealth will never be satisfied with his income. This also is futile. When someone’s prosperity increases, those who consume it also increase; so what does its owner gain, except that he gets to see it with his eyes?”
Ecclesiastes 5:10-11, NET
Session 1 built its entire opening argument on the fact that “more” has no natural finish line. That’s still true here, and it’s the reason this session can’t simply tell you to go multiply your talents without qualification — multiplication aimed at nothing but a bigger number is just hoarding with better public relations. Solomon describes two ditches on either side of a narrow path: bury it out of fear, on one side, or chase it forever out of appetite, on the other. Both end the same way — wealth that was never actually put to use for anything, just accumulated or hidden until it owned the person who was supposed to be managing it. What Solomon offers instead isn’t a third pile of money. It’s a different relationship to the whole question:
“I have seen personally what is the only beneficial and appropriate course of action for people: to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in all their hard work on earth during the few days of their life which God has given them, for this is their reward. To every man whom God has given wealth, and possessions, he has also given him the ability to eat from them, to receive his reward and to find enjoyment in his toil; these things are the gift of God.”
Ecclesiastes 5:18-19, NET
Notice what Solomon calls a gift here: not the wealth itself, but the ability to enjoy it and find satisfaction in the work — contentment married to productive labor, rather than either restless accumulation or fearful concealment. That’s the narrow path this session is actually describing. Investing, in the sense this session means it, isn’t a command to want more. It’s the refusal to let what’s already been entrusted to you sit idle out of either fear or greed, paired with genuine, unanxious enjoyment of whatever fruit that stewardship produces.
Paul writes to Timothy with exactly this same balance in view, addressed specifically to people who already have wealth:
“Command those who are rich in this world’s goods not to be haughty or to set their hope on riches, which are uncertain, but on God who richly provides us with all things for our enjoyment. Tell them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, to be generous givers, sharing with others. In this way they will save up a treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the future and so lay hold of what is truly life.”
1 Timothy 6:17-19, NET
Paul’s instruction to the rich isn’t “give it all away and own nothing” — it’s a redirection, not a renunciation. The word translated “save up a treasure” here is ἀποθησαυρίζω (apothēsaurizō), and it appears in the New Testament exactly once — this verse and nowhere else. It’s built from the same root Jesus used when He warned, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth” (θησαυρίζω, thēsaurizō, Matthew 6:19) — Session 1’s own opening text. Paul isn’t contradicting Jesus. He’s taking the identical verb, adding a prefix that intensifies it, and pointing it in the opposite direction: not storing treasure on earth for yourself, but storing treasure through generosity, aimed at eternity, through the very people your wealth can now reach. Same word family. Completely different destination. That’s the whole argument of this session compressed into a single Greek prefix.
There’s a reason margin exists at all, and it reaches back further than any Mile Marker, further than this parable itself, all the way to the first thing Scripture says about why human beings exist:
“Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the earth.’ … God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth and subdue it! Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that moves on the ground.’”
Genesis 1:26, 28, NET
Before sin, before scarcity, before a single talent existed to bury or put to work, God made human beings to bear His image and extend His rule over what He’d made — to cultivate it, multiply it, steward it toward flourishing rather than simply consume it for themselves. That’s the assignment underneath this entire session. Margin was never entrusted to you just so it could sit there, and it wasn’t entrusted to you only so you’d have something to invest for its own sake, either. It’s the raw material of the very thing you were made to do: take what God has put in your hands and use it to advance what He’s doing in the world. A buried talent doesn’t just fail to grow. It fails at the one thing it was actually for.
Illustration
Stanley Tam (1915–2023) started a small silver-reclamation business in Lima, Ohio, in 1936 with thirty-two dollars — twenty of his own and twelve borrowed from his father. Three years in, the business was struggling, and Tam had already made a private promise to God: if the company survived, God would become a genuine partner in it, not just a beneficiary of whatever was left over at the end of the year. In 1940, he kept that promise, legally transferring fifty-one percent of the company’s stock to the Stanita Foundation, a nonprofit he’d created specifically to receive it. He didn’t bury the business and walk away from it in some spiritualized gesture of renunciation — he kept building it, kept working it, the way the first two servants in the parable worked what they’d been given. In 1955, after developing a new product line and having what he described as another decisive spiritual encounter while traveling in Colombia, Tam came home, talked it over with his wife, and transferred the remaining forty-nine percent as well. From that point forward, one hundred percent of United States Plastic Corporation’s profits belonged to God’s work, and Tam continued running the company as its president for decades, still working it, still growing it, specifically so there would be more to give. Over his lifetime, the company he refused to bury contributed more than one hundred fifty million dollars to Christian ministry around the world. Tam died in 2023 at a hundred and seven years old, and by his own account was still telling residents of his retirement home about Jesus in his final years. Nobody handed Stanley Tam a windfall. He was handed thirty-two dollars and a choice about what to do with it — the same choice, in miniature, that faced every servant in Jesus’ parable.
Notice, too, how naturally Tam’s story connects backward to Sessions 9 and 10. This course never separated investing from generosity as though they were two unrelated topics — a “give more” session followed by a “get more” session. Tam multiplied the business specifically so there would be more to give, and the giving itself followed the same Planned, Periodic, Purposeful, Proportional pattern Session 10 described, just at a scale his growing company made possible. That’s the “many things” from Matthew 25:21 in practice: not a bigger pile sitting in an account, but a widened capacity to do everything this course has already trained you to do — save toward Mile Marker 4, give with intention, build margin that serves people beyond yourself. Investing, rightly aimed, doesn’t compete with generosity. It fuels it.
Here’s the honest tension this session has to answer directly, because it’s a real one: Session 1 spent its opening pages warning that “more” has no finish line, and Session 5 built an entire session around the discontentment that chasing more always produces. Doesn’t a session titled “Invest, Don’t Bury” just hand that same appetite a spiritual-sounding excuse?
It would, if the point were the size of the number. It isn’t, and the parable itself tells you why not: the master never asks the servants what their final total was. He asks what they did with what they were given, and he measures faithfulness, not size — the servant with two talents who doubled them hears the identical “well done, good and faithful slave” as the servant with five (Matthew 25:21, 23, NET). Multiplication was never the goal in this parable. Faithful engagement was, and multiplication was simply what faithful engagement produced. The distinction Session 2 promised to unpack lands exactly here: saving or investing toward a named goal — Mile Marker 4’s home, education, ministry, retirement that frees you for different Kingdom work — is a fundamentally different act from accumulating because a bigger number feels safer than a smaller one, even when the two activities look identical on a bank statement. One is aimed at something outside yourself. The other is aimed at nothing but its own growth. Stanley Tam’s company grew every bit as aggressively as any purely secular competitor’s — the difference was never the growth. It was where the growth was aimed, decided in 1940 and confirmed again in 1955, long before the size of the number was anything to brag about.
Consider This. Think about the margin you currently have — whatever’s sitting in savings, invested, or simply parked because you haven’t decided what to do with it yet. Is it aimed at something specific, the way Mile Marker 4 describes? Or has it been quietly accumulating because moving it feels riskier than leaving it alone?
Everything to this point has been Explanation: the two servants who worked what they were given, the third who buried it and called his paralysis wisdom, Solomon’s warning against both hoarding and endless appetite, and Paul’s redirection of Jesus’ own word for treasure toward a destination that actually lasts. None of it has moved a single dollar or made a single decision. Session 12 is going to ask you to look back across this entire course and decide what continuing actually looks like once the twelve sessions run out. This session’s job was narrower: to make sure whatever margin you’ve built by then has somewhere to go, rather than a hole in the ground to sit in.
Name What You’re Burying. Look at whatever margin currently exists in your financial life — savings beyond your Life Fund, an account you haven’t touched in years, a raise you never redirected anywhere, anything sitting still that could be working. Write it down specifically: the account, the amount, how long it’s been sitting there untouched.
Now ask the third servant’s question of yourself, honestly: is it there because you’re afraid to move it, or because you genuinely haven’t decided yet where it’s aimed? Those are different problems with different solutions. Fear needs to be named and confronted. An undecided goal needs a decision — pick one of your Mile Marker 4 categories from Session 2 (home, education, retirement, a specific ministry) and aim this specific margin at it, in writing, with a number and a rough date attached.
If nothing came to mind — if every dollar you have is already working toward something named — spend this time differently. Write down what you’re already investing toward, and thank God specifically for the faithfulness that got you here. Faithful stewards get to celebrate too.
Big Ideas
Kingdom Principle
God Didn’t Entrust You With Talents So You Could Keep Them Safe. He Entrusted You With Talents So You Could Put Them to Work.
Closing Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, forgive me for the times fear looked like wisdom and inaction felt like safety. I don’t want to bury what You’ve entrusted to me, and I don’t want to chase more for its own sake either. Show me where my margin is aimed, and where it’s just sitting still. Grow in me the same faithfulness You praised in the servants who simply put to work what they were given. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Go Deeper
Accessible Read Matthew 25:14-30 in full, slowly, out loud if you can. Notice how few words Jesus spends on the two faithful servants compared to how many he spends on the third. What does that proportion suggest about where the real lesson is concentrated?
Substantial Read Luke 19:11-27, the Parable of the Minas — a similar but distinct parable Jesus told on a different occasion. Notice what’s the same (servants entrusted with resources, judged on what they did with them) and what’s different (equal amounts given to each servant here, rather than “according to his ability”). Why might Jesus have told this lesson twice, with a deliberately different setup each time?
Academic Compare θησαυρίζω (thēsaurizō) across its other New Testament occurrences — Luke 12:21, Romans 2:5, James 5:3 — against ἀποθησαυρίζω’s (apothēsaurizō) single appearance in 1 Timothy 6:19. Consider why Paul may have chosen an intensified, rarer form of Jesus’ own verb rather than simply reusing thēsaurizō unmodified, and what that choice suggests about the relationship between Jesus’ warning and Paul’s instruction to the rich.
Six-Day Practice
Day 1 Read Matthew 25:14-30 in full. Circle or underline every verb describing what each servant did with what he was given.
Day 2 Read Ecclesiastes 5:10-20 in full. Where in your own life have you felt the pull of verse 10 (never satisfied) versus the pull of verse 13 (hoarding out of fear)? Name both, honestly, if both apply.
Day 3 Complete The Experience above if you haven’t already — name what’s currently sitting still in your financial life and give it a direction.
Day 4 Read 1 Timothy 6:17-19. Whether or not you’d call yourself “rich,” this instruction is addressed to anyone with more than their next need requires. What would it look like to be “rich in good deeds” with the specific margin you named on Day 3?
Day 5 Read Matthew 6:19-21 next to 1 Timothy 6:17-19. Notice the shared word for treasure. Write one sentence describing, in your own words, the difference between the treasure Jesus warns against and the treasure Paul commands.
Day 6 Read Matthew 25:21 and 23 together — the identical verdict given to both faithful servants, regardless of how much each one started with. Where do you most need to hear those words, “well done, good and faithful,” spoken over something you’ve actually done rather than something you’re still planning to do?
Questions or comments? If you have questions or comments about this session, or about how it applies to your own situation, email us at feedback@thedisciplespath.com.
Leading This Session
This session sits close to a genuinely sensitive nerve for some people in the room: financial fear that isn’t irrational, built from a layoff, a medical bill, or a season where “buried” money was the only thing standing between a family and disaster. Don’t let the parable’s language flatten that into simple cowardice — distinguish, out loud if needed, between a Life Fund (Session 2’s Mile Marker 3, which this session assumes is already in place) and margin beyond that fund, which is what this session is actually addressing. Nobody should walk away thinking their emergency savings are a spiritual failure. The Stanley Tam illustration can land as intimidating if it’s presented as a target rather than a pattern — he started with thirty-two dollars, not a windfall, and the lesson is the posture (working what he had) rather than the eventual scale. If the room has visible disagreement about what “investing” should look like practically — aggressive versus conservative, business versus traditional markets — don’t referee that debate. This course isn’t in the business of specific investment advice, and the parable itself never specifies a strategy; it only condemns inaction.
Next: Session 12 looks back across everything this course has built and asks the only question that actually matters twelve months from now — not whether you understood it, but whether you’re still living it.
Session 11 · Kingdom Treasure
Invest, Don’t Bury
If God has already given you more margin than you had a year ago, what is that margin actually for — and how would you know if you were quietly burying it instead of putting it to work?
Two Servants Who Weren’t Afraid
ἐργάζομαι (ergazomai, “put to work,” v.16) versus ὀρύσσω (oryssō, “dug,” v.18) — the gap between engagement and burial is what the parable measures.
Why the Third Servant Really Failed
The master’s minimum bar was passive interest — inaction, not modest risk, is what draws condemnation. “Wealth hoarded … to his own misery” (Ecclesiastes 5:13).
The Narrow Path Between Two Ditches
Hoarding and endless appetite are the same failure from opposite directions. Paul’s ἀποθησαυρίζω (apothēsaurizō) redirects Jesus’ own θησαυρίζω (thēsaurizō) toward a lasting foundation.
“Isn’t Invest and Multiply Just Greed in a Costume?”
The master measures faithfulness, not the final total — both the two- and five-talent servants hear the identical “well done.”
So · Now
God Didn’t Entrust You With Talents So You Could Keep Them Safe. He Entrusted You With Talents So You Could Put Them to Work.
Name what’s sitting idle in your financial life, and give it a direction from your Mile Marker 4 list.
The Experience, above
Kingdom Principle
God Didn’t Entrust You With Talents So You Could Keep Them Safe. He Entrusted You With Talents So You Could Put Them to Work.