Finders, keepers, losers, weepers. Remember that saying when you were a kid? Now, it may have been meant to encourage you to not lose things. That's one way in which it was used. But if you're like me, it also justified keeping some valuable object that you found, like a $5 bill or your little brother's Willie Mays baseball card that he foolishly left lying around. Too bad for the person who lost it. As you grow up, finders keepers becomes grocery products that the checkout person neglected to ring up, or an over-refund that the IRS mistakenly sent, or perhaps that new drill that the carpenter left at the house. Remember this one? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. Really? Unlike most heavyweight boxing champions, Floyd Patterson was a quiet, sensitive man. He wasn't the kind who bragged and was in your face. That's not the kind of person or boxer that he was. He was a champ. When he died five and a half years ago, his obituary in the New York Times quoted him as saying, You can hit me, and I won't think much of it, but you can say something to me and hurt me very much. The last two weeks in the presidential primary race, we've witnessed the power of what appear to be false words to produce hurt. False words and the ethic of finders, keepers, and as can have something in common. A character in the crime novel Witness to Myself observes, a liar and a thief are the same thing. They steal something from you. No doubt you've been the victim of both, of lying and of stealing, and a perpetrator of both. We all have. Today, our sermon series, God's Perfect Ten, from Exodus 20, brings us to God's commandments against both those things. You shall not steal and you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. As we've seen in earlier weeks, God's perfect ten define how we're to live to fulfill our calling as God's redeemed people. It's not how we get to be God's redeemed people. His first four commands in Exodus 20 concern loving Him. You shall have no other gods before me. Number two, you shall not make for yourselves a curved image or any likeness, and that's for the sake of worship. Number three, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. And number four, remember the Sabbath to keep it holy, holy to the Lord. The last six commands concern loving others, but there certainly is an overlap between loving God and loving others in these. They protect the well-being of others in family and in the community. Now, the last two Sundays we examined three of those. Honor your father and your mother, commandment number five. That upholds God's designated authority in the family. And then number six, you shall not murder. Number seven, you shall not commit adultery. Both of those hold up life together. Life itself and life together. Now God's two commands in Exodus 20 verses 15 and 16, that's our key passage for today, those commands against stealing and false speech uphold our stewardship under Him together. You may not have thought of those commands in that way, but in its biblical context, they uphold our stewardship under God together. They protect our God-given right to property, and truthful dealings with one another. As I said last Sunday, these are things that the grace of God in Christ enables us to do. Without it, we're hopelessly lost. But the grace of God changes us and teaches us to do these things. 2 Peter 1.3 tells us that His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us to His own glory and excellence." And then Titus 2.12, the passage I quoted last week, that tells us that His saving grace trains us, teaches us, shapes and molds us to say no to sin and yes to godliness, which means, among other things, saying no to theft and yes to generous stewardship. Remember, for every negative stated, command there is a positive other side to it. In Exodus 20, 15 it commands you shall not steal. The Hebrew word translated steal here refers to theft done in secret as opposed to robbery by force. Now robbery by force is wrong, but this command has first and foremost in its mind theft that is done in secret. It's taking another person's property without their knowledge or permission. It's taking something that doesn't belong to you. So stealing violates our shared stewardship under God. Let me explain. In Genesis 1, verses 26-28, it says that God made mankind, male and female, in His image, and He blessed them with the mission to fulfill and to develop the earth and to exercise dominion over all its inhabitants, all the creatures. Psalm 115-16 says, The heavens are the Lord's, but the earth He has given to the children of man. He has given it to us to be his steward on his behalf, to care for it, take care of it as he does. God ultimately owns everything and only he has the right to give or to take it away. He's blessed us in our stewardship of his earth together with the right of property. God's command, you shall not steal, requires that we respect each other's property, which means that He's given us that right to own personal property in the stewardship that He's given to us. He's entrusted it to us. He's granted us ownership in order to carry out our caretaking of what's ultimately His. So stealing undermines God's gift of stewardship. And it also injures the victim. Now some of you may have had your homes broken into, things stolen, or maybe it's a car that was broken into. When somebody breaks into your home and steals, how do you feel? You feel violated, don't you? We've had that, don't we? You feel violated. And that's because you have been violated. It's not just a loss of stuff. Theft attacks your dignity as God's image-bearer and God's steward. It plunders your work and the fruit of your labor. It damages your well-being in some way. And so God commands against ripping each other off, ripping off your brother or exploiting the weak. The Bible identifies a wide range of theft, and this is not an exhaustive list, but it includes secretly removing boundary markers, property lines, using false measures and balances. The idea of honesty and commerce. Selling products of inferior quality. One of the illustrations the Bible gives is selling chaff for wheat, especially to the poor because you can take advantage of them. Or charging interest when loaning to the poor. Loaning to the poor among the Israelites was a way of helping them in their need. And so they want to charge interest for it. They could do some business transactions with outsiders, but in helping their fellow poor people, those that are in a point of need, they weren't to charge for that and make a profit off of that. Or holding back on paying workers their earned wages. Or a contractor you've hired to do some work and holding back on paying him. stealing a person and selling them. You know, that earned the death penalty for both the one who stole the person and the one who bought the person to be a slave. And that really undermines the whole issue of slavery that we had in our own American history. That knocks the knees right out of that, even though people tried to get around it. The current popular practice enabled by our government regulations of walking away from your mortgage payment or your college loan, even though you can pay it, that also is a form of theft in modern government. Not only against the lenders, but also against everybody else who has to pick up the tab. That's theft when you have the ability to pay. God calls us, as his people, to a far different way of life. One that will testify to him and his integrity, and him as the one who owns it all, testifies to him before all peoples around us. You see, stealing violates God's good gift of stewardship over the earth. God's command, on the other hand, guards each of our stewardships under God together. It promotes honest labor as the means of gaining things that we need and gaining the things of what He wants us to use for His purposes. So pursue honest stewardship to gain the things you need. God knows we need things. We need things to live. We need things to serve Him. Pursue honest stewardship to gain those things. We need always to keep the Lord in mind as we do this. Deuteronomy 18 says, You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you the power to get wealth. Ultimately, that goes to God. So we're to always remember Him as we use our things for His purposes in this life. Deuteronomy 25 and verses 15 and 16 says, A full and fair weight you shall have. Keep God in mind on these things. a full and fair weight you shall have, a full and fair measure you shall have, that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving." He's given that stuff to you to begin with. Deal honestly with it. Don't steal. Don't deprive someone else of what is rightfully theirs and the way you conduct your business. For all who do such things, it goes on to say, all who act dishonestly are an abomination to the Lord your God. Proverbs 11.1 says, on the other hand, a false valence is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight. When you work with integrity, when you do business with integrity, when you're honest in your contracts and how you fulfill those, You bring God to light. He delights in those things. Because He's the God who honors His promises. He's the God who honors His dealings with people. He's the God who oversees those things. And that God calls us to exercise a stewardship of goods and properties and business, which is an honest stewardship of what He's entrusted to us. Honest stewardship recognizes that we share God's stewardship together with others. So we're concerned to work and do business and use what God's given us in a way that protects and fosters the well-being of their stewardship as well. Deuteronomy 22 is a fascinating passage in this regard. It lays out what one writer calls the economics of the straying ox. You won't find that in the economics books, but this is the economics of the straying ox. Listen to this. You shall not see your brother's ox or a sheep going astray and ignore them. Keep that word ignore in mind. You shall not take them back to your brother. And if he doesn't live near you, and you don't know who he is, you shall bring it home to your house, and it shall stay with you until your brother seeks it. Then you shall restore it to him. You shall do the same with his donkey or his garment, or with any lost thing of your brother's which he loses, and you find you may not ignore it. You shall not see your brother's donkey or ox fallen down by the way, and ignore them. You shall help him to lift it up. Last week we saw, or two weeks ago, yeah, last week is the passage with regard to your enemy. Same thing was said. Here's to your neighbor. Doesn't matter who it is. This isn't finders keepers, losers weepers, nor is it hiding from your brother's economic peril, which, if you're losing your action, you have to be in those days. It means we pay attention to those things. It's exercising our own stewardship of time and resources to restore our neighbors when he needs help, when his resources are in jeopardy. Don't ignore. Restore. That's the word. That's the ethics, the economics of the straying ox. Practice generous stewardship in what you gain. Generous stewardship in what you gain. Work to be a giver, not a taker. As we've seen, the command, you shall not steal, has to do with more than just refraining from stealing someone else's stuff. Just before the Lord tells his people not to steal in Leviticus 19.11, he tells them how to work the land he's given to them. Listen to this in verses 9 and 10. When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to the edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. Why? You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner. I am the Lord. He's the God of the poor. They've been made in His image. He's the God of the immigrant, the sojourner. They're made in His image. Generosity is a key part of the stewardship that God has blessed us with. He calls us to devote ourselves to generous stewardship of what He gives us through our work. In Ephesians 4, verse 28, the Apostle Paul says, Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. What a great way of stating the commandment, Thou shalt not steal. Let the thief no longer steal. But rather let him labor doing honest work with his own hands. Why? So that he may have something to share with anyone who is in need. That's the transformation that Christ brings. He changes the thief from laboring to steal to laboring to give. From being a taker to being a giver. And with it, he creates all kinds of possibilities of sharing for the good of others. And we've got a living proof of this within our own congregation. We may have more than one. But some of you may not know that Don Frey, Don, don't be embarrassed by this. He's not something he tries to hide. But he's led an interesting life in his earlier years. That included armed robbery and time spent in the state penitentiary in California. But God changed him. And you know what you find him doing now? He spends hours and hours working on rehabbing, using his skills and ability on helping to rehab the City of Life building room for the sanctuary for the Christian Neighbors Church. That's exactly what that Ephesians 4 passage is talking about. Let the thief steal no more. Doing honest work with his hands that he might be able to provide for someone in need. In this case, he's helping to build, in a literal sense, a church that's involved in transforming people's lives. From a robber to a giver. That's what God does. That's what Christ does. 1 Corinthians 6, 9-11. We can all put ourselves in this situation someplace in this verse. Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. Such you were at one point then. Such I was at one point, rather. We all were one of those categories or any number of others that the Bible puts in. Such were some of you, but you were washed. You were sanctified. You were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. Right then, amen. Christ has redeemed us from our way of sin to be a different people fitted for stewardship with him and his kingdom. Stealing doesn't stand alone either. God follows this command, thou shalt not steal. with the command against lying. As we've already seen, actually, these two kind of overlap. So Leviticus 19.11, a verse I referred to a little bit ago, it links them together. You shall not steal. You shall not deal falsely. You shall not lie to one another. The commands uphold our God-given stewardship of his world together and the little place that God has put us in. And so he calls us to say no to lying and yes to loving truthfulness. And by that I mean loving truthfulness and loving truthfulness when it's given. Exodus 20 verse 16 says, You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. The language here suggests a legal trial in which false testimony against somebody can bring punishment against them. So the book is 1911. The verse I just read extends this beyond the legal setting. You shall not deal falsely. You shall not lie to one another, and this has in mind personal interactions. The command prohibits a hateful lie, but also any kind of false speaking, including flattery, which you flatter someone because you want to get something out of them. It's false speaking. Especially when you want to gain something at someone else's expense, or to pervert justice. Numbers 23.19 says, God is not a man that he should lie, or the son of man that he should change his mind. Has he said and will he not do it? Or has he spoken and will he not fulfill it? Titus 1-2, and assures us that the God who promised us eternal life in Christ is the God who never lies. That's his character. And so false speech breaks faith against the Lord of Truth. Every lie does that. The Hebrew word false here in our passage in Exodus 20 verse 16, in the phrase false witness, refers to a breach of faith or trust very often. To despise truth is to despise God's very character, which is truth. In whose presence we speak. Lying breaks trust with him. Leviticus 6, 2 and 3 identifies deceiving a neighbor or lying about something to his hurt as committing a breach of faith, not simply against the neighbor, but it says against the Lord. against God. We never do things in isolation here. God's always in the picture. Lying also breaks trust with the community. Any just legal system presumes the necessity of honest and trust at all points. The parallel command against false witness in Deuteronomy 5.20, there's another command which echoes this one, it uses a different word for false there. There, the word for false has the idea of something which is empty or worthless and not just false. It covers any kind of witness that tries to evade or obscure the truth as in that famous slippery testimony under oath. It all depends on what the meaning of the word is. Remember that? Testifying falsely severely threatens the justice of any legal system. Lying and deception undermine the integrity of doing business. And trying to play with the truth kills trust between a husband and wife. Doesn't it, wives, when your husband tries to play with the truth? It kills trust. In short, compromising the truth destroys community life together. Any form of lying is a social, not simply a private evil. It is not some harmless little thing. Exodus 23 verse 1 commands, You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness against a person. What the crowd does, or who the person is. Proverbs 25.18 says, A man who bears false witness against his neighbor is like a war club, or a sword, or a sharp arrow. Just picture on your mind. the arrows coming out, or the club beating someone. It's a deadly weapon. In effect, it's character assassination, another form of killing. It steals a person's reputation when you lie about them, or slander them. It kills it in the public eye. It oppresses its victims. Leviticus 19.16 says, You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand up against the life of your neighbor. I am the Lord. To lie is to stand up against life, not God. The damage may not always be in killing someone's character, but at the very least, it hinders another person from making beneficial decisions because of the false information. It really perturbs me when a doctor will lie to his patient to spare him from knowing the truth. How are you going to deal with the reality unless you've got the truth? It doesn't do them any favors. Every lie affects others in some way and weakens the community bonds of trust. So, Proverbs 6, verses 16-19 lists a lying tongue and a false witness who breathes out lies as two of the seven things the Lord hates as an abomination to him. In fact, Deuteronomy 19-19 prescribes that if a witness gives false testimony, you shall do to him as he is meant to do to his brother, so you shall purge the evil from your midst. If the punishment that the other person would have gotten was a stiff fine, having to reimburse someone double-fold or four-fold, that was what the false witness was then to be punished with. That meant that if death was the punishment, that is what would have been put on the false witness. Now, if that were so today and done today, I wonder if Herman Payne's life would have been a lot easier the last two weeks. Speak honestly and faithfully with others. This is the flip side of not lying. Proverbs 12.22 says, Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who act faithfully, truthfully, honestly, are His delight. The command to lie isn't only concerned with truthfulness and trust in society. It's also focused on caring for the well-being of your neighbor, with protecting him or her from wrongful harm. In other words, the commandment has one eye on the truth, and one eye on the neighbor. Proverbs 14.25 says, A truthful witness saves lives. And Proverbs 24.26 adds, Whoever gives an honest answer kisses the lips. Now that is, honest words treat the person with respect and with affection. The kiss in the ancient world was a sign of respect and a sign of affection. And speaking the truth to the person. It's like a kiss on the lips. Speak the truth in love to grow up and to build up. Ephesians 4, 15 to 16 says, Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way unto him who is the head, into Christ, so that it, the body of Christ, builds itself up in love. Speaking the truth in love. Not in anger, but in love. Not in revenge, but in love, not to score points, but in love. The truth can be misused in all kinds of ways. Love uses the truth rightly. Ephesians 4.25 and 29 says, Therefore, having put away falsehood, Let each of you speak truth, the truth with his neighbor, for we are all members of one another. We're stewards together of God's good creation. We live together. We represent God together. We serve Him together. So don't have your mouth full of falsehoods with one another. Speak the truth with your neighbor, for we are members of one another. Let no corrupt talk come out of your mouth, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. We don't build each other up with lies. Not even those white little lies that we think will do some good. Yesterday, I was going to be raking leaves in my backyard. The woods behind us kind of directed all of its leaves to our backyard, it seems. And you rake it up, and it's back there again. One of my neighbors had pity on me. He's a good steward. He had pity on me. And he's got one of these mowers with a thing behind that picks up all the leaves. And he gave me a call yesterday early afternoon. And I was going to be taking off. I had to run some errands. And I was going to come back and attack those leaves. And it was going to be a ton of work. And I was going to make just a little dent in it, I'm sure. But I was going to attack it. He called me up and said, Roger, would you like me to come down and do those leaves for you? Evidently he saw them and took pity on me. And he had just been doing that in his own yard. And I said, well, yeah, that would be a really great help. And so he did. And I went and did the errands, the things I had to do. And I had to get back by a certain time. And as I got back, he was just leaving. And I thanked him. And then he went back home. And I began getting in the leaves that were in the bushes that he couldn't get at with his machine. And in due time, I'm waking up and getting some cows of my own. And I'm putting them out to the front for the cow to pick up. And Becky comes home from work. And Becky had been dreading, what are we going to do about those leaves? There's a ton of them there. And here I am raking those leaves. And I'm thinking to myself, man, she's going to be really impressed with me. She's going to think I did all this stuff in just a couple of hours. And I'm thinking, she's going to love me for this. Wow, what kind of a dinner could I get out of this tonight? Those thoughts were going through my mind. You know, I didn't do that. But if I had, What would that really have done for the relationship? It would have put me in a good light, but it was a lie. It was false. And ultimately, that doesn't build relationships. That won't build up, either for me or for her. It's only the truth done in love, but it needs to be the truth. Sometimes love, we think, can move us to do things that may not be true. That never helps. that really doesn't build up in the long run. We are to speak the truth, and we are to speak the truth in love. If we're going to speak the truth as a way of life, we need to feed on the truth. 1 Peter 2 says, counsels us, So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. And the next part of this verse, a lot of you are going to be familiar with, but it's important to connect it with the first part. Put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk that you may grow up in salvation. It's as we fix our minds and heart on Him who is true that we value truth. It's as we contemplate Him who has truly spoken to us in His Word that we learn to speak truth. It's as we embrace His truthful dealings with us that we are molded to do the truth with others. God's world to come will have no room for an ethic of finders keepers or of false words. No room for that. 2 Peter 3.13 calls that world to come the home of righteousness. Not the home of anything else but righteousness. Among others, no thieves or swindlers will inherit it. No liars or anyone who does what is false. This place is different. It's different from this world. It's different. No thievery of any kind. No false testimony of any kind. Just what's whole and true and what builds up. In this world, Christ was condemned to death by false witnesses. But that was the very means by which God condemned the sin and saved the sinner. Every sinner who puts their trust and hope in Him. Christ redeemed us from our thievery and from our lying tongues. Not simply so that we can have a place in His new world, but to be stewards of that new world. Stewards together with Christ, the Lord of that world. And he's preparing us for it now, in this world, training us to be different in this world in preparation for the next. To be stewards together of a different kind. Stewards who say no to theft, and yes to generosity. Stewards who say no to lying, and yes to truthfulness. Loving truthfulness. And he intends that the world see and take notice. Let's be that kind of people this week in the grace that God has given us. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have not left us to our own in this regard. but that you have provided us with all that we need for life and for godliness, for being the people that you've called us to be. And I want to thank you that the people you've called us to be is a different people. I'm tired, Father, of a lot of things in this world. Sin, to name one. I'm tired of that, Father, and the different ways it explodes. And I'm tired of it in me. And I pray for myself and for all of us, Father, that this week you might knock a little bit more of that out of us and replace it with generosity and with truthfulness and love and with all the things that your commands talk about. Thank you that that's not the way we get to be your people, but it's the way we're called to be your people and you provide grace for becoming and also being. We thank you in Jesus' name. May your name be blessed.