“His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” (Matthew 25:21). In the Parable of the Talents, the Lord calls the servants who managed to double their talents good and faithful. They were both good and faithful. We can imagine that if a servant had been entrusted with the care of his master's property, and then he manages to hold onto that property, then he would arguably be a faithful servant, given that the master has at least as much property as when he left. Indeed, even the servant who was given one talent and did nothing was not called faithless. He may have been called wicked and slothful, but he at least kept the talent entrusted to him from being lost or stolen or destroyed. If our approach to living our lives is one merely of subsistence, of doing the bare minimum to keep our head above water, even if we are technically being faithful, the Lord will not call us good unless we are magnifying our gifts and talents and multiplying and replenishing the Earth. God does not look to us to merely guarantee a zero net loss. He wants us to double His investment. Then we will be not only faithful but good. In the Parable of the Sower, the seeds that fell among stones and thorns were seeds that faithfully sprouted and began to grow, but only the seeds that actually multiplied some thirty, some sixty, and some an hundredfold, were considered to have fallen on not just faithful but good ground. Let us all be both faithful and good. Let us all set out sights far higher than the bare minimum, and be anxiously engaged in magnifying and multiplying the talents which the Loud gave us.
