Stewardship - Be Content with What You Have

November 2, 2003, 8:00, 9:30, 11:00 AM

Rev. Steve Felton

Typed from audio transcript

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Well, what kind of week did you have this week? Did you remember when you heard somebody talking down another person to stand up for him, to speak for him the same way Jesus spoke for you? Did you remember when you had the opportunity to say something bad about somebody else or just hold your tongue and try to think of the good about them instead? That was our Eighth Commandment last week. How'd it go for you this week?

I'll tell you something about how my week went. I had a really good week. I found out about this special deal with my mortgage company, the company that holds the mortgage on my house. They'll do a refinance now and cut my rate by 1¾% and they won't charge me a nickel to do it. All I have to do is start making lower payments, have less interest. What a deal! So I talked to them, called them up, arranged it, and I just have to sign a few papers and it will happen. Rather than take the extra money that I won't have to pay to pay off the loan, I'm just going to have that apply instead back towards principle and I'll get the whole thing paid off earlier. Pretty good deal. You don't run into that everyday.

I've been watching the news of the Stock Market here. I'm not trying to give you all the news of the world, but that's looking pretty good, too. It's not back to where I was in March 2000 yet. I mean, that was just unreal. That wasn't even reasonable, but it is back to where it was and even a little higher than it was in March 1999. And this week, where I work downtown, I exercised a stock option, bought some shares of stock at a low price and immediately sold it at a high price and made a healthy profit on that. And I took that money, and I put it into my retirement funds. And so now I should have that house paid off even earlier still, and finally my retirement funds should be growing a little bit faster than I even planned. It's all just working out very well. In fact, I have it so that when my retirement funds reach this certain point that I've set and when I get to be 62 years of age and when my company pension kicks in, I'll be able to made a choice at work. I'll be able to say, "Well, do I want to stay here or do I want to go and take my ease?" Do everything. Everything's working out wonderfully except for one problem. I look at my life and you know what? I sound just like the man in Jesus' parable in Luke 12. Everything was going well for him. He had so many crops he didn't have room to store them all, and what did God say to him? You fool. Everything you have is going to be taken from you, and who's going to get to enjoy that? Like I said, everything's going well, but I wonder am I the guy in the parable? Is that me?

Last week, I said these commandments get more subtle as we go along. You know, the Eighth Commandment is really just about words and the Ninth and the Tenth Commandments are the ones about coveting. That's just about thoughts, just about thinking. I'm not supposed to be wanting too many things unreasonably. God will provide for me as a righteous person. God just bountifully gives me everything I need.

There's this hymn in Lutheran worship, the blue hymnal. It's Number 401. That hymnal has been out about 21 years now; and, during that time, I've spent 18 of those years in churches that use that new hymnal and we've never sung Hymn 401. I was looking at it this past week as I was preparing this message, and it seems to speak right to this. I've never sung that hymn in church, and I wonder why. It's one of the few hymns in the hymnal where the author of the hymn was still alive when the hymnal was made. There are a few of those. I wondered why I'd never had the chance to sing it. I looked at the words closely, and there is a lot of stuff in there that's not really all that cheery. I'm going to share with you Hymn 401 as the outline for this message, Verses 1, 3, and 6 all start with these words, "Forgive us Lord." I'm not really a soloist, but I'll give you a little sample of this. Verse 1, "Forgive us, Lord, for shallow thankfulness, for dull content with warmth and sheltered care, for songs of praise for worldly wealthiness, when of your richer graces we're unaware." Forgive us, Lord.

We're only about three weeks away from Thanksgiving, and how's the tradition work for your family Thanksgivings? Where I go, someone always gets up and offers a prayer before Thanksgiving dinner and you can just about predict what the prayer is going to be about. It's going to be about all the wealth of blessings, all the earthly blessings that God has given us. Sometimes we even mention the turkey by name and the potatoes and the pumpkin pie, but it's all about the things that God has just showered on us. And you get to the point where you can just about predict how it's all going to work and it has just become sort of, okay, well, that's part of the tradition and you don't even think much about it. You know what it's all about. Each one of these "Forgive us" verses in the hymn is followed by a plea, a plea for God to step into our lives and to lead us to a deeper thankfulness, not just a shallow thankfulness, a plea that God would give us "God eyes" that see His greater purposes for us and for this creation of His, a plea that He would give us eyes that would see His vision for the world. Verse 2 goes like this: "Teach us to thank you, Lord, for love and grace, for life and vision, for a purpose clear, for Christ your Son, and for each human face."

You see, there's a woman. She keeps a parakeet in a cage, and she changes the paper in the bottom of the cage, and she changes the water in the cage and she likes the little bird. She feeds it everyday, and I ask you is that what God's relationship with us is like? Are we just God's parakeet in His cage, and He just feeds us because He sort of likes to have us around? Does He just feed us to keep us alive? And my answer to that question is no. No, it's more than that. We're more than that in relationship to our God. His love, you see, is a committed love. It's a sacrificial love, a love that it goes so far for us that He'd even give up His own Son for us. We're more than just little singers down here in a cage. We're more than just little voices that have been taught to say certain things and we repeat them mindlessly without knowing what they mean. You see, God created us in His image. We talk with God. He invites us to talk with Him, not just to Him. Our prayers are not just to Him. Our prayers and our study and our worship are conversations with God. We visit with Him. Sometimes we struggle with Him. We try to argue Him out of things. Sometimes we question Him. We say, "Why, God? Why are you doing this? Help me understand it because I don't have a clue." We try to communicate two-way with Him so we can find out what His purpose is and so we can work toward the fulfilling of His purpose. We share our hopes with God. Parakeets don't do that. We share our dreams with God, and we share our fears with God. We even safely lay bare our souls before God when we confess our weaknesses and the black and rotten parts of our lives. We have a real relationship with God.

The third verse goes like this, "Forgive us, Lord, for selfish thanks and praise, for words that speak at variants with deeds. Forgive our thanks for walking pleasant ways unmindful of a brother's broken needs." When we offer our prayers and our conversations up to God, so many times it seems like they're just all I focused. "God, thanks for giving me this." I'm glad He's given me the bounty I was talking about earlier. That was all true. I'm glad about that. "And, God, by the way, I'd like you to also give me this and give me this and, when I look over and see some of the things my neighbor is doing, I'd really like to even have the same kind of thing my neighbor has in some areas." It seems like so much of that is focused on me, as if I'm just the center of the world, as if I'm the only thing that matters, as if the only thing worth praying about is my own good. And if there are other families around me who don't seem to be just rolling in the bounty the way I am or for whom everything doesn't seem to be just going as smooth as it is going with me, then I sort of want to conveniently forget about them and just sort of keep them out of my mind so that I don't get too uncomfortable with all that.

Here's the plea that follows that verse: "Teach us, oh Lord, true thankfulness divine that gives as Christ gave, never counting cost, that knows no barrier of yours and mine, assured that only what's withheld is lost."

Do you ever read that column in the Des Moines Register, "It's an Iowa Moment?" It's a collection of letters that people write into the paper. And, in the letters, they talk about how they had some kind of problem and an Iowan came into their lives and stepped up and helped them. Sometimes, the Iowan stepped up and just gave them money, helped them out with money. And sometimes an unknown character came along and interrupted what they were doing and gave them their time and their abilities to help them get back on the road and on about what they were doing again, going out of their way to help someone who needed help. Did you ever think that's what Christ's whole life was? It was a collection of Iowa moments. After all, He went out of His way to help. He left His heavenly home to come down here. I wouldn't have had to be on His path. He put everything that He had out to help. Everything He had to give, He put it out to help. And He did it for strangers. For strangers, people He'd never met face to face before. And we won't see Him face to face in the same way we see each other face to face until that day that we're finally with the saints in heaven. Then we'll get to see Him face to face. We have Christ touch us personally every week in our worship, but we don't get to see Him face to face. Even in sins, Jesus didn't make the separation between your sins and His lack of any kind of sins. He took that barrier between yours and mine, and He threw it away. He broke it down so that all of our sins just flow right on across, and they become His sins. He assumes them into His own body for us, and then He pays the price for them for us and, our sins, they aren't ours anymore. They're just gone. They aren't ours anymore. He washed all our sins away, and now they're like the last soap suds that went down the shower drain. You never see those things again anymore, do you? I wonder where those go. I wonder where they go.

And what did Jesus expect for that? We talked about what He got. He said the foxes have the holes and birds of the air have their nests, but for the Son of Man, there's not even a place to lay His head. I ask you don't we want to be Christ-like? Don't we want our lives to become a collection of Iowa moments like His life was where we can take the opportunity to step up and help somebody else with their property needs or with the needs they have to support and defend their body instead of wanting to get their things away from them?

Verse 5 goes like this: "Forgive us, Lord, for feast that knows not fast, for joy in things that meanwhile starve the soul, for walls and wars that hide your mercy's vast and blur our vision on the kingdom goal." It's so easy to assume that all things will just come to me. We've come to expect that. Things just come to us. The material things, I was looking in a catalog last night thinking I want to ride my bike when it gets a little colder out yet, and I'd like to get some toe booties to keep my feet warm when it's like 35 degrees out. I think that's probably just going to flow to me. I've got a little money in my checking account. I can just order them. And if I want something a little bigger, like I don't have enough bays in my garage to hold all my big toys, well then I just start saving, right? And in a couple of years, I could build on. Or if I really care that much, I could go out and borrow it and add it on right away. Things just seem to flow in. And for most of us, that's the way it works here in prosperous Des Moines, Iowa. It just works that way. And for something really big, like retirement, get started now and keep going and work yourself out a multi-year plan and when the day comes that you finally put down your work, you may not be able to buy a diamond necklace then, but you probably aren't going to starve to death. God just provides us bounty beyond our expectations and they just flow into us and we trust that if we just keep plugging away, everything is going to come to us.

But sometimes we forget that there's a cost. Do we think that we're going to reach the end of this road and never face any kind of cost? I'm certain some of you have already paid costs, costs that you'd never imagine you could even have ever been able to face, but God saw you through them. Remember, Christ had to drag His cross through the streets of Jerusalem and it was so heavy on Him that He fell under it. And He invited us to pick up our cross and follow Him.

The extra things I want to make available for my family, sometimes I work so hard for those that I forget what I'm working for. And what my family needs most is to see the love of Christ in me and see it applied into their lives. I don't need most to see me working my life away to give them all kinds of things that, in the end, don't make any difference to whether or not they spend eternity in heaven with Christ, but I forget that sometimes. I think if I just save up a little bit more, when I retire I'd be able to travel out and see my grandkids a little more often, right? Or I'll just put the retirement off and I won't even get to see them very much until they get older. Golly, how do you weigh all of that? There's a cost. And besides that, I have to remember that my family is just not made up of people who have the same last name I do. My family is bigger than just those people who share half my chromosomes with me. My family is Christ's family. Who did Christ die to bring into His family for? Who'd He do that for? Did He not do that to save the world from their sins? Did He not give Himself up because God wanted everyone to be saved to have life eternal? Did Christ not call all of us together to worship God the Father in His name? Did He not call all of us together to do that? Who is my family?

Here's the final plea. Open our eyes to see your love's intent to know with minds and hearts its depth and height. Let thankful days and loving labors spent reflect the truly Christ-like life and light. Yeah, Lord, let us see your family as our family and let us see all this wealth of possessions that you give us often without us even asking for them, let us see them as tools to put to your service. And give us some kind of judgment when we look at the next thing that we don't even have yet and say how will that serve? How will that serve you, Lord, and how will that serve others in this dying, tragic world?

Now here's my final question: Does that mean that I can't have a good crop come in, enough so that it's a barn buster? Does it mean that I can't enjoy the prosperity that God rains down on me, that I can't plan for my future? Well, no it doesn't. But it means that I have to keep my focus right. I have to keep focused with Christ's eyes as I look at the world with all this wealth and all this abundance that He's given me so that my focus is His focus, not just my own focus. And if I do that, then God's peace which passes all our understanding, if you do that, His peace will keep your hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus. It will keep you in peace to the end. Amen.

Copyright 2003 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church