A Gatekeeper and His Key

When the king left the city, he gave the gatekeeper a new key.

“Winter is coming,” the king told him. “Keep the gate. There must be shelter here for those caught on the road.”

The gatekeeper bowed and gave his word. His father had kept that gate, and his father before him. Neither had ever lost a key.

On the first cold evening, a woman arrived with two children. As the gatekeeper lifted the bar to admit them, the key slipped from his hand and struck the stones. One of its teeth had bent. After the family passed through, he spent an hour straightening it. Before going to bed, he tried it in the lock three times.

The next evening, a merchant arrived after sunset. The gatekeeper raised his lantern, but the man’s face remained in shadow. Suspicious of his true motives, the gatekeeper turned him away.

“Come back in the morning!” he called. By morning, the merchant had gone and was nowhere to be seen.

As the days shortened, the gatekeeper began closing earlier. He questioned travelers through the door. Those whose answers troubled him, he sent elsewhere. Sometimes he heard them arguing outside, but eventually they always left.

Soon, snow settled against the walls. Travelers knocked with gloved hands, then with stones when their hands grew numb. The gatekeeper watched from his room above the entrance. He couldn’t open the gate for everyone, after all. Each use wore the key, and each stranger might be a thief! The king had entrusted him with his key and the safety of the city.

Thinking of the king, the gatekeeper wrapped the key in a cloth and polished it each evening.

When the king returned again in the spring, the gatekeeper hurried down to meet him. He had polished the key that morning, anticipating the king’s arrival.

“Not a scratch,” the gatekeeper said with satisfaction as he placed the key in the king’s hand.

Yet the king didn’t look at the key.

“On the way here, I passed a woman burying her husband and child. She said she had reached these walls,” the king said.

The gatekeeper lowered his eyes.

“There were thieves abroad, your Majesty. I could not be certain whom to admit.”

“Were you certain he was a thief?”

“No.”

“Then why was he left outside?”

The gatekeeper had answered this question many times through the winter, though no one had asked it.

“I know how strictly you judge a man who fails his duty. I was afraid of what you would say if I damaged what you gave me.”

The king held out the key for the gatekeeper to see.

“What did you think I gave you?”

“A key, your Majesty.”

“I gave you a gate.”

Such is the danger Christians face when laboring in the Kingdom of God.

It is not hard to be safe. It is not hard to take a class without revealing how little you know or to keep people out of your home so that they don’t know how you live. It’s even easier to never take a big step because what you know today feels safer than what tomorrow might require.

You do not have to refuse the King outright to be like the gatekeeper; you can simply keep finding reasons why obedience must wait.

There is always a way to stay safe, but “safe” can indeed have a cost. You can count what you have kept, but it is harder to count the people left unserved and the good left undone. The gatekeeper could show the king his key. He could not show him a winter’s worth of closed doors.

So it is that, for the Christian, when protecting what God has given us becomes an excuse not to use it, we withhold good from the people our gifts could serve.

What We Bury

In Matthew 25:14–30, Jesus tells of a man who entrusts his property to three servants before leaving on a journey. One receives five talents, another two, and another one, each according to his ability. The first two put what they receive to work. The third digs a hole and hides his master’s money.

This final servant did not use the talent for improper means, lose it, or gamble it away; when his master returned, he was able to conjure it up in precisely the same state as when the master had left (vv. 24–25).

However, as is clear with the first two (vv. 16–23), the third servant misunderstood the assignment and did the same as the gatekeeper. If the assignment were to simply not lose the talent, he would have done well. Yet his error lies in the fact that he treated the talent as a liability to manage rather than a responsibility to fulfill, and his master’s return shows the difference in this posture.

Jesus is not baptizing every ambition and desire that you can tack Christian language onto and calling you to pursue it, but He is forcing the question of stewardship upon us. Are you using what you have been given for Christ and His Kingdom, or has protecting it become an excuse to avoid the obedience He requires?

Every Christian has been given something from the Lord, and we must ask what we are doing to steward those opportunities and giftings.

Your education, income, abilities, relationships, and remaining years are not merely things to keep from losing. They belong to a life over which Christ has laid claim. This includes both that which you use and exercise capably and that which you are still learning how to use.

Perhaps you could teach, but you would rather wait until you can do it without stumbling. Perhaps you could help a younger believer read the Bible, but you are painfully aware of how many questions you cannot answer. Perhaps you desire to share the gospel with a coworker or fellow student, but you are worried what it might do to your spot among your peers.

The limitations are not imaginary, but neither is the possibility that someone could be served through your imperfect obedience now.

Why We Bury It

So why do we often shrink back from both the ways that God has uniquely gifted us and the ways in which He might grow us?

When the third servant explains himself, he begins with his understanding of the master: “Master, I knew you to be a hard man …, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground” (Matt. 25:24–25).

Before there was a hole in the ground, there was a judgment about the master. The servant’s conduct followed what he believed to be true of the one he served.

The reality for many of us is that we may know how to describe God’s character correctly while making decisions as though something quite different was true of Him. We confess His goodness, but imagine Him waiting for an opportunity to expose our inadequacy. We affirm His wisdom, but struggle to obey unless we can first see how everything will work out.

Under such conditions and beliefs, doing nothing can begin to feel like the most responsible option and wielding the shovel to the detriment of others makes sense. After all, keeping your cards close to your chest can seem to spare you the embarrassment of trying and failing.

But what exactly are we protecting? Sometimes, the thing we are most concerned with is our own reputation and comfort rather than God’s “property.”

There are good reasons to wait. We simply must make sure that we are not attempting to serve Christ while remaining unwilling to depend on Him.

What We Believe About the King

The servant calls that master “hard.” Yet consider what the first two servants receive. Both hear the same commendation: “Well done, good and faithful servant.” And both are invited into their master’s joy (25:21, 23).

It is worth noting that these two servants are not numerically equal in terms of return. One gained five talents and the other two—yet the second is not rebuked for returning less but is commended in the same way.

The third servant is thus both right and wrong. He is right that the master deserves weighty consideration and will call His servants to account. But he failed to recognize that He is also the Lord who invites His servants into His joy.

This matters desperately for those of us who hesitate because we are aware of what someone else could do with our opportunity or giftings. Christ has not asked you to account for the gifts He gave another person! You are responsible for what He has entrusted to you. Yet this responsibility is not a demand to earn His love through usefulness. We develop and offer our gifts because we belong to Him, not to persuade Him to receive us.

The gatekeeper kept the key safe, but the people outside needed him to use it. Who might be served by what you are still hesitant to offer? You do not need certainty about everything that will happen when you obey. You need to trust the King who gave you the gate, knowing that it is into His joy that He invites you.