Many Christians dream of what it might be like to stand before Jesus one day and hear him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” Could any other affirmation be more important?

Can we be assured of receiving that kind of affirmation from Jesus? Yes, we can—through faith in him, as Ephesian 2:4-10 explains: saving grace comes through faith as a gift to us from God.

That’s what Jesus teaches in this Matthew 25 parable. Two servants receive abundant gifts and trust their master enough to go out and invest those gifts. Any investment involves risk, and yet these servants are willing to take the risk because they trust their master. The third servant doesn’t trust the master, doesn’t invest his gift, and then loses his gift and his job when the master returns. God—our Master—insists that we trust in him.

God gives all of us gifts to invest in the world around us, particularly in ways that show his love to others. But if you’ve ever been faced with the choice between stopping to help someone and getting to work on time, you might understand how the world doesn’t always value our desire to invest our gifts for God’s ­glory. Trusting him enough to use our gifts his way isn’t always easy. But if we want to hear him say, “Well done,” we have to trust him anyway.