Ten Lies That Shatter Lives (8): It Belongs To ME!



A Sermon On:

Isaiah 58: 5-10

Luke 6: 27-36

Exodus 20: 15







PREPARED BY

KEN GEHRELS

PASTOR

CALVIN CHRISTIAN REFORMED CHURCH

NEPEAN, ONTARIO


I remember it clearly. There were about 6 of us. It was a gift shop. We were on a class trip to Quebec. It was souvenir hunting time. The store was full. We thought for sure she wouldn't see us. One of us had a deck of cards. Another had a small figurine. We made our way out. She DID see us. And the resulting scene with the principal of the school was not pleasant.

"You shall not steal."

A group of gr.8 boys acted as though something they didn't own was theirs to do with as they pleased, including walking off with it for their own consumption.
That is stealing.

It doesn't only happen with young boys. People of all ages, men and women, engage in such activities on a regular basis.
Fraud
shady dealings
robbery,
fine print clauses in contracts meant to trap the unsuspecting customer
failing to mention things that lead to gain for one and loss for another
all these are violations of the 8th commandment.

"You shall not steal."
You shall not take what belongs to someone else and use it as though it were your own to do with as you please.

God tells us time and again in His Word that He has little patience for such activity. Passage after passage show the fury of God with those who swindle and defraud others. The laws that God put in place for the nation of Israel show clearly that there is no room for trampling on another person's turf.
Damaging, swindling, extorting, carrying out business under false pretenses or outright theft of what belonged to another -
- these sorts of things were met with swift and harsh justice. Up to 4-fold restitution was called for.

All of which means it doesn't take a genius to figure out that we can begin interacting with this 8th commandment by asking ourselves a few pointed questions about where we stand -
Do we find ourselves reaching for some of the rather worn out lines with which people try to justify their actions? Ones like:
Do we respect the sanctity of our fellow person's possessions"?
Do we treat them in the way WE would like to be treated?

It wasn't a real big deal, but I remember the feelings of violation I experienced some years ago when a bicycle was ripped off out of my garage. I was a student at the time. Not a lot of money. And I was ticked!
They messed around in my garage.
They took my bike.
A lousy feeling.

Many of you know, in far bigger ways, that sort of feeling. People abuse what is yours. It stinks. Makes you angry. Yuk!

But, you know, as I lounge in MY chair and taste the lousy feeling from when MY space was violated and MY bike was stolen, I suddenly am put in mind of a few questions that were put to someone named Job when he was mulling over his particular situation in life, a situation where everything had been squashed and taken away from him.
God comes to him and asks him to consider this:
WHO?

Oh, yes......
Now......
What's all this talk about your chair and your bike?

Hear the Word of God from Psalm 24:
"The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof." (Ps 24.1)

And we are reminded that we are not potentates, little land barons and owners of wealth, but merely caretakers, stewards, people put in charge of a few things for a little while.

And we are called to use what we have in a way that the real owner would use them.

We are called
to do with them
what GOD would do with them.

Which is not a hard thing to figure out. We just have to listen to Jesus' words in Luke 6: "Be merciful, just as your Father in heaven is merciful."
.... Your heavenly Father is merciful.....
giving you rain and sunshine, food and shelter.
giving you the sacrifice of His own dear Son!
Giving it to people who didn't deserve it
expect it
or even want it.

Be merciful.
You.
Christian, follower of Jesus Christ
Imitate Him. He is your life standard.
That is what God demands - no more, no less.

You have been given tremendous resources. And they are not meant as window dressing, or to gather dust in a warehouse or basement rec room or bank account.

Here's where God sets the bar:
Love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because He is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.

Perhaps our instinctive reaction is, "No way! I worked for it, hard - very hard. That person didn't work for it, much less deserve it. It's MINE!"
If that is our gut reaction then we are violating the 8th commandment.
We are stealing.
We are taking and using God's property as though it were ours to
do with whatever we felt like.
And we are no different then those gr.8 sinners in Quebec.

In Matthew 25 Jesus asks some incredibly tough questions of the people standing before Him. He sets the stage for asking those questions by telling a story about management of money. Different people were given different amounts by their boss, but all were expected to use what they had to the fullest.
Those that did the job received the praise of the master. Those that refused, or concentrated on covering their own hide first, felt the full fury of their master's anger. They were separated out from the faithful ones and cast into darkness.

Jesus tells this story. Then he takes the questions that the master in the story asks of the employees and asks them of his listeners.
He asks them of us.
He asks, in effect, "How do you use the resources I entrust to you?"

He doesn't ask this in some theoretical way. He gets uncomfortably practical; asking questions that don't stop with the cozy pew setting we've got here this morning, but bust through the walls and take us out into the real world:
God has provided us with huge potential; incredible heaps of resources. Some of us have more. Some less. But compared to many places in the world, we are big time rich, rich, rich, rich.

So what do we do with it?
Use it for the best interest of the person we see in the mirror?
Or for the one in need, our neighbour?

Jesus isn't dreaming up new stuff here. This stuff has been God's concern all through the ages.
Remember the words from the prophet Isaiah - What makes God happy?
Remember what he said?
Grab your hymnbooks. In the back is the Heidelberg Catechism, an instructional document that codifies some of the central teachings of the Bible. Let's read together Q/A 110-111. They're on p.913.

110 Q. What does God forbid in the eighth commandment?
A. He forbids not only outright theft and robbery,
punishable by law.

But in God's sight theft also includes cheating and swindling our neighbour by schemes made to appear legitimate, such as:
inaccurate measurements of weight, size, or volume;
fraudulent merchandising;
counterfeit money;
excessive interest;
or any other means forbidden by God.

In addition he forbids all greed and pointless squandering of his gifts.

111 Q. What does God require of you in this commandment?
A. That I do whatever I can for my neighbour's good,
that I treat others as I would like them to treat me,
and that I work faithfully so that I may share with those in need.

Boom.
That's it, the blunt bottom line.
It's also generally the point where people begin to get really uncomfortable. Cause they figure they'll get taken to the cleaners if they live this kind of a lifestyle. They're convinced they're going to get burned in the process.
Can you feel a bit of that restlessness inside you?

The only antidote I can suggest to that kind of stomach upset is to have us ask ourselves, "When God gave what belonged to Him - the life of His precious and only son Jesus Christ - did HE get burned?"

Have people turned their back on God's gift to them?
Have people misused God's gift;
taken it for granted;
treated it as commonplace;
trampled on it?

Has God been burned along the way?
How did it affect His giving and caring?

Will we be burned?
How will the anticipation of that affect our giving and caring?

Be merciful as your heavenly Father is merciful, says Jesus.

Those that misuse other's goodness are responsible for that misuse and will be called to account for it. That is not the foremost concern of those who are called to do the giving and the sharing and the helping.

Is it easy? Look at how far Jesus was called to go in giving himself. Notice the blood dripping from His forehead as anxiety and tension cause the capillaries in his skin to burst while he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane just before he is executed.

Tiring,
demanding the absolute most.
stripping us of any material security blankets in which we would like to snuggle
is the deep call of the 8th commandment, "You shall not steal."

Someone once said, "There are roughly four kinds of people in the world.
Four points along the continuum of handling wealth.
Where are we?