Matthew 21

We forget sometimes who the true owners are. We get caught up in our jobs and we forget that ultimately the company owns everything that we do. It's not ours. We are working for someone else. We get caught up in parenting and we forget that our kids are not our possessions. They are people with their own lives and their own hopes and dreams. We get caught up in our faith and we forget that it is not our Gospel. It's the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The workers in the vineyard forgot that they were working for the owner and when it came time to share the crop with the owner they defended the vineyard as if it were their own property. They became greedy and lost their perspective, so instead of giving up a portion of what they had worked for in accordance with their agreement as tenants, they gave up their homes and possibly their lives as murderers.

What do we give up when we lose perspective and start to think of the Gospel as our own story? Or when we self-righteously guard our work against the very company that enabled us to have employment? Or when we try to run our children's lives as if they were our own lives?

Jesus was speaking directly to the Pharisees in this parable, and they realized that he meant that they had rejected all attempts by God to keep them in a relationship with Him. At that point, God was willing to allow others (the Gentiles) into the vineyard to do His work. The Hebrews had rejected Him and had lost their perspective. Originally designed to share the Gospel with the world, they chose to shut themselves off from the world and act as if the Word of God was theirs to hoard.

In our case, we are not Pharisees and we are not preparing to kill Christ, but we do still have similar challenges with our perspective of things as I listed above. We must be careful to recognize when we are becoming too prideful and allow God to humble us so that we don't become a second generation of Pharisees – caught up in our own Scriptures and separated from a real relationship with God.