What are you going to say in the last day when you are called to account for the fact you have heard the gospel, you have heard about salvation, you have heard about the Saviour, and you never responded? At various points in your life the gospel came to you. You heard about it at school, or you read from the Bible yourself, or a friend or family member was converted, or somebody witnessed to you, or you heard a sermon in which what Christ has done for sinners was explained to you. You were given that pound, that opportunity. Why didn’t you do anything with it? Are you to be commended because you return what was given to you. There is no credit in that. You are obliged to do that. But the gospel was given to you, not so that you store it up in your head as an interesting fact, but so that you act on it. It is designed to change the whole course of your life, but instead it has been set aside. You knew about it; you cannot deny that. As soon as the king returned, this servant produced what had been deposited with him. You might say, ‘Oh, but I never denied it. I never opposed it’, but what have you done with it? You come before God on the Day of Judgment, and you are forced to concede that you have done nothing with the most precious possession you ever received during your life on earth. What a fool! What are you doing? Your eternal destiny is at stake. You have done nothing. You are going to be condemned. You are going to be lost eternally, and you hear this message with your eyes glazed over and fail completely to respond to it. What is going to happen to you?
Many people simply block out any awareness they have of God. That's my application of the parable at any rate. They don’t want to know. This servant was given this worthwhile thing to trade with and he won't do it because he hates the nobleman. Are you like that? Perhaps you never thought about it in these terms. You have an awareness of God, an instinct for him, but you won't do anything with it. You won't pursue it. You won't invest it. You won't attempt to enlarge your knowledge. You won't ask any serious questions. You see us reading from this Bible. Perhaps you possess one yourself and you've read it sometimes. Maybe you found some beautiful passages and others you simply don't understand. But you put it to one side. You have no interest in that. What is the Bible? You don't ask. What is this divine revelation? Is it credible? Will it help me? Will it inform me about God? Or is it, as some people claim, a mass of contradictions?
There are people who will not think about the Lord, about the things of God, about their souls. They are hostile. They are atheists. Or they reject anything they've ever believed or heard. They just don't want a God on the scene at all, and they hate any notion of coming under the authority of God. They reject his commandments and call them the inventions of men and write their own codes of conduct. Others respect to some extent this message of the Bible. They believe God is their Creator. They believe God is over all. They have some awareness that he exists, that he must be there. It may be that they have heard time after time about how Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, came to earth to suffer and die, to make a way of forgiveness, a new life for sinful people. There was one leading politician in this country, a few years ago, who was driving his car on a Welsh lane and it skidded and it turned over several times and he was unhurt. He was left upside down. He struggled out of his car, got help, looked at his car, saw its mangled condition, and he said to the newspapers afterwards, ‘Somebody up there likes me.’ Now it may be that your knowledge of God is as vague as that, but you believe it: there's somebody there. But you are not really responding to this message. You are not seeking the Lord, and praying earnestly to him. You are not calling on the name of the Lord for forgiveness and eternal life, the gift he has promised to all who come to him.