Please remain standing as we turn to two passages. Our text is only one verse, and that we'll read in a moment. But first, let's turn to 1 Timothy 6, verses 3 to 23. The Bible has a lot to say about money, and this is just one of them. So 1 Timothy 6, this is toward the end of Paul's letter. And as we begin at verse 3, we hear God's word again. If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain. But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. But as for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. I charge you in the presence of God. who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession to keep the commandment unstained and free from reproach until the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will display at the proper time. He who is the blessed and only sovereign, the King of kings and the Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see, to him be honor and eternal dominion. As for the rich, in this present age charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future so that they may take hold of that which is truly life. O Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. Avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge, and for by professing it, some have swerved from the faith. Grace be with you. And then remaining standing as we turn to this one verse in Ephesians chapter four, verse 28, as we continue to consider the new life in Christ, 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. Thus far, the reading of God's word. May he bless it to our hearts. Please be seated. You'll find an outline in your bulletin on the reverse side of the worship page as we look at the theme of pleasing God with money. And shall we pray again? Father, thank you for your word. It is powerful. It is a sharp, two-edged sword. It cuts us deep where we live and what we're thinking about, what we care about. Lord, may we care about you. May we listen to your word. May we love our Lord Jesus in sincerity as we please you with all that we are and have in Jesus name. Amen. My wife and I have been watching some documentaries on Netflix about different countries in the world and this particular Man visits many countries which are oppressed or with great difficulty or are hard to get into. He visited places like Libya and Colombia in South America. He visited Mexico and other places where we think there is violence, there is corruption, there are drugs and all kinds of crimes controlling the economies. And indeed, it seems to be true. You visit a place like Mexico and the Mexicans themselves will say that the whole country is based on corruption. It's all based on buying and selling favors from people in high places. It's based on the drug trade with themselves and the United States and even amongst themselves. It's amazing that so many millions of people can somehow still manage to survive and many of them barely. Do so. And so it is simple and easy for us to say, well, you know, because they are running after money, it must be money that is the problem. You look at a passage like we just read in first Timothy, and we often misquote it. And we say to ourselves, well, money is the root of all evil. Have you ever heard it said that way? Money is the root of all evil. Well, it doesn't actually say that it says the love of money. Now that's the problem. The love of money. is the root of all kinds of evil, not every single one, but many, of course. And so we have to understand that it is something which God's Word speaks of clearly and repetitively. It doesn't just say, well, money is, as we sometimes call it, filthy lucre. Whoever touches it is corrupted by the money. But it isn't that. It is the hearts of people, of all of us, who are running after riches. And that's what Paul warns Timothy about. Those of you who desire to get rich, and all of us, you might say, are already rich in many ways, especially compared to the world's peoples as a whole. But even so, that seems to be what takes up so much of our time and energy, thinking about the economy, thinking about how we're going to manage in difficult economic times. And economists find this subject notoriously difficult. and complex. The question is, does God care about it? Or is it just something out there in the world that everybody worries about, and that's the end of that? Some people say, well, the solution is just to keep trying to grasp everything we can possibly get and to keep it, because other people might take it away. Or other people might say, well, let's just deny our possessions and live as monks. I can remember a pastor friend of mine in the PCA visited Uganda a number of years ago. And, of course, many of us are aware of the problems of poverty in Uganda and the corruption that is there also. And he says that he rather foolishly imagined before he visited Uganda that because the people were so poor, they would be less selfish and there would be less to fight over. And he came back and he said that was anything but the truth. They fought over anything and everything. And, of course, it sounds obvious when you think about it. They would fight over little sticks and little pieces of stuff that they had because they were scrabbling after keeping things for themselves and from other people. It doesn't matter whether you have a lot or a little. We all have this problem in our hearts of greed and selfishness about everything that we have. And we all need the good news of Jesus Christ and the attitude of grace is given to us in the Bible here in Ephesians. Chapter four, it's a deceptively simple solution. If you would just say these things and live these things, and if others could learn them only by the grace of God, then we find that God promises blessing. It says, let the thief no longer steal. So, point one, stop stealing. Point two, but rather let him labor. Start working. Doing honest work with his own hands. so that he may have something to share with anyone in need and then to be able to give to those in genuine need. And this is the new life in Christ with practical implications to which we can all relate. The new life in Christ enables us actually to please God with money. If you don't think that's possible, simply go over this verse with me today. We are talking about the new life in Christ. and how peace in the body of Christ has to do with selflessly serving one another. How we need this command, as we saw last time, about truthfulness, and then about anger, and then about stealing, we really have kind of an example of the various of the Ten Commandments, the commandments of God, summarized in this passage. Now the old life does not disqualify us for salvation. that it says, if you've been a thief, and we'll see in a moment that all of us have been, but those who have been stealing should stop stealing. It's a new life. It's a new beginning. This is something we need to put behind us in the power of God in Christ. And then the new life does come by releasing us from that bondage to our possessions and then not stealing but laboring with honest work that we may have something to give. Now, stop stealing. Paul tells Timothy in 1 Timothy to please those who are your masters, which I think we could say by analogy are employers, to please them and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive. It ought to be a hallmark of Christians that we actually are honest. Surprise! This surprises the world. If a Christian can, by the grace of God, actually be honest and stop stealing. Now, just for you children, you know what stealing is. Fundamentally, we think of taking something that is not yours. Usually we think of the big things like robbing a bank or breaking into a house or mugging someone on the street. These things, of course, are so common everywhere in every society. But there are more subtle examples, examples that really hit every one of us in one way or another. And the first one is, well, the Bible calls it, it's kind of an odd word, but it's pilfering. Now, if you look at Titus chapter 2, you'll see an example of this in verses 9 and 10. It says bond servants are to be submissive to their own masters, well-pleasing, not argumentative, not pilfering, not pilfering. but showing all good faith. Now, what is it to pilfer? It comes from a Greek word that means to embezzle or take something secretly, to put it aside for yourself without anyone knowing it. All businesses, unfortunately, are forced to take this for granted. I forget the word for it. There's a certain word that if you're in your budget as a businessman, you put down profits and losses and employees stealing stuff. or other people stealing stuff, it's kind of a part of their business. It's not good, but it exists universally. And normally a person who's working for a company will say, especially if it's a big company, but even if not, look, my employer makes plenty of money. What difference does it make if I take something home from work, some office supplies or whatever it might be, They can afford it, we reason. Well, I suppose we could ask our employer if he could afford it and if he wants to give it to us. That's one thing. But simply to take it, that's called pilfering. And the Bible says it's wrong. It happens so often everywhere. We almost take it for granted. You children could certainly desire to sneak something. That's the idea of pilfering. You sneak into the kitchen and you grab a cookie from the cookie jar without telling your parents and they said, don't have your cookie. after a certain time or whatever it might be. And it's something that is not yours. It's something that you shouldn't have. And even at the littlest age, children try to see what they can get away with, what they can take. And nobody will notice that it is gone. And that too is stealing. OK, you didn't rub a bank, you think to yourself. And you kind of put a grade in your mind of how serious this kind of stealing is. But the Bible just says it so very, very simply, don't Steal. That's one example, pilfering. Secondly, false weights. We read from Proverbs chapter 10, but let me read to you from Proverbs chapter 20. The Lord detests differing weights and dishonest scales do not please him. That's another famous little trick. There are so many tricks and scams. You find them when people call you and tell you that you owe a lot of money to the IRS. And they tell you to go down to CVS Pharmacy and to get a card. And I know people that have fallen for this. And they send money off because they think they're in trouble with the IRS. Or they tell them their computer has been infected with a virus. And it's not. Or if it is, they just put the virus there. And then they kind of require a lot of money from you in order to take something that is not yours, something that is different than what it is supposed to really be. It's a sneaky lie. The Lord detests differing weights. Now that's, of course, common. Let us say in the Middle East, you go over there and you're going to buy something by weight. And you take a scale, you know, the old-fashioned justice scale, two pans, one on each side. And you, on the one side, you put a little weight. It might be, let's say, I don't know, let's say half a pound on the one side. You want to buy half a pound of apples or something. You put them on the other side. And then it balances out and you pay for the half a pound of apples. What if the weight is a different weight? It's less. And so he says, look, you got a half a pound, but you didn't. You got less than what you paid for. This is what is behind much corruption today. So those of you in the Air Force, I believe the Air Force has had problems with counterfeit aircraft parts, with paying for something that is not real. that is less quality than that for which you paid. It's a racket. It happens all the time in food sales. You notice that sometimes people will put on some products no cholesterol, which comes from animal products, no animal products in it, but it's filled with all kinds of other fat that you might not want to eat. And they say, well, it's no cholesterol anyway. Well, it's deceptive. False advertising. Promising more than you can deliver. The creation of false value. When I was growing up, It was really cool to have a polo shirt with an, well, not polo, but you know what I mean, an Uber, a pullover shirt that says little alligator on it. And that was great because that was an expensive shirt. And therefore you would want to be seen with an expensive shirt, perish the thought you'd be found with a shirt that is not expensive. And that's the idea of artificially creating value of something due to kind of a snobbery. We want to be able to carry home our possessions in bags with the names of fancy department stores on the side. There are counterfeit purses of Gucci and different kinds of shoes and all kinds of possessions that people label as being expensive just so people will buy them. All these kinds of cheats are examples of false weights and deceptiveness in business practices. And I can remember a little boy, a son of one of my friends, said that he spotted his dad looking at shoes in the display cabinet along the store in the mall and immediately started saying, they're tricking you, daddy, because his dad had told him if he starts thinking he has to have something, it could be because somebody is trying to trick you into thinking that this is something you absolutely must have. Now, sometimes we must have some things, but other times we really don't need the things we think that we need. And other people will take advantage of your desire, your greed, your desire for something you don't actually need. How many times has this happened? You see an advertisement on the TV or you hear one on the radio or you see it in a magazine and suddenly you think, I didn't know I needed that. I'm going to go out and get that right now. And that's the whole idea of things that we have in our consumer society I grant you it's kind of a first world problem. We have extra money. We have extra possessions. We have things that we really don't need in our society so often. Well, there's another example from the Bible. Thirdly, laziness. Now, this is basically not pulling your own weight. Not working when one is able is actually stealing. We read a little while ago from Proverbs chapter 10, a slack hand causes poverty. but the hand of the diligent makes rich. Now this is a proverb, as all proverbs are, they speak in generalities. In general, the whole picture is supposed to be, you're supposed to work. You're supposed to actually do something useful with your hands or with your mind or whatever it is, and that in turn is something that has value in itself. And then that value comes to you as something for which you have worked. And it is generally true, though not always, because of sin and corruption, that as you work, you get what you receive from that labor, and you are supported from that labor. It's a simple thing. And yet, again, looking at all these documentaries that I've looked at recently, it is so uncommon. And in fact, it is a problem that we all have. We do not want to work so often. Some people are perhaps workaholics. But even they would have a time when they say, you know what? I've paid my dues. Have you ever said that to yourself? I've paid my dues. I really don't need to do this any longer. We do live in a leisure society. And I suppose for many, we envy the rich and famous who just jet set around the world and do whatever they want. One commentator says it this way, recreation is meant to be a condiment to our calling, not in itself an occupation. Now, that's very interesting. Nothing wrong with recreation. Nothing wrong with travel in its place. Sometimes you need a break. Sometimes it's nice to get away. But that's not all there is to life. Fundamentally, we are to work. And when we don't feel like doing that, it can be an expression of laziness. Now, we're not talking about people who can't work. We'll talk about that in a moment. Someone with a disability. someone who is elderly, someone who is sick, whoever might have other responsibilities that prevent them from working at a given time. But I'm talking about those who are able bodies, we sometimes say, who are given the gift of being able to work and do not do so. And so the Bible here says very, very clearly, let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor. We live also in a welfare society where people say, look, so many other people have been given things that I do not have. I want them to give those things to me. It's known as the world owes me a living concept. We shift blame. We have a grudge against our employer. We work less than we ought to work. And yet, the Bible says that we owe God our lives and our fellow men our labor. Otherwise, what will happen? Someone else is going to have to support you. Someone else will have to pay for your food. or for whatever it might be. So we find that ordinarily, someone who can work should work. In fact, the Bible says if you don't work, you shouldn't eat. It's that simple. It's very, very basic. In a society that reflects Christian values, which is very hard to find these days, but ought to be true in the church, only necessity, absolute and true need, would lead to freely giving of that which we have to others. And there is such a thing, as we'll see, in a moment. So look at all the different possibilities of things which indicate that all of us are by nature thieves even though we don't want to admit it. Here's one last one. And this comes from Malachi chapter 6. The Bible says you know what. All of us have a desire to get something for nothing. And then of course if we receive something from God which is actually his entire grace we simply sometimes don't seem to care at all about it. The book of Malachi says that this is the pattern that happened in Israel, that people were stealing from God. And that sounds so silly. What do you mean, stealing from God? God already has everything. He doesn't really need anything. We have everything we need, according to the scriptures, especially as believers. How can you possibly steal from God? Well, this is called a sin of omission. We don't do something that we ought to do. And what we ought to be doing is bringing what the Bible calls the whole tithe into the storehouse. How are you robbing God? How have we robbed you, you would say. It says in Malachi chapter 3 verse 8. But you have robbed in your tithes and contributions. You're cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you. Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house, and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you. and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need." Now, a tithe is extraordinarily gracious. For one thing, it is proportionate. I can remember one time I would give the children a lesson in Sunday school class, and I would say, all right, I'm going to give you 10 pennies here in a minute, all right? I suppose these days I've got to give out quarters. 10 pennies is not a whole lot. But suppose it's only 10 pennies. Now, you're 10 pennies richer than what you used to be. I want you to give me back one of those pennies." And even then, a child might kind of hesitate. You know, I just had ten pennies, now I have to have nine? Wait a minute, I thought you gave me these. Exactly, I gave them to you. No problem with giving me one back? That's one in ten. That's what we mean by a tithe. The youngest child can tithe of his or her allowance. The richest person should tithe of whatever he has And it's only a tenth, no matter how you count it. It's proportional giving of what God has given to you to remind yourself that God gave it to you to begin with. Just as I gave those 10 pennies to the child, God gave us all we have. We give one back and we shouldn't suddenly hold on to it as if it was all ours to begin with. And that's where the tithe comes from. It's meant to be a continuous reminder of the fact that everything belongs to God. It is really an act of spiritual service. So, bringing the full tithe into the storehouse. If we don't, the Bible actually says he will withhold blessing. And if you bring the tithe, then he gives blessing, not always in the same coin, but in the reality of our entire health, spiritually speaking. Well, are you a thief? I hope we all realize that's true. If you don't know it yet, Although I've given you several examples, I want you to hear with me the larger catechism which always convicts us because it is exhaustive and exhausting to read. All right, I'm going to read it anyway. One of the sins forbidden in the Eighth Commandment, which is thou shall not steal. I'm going to not read the whole thing because we're lacking a little bit of time. The neglect of the duties required are certainly forbidden, but theft, yeah, we got that. Robbery, got it, check. Man-stealing, that's stealing people to sell them as slaves. Receiving anything that is stolen. Fraudulent dealing, false weights and measures. Removing landmarks, that means stealing property by saying, oh, the landmark is really here. Oppression, extortion, usury, that's charging unreasonable interest on a loan. Bribery. vexatious lawsuits, just bringing a lawsuit against, I don't know, I can remember McDonald's was sued for millions of dollars for hot coffee, stuff like that, you know. I mean, little things that we decide to take advantage of. Engrossing commodities to enhance the price, that's hoarding, keeping stuff and then causing the market to go up because of it. Oh, inordinately prizing and affecting worldly goods, in other words, loving our stuff too much. Distractful and distracting cares in studies and keeping and getting and using our possessions. Envying at the prosperity of others, idleness, prodigality, that's just wasting whatever we have. Wasteful gaming, that's gambling. All the things whereby we do unduly prejudice our own outward estate and defrauding ourselves of due use and comfort of that estate which God has given us. Are you a thief? It's a matter of the heart. It's always been that way. We have everything from God and we hold on to what we have. far too tightly. Well, begin working. That was the way it was meant to be from the beginning of creation. Don't imagine that being in the Garden of Eden was meant to be an endless vacation even before the fall. Adam and Eve were not supposed to be just lounging around enjoying God's good gifts. Before the fall, remember, they were told to tend and keep the garden. They were supposed to be active. God gave Adam and Eve arms and legs and minds and hands and everything in order to be able to work in the garden. And it even says that God gave them a pattern. God himself works. He uses his power, infinite power, to create all things. And he did so in six days. In the whole area of creation and providence, God is always active, amazingly enough. And then we were supposed to work for six days. Remember that? That's one of the commandments, six days shall you labor. and do all your work. Therefore, in the image of God, we being made in the image of God, and I know sometimes you don't believe this, but work is actually a good thing. Yes, it is. God says so. It's something for which we were made. God could have given everything to us on a silver platter, as he could have done with Adam and Eve. But he ordained us that we should have a reward for our labor, even in the garden, even when manna fell from heaven. In the desert, they had to go out and pick it up. at least six days of the week. They had to go pick it up, but they did get a day of rest to teach them the principle of rest and labor. Now, after the fall, when sin enters the world, now things are a mess, indeed. With respect to our labor, it's harder than ever. In fact, it's no longer just labor. We call it toil. And Adam was given that curse, really, that it would be with sweat and tears and blood, as we get that saying from that we have to labor and bring things forth from the ground. Every single job you've ever had or ever will have in this life is going to be frustrating at times. And you all know that. I hope you're resting well from your labor right now because this helps us to know where our salvation comes from. It helps us to know that God is good and gives us reward from our labor, but it also humbles us as it frustrates us, keeping us from lust or shaming us if we think this is what life is all about. It is not about possessions. We should not worship money, and we should not simply sit around and do nothing. I say again, it's a simple, simple thing. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work. Now, as a believer, redeeming our time and our hands and our labors is part of what Christ came to do. We are to labor, and the emphasis here in this is with your own hands, doing honest work with your own hands. And the emphasis in the Greek is on the word own. With the hands that God has given you, you're to do something with your hands. I mean, again, it doesn't have to be necessarily manual labor, though that certainly counts. We labor with what we've been given. Our first obligation is to support ourselves and our households. And then we labor and do that. which is good, doing honest work, as the ESV emphasizes here. Remember, money is not evil. Work is not evil. It's the love of money. It's the worship of our labors that's wrong. Work with your hands, as we instructed you to do, says Paul in 1 Thessalonians 4. 2 Thessalonians 3 says, laboring and toiling, working quietly, and earning your own living. That's the normal way it should be. You should be able to work for your own living and labor well. Jesus told the tax collectors and the rich and the soldiers to labor well, do what they could do and be honest and don't steal and that sort of thing. Christian businessmen don't fear making money. If you make some money, that's a blessing from God, but it must be in balance with the next point as I'm going to share it with you in a minute. And if you don't have as much as others, don't be jealous because others have more than you because The plagues of riches are indeed that you worry about everything all the time, and you are a slave to your possessions. You can't think about anything else but continuing to pile up riches, as Paul warns us about in Timothy. So work hard in every lawful and worthy job. We had a wonderful conference yesterday. It's too bad not more people were there, though we had a pretty good turnout, to hear about diaconal ministry. Deacons deal, as we were reminded, not with things but with people, but with people in their needs. various kinds of needs. And as people come to the deacons, they have to evaluate, is this a real need? If it is, and people have been not able to provide for themselves sufficiently in a given situation, then the deacons have to evaluate how best to help them. But the first thing you find out is, are you working? Are you laboring? And are you not just wasting your money and living beyond your means. And if you have a job, it can be any job, I can remember being a groundskeeper. And I'll tell you, I was actually quite satisfied with that job because I could see the results of my labor every single day. It looked better. You could see it happening. At the end of a long day, I would be mowing a block or two of apartment buildings, and it looked really good. And it was a very rewarding kind of a job. I was a janitor in seminary. And somebody mentioned yesterday how they clean toilets for a living, so to speak. And as one of the deacons pointed out, that's a holy calling if you want to believe it. Yes, it is. Even that is something that God has given you the ability to do. And sometimes I think back to my life of cleaning toilets and I think to myself, it's easier to clean toilets than to clean up sin. It really is. And to deal with sin problems, they're so stubborn. And we've all got them. And that's what we ought to be cleaning up. But meanwhile, cleaning up what's dirty, hey, it's a basic necessity of life. And if you're doing that or anything else as part of your life, then that is honoring to God if it's done in faith and in faithfulness. Now, you might think that you still don't have enough. Well, you need to examine your life. You need to work. You need to save. You need to even, and this is the surprising one, you even need to begin giving. This is entirely counterintuitive. Remember the story of the ten pennies? If I keep ten pennies, I'll have ten pennies. If I give one back, I'll have nine pennies. Simple math. Ten minus one is nine. But that's not the mathematics of grace. God pours out blessing from heaven to us because otherwise we would have zero pennies. We would have nothing. And that's true in our spiritual lives too. We would have Nothing. We would be under God's wrath and curse. God is able to make all grace abound to you, it says in 2 Corinthians 9.8, so that in all things, at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. Oh, wait a minute. The reason why we have is so that we can supply our own needs, true, but that we might even have enough to give generously to the needs of others. I've given philosophies of life. personal names. This is the economic philosophy of life. Anybody ever hear of Jesse James? He was an old-fashioned bank robber in the Old West. And he figured the way to get money is to ride around and rob stagecoaches and take the gold that was being shipped over to Fort Knox or whatever it might be. And so that was a philosophy of life. The Jesse James philosophy of life is stealing and keeping. And, of course, that is criminal. That is what we're talking about in the most fundamental way, not to steal, but rather to work. Now there's the Robin Hood philosophy of life. You heard of Robin Hood. Sometimes he's pictured as kind of a noble figure. This is the guy who takes from the rich and gives to the poor. And this was supposedly, I don't know, again, I don't know if he's a real figure or not, but he supposedly lived over in England in Sherwood Forest and he was under the oppression of the king, I guess, and other people were too, I suppose. But then he went out and simply took things from the rich, and then he gave them to the poor, and that's his philosophy of life. Steal and give. So we've got criminality. We've got socialism. Uh-oh, what about the next one? Work and keep. This is the Scrooge mentality of life. And unfortunately, we all have this problem. We think the more I have, the more I keep, the better it will be. But you remember old Scrooge in the Christmas story, remember? Here's tiny Tim, a little boy, lame from birth, in need. And Scrooge, boy, he had a pile of gold. He took things and he kept them and he didn't give anything to those in genuine need, as Dickens portrays the story. And that's work and keep. We might even want to label this as the capitalist philosophy of life. Now I'm trying to be fair and tough on everybody because we all have our Achilles heel. We all have our philosophy of life that is not complete. Sometimes we do say to ourselves, all right, I will work and supply my own need but not give to others because who knows when I might need something in the future. Now, that's a tough thing because we do live in perilous economic times, don't we? We wonder if we're ever going to be able to retire, if that's part of our vision for the future or whatever it might be. And we might know and we might think that economic times could get hard again and then what are we going to do? This is essentially worry, right? We worry, don't we? We fret. And this, of course, is the problem of the love of money, which is the root of all kinds of evil. What is the Christian philosophy of life? Not Jesse James, stealing and keeping. Not Robin Hood, stealing and giving. Not Scrooge, working and keeping. But the Christian philosophy says work and give. That is not only the Christian philosophy of life, it's how God saved us. He didn't owe us anything but death. the wages of sin. What he owed us was death, punishment. And what does he give us? Life. How? Through Jesus Christ, who, though he was rich for our sake, became poor. And we, through his poverty, became rich. This is the reality of the Christian life, not just in America, where we have lots of physical possessions and we are all, you could argue, very wealthy compared to the rest of the world, but we really ought to recognize that everything we have, being a gift from God, is actually a gift from God through Jesus Christ, his redemption. The word redemption is economic. It means paying for something that we owe. And he did that. He redeemed us from the curse of the law, paying a horrible price, more than we could possibly imagine. Unselfish work and giving ought to distinguish the Christian from the world. As God and Christ has given to us, so also in wisdom we are to give to others. Now that's in the light of true necessity, as we finish our last point, true necessity. God does not give all men equal blessings. There are people with all kinds of needs. There were various kinds of needs in the early church. Some of them were due to persecution. even as we have around the world today, that persecution broke out first in Jerusalem. And so Paul had to go around and ask for donations to those poor people in Jerusalem who were suffering that kind of persecution. That was a genuine Christian-based sacrifice that these people were making, and these are clearly among the truly needy. If anyone has material possessions and he sees his brother in need, How does the love of God dwell in him if you don't help a brother in genuine need? Wurmbrand, who was tortured for Christ years ago, was imprisoned with a bunch of other Christians for their faith. And some people were very weak and could barely eat. And the other Christian prisoners would gather their bread and tithe their bread. That is, they would take each of them a tenth of their bread to give to those who are in special need. That was an example of giving to someone in desperate need by tithing, by taking part of that which you have and giving it for the needs of others. Now the motive is where we find our true Christian height of glory in giving, the work of Christ. Christ has all power given to him because of his labor of life and atoning death Christ has now shared with us an infinite blessing, a new life with it. You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. That famous verse begins, on how he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor. You know the grace, that is the sheer gift of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by faith in him, the renewing, the power, the resurrection, you can actually, believe it or not, please God with your money. You say, but I'm poor. Doesn't matter. The widow gave her might. You're still giving only one out of ten. Yes, you can give more, but one out of ten. And this demonstrates gratitude to God. You might say, well, I earned it. I worked hard for this. I deserve it. Well, God gave it all to you, including your skills and your ability in the place where we live. You say, I won't have enough. I'm afraid I'm not going to have enough. The Bible says stinginess leads to poverty. It's not the way out. Malachi chapter three. So work hard. Yes. Help others help others with that which you have been given yourself. And then there may come a time when you may need help from others. And then one hand helps the other hand. One person is helped by another in genuine need particularly in the church. And that will be a demonstration of the grace and blessing of God in this life and in the next. Shall we pray. Thank you, Lord, for this beautiful picture of grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and how you do love us to be cheerful in our giving for the same reason. The grace of believers is a reflection of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. We pray that you will help us, therefore, to be generous, to be filled with faith, to not be driven by worry or fear or greed or selfishness, but to turn to you, the good and perfect giver of every good and perfect gift. In Jesus' name, amen.