This evening, we're going to be looking again at the Book of Proverbs as we continue on through the Book of Proverbs. Only three more chapters left in the Book of Proverbs. And I think we've been in it for three years or so now, so it takes a while to get through. But I hope it's been profitable. It's certainly been profitable for me to go back and be reminded of Solomon's wisdom, to see how much instruction there is for God's people in these verses. Many a time, I have been preparing the sermon and found myself absolutely convicted by what Solomon is saying. So his words strike to the heart very often and expose my own sin and cause me to seek the face of God looking for forgiveness. So Proverbs 28 and verses 19 through 24 and together let's seek the face of God and let's ask for his help in understanding his word before we hear it read. Please join me. Sovereign Lord we do thank you for the wisdom that you gave to your servant Solomon. We thank you that he had that initial wisdom to ask you for insight, for wisdom to govern your people, and you gave it to him. And then he left behind a precious legacy of your word for us to instruct us. In Solomon, though, we have a cautionary tale. He was a man with great wisdom who chose not to listen to that wisdom. He chose not to do what he knew was right, and instead so often followed His own desires, and we can all fall prey to that. So I pray, Lord, that You would help us to hear this Word, and that You would bring it home to us, that our hearts would resonate with it, and that our desire would be to serve You as well as we possibly can. And we pray this in Jesus' holy name. Amen. Proverbs chapter 28, verses 19 through 24, and I remind you this is the Word of God to His people in every age, every place. He who tills his land will have plenty of bread. that he who follows frivolity will have poverty enough. A faithful man will abound with blessings, but he who hastens to be rich will not go unpunished. To show partiality is not good, because for a piece of bread a man will transgress. A man with an evil eye hastens after riches and does not consider that poverty will come upon him. He who rebukes a man will find more favor afterward than he who flatters with the tongue. Whoever robs his father or his mother and says, it is no transgression, the same is companion to a destroyer. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Throughout the Proverbs, obviously one of the great contrasts that we've seen up until now is the contrast between honest labor and laziness. The sluggard is constantly being warned in the book of Proverbs. And we're being told that we should be laboring diligently in whatever calling we have. The fruits of honest labor are not just contrasted with being lazy. The fruits of honest labor are also contrasted with the idolatrous pursuit of riches by the covetous. We are not simply called upon to labor and to amass as much money as we possibly can to work however we can following whatever morals or dictums that we think fit for that particular time. We are told to labor faithfully, to labor faithfully in our calling as unto the Lord, and not to do anything on our calling that would go against the law of God, even if it might, in the short term, lead to financial difficulty, but rather to stand firm for the Lord, to be faithful, to be diligent and to be willing to sacrifice for the sake of our faith is something that every Christian worker is called to. We start off then with this reminder that he who tills his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows frivolity will have poverty enough. One of the things that I'm often reminded of is how many times in my life I've heard of people spoken of in terms of their potential. Oh, this person has so much potential. He has got great potential. What gifts he has, what abilities the Lord has graced him with. But all of those gifts and that potential and so on, it is useless and worthless if it's not put into effect. A man may have great potential and then never do a thing with it. If a man has the potential to be the fellow who finally finds the cure for cancer, but instead spends the rest of his life playing Xbox games on his parents' couch and eating Cheetos, he is not going to achieve anything. No one I need to stress this, will find the cure for anything except momentary boredom, perhaps, playing Xbox on the couch in your parents' room. So, potential has to be realized. All the potential in the world, unless it is, will get you nowhere. And here we have the idea of land. Now, land is a useful thing. Land in an agricultural society, at the time Solomon was writing, it was worth its weight in gold because with land you could do what? You could grow? Food. You could provide food. And if you grew more than you needed, you could sell that and make money and support your family. But unless that land was tilled and then plowed, the rocks being removed, and then the seed planted, it would bear no crop. You could have the most magnificent land in all of Israel. And yet, if you didn't actually get the ox out, hitch it up, do the difficult work of tilling the soil, And then the other diligent work, these days all of our planting is done by machines. It's all automated, so is the sowing and the reaping. But farmers at that point, they had to put seed in a bag and then walk up and down the rows, sowing that seed. And then when it came to be harvest time, they had to go out and reap the grain themselves, bundling it into shears. It was hard work. It required diligence. It required the willingness to labor by the sweat of your brow to bring forth from the ground the blessings of God. Now, this is not the first time we've seen this proverb, incidentally. It was given before in chapter 12, verse 11. And this is one of the things that we see in proverbs. I trust you've all seen this, the fact that if it's an important idea, God doesn't just tell it to us once. He tells it to us again and again and again by repetition we remember because we are by nature are forgetful people, especially when something goes against our nature. Your mom often had to tell you things again and again and again before you began to do them. For instance, I was, I don't know, you might say religiously opposed to brushing my teeth. My mother had to get to the point where she would go in and after I'd said, oh yeah, I brush my teeth, we would do first the smell test. I got around that by taking a dab of toothpaste, placing it on my tongue. She began to figure this out. If he was really brushing his teeth, they wouldn't be quite that orange, greeny, yellow color that they are. So what did she do? She began to feel the toothbrush, all right? I then began to wet the toothbrush and then put the dab of toothpaste on my tongue. But then one day as I was doing this, I was like, you know, it'd be really easier just to brush my teeth. you know, than going through the subterfuge and then wondering if I'm going to get caught. So it was her diligence that finally made it possible for me to have several teeth remaining at this point in time, even though I had labored with my British background to destroy them. It was that constant repetition and not growing weary and doing well that paid off. The Lord does the same with you. Have you ever noticed that he sends you the same reminders again and again and again, hoping that they will strike home? and that you will change your behavior. He does that in his word, reminding us of the things that we need because the blessings that come along from labor do not come by miracle. They come rather through diligence. Yes, God could miraculously bring forth wheat from a barren field, absolutely, but that would encourage on our part sloth. and indolence. He put us into this world to work. Work, remember, is pre-fall. It's a good thing. It encourages good things. When we don't labor, we run into trouble. It is very true. It's a secular proverb, but it's still true. The devil finds work for idle hands to do. That's always been the case. We were created for work, and being lazy does us no good. So, if we are diligent and we till, there may be times when the harvest doesn't spring up or where we have bad weather and it's destroyed and things like that, but in the ordinary course of providence, God will give us a crop. and we will be blessed in that. However, if we give ourselves over to frivolity, a wonderful old-fashioned word, if we are frivolous and our lives are empty and filled with partying and leisure and so on, we will have poverty enough. It doesn't matter how much money you start with, generally, if you give your life over to a life of leisure, then you are not responsible. You will run through it very, very quickly. The prodigal, for instance, did exactly that. He was given a large inheritance, surely enough that an ordinary person, by investing wisely and shepherding his resources, could actually buy. It was the money that his father had accumulated by a lifetime of his own work. But what did he do? He went out and he wasted it. on wine, women, and song. You've always got friends with money in your pocket and a willingness to spend it stupidly. And that's exactly what happened. But when he ran out of money, he ran out of wine, women, friends, and song and found himself in a pigsty. At that point, he had poverty enough, perishing from hunger. This is a lesson that is repeated again and again and again. Do not be filled with vain, empty, and ridiculous frivolity. Instead, be a man who is, while not super serious to the point where you are, you know, like C.S. Lewis' character Puddle Glum, always, you know, erring on the side of disaster or, you know, an Eeyore in life. That's not the way that Christians are supposed to be, but At the same time, we should be industrious. We should be useful. We should be at work and working to the glory of God. Now, work is good, labor is good, but we can labor to a bad end. Verse 20 and 22 remind us of that. If you'll take a look at those verses. 20, a faithful man will abound with blessings, but he who hastens to be rich will not go unpunished. And then verse 22, a man with an evil eye hastens after riches and does not consider that poverty will come upon him. We should be laboring in order to provide for our needs, in order to provide for the needs of our loved ones. We are to support our families in addition to ourselves. But we are not called upon to labor with an eye at becoming rich, and certainly not becoming rich quickly. The book of Proverbs has again and again told us of the folly of pursuing get-rich-quick schemes. There were get-rich-quick schemes even in ancient Israel. And the vast majority of the men who followed them, who invested in these, I've got this great deal. If you just give me this amount of money, I will give you four times that at the end of the year. There were people who did that kind of thing, and then the person who encouraged you to invest absconds with the money. So, the man who is seeking to become rich quickly often becomes poor even quicker. And the man who is evilly after wealth is contrasted with the man who is honest in his labor. The man who is honest in his labor and who is faithful, he is the man who abounds in blessing. This is a man who may be rich, the good man may be rich, and yet what is more important to him are the riches in heaven that he is accumulating through his faith. He is above all faithful, and this man is contrasted with the man who hastens to be rich at the expense of faithfulness. He's willing to do anything in order to achieve his objective, which is to accumulate money. He walks in a crooked path. He walks in any crooked path if he thinks it'll end in financial gain. He, as one commentator put it, leaps over every bound of principle. And because he is hastening to be rich, he cannot wait for God in the path of Christian diligence. He seeks to speed up God's providence. He wants something, he will do anything to get it. In 1 Timothy 6, 9, Paul warned Timothy about these men who were hastening to be rich at any cost. He said, but those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition for the love of money." Note this, not money itself. Money is something that we have, we use. It's an inanimate object. It's like any tool. It can be used for good or it can be used for evil. It's not the money that's the problem, it's the heart that's the problem. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. Now, the faithful man, by contrast, he makes no loud profession of his goodness and his diligence and so on. He labors, but he has his eye not on the money, but on the Lord. He labors in his profession because he wants to honor God, to do what he has been called to do to the best of his ability. And he would rather be, as Charles Bridges put it, poor by providence than rich by sin. That's a man who is faithful. He wants to serve that man. Bridges asks, who shall find him? But when you have found him, mark his abounding blessing, blessings covering his head, blessings for both worlds. Is there not infinitely more promise in the ways of God than in the ways of sin? Be the path ever so tried and perplexed, only let it be a straight path, and the Lord's sunshine will cheer it. It's better to be somebody who labors and goes through difficulty and suffers discouragements and setbacks and so on, walking on the right path, the straight path in the Lord's sunshine, than the man who travels down the broad path that leads to destruction and earns his wealth that way. And the crooked man, we are reminded by Solomon, often impoverishes himself. The crooked man is sometimes destroyed by his own greed. Leo Tolstoy, who was the master of the Russian morality tale, everybody remembers him for, well, what is the great novel that everybody remembers him for? Let's see, War and Peace, there you go. This monumental volume talking about the Russian-Napoleonic wars and so on. But he wrote a number of short stories, and many of them were morality tales. One of those morality tales was a short story by the name of Master and Man. And Master and Man concerns really two men. There's Vasily Andreevich and his servant Nikita. Nikita and Vasili, Vasili's the master. Nikita is his poor, impoverished man. Vasili is a man who has accumulated great wealth, but at any cost. Nikita serves him. It's not due well because Vasili is tight-fisted. He didn't even pay him directly. He gave him goods that he might survive, so he was like one of those miners. whose soul was in hock to the company store. So he served this man and was, in essence, a little more than a slave to him. Well, Vasily Andreevich heard about a forest that was coming up for sale with prime lumber. It was going to be auctioned, but if he He could get there first and offer the owner a large amount of money. He could get the forest without having to bid for it. He could get there ahead of all of the other potential buyers. But it seemed impossible because it was the middle of winter and the weather was particularly bad at that time. He didn't care, though. What he cared about was the money. So he calls out Nikita, his faithful servant, and he loads up his sledge and they drive off pulled by horses. The weather gets bad. They stop at a local inn for dinner, and they eat. And the company's pleasant Tolstoy emphasizes the simple happiness of the peasants at this inn, the fellowship that they have, the contentment they have with what they have. And he contrasts it throughout the story with the greed of Vasily. He's never happy because he's never content. He never gets to the point where he's able to say, it is enough. And he's always wondering. He's got to have more goods. He has to achieve the next thing. He's always plotting and planning. And so he is, while Nikita is able to fit in immediately with the peasants and enjoy himself, Vassili is uncomfortable and wants to be on his way. It's, we just need to eat and get out of here as quickly as we can, getting back on the road. The peasants warn him. They say, there's a terrible blizzard coming. You should stay here for the night. But he thinks, if I don't get there by morning, someone else might. So I have to go. I must get this forest. I must. I must. So they go out, and the blizzard starts. And of course, they quickly, they become whited out. They're not able to see very far. Russian winters are fierce, and the storm gets worse. They lose the path, and then disaster. They hit a snowdrift. The sledge overturns. The two of them cannot put it right. They're disoriented. At this point, they're chilled and despairing, even though Vassili is wearing too heavy. And this is an interesting other point. He's wearing a lot of heavy clothes, but he doesn't give any to Nikita, his poor servant, who has very little winter clothing. Nikita quickly understands that all is lost, and he basically settles down to go to sleep, to die. But Vassili, no, he's not going to do that. He's not going to lie idly. He's not going to wait for death. Vassili is sitting there, and Tolstoy says the thing that's keeping him going is, quote, all he has to live for, his great wealth, the things that are most important to him, his land, his profits. He looks down at Nikita, and he says, this man has nothing to live for. And in that moment, he judges his life to be worth infinitely more simply based on the possessions that he has. So he takes the horse and he rides off, leaving Nikita to die in the snow, saying, literally, it's all the same to him whether he lives or dies. What is his life worth? He won't crutch his life, but I have something to live for. And then, ironically, he says, thank God. his wealth. So he leaves his servant in the snowdrift and goes off. His terrible greed has placed not only him but his servant in a terrible situation of danger. And then when push came to shove, what does he do? He leaves his servant to die in the snow while he seeks to save his life. because he must continue his quest to accumulate things, to accumulate wealth. That's what he's living for. What is he doing but serving an idol that is destroying him? And yet so many people do that. They commit their lives to that idolatry of serving wealth and pleasure and frivolity and things that are here today and gone tomorrow. If you want to know how much that wealth will ultimately be worth to you, Well, look to the example of Tutankhamun. They packed his tomb with the riches of an empire, amazing and splendid things. Not one piece of that gold that was in his tomb did him any good after he died. We have a warning in verse 21, then, that to put money over scruples will lead to bad, bad things. A man who puts money over scruples will care nothing for justice. He'll care nothing for equity. To show partiality is not good, because for a piece of bread, a man will transgress. Like Vasili, who didn't care that it was his greed that had doomed his servant, that man will do whatever is necessary to advance his estate. And so if you put him or her in a position of responsibility, that person will take bribes. That person will use their position to pervert justice if it gives them financial reward. And that was not just a complaint in our own time, but it's something that permeated ancient Israel. often with disastrous results. We remember in 1 Samuel 8.1, Samuel made his sons judges over Israel, but what do we read? The name of his firstborn, this is 1 Samuel 8.2, the name of his firstborn was Joel, and the name of his second, Abijah, and they were judges in Beersheba, but his sons did not walk in his ways. They turned aside after dishonest gain, took bribes, and perverted justice. Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah and said to him, Look, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations. So their greed ended up changing the very government of Israel, their greed. Greed also will mark a man. After a while, only the most vicious partisans will continue to support somebody who is obviously using their office or their station in order to accumulate money. And that was the case with Samuel's sons. All Israel knew they took bribes. All Israel knew that they were men of low and base morals. What a thing. Is that how we want to be spoken of or thought of? Would you want to be recorded in Scripture as the kids who took bribes and didn't follow their father's godly example? Is that who you would want to be when you grow up? And yet so many people who would say, no, no, that's not who I want to be remembered, they live that way. They see money, they see an opportunity to use their office or their station or their position in an organization in order to get ill-gotten gain. And the money just is too attractive. And so they destroy their reputation, and not just for time, but often they destroy their reputation within the church. Sometimes the pursuit of money leads them to destroy their very soul. In pursuing an idol, it'll do them no good. Well, he goes on, that is Solomon, to remind us that he who rebukes a man will find more favor afterward than he who flatters with the tongue, verse 23. Another mark of a wise man, a mark of a faithful man, is not only that he is somebody who is not living for idols, living for money, he's also a man who prefers a wise rebuke to empty flattery. And that's an uncommon thing, because in every age, many people have preferred the flatterer to the person who reproves them. One commentator said, few people have the wisdom to like reproofs that would do them good, better than praises that do them hurt. And yet a candid man, notwithstanding the momentary struggle of wounded pride, will afterwards appreciate the purity of motives and the value of discovery. That's wisdom. When somebody tells us something we don't like, but we need to hear, that's wisdom. But far too often, adults act like children in this respect. They act like children who, after they have really hurt themselves, do not want what they need. When a child, let me ask you kids, when a child, a young child, not like you, of course, not mature children like you, when they hurt themselves, where's the last place they want to go? the hospital or the doctor's office, right? They begin to say, no, no, no, don't take me there. And why? It's the very place they need to go. But they don't want to go because they fear The pain they think is going to be inflicted. So they'll scream, they'll cry, they'll struggle, they'll do anything to avoid being treated. Often they will be angry and hateful when receiving treatment because it hurts. They lash out often at the very person who is trying to make them better. You know, I can remember at least one occasion where I kicked and screamed and scratched like a banshee. You know, looking back on it, I feel terrible for the doctor who was trying to save my finger from being amputated after I'd crushed it in a chair. Ultimately, he did that, but at what a cost to himself, you know? It was essentially like operating on a bobcat, I'm sure. Sometimes a child would rather die than endure the pain of treatment. What's necessary to make them better? And honestly, adults, we can be like that when it comes to reproof, when we're headed down a pathway that leads to either the destruction of ourselves temporally, that is, in time, in life, or eternally. We don't want to hear anything that might hurt. So the people who tell us the truth about our actions and our faults, we lash out at them. We're angry with them. We say hateful things to them. We say that if this person loved me, they would tell me things that are false about myself. That makes no sense and yet we do it. And we say to ourselves, it's far better to have flatterers surrounding me as I go merrily with frivolity on the way to hell, instead of to be surrounded by wise reprovers on my way to heaven. That's not the case, brothers and sisters. So when it comes to reproof, have that eternal perspective. When somebody tells you something that hurts nine times out of ten, the reason is the sting of the truth in it. It's the truth that hurts us. Somebody tells me, hey, Andy, you're too slim. You really need to eat a little more. I'm not going to be, you know, it's not going to, you know, call me skinny. I'm not going to get offended. begin implying that I'm fat and that I could, you know, use a little more exercise. Hey, you watched that. It's getting too close to the truth. Jesus, though, showed us what we should be doing. First off, Jesus did not want flatterers. Have you noticed that in his word? He is not the kind of man who encouraged flatterers, groupies, fanboys to come assemble around him. Remember what happened when Nicodemus came to visit him? Who was Nicodemus? He was a Pharisee and he was a member of the Sanhedrin, a ruler among the Jews is how John puts it. A man of great importance within Jewish society. So he comes to him by night, okay, he doesn't want to be seen with Jesus in daylight, so he slips in, he sees him at night, and Jesus doesn't say to himself, oh wow! Finally, I'm making an impact with a ruling class of my people. This is my opportunity. All I gotta do is butter this guy up a little, and he'll go along with me. So I'll say good things to him, he'll say good things to me, you know, I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine, we'll get along fine. No, he doesn't do that at all. Nicodemus starts out with the traditional compliment line, doesn't he? He starts out, Rabbi, we know that you're a teacher come from God. No one can do the signs that you do unless God is with him. He's puffing him up as much as he can, still implying that he's a mortal man, however. Jesus is not having anything and changes the entire track. Did you know, Nicodemus, that unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God? Wait, what are you talking about? He doesn't flatter and he doesn't receive flattery. Instead, he turns to the issue of Nicodemus' soul and what Nicodemus actually needs, which is to be born again. You're a ruler of the Jews and you don't know these things? That's the opposite of flattery. That's a reproof. You don't know what the Old Testament taught about salvation. It's the faith of Abraham, his being born again, regeneration, the gift of the Holy Spirit. Don't you realize these things? He told him what he needed to know, not what he necessarily wanted to hear. And you can read in the text. Go read John 3 and notice how irritated Nicodemus becomes. He's being sarcastic. How can a man enter into his mother's womb again when he's old? I mean, this is ridiculous. But Jesus continues on. He doesn't flatter Nicodemus and he doesn't receive flattery from him. He certainly didn't flatter his disciples, did he? When Peter is zealous to make sure that Jesus understands that he will never be seized by the Gentiles and put to death after he says, that's what we're going to Jerusalem to do. Not so, Lord. Never will this happen to you. Does he say, oh, Peter, you're such a good guy. I know you love me so much. And you just, you're looking out for my soul. What a guy. You know, give him a little punch on the shoulder. But you know, no. What does he do? What does he call him at that point? Satan. Get thee behind me, Satan. Wow. Call a friend the devil and see how, I mean, and do it seriously, not you devil, but rather, you're the devil, you know that, and see how they react. You are an offense to me, for you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men. But it was the truth. It was the truth. Peter's standard of values was wrong. And it wouldn't change dramatically until after the resurrection. And if I can, let me say, beware of this in particular when it comes to us and our relations. We seldom consider how much more comfortable we are flattering people, especially the people we love and the people we desire to love us, more importantly, instead of offering a needful reproof. And I'm not just talking about how we answer questions like, do these pants make me look fat and so on. I mean, when it's a real character issue, a flaw that needs to be addressed, something that's creating a problem, something that is holding that person back in terms of sanctification. What person wants to deal with the hurt and the anger and the bitterness that comes from telling somebody you live with about a character flaw? to honestly go to them and say, this is really impeding not only your walk with Christ, but my walk with Christ, and the walk with Christ that your children or other people might have. And too often what we do, we unintentionally end up fostering bad habits instead of rebuking them, and we end up not encouraging the good ones. But true love, if we actually really love this person, it demands that we do go to them and tell them the truth in love. And if that person has a lick of wisdom, they will prefer the wise rebuke to the empty flattery, honestly. Finally, we read this in verse 24, whoever robs his father or his mother and says it is no transgression, the same is companion to a destroyer. Now, when we think, generally speaking, brothers and sisters, of the person who puts money over doing what is right, who we think of as corrupt and money-grubbing and idolatrous and so on, we are usually tempted to think first of adults and then to think of high officials, the megachurch pastor, the big evil in most of our movies today, the corporate boss, the corrupt judge, that kind of thing. Those are the evil guys who are after money or the mob boss, you know, the obvious criminal and so on. And as I said, our movies, our pop culture encourage us to think that way. We never think, though, of children as thieves. We never think of them as robbing their parents. But whoever robs his father or his mother, the word says, and says, it is no transgression. I didn't do anything wrong. That same is the companion to a destroyer. Oh, you know, I wouldn't go into my mom's handbag and open up her wallet and take her money out and put it in my pocket. Oh, but I'll gladly drain her bank account with all sorts of unnecessary things. I'll give you an example, though, of how a child can rob their parents, willfully rob their parents, and think that they're doing nothing wrong. I'll give you an example of a young man. He went to a university in another country. His parents were far away. They didn't know what he was up to, and they didn't know how much university cost. He was the first child in his family to go to university, and they hadn't been to university. So what did he do? He inflated the cost of everything by quite a good degree. The amount of books that this man said he needed would have filled a small library and then some. But what was he doing? He was taking the money and then he was using it to buy drugs and alcohol. Wine, women, and song. It cost his parents throughout his university career far, far more than they ever would have paid. And then because of the lifestyle he was living, you know what he did? He failed to graduate. And so he cost a huge waste of money. Eventually, he did get his degree, but it was only after several retries because he had wasted so much of his life, so much of his time, so many of the opportunities, and so much of his parents' wealth that they were working to provide for him. Wastefully, he robbed them. They were sacrificing. That's an extreme example, obviously. But there is that everyday theft that kids call no transgression at all. I take, and I take, and I take, and I add nothing to the household. I live in this people box with a magical, magical food dispenser. It's like the replicator on the Starship Enterprise. I just go over and say, cheeseburger, and boom, it pops out, you know? There's this cabinet. It's got two doors. I open it. I take out food, and then it's magically replaced. I can eat as much as I want. All right, here's the secret. The parents are restocking the magic box and they don't go to the supermarket and say, please give us money. We have four starving children. No, they go to work and then they earn money and then they buy things and they bring them home and they put them in the magic box and then to them it's magic as well. Wait a minute. I bought a gallon of milk yesterday. It's gone. Elves? Gremlins? Fairies? Oh yeah, I had four glasses of milk. You had what? In one day you had four glasses? I mean big tumblers of milk? Nobody needs that much dairy. Are you a cow? What is this? But kids do it without even thinking about it or how much it costs. That's just the refrigerator. One could talk about the lights that are left on because the electricity is free, that kind of thing. Everything is used as though it is magically replenished and no thought is given for the sacrifices and the hard work that the parents have to do in order to replace these things. That's not Christian. It's not Christian at all. The Bible here says that such an individual, one who takes and takes and takes without being grateful, without repaying, without seeking to sacrifice in return for the good of others, that such a person is no different from an open destroyer. And there, you should think of a bandit or a thief who would destroy the livelihood of somebody by taking everything they own and not thinking a thing of it. But, oh, the excuses people are prone to make when they're doing that kind of thing. Oh, my parents can afford it. Or secretly, they think to themselves, I deserve it. Or this is actually one of the favorites. Considering how much my friends are getting, this is nothing. Nothing at all. And it's not even thought about. It's theft without even consideration. It's like the way that many people in big business steal from the corporation. They're so large, they'll never miss it. And they think about their parents that way. They have inexhaustible resources. Oh, if they only knew how exhaustible our resources actually are. Now, let me finish with one application, and it's this. I told you only, believe it or not, the beginning of how Master and Man goes with Vasili and Nikita. I told you that Vasili, deciding that his life was worth far more than this pathetic peasant who had nothing, he rides off. The horse, though, apparently has more of a conscience than Vasili. The horse rides in a circle. and brings him back to the sledge, and there he sees Nikita lying, already beginning to be covered by a layer of snow, obviously freezing to death. And Vassili is suddenly seized at that moment by pity. And there's this radical, it's the kind of thing that you see in Dickens and Tolstoy, it seldom happens in real life. All of his priorities are reordered in a moment. And he determines that he has to do what he can. He realizes, OK, if I continue to ride around, both of us are going to freeze to death. But I can save this man's life. So what he does is he lays on Nikita and shields him from the snow, giving him his clothes and then laying on him. And so in the morning, after the villagers go out to find them, they find the sledge buried in the snow, and they find the two of these guys buried in the snow, and they find Vasili spread cruciform on top of Nikita. Obviously, it's a reference to Christ and his giving of his life for our sake. And Nikita is alive. Vasili is dead. Vasili gives his life to save Nikita. It's a wonderful story, but without regeneration, it just doesn't happen. Brothers and sisters, if your life is given over to greed and idolatry and so on, you may say, oh, I'm going to change this, I'll change that. You never will. If you're a thief, you'll remain a thief unless the Word of God works within you, changing your priorities radically, changing the things you love. If you're given over to frivolity, emptiness, and vanity, you'll continue to be given over to emptiness and frivolity and vanity unless the Holy Spirit changes your desire. But that can happen. People who go to university and waste thousands and thousands of dollars of their parents' money, thinking little of it, can afterwards be affected by the Holy Spirit and brought to understand and acknowledge what they did, and then to repent of it, and to try to live a different life entirely. A life where they're still attempting to be diligent, but not living to accumulate money, rather living to help other people, actually doing what Vasili should have done from the very beginning and helping his servant Nikita, living for the sake of others and service to Christ. Remember the forgiveness and grace that's always available even to the worst of prodigals. We see that, of course, in the tale of the prodigal son. If you live a life given over to wastefulness, given over to theft, or given over to greed, the amazing thing is people may not forgive you, but God always will. He will welcome you back if you will but go to Him on bended knee and confess your sin and call upon Him to save you through the blood of His Son, Jesus Christ. He will. All the prodigal needs to do, all the thief needs to do is go to Christ, confess his sins, and then put his faith and his trust and his love in him. It doesn't matter what your sins are or how deep they are. His love is deeper still. His grace is greater than all your sin, even all of our sin. It can be submerged in the grace of God and leave nothing. But if you will not return, if you will not turn, then I tell you, all of the idols that you serve, all of the things that you think are most important will, in the end, only speed you on your way to destruction. Thinking you will become rich, you will actually impoverish yourself. It's interesting that as Jesus is addressing the churches in the beginning of Revelation, Revelation 1 through 3, He reserves, of course, His sharpest rebuke for the Laodiceans, the richest of all the churches. They thought that they were rich. They thought that they had all they needed. They'd given themselves over to pursuing worldly ambitions and making friends with the world. But he told them how they really were. You know what you are? You're poor, you're blind, you're naked. You have no treasure that lasts. And anybody who is seeking to build up the world's goods is in a similar state. Don't be like that. Don't be like the fool who goes about trying to grab hold of vapor. mist, sand that's passing away very quickly. Instead, hold on to the things that last forever. Take hold of eternal life and pursue it with all the diligence you can muster. Let's go before the Lord now and ask for His help. God our Father, we are thankful, Lord, that You are the one who tells us the truth. You give us those reproofs we need to hear. You convict us when we need to be convicted. So often our hearts would go after flattery and compromise and all of the things that will do us no good. So often we would give ourselves over to accumulating wealth or power or pleasure or whatever it is that animates us apart from you. But you come and you show us that they do us no eternal good. So I pray, Lord, that you would remind us of that when we're tempted to give in. And I pray, O Lord, that we would be people who are diligent, at least as diligent, Lord, about the condition of our souls as we are the condition of our bank accounts. May it be that we care far more, Lord, than for the things that last forever. Let us not be lazy, but let us also not be given over to greed. O Lord, we pray these things in Jesus' holy name. Amen.