Every child in every culture has, at some point, uttered the phrase, "That's not fair." Well, life is NOT fair. Yet, we all want life to be fair some of the time. Andy Stanley suggests that we are really only concerned about life being fair when our piece of the pie is smallest. If we got the big piece of pie, we usually don't feel that life has been unfair to us. Even so, life isn't even. One guy marries into wealth and gets to enjoy the benefits of a big deer ranch. That was always my dream. When I met Cindy, I found out that her dad owned a "farm" in Anderson. Wow, I thought, my dream is coming true. Then, I found out that she stood to inherit 7 acres of a treeless, open prairie with no utilities and no infrastructure. Yet, one of my friends married a girl whose dad owns almost 2,000 acres of an old Mississippi plantation that is today prime deer and quail hunting habitat. Life's not fair.
In today's lesson, Andy observes that the unfairness, the unevenness of life often become an opportunity for irresponsible behavior. In past lessons, we learned that irresponsibility eats a hole in your soul. You begin a negative spiral as a result of this terrible confict in life. Perhaps, Ben Franklin said it best, "He that is good at making excuses is seldom good at anything else."
Andy also notes that people with a large piece of the pie, people with "extra" are often irresponsible with their bounty. The more money you have, the more you waste. The more free time you have, the more time is wasted.
Andy Stanley suggests that we ask the question, "What am I going to do with the opportunity that God gave me, regardless of the opportunity that someone else has been given?" Jesus taught this 2,000 years ago in Matthew 25. God's perspective on unevenness or unfairness of life was illustrated in the parable in Matthew 25:14. Andy describes this passage as a story that teaches a lesson about the unevenness of God. Parables were used to make a point and parables did not actually happen. In this story, the master gave one servant 5 bags of gold, another 2 bags of gold, and another 1 bag of gold. Andy calculated that each of these bags of gold represented about 20 years worth labor. Obviously, this was NOT an even distribution of wealth. As you recall, two of the servants put the money to work and doubled the master's money. Yet one of the servants, the one who was given the least gold, began to blame the master and whine when called to account for his lack of effort on the master's behalf. Notice that the master chose to take the gold from the servant who had been irresponsible and give it to the servant who had been most responsible. Was it fair?
Andy points out that everybody gets an uneven amount of opportunity in life and everybody gets held accountable for what they do with the opportunity given to them. Our job is to figure out how to leverage the opportunity we are given--great or small--to its maximum. What are we going to do with what we have? We need to look at our own bag and refuse to waste it or refuse to excuse myself because I don't have as much as others. Andy makes reference to a book by Scott Rigsby called UNTHINKABLE in which we see a double amputee become the first double amputee to cross the finish line in the Ford Ironman World Challenge in 2007.
Will you accept what's in your hand as coming from your Father in heaven and leverage it for something bigger than yourself? Remember, life's not fair. Get over it!
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