When I was a young teenager, my dad decided one year that our house needed to be re-roofed. And he was right. Our shingles were bubbling up on the roof, and if you walked on the rooftop of our house, it would crumble beneath your feet. So yes, it was past time to re-roof our house.
Here’s what you need to understand about my dad: My dad was diametrically opposed to paying for someone else to do a job that he could do himself. And by “he could himself,” I mean he and his sons could do ourselves. And I’ve carried that fine tradition along with my sons.
So that year, he decided that it was time to go ahead and tear the old roofing off our house (shingles, paper, and nails) and redo it. And of course, he decided to do it the time of year when his sons were home the most— July.
We commenced to re-roofing our house that summer. So one fine Monday morning, me and my older brother, my dad, and my dad’s good friend, Dave Dorn (who, for some insane reason, decided to join us on a roof in July), commenced to re-roofing.
I could relate many funny and painful stories that happened, but early on, the first thing we had to do was tear the old roof off. So we began with spades to scrape along the top of that roof and pop nails out and scrape roofing off, and we were getting nowhere fast. We worked our tails off and were not making hardly any progress.
A day goes by, maybe two, and finally my dad says, “I’m going to go get help,” which was just stunning. So he leaves, comes back that second or third morning with four grown men, puts them on our roof, and they start tearing the roof of our house off.
My brother and I were stunned. Where do you get four adult men who will just come to your house and tear the roof off? So we asked my dad, “Where did you get these guys?”
He said, “Well, I went down to the unemployment office, and there were a bunch of men standing in line. And I said, ‘Who wants a job?’ And the first four guys who said, ‘I do,’ I put in my van and brought back home.”
I’m a homeowner, and I have children. I can’t imagine picking up four strangers with no background checks and throwing them in your van and taking them to my house to work with my kids. But I guess it was a different time.
My dad did that, and we were so thankful as we were able to get the roofing taken off the house much quicker, which only left the rest of it for us to do. Did I mention that it was July in South Carolina? It was brutal.
When thinking about this story that we’re looking at today in Matthew 20, my dad was actually acting more historically consistent with people who hired day laborers to complete a job when it needs to be done than I do.
We see this all the time in South Carolina: Laborers come in to pick the peaches in the summer and the apples in the fall. That’s what happens. And that’s what happens in our story here in the parable that Jesus tells in Matthew 20.
This is a story with eternal significance, so let’s take a look at these verses and then draw out some implications that I hope will help us understand.
Verse 1 says,
“For the kingdom of heaven is like…”
Just stop right there. He begins with the conjunction “for.”
Chapter divisions were created for us. They were not written in the original books. They were created for us for reference, so we can find things, but they were not there. So what happens at the beginning of Matthew 20 is just really a continuation of Matthew 19. So, back up one verse. Matthew 19:30 says,
“But many who are first will be last, and the last first. For the kingdom of heaven is like…” (Matthew 19:30)
And now look at 16:20, where he concludes,
“So the last will be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16).
So he continues what happened in Matthew 19 in this parable in Matthew 20, which concludes by describing what the kingdom of heaven is like and helping unpack this idea that the first will be last and the last will be first.
In other words, what he’s saying here is that the kingdom of heaven is going to be a bit reversed. It’s going to be backwards. My dad would say, “cattywampus.” That’s what the kingdom of heaven is going to be like. It’s not going to be like you would expect.
Here’s the main point: The kingdom of heaven is filled with surprising grace, not meritorious reward.
It will not be what you think will happen. What you think you earned or invested on earth is not going to exactly be like the kingdom of heaven. It’s going to be filled with grace and surprising grace. Jesus explains this with a parable, so look back now at verse one.
“For the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard” (Matthew 20:1).
So it’s harvest season. The grapes are ripe on the vine, and the master says, “Let’s get those grapes off the vine.” He goes wherever it is—the unemployment office, the marketplace—and hires laborers for his vineyard.
Now here’s what you need to understand about the Jewish day: At that time, the Jewish day began at 6 a.m. and ended at 6 p.m. It’s a 12-hour day. So you start at 6 a.m. and the day’s over at 6 p.m. That’s it.
So you have these time markers in this passage that will help us understand what’s going on here. Here’s what I’m going to show you: I’m going to show you five, three, and one, okay? Five, three, one.
The master hires five sets of laborers. Five sets of laborers. He hires, first of all, the early laborers. So he goes out.
If the day begins at six, does that mean he got up at six, or he made it to the marketplace at six, or he hired the laborers to begin at six? We don’t exactly know. Sometime in that timeframe, he hires the first laborers.
What do the kids do, six or seven? Sometime in the six or seven timeframe—I’m so sick of hearing that—he hires the first set of laborers.
Then what does Matthew say? Verses 3 and 4. If the first hour, or zero hour, is 6 a.m., then the third hour, he goes and hires another set, the third hour would be what time? 9 a.m. Good job. You guys can add by threes. Good.
Then it says in verse 5 that he goes back at the sixth hour, which would be what time? Yes, nine plus three is 12/noon. Yes.
Then the ninth hour would be what time? 3 p.m. Good. You guys are doing great. This is all addition. No subtraction, division, or multiplication today. Only addition.
But the last group is hired at the 11th hour. Look at verse 6.
“And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing. And he said to them, ‘Why do you stand here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too’” (Matthew 20:6-7).
So the 11th hour would be what time? 5 p.m. That’s right. I threw a curveball. You only add two that time. That’s all right: five o’clock (5 p.m.) and the day ends at 6 p.m. The 11th-hour people go out. So five sets of laborers.
Three agreements. There are three agreements. First is the early agreement that only impacts the first set that was hired at zero hour. Verse 2:
“After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard” (Matthew 20:2).
A denarius a day was standard pay for a day’s work. For day laborers, a denarius was normal. It’s normal pay. It’s not ripping anybody off. This is what you get. This is how long you worked. Done. That’s the early agreement.
The second agreement is the mid-agreement. It covers third-hour, sixth-hour, and ninth-hour guys. Look at verse 4:
“and to them he said, ‘You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right I will give you.’ So they went. Going out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour, he did the same” (Matthew 20:4-5).
So third, sixth, and ninth, he says to them, “You get to work too. The grapes are there. Let’s harvest them. Whatever is right, I will give you.”
This agreement is based on confidence in the master, not a contract with the master. It’s based on mercy, not merit. He doesn’t say, “I’m going to give you a denarius.” He says, “I’ll do whatever’s right.” That’s the second agreement.
The third agreement is the late agreement. In verses six and seven, he says to them, “Why do you stand here idle all day? …You go into the vineyard too.” So the third agreement is even more loosey-goosey. He says, “You go too.”
I guess they probably thought, “Well, I’m not doing anything else. Who knows what I’m going to get paid, if I’m going to get paid. He just says, ‘You go too.’ I just trust that he’ll do right by me, whatever that means.”
So the first agreement is a contract. It’s a contractual relationship. They make an agreement for this amount of time, for this much pay. The rest of the agreements are a trust relationship based purely on grace. “Whatever’s right,” and “you go too.” Trust the master and get to work.
Five sets of laborers, three agreements, one wage. Verse 8:
“‘Call the laborers [the master says] and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, up to the first.’ And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius [ah, the five o’clock guys]. Now when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received a denarius” (Matthew 20:8-10).
He doesn’t mention the middle guys. He only mentions the first and the last, but the assumption is that everybody got the same, that he gave everybody a denarius.
Then you have the response. The only response we have is from the first-hour guys. Jesus tells us what they thought and what they said.
First of all, what they thought: They presumed they were getting more than was agreed upon, which is perfectly understandable from a human perspective, right?
A couple of weeks ago, one of my kids said, “What are you preaching on?” And I told him this story, and he goes, “Yeah, that makes sense.”
These guys came way later, and they’re getting a denarius. It just makes sense, right? It makes sense that you kind of go, “Oh, sweet. This could be better than I thought.” But that’s not what happened.
At some point, the presumption turned to entitlement. At some point, what they thought might happen (like, “Hey, maybe this will work out better than I thought”) became a “No, actually, this better work out better than I thought. Otherwise, this is unjust.”
What they thought became what they said, which was that they grumbled, which is the word muttered or mumbled. People who feel entitled grumble. They mutter.
I was reading in Numbers, the last couple of weeks, just reading through the Bible, and in Numbers 14, you have the people’s response after the 12 spies went into the land and came back and gave a bad report. It says over and over, they grumbled, they grumbled, they grumbled. Verse 27 of Numbers 14 says, God says,
“How long will this wicked congregation grumble against me?”
I just wondered—because I was reading Matthew 20 and I saw this—I thought, “I wonder if Jesus uses the same word in the Greek translation,” which would be the Septuagint. The Bible that Jesus read was in Greek. It wasn’t the Hebrew Bible; it would have been the Septuagint. “I wonder if it’s the same word in Numbers 14 as Matthew 20 that Jesus uses.”
Sure enough—the reason I’m telling you this story—of course, the answer is yes. Yes. You have that picture of the congregation grumbling against God and against Moses and Aaron, and it’s that same attitude that’s here in Matthew 20.
In context, the first-hour workers are saying, “This isn’t right,” and “I object. What you’re doing is wrong. They are not our equals. We worked harder and longer, in the heat of the day. These Johnny-come-lately’s come in the last hour, and you give them what you gave us. That’s not fair. The sun’s going down. It’s getting cooler. They didn’t work as hard as we did. This is injustice.”
They said exactly— If you have more than one kid, and you give one kid something that the other kid doesn’t get, they said exactly what every kid says, which is what? “That’s not fair!” Yeah, but you have to say it a little more nasally and whiny. So try it again. “That’s not fair!” That’s what they said.
The master responds to their artificial injustice with true justice. Verse 13:
“Friend, I am doing you no wrong…” (Matthew 20:13).
I looked up this word “friend.” It’s used three times in the New Testament, the Greek word that’s translated “friend” in English here. It’s used three times in the Bible. All of them are in Matthew, and all of them are when someone is presuming on grace.
It’s here, it’s when the guy shows up to the wedding feast not properly dressed, and the last one is when Judas comes into the garden to betray Jesus, and Jesus calls him “friend.” In Matthew, if Jesus calls you “friend,” that’s not good. It means you’re presuming on grace.
“…Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and [get out.] I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you…” (Matthew 20:13b-14).
John Stott paraphrased this: “Friend, may I show you the document you signed this morning?” You just signed it a few hours ago, agreeing to one denarius for one day’s pay, and now you want to talk about justice?
You know what’s justice? You got exactly what you earned. You got exactly what you deserve. You got exactly what you merited. We talked about it, you agreed, you did it, I paid. Done. There is no injustice. Your cries of injustice are artificial. You got exactly what you earned. Verse 15,
“Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?” (Matthew 20:15)
The word for “begrudge” has the same root as “ophthalmology.” “Do you give the stink-eye to my generosity?” is a good translation. “When I give somebody grace, do you give it the stink eye?”
J.B. Phillips translates the last line,
“Must you be jealous because I am generous?”
I love that juxtaposition of jealous/generous. You’re not objecting to injustice, you’re objecting the generosity. You’re objecting to grace, not injustice. You don’t like grace.
So that’s what the kingdom of heaven is like. Verse 16, the first will be last, and the last will be first. It’s going to be filled with surprising grace that might make you mad.
This is a parable of grace, which challenges those who operate on merit. So the question for us, brothers and sisters, is, do you want to be like the first-hour laborers or the 11th-hour laborers? Said differently, do you want to relate to the master like the first-hour laborers or the 11th hour laborer? Do you want to relate to the master based on your merit or God’s grace?
Now, you know the answer. The correct answer is grace. We all know the correct answer, and we would all say the correct answer, but the reality is that Jesus in his grace and kindness are showing us that sometimes we operate like the first-hour laborers. Sometimes we operate with a mindset of merit with the Master.
In this passage, I want to point out four ways in which we operate with a merit-based mindset with the Master. Let me give them to you. Here are four signs of operating with a merit-based mindset with the Master.
1. Jealousy or envy
Am I jealous or envious when someone receives good that I didn’t receive? The early laborers were jealous, envious of the comparative hourly rate that the other laborers received.
When somebody receives a promotion or a pay raise or a beautiful wife or a dashing husband or a gift from someone that you didn’t get, are you jealous? Are you envious? Are you covetous of what they have and you don’t?
When someone receives grace or a grace gift that they clearly don’t deserve or that you don’t think they deserve, are you jealous? Does envy burn within your heart? When you see the success that someone else enjoys, that they have the life that you wish you had, that they have __________ …everything— and you envy and covet and are filled with jealousy.
I thought about Psalm 73 with so many of these. Verse 3 says,
“For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked” (Psalm 73:3).
There it is: “God gave them so much that he didn’t give me, and I’m jealous.”
“Why does that person have so many talents? Of course, they’re fantastic at home decorating, because that goes along with their 40 other talents. Why not have 41 talents instead of just 40? After all, they have everything.” Have you ever thought that? “Sure, I have my two talents. God gave them what I thought was 40, but then I saw their home, and actually, it’s 41.”
Peter quoted last week from the Tilly Dillehay book that there are inequalities in heaven and hell, but only envy and hell. And he said,
“When we envy, we are playing by the rules of hell.”
We would answer, “We want to live by grace,” but when we envy, we’re not playing like it. We’re playing like we are daughters and sons of hell, and it might be a clue that you’re operating on a merit-based mindset with the Master.
2. Grumbling
You saw it in the story, that spirit of entitlement that wells up within us. This is the verbal response to perceived injustice. It brings other people in so that they can see that “I’ve been mistreated, I’ve been ripped off.”
Do you see that? “I’m going to tell you how I’ve been mistreated and ripped off,” like the overachiever who doesn’t get recognized for his greatness, and he has something to say about it because “they didn’t do half of what I did. Do you see that too, what I see?” Psalm 73:12,
“Behold, these are wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches” (Psalm 73:12).
Look at them. Do you see how bad they are, how wicked they are? And yet they increase in riches. They have the easy life, when I have done so much better.
Do you lament the lack of karma in the world sometimes? Psalm 73 is filled with that. We’re not Hindu, but we’re functionally Hindu sometimes. When an idiot gets hurt or something bad, you’re like, “Well, yeah, they’re an idiot.” But when an idiot gets good, we’re like, “Is there no justice in the world? Where is the karma?” God is not a God of karma, but sometimes we act like it. People should get what they deserve, right? I mean, not me, other people. We grumble.
3. Anger
Am I mad when God doesn’t give me the life or the things I expected? The first-hour workers were angry that the master didn’t give them things they expected after he did spectacular things for others. Oh, expectations, they dog us. I’ve had my share of disappointments, but many of you have had far, far worse, heart-wrenching disappointments or suffering when things didn’t go as you expected.
I had breakfast this week with an older gentleman who told me, kind of in passing, that in the last couple of years, his adult daughter died suddenly. Every dad in those conversations who has a daughter imagines the grief that that would entail. I did. I have a daughter. I love her very much. Every dad, and in that moment, I felt the same thing: “I can’t imagine losing my girl.”
Many of you have endured far worse. How do we view God in those seasons of intense loss? Anger is often driven by feelings of artificial injustice: “God is not right to withhold good things from me or to take good things away from me. He is unjust. He isn’t right. I’m angry because I’m not getting what I deserve, and God is supposed to give me good things. It’s his fault.”
“All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence” (Psalm 73:13).
Do you hear it? “I have done the good things, and it’s empty. It’s vain.” I go to church every Sunday. I actually give money. I don’t just show up. I give of what God has entrusted to me. I serve. I take care of others. I don’t beat my wife. I love my wife, I take care of my children, and I get this. It’s empty, it’s vain, I’ve invested so many good things, and God is not keeping his end of the bargain. I’m holding him accountable for injustice.
4. Arrogance
These go together, by the way. A lot of overlap. Do I assume that I should receive more or better than others who don’t perform as well as I do? Maybe I’m not jealous, maybe I don’t grumble. I’m just surprised that someone like that would be honored more than me. Surprise isn’t a sin, right? I’m just surprised.
I’m surprised that he received that acknowledgement at work, but I didn’t. I’m surprised that she won the part in the play or that he is singing that solo. I’m surprised that they were invited to that weekend with my friends instead of me, when I’m a better friend. In other words, the arrogant make a gift of grace about themselves. When someone else receives grace, the arrogant say, “Well, why didn’t I get that? I deserve that.” But a gift of grace for someone else isn’t about you.
The grace gift of the master had nothing to do with the early hour workers, but they made it about themselves, didn’t they? They made the grace of the master about them. The arrogant responds, “It has everything to do with me! Don’t tell me it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It has everything to do with me because you made them equal to us.”
Did you see that in the text? It wasn’t just a gift of grace. “You’re making them equal to me, and they are not. I worked harder, longer, and in the grueling part of the day. They are unequal, and you made them equal.” Do you hear it?
The master says, “My grace to someone else has nothing to do with you. I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.” That’s what the master says. “It has nothing to do with you.” Do you emphasize fairness over grace?
Church, I think we need to view theology top down rather than bottom up. Viewing theology bottom up is very common. Here’s the difference:
Viewing theology bottom-up says, I’m made in God’s image, I have a pretty good idea of what justice is, or really any other character trait of God, any other communicable attribute, I know what that is. In this case, justice. “I know what justice is. I’ve defined justice, and I see justice, and I work for justice.” Then God does something that doesn’t fit my definition. So I go, “God is not just. This was not God’s justice.” That’s viewing theology from the bottom up, me to God.
Viewing theology from the top down, God and his character is justice. So if what I experience in this life seems unjust, the problem is not that God isn’t just, it’s that maybe I don’t understand what justice is because his ways are not my ways and his thoughts are not my thoughts.
So often, you see it all around you, people come to the conclusion that, “I know what justice is, God didn’t do that, so maybe I’m not following God after all.” You see Christian after Christian deconstructing their faith because they decided that God is not what they thought he was, because “I know better what justice is than God does. So I’m done, because he’s not just.”
By the way, do you wonder—in this story—why the master reorganized the giving of wages? He could have just paid the first guys first, sent them on their way, and avoided the whole controversy. Those of you who are controversy-averse picked up on that right away.
All you have to do is pay the early guys, they’d have been none the wiser. You never would have had this conversation. You could have just paid the other guys what you wanted to. Everybody’s happy. Isn’t that the goal? To make everybody happy?
I think what Jesus is unpacking here is that Jesus isn’t content to give us our wages and leave us in our ignorance and arrogance. He flushes out our hearts. The master did that for the workers, and Jesus is doing it for us. He’s flushing out our hearts.
If our responses to the grace of the Master are jealousy, grumbling, anger, and arrogance, the Master is flushing out our hearts. He’s saying to us, “You might be living in a merit-based mindset with the Master, but the kingdom of heaven is filled with surprising grace, not meritorious reward.” The natural man assumes reward is geared towards merit, but grace surprises us. Jesus wants his disciples to be like the late workers, not the early ones, to relate to Jesus on trust, not contract, on grace, not merit.
So do you want to stand on merit or grace? Do you want to be in a relationship with the Master (God himself through the Lord Jesus Christ) on merit or grace? Do you want to stand before the holy God on your merit or the grace of Christ? By the way, God is willing to do either one. He’s willing to treat us on merit or grace. Let me show you that in one place.
Romans is many times reflective of this story in Matthew. One of them is Romans 6:23, where Paul is paraphrasing Jesus’s point in Matthew 20. Paul says this,
“The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23a).
Do you know what a wage is? A wage is what you earn. It’s what you merit. When you get paid on Fridays, that’s your wage. It’s not grace. Some of you know that. Some of you are like, “Yeah, this doesn’t feel like grace at all.” It’s not grace. It’s what you earned. It’s what you merited, and the wages of sin is death.
You got your W-2 a few weeks ago, and it has a wage box, and it has what you earned in 2025. Our W- 2 for eternity says, “Wages: death,” because that’s what we earned. The wages of sin is death.
Do you want the wage you deserve? Do you want to go by what you merit, or do you want unmerited favor?
“…but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23b).
So, do you want to be a Romans 6:23a person or a Romans 6:23b person? Do you want to say, “I want to stand by my merit and hold other people by that same standard,” or “do I want to be 6:23b where I want to live by unmerited favor?” Because the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.
Now think about Matthew 19, the chapter earlier. The rich young man comes to Jesus, and he says to Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus is the free gift of God for eternal life, and Jesus says, “Keep the commandments.”
He says, “Got that.”
Jesus says, “Well then, come get the free gift of eternal life. Leave all you have and follow me.”
The guy walks away, and Peter says, “We did that. We left all we had, and we’re following you.”
Jesus said, “Yeah, yeah. But Peter, if you take what I told the rich young man and turn it into another commandment to keep, so that you merit eternal life, you will merit death,” because you can’t merit eternal life.
You can only get it as a free gift through Jesus Christ our Lord. That’s what he’s telling us. “You see, Peter, you can’t make it happen,” so he tells his disciples this story, this one, to say there’s nothing you can do to merit it.
Bible scholar Michael Green summarized it well when he said, “When sinful men and women are faced with a holy, good God, they have no clothes to hide their nakedness. Merit is excluded. All depend on grace alone. Without it they would not have a chance.”
On the cross of Christ, Jesus said, “It is finished.” One of the things that means is that all the merit that’s needed to stand before a holy God is finished. It’s accomplished in Jesus Christ. The free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The call of Jesus is for you and me to be like those late workers, to just trust the grace of the master, to get to work. Not to trust your own merit, but to trust his grace alone. Through him, we have eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
