We end the week with a question from Isaac, who listens to us in his hometown of Nairobi, Kenya. Pastor John, thank you, thank you, thank you for your encouragements in APJ 1611, "How Does Chronic Pain Glorify God?" I resonate with this episode deeply and I carry those promises for myself.

I have a question concerning the story or the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16 verses 19 to 31, specifically about Lazarus. Please help me make at least some sense of his life. He lived all of it poor. He died poor. It shouldn't bother me, but it does.

I carry neurological, physical, and mental disabilities and have for many years as an invalid, unable to create any life for myself. I am now 30. Feel I should have become a productive, self-reliant man by now? I'm not. I may never be. But we also don't see a definite purpose or self-will or self-drive in Lazarus's life either.

I also lack those very same things. How would you motivate a disabled man, disabled nearly to the degree of Lazarus, to not waste his life as his physical life wastes away? Well, of course, this is a dangerous thing for me to do, to venture to give counsel to someone whose condition I know so little about, especially when he says, "I carry neurological, physical, and mental disabilities." So please understand, Isaac, that what I say here is tentative as far as its specific applications to you go, even though I do want to stand by the biblical things I'm going to say.

So a warning, and I want to defer to you to know yourself. First I would remind you of the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, 14, following. The master, and he represents Christ, gave to one of his servants five talents. Now you know that a talent is an amount of money in those days, not an ability to do something, but I think it does represent any kind of resource that we have as a gift of God that he expects us to use for his honor.

And he gave one, five, as I said, and he gave another, two talents, and he gave another one talent, and then he went on a journey, and when he came back he called them to account to see whether they had wasted their lives in his resources. Now two things seem relevant from this parable for your situation, Isaac.

One is that God clearly recognizes that different disciples have different capacities. Five, two, one. That's a great difference. Being one and five, what is that, 500% difference? And he doesn't expect that the person with fewer resources will produce the same amount as the one with the greater resources. He says, "Well done," to the man who turns five into ten, and he says the same, "Well done," to the man who turns two into four.

So you should infer from this that God will call you to account not to be as productive as someone with a different set of gifts and limitations, but simply in accord with what he's made you capable of. That's the first thing. Second thing that this parable says to your situation is that that third man who basically did nothing with his single talent was not scolded because he didn't turn one into two.

He was scolded because he didn't even put it in the bank. In other words, it sounds like the master is saying, "Look, you say I'm a hard man, hard to please. I'm not the hard taskmaster you think. All you had to do was put it in the bank and get interest for it and then tell me that I had it with my interest and why you put it in the bank." He would have been commended, I think, for that.

I think C.S. Lewis is right when he said that God is hard to satisfy but easy to please. So don't feel helpless that you are going to be judged by a standard beyond what God has equipped you to do. The next thing I would point out in Scripture is that Paul was given a thorn in the flesh in 2 Corinthians 12, verse 7 through 10, and the point of giving him a thorn in the flesh was to weaken him.

You might say he gave him a disability. He pleaded with Christ to take it away, and Christ said, "No, my power is perfected in your weakness." That is an amazing statement. God is not mainly looking for powerful people who can lend him their strengths. God needs nobody's strength. He gives, he takes according to his will.

All strength is from him, through him, and to him. What he's looking for is trust and a deep contentment in his fellowship in the situation that he gives us because that will make him look more precious in our lives than any health or any wealth or anything else. That's what he's after.

Make my power, my sufficiency look great. And if I have to make you weak in order to make me look strong, I will. So don't measure the usefulness of your life by productive capacities. God has given you what he has given you in order that in your weakness you might rely upon his strength and in that way magnify his worth.

And then I would mention Isaac 2 Corinthians 9 verse 8. God is able to make all grace abound to you so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you, Isaac, may abound in every good work. Now what I take away from this verse is that every good work that God expects me or you to do, he will give us grace to do it.

That's what he says. For some, that will be a lot of productive activity. For others, it will be less, far less. And the older and the weaker we get, the less productive we are going to be. And some are assigned to be weak all their lives. But what this verse implies is that you and I should wake up in the morning and ask God to grant us the grace, the promised grace, to do just those good works that he calls us to do.

Now that may be a smile directed to a passerby or a quiet freedom from murmuring in the midst of misery or a healthy performance of some technical task. God decides what good works we are assigned to do, and he promises to give grace to do them. And the last thing I would say is a comment on Lazarus and the rich man.

This is not a parable about the character of Lazarus. We know virtually nothing about his state of mind or heart. He's not held up as a person of faith, though we can infer that he was a person of faith in God, in Jesus, because he goes to heaven while the rich man goes to Hades.

But Jesus never mentions his faith. We do not know how resourceful Lazarus was. Be careful. You say he didn't have any resourcefulness. Well, I don't know that. It says in Luke 16, 20 that he was laid, was laid at the rich man's gate. So someone is carrying him from where he lives, maybe out in Shantytown.

Someone's carrying him and putting him down at a spot where there might be some hope of crumbs. Now, did Lazarus arrange for that? Did he use the little tiny bit of resourcefulness that he had to arrange each day to be put in the place where there might be some little bit of food for him from the rich man's table?

We don't know. It's all speculation. So don't use Lazarus as a model. Either way, he may have been a great model of resourcefulness. I have seen great resourcefulness in mentally ill people in my neighborhood who make a living and live in their car. And no matter how I try to help them, they want to live in their car because they have proved their resourcefulness to make it by certain kind of panhandling, a certain check from the government, and a certain use of a dinged up old truck.

And I've sent them to every conceivable manner of helping institution, and they just want to prove their own resourcefulness. In other words, it's just not simple to know when you look at a poor person what measure of resourcefulness they may be exercising. So Isaac, the sum of the matter is that God knows your neurological, physical, and mental limitations.

You are not a mistake. There is a reason for your existence as you are. Join the Christians around you by seeking God's wisdom for what that reason is, your reason for being. And then as much as lies within you, by grace, give yourself to that. And I wonder, Isaac, if you are aware of the great poet from the 1600s named John Milton.

He wrote the most famous poem in the English language, probably, Paradise Lost. And in the midst of his amazing, productive life, he went blind. And he felt that God had taken away from him the one gift that he had to be useful. But eventually he wrote a sonnet about his loss, and he called it On His Blindness.

And I want to close by just reading it to you because of how encouraging it's been to me over the years and to others who feel their limits and their fading powers. When I consider how my light is spent ere half my days in this dark world and wide, and that one talent which is death to hide lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent to serve there with my Maker, and present my true account lest he returning chide, doth not exact day labor, light denied, I fondly ask?

But patience, to prevent that murmur, soon replies, God doth not need either man's work or his own gifts. Who best bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state is kingly, thousands at his bidding speed, and post, or land and ocean without rest, they also serve who only stand and wait.

That's a famous sonnet that puts words to suffering in the form of an agency frustrated. John Milton's poem On His Blindness. You can find the text online. If you wish to meditate on it, just search for it. On His Blindness. It's worth reading and rereading a few times to get the depth of what is communicated here from Milton's heart.

Thank you for joining us today. You can ask a question of your own, search our growing archive, or subscribe to the podcast, all at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. And we're going to break for the weekend now. I'm your host, Tony Reinke, Pastor John, and I will see you back here on Monday.

Thanks for listening. We appreciate it.