Your rightful Lord – you have forgotten him, but he will come. He gave you your conscience. He gave you your glimmering awareness of himself, and you must face him. In military service years and years ago, if a person was a deserter, they didn't send that person to some central court. It seemed like a curious system. He had to go all the way back to his unit from which he deserted, and be tried there. If that unit had disbanded, he had to go to the previous one or the successor one. So imagine a deserter and there he was maybe on the south coast, and he had been away from his unit for five years. They had perhaps forgotten he was ever there. Somehow or other he was identified and caught by the civil police, let’s say, right up in the north of Scotland, and the magistrate's court ordered him to be handed over to the military authority, and they sent someone and they handcuffed him and brought him all the way down to the unit from which he had deserted. That was where he had to be court martialled. So it is with us. Your Lord will come. You don't even know him, or even think about him. But in the day when you breathe your last, you will be as it were, manacled and taken all the way back to your Lord who made you, to whom you must give an account.
Your Lord will come; there is no question about it. You will have to meet him. You cannot get away with it. A very well-known public figure was speaking of her personal recollections, and recalling when she was a little girl, and how the teacher of her particular class was so angry with her that she wrote a letter to the girl’s mother. The girl realized the letter was bad news, and she opened it and she looked at it, and there was the teacher informing her mother that she was disgracefully inattentive in class. So what did she do? She tore it up into tiny little pieces and flushed it down the toilet. Well the next day the teacher said, ‘Did you give that letter to your mother?’ And she looked her teacher straight in the eye and she said, ‘Yes miss.’ ‘Well is there a response?’ ‘No miss; she didn't say anything.’ And then she began to tremble. Every time there was a parents evening, every time her mother went to the school, would the teacher ask her? Great tension! But she never did. She forgot all about it. That lady still had a conscience about it when she was old, however she got away with it. How many things have you got away with? How many potential moments of great embarrassment have passed, and maybe you have kind of got used to it. But there's no doubt about this: your Lord will bring you into his presence. He is God. He has not forgotten anything. He is holy and perfect, and he will bring you into judgment. Whatever you forget, never forget this: you must face your Creator and your judge. It must happen.
How will he come? ‘The lord of that servant will come in a day when he looketh not for him.’ However many times we hear that God is going to judge this world and judge us personally, it will come as a great surprise, because we do not take it seriously; we do not take it to heart. We do not live with the reality of judgment and of eternity ever before us. We push it away from us and immerse ourselves in convenient distractions.
‘Cut in sunder’ – the powerful language of the parable. The unfaithful servant, the person who never realized, never acknowledged he was made by God, never sought his mercy, never had his wonderful converting love; they will cut him in sunder and appoint him his portion ‘with the unbelievers’ – the parable moves from the illustration to the reality. The experts say it could even mean cut into four pieces. Certainly there is a cut between body and soul; the body dies and the soul goes on. But this language is meant to indicate severity, suddenness, an instantaneous event. If you are unfaithful to God, then you can expect the anger of the Lord. It's meant to indicate an irreversible act: severed from life in this world, severed from hope of salvation. All your opportunities and all your dreams in life just terminated by an angry God. Once you are in that state, it is no use praying for you; it is no use praying for an unbeliever who has died. The anger of God has caught up with that person. There is no purgatory; that is just an invention, and a foolish invention. The word of God says that the person who dies unforgiven goes before God for judgment. There is no further opportunity. Here is the tragedy: he will appoint him his portion. That is all he has a right to: a place with the godless throughout eternity. That is what he chose. Is that what you have chosen in life? A place with the godless. What a horrible choice, for all eternity where all good is withdrawn, where venom only reigns.