It may be that life has sort of changed keys for you in the middle of the verse and you're off step and you'd like to have someone pray with you. Maybe you see sharp or you might be flat. But if you're in need tonight of some people to pray with you, I just want to invite you to come and let's form a circle of prayer. You may be coming for yourself or someone else that you would like to represent that you're burdened for. We're going to join hands here and form a circle of intercession.
God knows the needs that are represented. As you sit there you can pray for these who are here. God knows. God understands. No one cares like Jesus. No one loves like Jesus. As we sang in that hymn a few minutes ago, there's not a friend like the lowly Jesus, not one. Make room for one more here right in the center. Thank you. All right, let's pray together.
Father God, we join our hands and our hearts in this circle tonight with thankfulness that there is one who understands, that there is a mediator, a great high priest who knows exactly what we are burdened with as we stand here, knows fully how we feel, knows the concern that we have for someone else.
Lord, we give thanks that you know and that because you know you're able to intercede before the Father perfectly regarding our requests, we lift our petitions to you silently from our hearts and yet you hear them. And even words that we cannot say, you are able to express on our behalf. Thank you so much. We acknowledge that there are times when the answer seems to be so delayed.
There are times when we long to hear an answer from Heaven and it doesn't seem to come, at least when we want it to or think it ought to. But your timing is not always ours. Your ways are not our ways. They're higher, they're better. We know that by faith. And I pray that as we know that by faith, it will bring to our troubled hearts a sense of peace and release.
Father bless these who have come tonight with that sense that you have heard, that you are acting on their behalf, that you love them very much. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. Thank you. I wonder if we could just stand for a moment. Would you do that and reach around, shake hands with people near you? We have some who may be new in our service tonight and we want to express a welcome to everyone. Thank you.
I had a note in the Bolton a couple of weeks ago for folks who were willing to share a testimony about stewardship to drop me a note. I received one from someone and I always try to preserve confidentiality in these for obvious reasons. These are not the kinds of testimonies that people often feel free to share. This individual shares in the letter, I am going to condense it and I hope in doing that will not leave out any important details or get him messed up.
Shared that early in his life, he was a believer, but money became his God. And as a result of that, got into two different businesses in which he lost everything that he had plus more. Eventually got into a profession that he was in for a number of years, 30 some years. And early on in that period of time, he writes about being in an evangelistic meeting in which one of the subjects for one of the nights was tithing. Apparently that was sort of the way they did it back in those days.
And one night was given to tithing. And on that night, this person shares that he made a commitment that he would do that. Went home, he and his wife prayed about it and talked about it. They didn't have the money. I mean the money wasn't there to give 10% to anything. And as they prayed about it, God laid it on their hearts that he should get a part time job to earn enough more money to make up the tithe. That's how they decided to do it. And for a number of months that went on.
And it wasn't I think a year until the person who was in charge of him as place of work came and said, we have something else for you to do. It involved a promotion and he was able to, by God's goodness, stop the part time job and had enough money then because of the extra income to make up for that tithe. So they were able to keep tithing.
He goes on to express how God had blessed in the decades that he was in that profession and says, I don't want you or anyone else to think of me as being rich or wealthy. I'm not. But money is the least of my concerns. I'm well provided for. And he says it all goes back to that evening when we made the commitment to tithe, which I thought was a great testimony. This person is now retired and has seen God bless that decision to be a faithful steward through almost 40 years in a profession.
And God has prepared and provided for him and for his wife in this time of their life as well that they've been faithful to him. That was an encouraging testimony and I wanted to share that with you tonight because we're going to talk about stewardship once more. And I invite you to open your Bible to 1 Corinthians chapter 4 where I'm going to read the first five verses. It says, Let a man regard us in this manner as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.
In this case, moreover, it is required of stewards that one be found trustworthy. To me it's a very small thing that I should be examined by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even examine myself. I'm conscious of nothing against myself, yet I am not by this acquitted. But the one who examines me is the Lord.
Therefore do not go on passing judgment before the time, but wait until the Lord comes, who will both bring to light the things hidden in the darkness and disclose the motives of men's hearts. Then each man's praise will come to him from God. And so the apostle reminds us here that we are stewards. And in the context here he's talking especially about his stewardship of the gospel, preaching the word of God. But he lays before us the concept of stewardship.
And he says that we not only are needing to be found trustworthy, our motives need to be right, and God knows our hearts, and someday we're going to be examined for our stewardship. But at that time he says each man's praise will come to him from God. The implication being that God is going to find at that judgment seat something there to be commendable for each one of us, which is something that ought to encourage our hearts. There are four principles of Christian stewardship.
Some of them arising here from this text, others from other places we're going to look. That will help us to grasp the broader implications of what it means to be a steward. I need your help in doing this. I'm going to ask someone to look up Psalm 89, 11. Do we have a volunteer for Psalm 89, 11? Thank you. And, uh, Lil, did you lift your hand on that one? Was, okay. All right. Dawn. Thank you. Lill, that's okay. Calm her down. It's okay. Psalm 50, verses 10 through 12. Three verses. Thank you.
Psalm 24, verse 1. Thank you. 1 Corinthians 14, 8. Thank you. Psalm 62, 11. Careful scratching your cheek. Okay. Thanks. Psalm 104, verses 29 and 30. And 1 Corinthians 4, 7. That shouldn't be too hard to find. 1 Corinthians 4, 7. Who would do that one? Lil. Good. Thank you. Thank you. The first principle of Christian stewardship that underlies everything else is the one that says God is the divine owner of everything. That God owns it all. We like to think otherwise, don't we?
That is our natural tendency. One of the first words that Lil Child says is what? Mine. Mine. And we're all like that, and we tend to go through life. Mine. Mine. It's hard to learn to open our hands and to let someone else have from what we consider to be ours. But God is the Creator, and because of the right of Creatorship, He owns all things. For example, Psalm 89, 11 says, So we learn first of all that the heavens belong to God.
The heavens belong to God along with the world and everything that is in it. Now you think about that. You think about everything that you see around you. It belongs to God. It's amazing, isn't it? God is the divine owner of it because He created it. It belongs to Him. Psalm 50, verses 10, 11, and 12. So not only the inanimate creation in the heavens and the earth, but also all of the animals belong to the Lord. The cattle, it says, on a thousand hills, the bird of the mountains.
Everything that moves in the field belongs to God. Every animal is His. Psalm 24, 1. And so we see here that the earth is the Lord's, but also all they who dwell in it. And so all of mankind, all of humanity, belongs to Him. We don't belong to ourselves because He is our Creator. All mankind is God's. Romans 14, 8. We are the Lord's. In Romans 14, He's talking about believers. In what sense are we the Lord's? Because He's our Creator? We've already seen that.
But is there another reason that believers belong to the Lord? He purchased us. That's right. He has redeemed us. He has purchased us with His blood. And so we are His because of redemption. Now we've talked about material things. Let's talk about intangible things. Psalm 62, 11. What does that say? All right. I must have copied down the wrong verse. Unless it is the difference of translations. What's that? Buy that one? Apply that one. What it's really saying.
Psalm 62, 11, according to the translation that I used in preparation for this, and I may have copied down the wrong verse, probably the computer program messed this up, says power belongs to the Lord. It says that? Okay. Power belongs to the Lord. In Matthew 28, 18, Jesus said all power is what? Given to me. All power. All authority is the idea. And so here we see that all power and all authority belongs to God.
Not just the inanimate world and the animate world and human beings and Christians, but also authority. All belongs to Him. It resides in Him. In Daniel it says the Most High is ruler over the realm of mankind and bestows it on whomever He wishes. Think we can believe that Wednesday morning? This week? After election? We have to. We have to. We pray. We vote. We do our part. And the result of it, we leave with God because God gives power to whomever He wishes.
And as we have said recently, not always for blessing, is it? Sometimes He allows rulers to come into power in order to discipline nations. And so we know that power belongs to God and He gives it to whomever He will, including someone as despotic as Nebuchadnezzar was in Daniel's day. And we don't have a ruler today in the world that even compares with Nebuchadnezzar in despotism. All right, Psalm 104 verses 29 and 30. All right. Thank you.
And what we see here is that the breath or the life of each individual, each animal comes from God. It all belongs to Him. The essence of life, existence itself, is rooted in God. Everything has life and breath because of Him. In Him we move and live and have our being. And finally, 1 Corinthians 4.7. And so all of our abilities and our capacities that we have come to us as a gift from God, they belong to Him, these gifts.
As God said to Moses in Exodus 4, who has made man's mouth, or who makes him dumb, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? And so it is God who gives us the various capacities that we have, or if we lack capacities, that comes from God. A person's abilities and capacities all come from Him. And so we conclude by saying everything that we have is God's.
Our physical being, our spiritual being, our ability to earn, to help, to know, to communicate, our possessions, our salary, our spiritual gifts, ultimately all of it belongs to God because we are His by creation, and if we're saved, we're His by redemption. I don't know, does that make you feel strict? In a sense, that's not a bad feeling because one of the encumbrances of life is that we feel like we are responsible for so much.
We're almost like these people I used to see on the Ed Sullivan show. Some of you don't remember Ed Sullivan, right? Was Ed Sullivan on Sunday night? I can't believe it. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. If you don't know who Ed Sullivan was, he's the guy that was in a theater that David Letterman is in now. I mean, more to some of you. You remember these people who had plates on poles?
They'd put a plate up there and they'd start spinning, and then they'd get another plate and start spinning, and they'd have this whole line of plates on poles spinning? Sort of a juggling. Mark, can you do that sort of thing? Why not? Well, we won't ask you to do it tonight. Doesn't life sometimes seem that way? We feel so responsible and we have so much stuff that we have to keep going. So it's not entirely bad for us to step back and say, wait a minute.
This is all God's, and I'm responsible to do my part, but I don't have to feel like that I have to keep all these plates going. This is God's life. This is God's doing. And learn to relax a little more in Him. Well, that brings me to the second principle of stewardship, and that is that stewardship is a sacred trust that's committed to us. As we defined it last week, stewardship is something that is committed to our care, something that we're responsible for.
We have some condensed verses that deal with this in 2 Timothy, if you want to open your Bible to that text. In 2 Timothy 1, here we have this idea of a sacred trust that is committed. It's used first of all in chapter 1, 2 Timothy, verse 12, where he says, For this reason I also suffer these things, but I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that He is able to guard, means to watch over, to protect what I have entrusted to Him.
Now, those words, that phrase, as it is in the New American Standard, how does the NIV put it? Somebody have it? Same thing? Okay. Guard what I have entrusted to Him until that day. What I have entrusted is really one word in the original language, and it means what is deposited. It means what is put in trust with someone else. It comes from a verb that means to place or to put along with.
So it's the idea of you're going to the bank and you put money in the bank, and what you're doing is putting that along with everybody else's money for safekeeping there. So as we think about a sacred deposit that is committed, the first way that that is used by Paul in writing to Timothy is that we have made a sacred deposit with God in that our souls are committed to Him. Our eternal well-being is committed to Him. It is a sacred trust, and God will take care of that. He will.
But now look in verse 14 where the apostle says to Timothy, guard, same word is back there in verse 12, but here he's writing to Timothy and saying, you Timothy, guard, protect, watch over, through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, the treasure which has been entrusted to you. And you see that same phrase? Here he uses an adjective, the good deposit. It's translated here in this version, a treasure which has been entrusted to you.
And so something has been entrusted to Timothy, and what that something is, is the gospel. It is the truth about Jesus Christ, and not only to Timothy but to all of us. And he says here that we are now to guard this deposit that God has made with us. We have deposited, as it were, our eternal well-being in God's bank. He's going to care for it. He'll protect our souls. God has made a deposit with us.
He has committed to us the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, and here Timothy is told to guard it, to keep it safe, to protect it. Does that need to happen still today? We think more in terms of giving it away, of sharing it, of proclaiming this deposit, telling others about Jesus. But there is also an aspect in which we are to guard it, because there are enemies of the gospel.
There are those who would like to, in some way, water it down, to mix it up with falsehood, so that it's no longer truly the gospel. So we're to guard the gospel that God has committed to us as part of our responsibility as a church, as well as as individuals. We guard the gospel message, we keep it in its essence, in its purity, and in its power. Once more we see the same concept used in chapter 2, verse 2.
Paul says in verse 1, You therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and the things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, these entrust to faithful men who will also be able to teach others. Here we have the verb form of the noun we've seen twice before in this text. Here Paul says to Timothy, I have given you some things that I want you now to entrust to others, to make a deposit in the lives of others.
So here's the idea of sharing it, that we are to deposit with others, to commit to others for their use and their safekeeping the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are examples of stewards in the Bible, but probably the best known example is Abraham's steward. Does anybody remember his name? This is Bible trivia time. You can advance to the front row if you know the answer, but I should take care of it. Who was his steward? There was a steward that he sent out to find a bride for his son.
I think somebody said it. Eliezer, that's right, Eliezer. Come to the front, yes, you can bring your husband with you. Eliezer was a steward. To him was given a sacred trust. He was to go into the land of Abraham's relatives and to find there a bride for Isaac. He did, didn't he? He traveled those hundreds and hundreds of miles and there he found that special one. What was her name again? Oh yes, Rebecca. She was brought back and became the wife of Isaac. A stewardship is a sacred trust.
It was so important to Abraham that he had Eliezer swear an oath with him in the customary way of that day. It became a sacred duty on the part of Eliezer to fulfill his responsibility. My point is this, that you and I have been given a stewardship by God. It is sacred. We are God's stewards, and as it says in 1 Corinthians 4, God wants us to be faithful. That brings me to the third principle, and it is this, that it is our personal responsibility to manage our trust.
Stewardship involves making the most of what has been put into our charge. Come back to the Gospel of Luke for a moment and go to chapter 19. Verse 11, And while they were listening to these things, Jesus went on to tell a parable because he was near Jerusalem, and they supposed that the kingdom of God was going to appear immediately. He said, Therefore a certain noble man went to a distant country to receive a kingdom for himself, and then returned.
And he called ten of his slaves and gave them ten minas, and said to them, Do business with this until I come back. But his citizens hated him, and sent a delegation after him saying, We do not want this man to reign over us. And it came about that when he returned, after receiving the kingdom, he ordered these slaves to whom he had given the money, be called to him in order that he might know a business they had done for him.
And the first appeared saying, Master, your mina has made ten minas more. He said, Well done, good slave, because you have been faithful in a very little thing. Be an authority over ten cities. And the second came saying, Your mina, Master, has made five minas. And he said to him also, And you are to be over five cities. And another came saying, Master, behold your mina, which I put away in a handkerchief, for I was afraid of you, because you are an exacting man.
You take up what you did not lay down, and reap what you did not sow. And he said to him, By your own words I will judge you, you worthless slave. Did you not know that I am exacting man, taking up what I did not lay down, and reaping what I did not sow? And why did you not put the money into the bank? And having come, I would have collected it with interest. And he said to the bystanders, Take the mina away from him, and give it to the one who has ten minas.
And they said to him, Master, he has ten minas already. I tell you that to every one who has shall more be given. But from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away. And these enemies of mine who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and enslave them in my presence. A story that Jesus told, isn't that an interesting story? Who do you think the noble man is? That went away into a far country to receive a kingdom and then came back. Who is that?
Is Christ Jesus. He is talking about himself. He is going to go away. He is going to receive a kingdom and come back. Who are the slaves who received the minas? We are, believers are, his servants. We have received from him opportunities to serve him. Who are the people who rebelled? His enemies he says. Who are they? All right, people in the world who reject him, who will not have this mandarin over us as he says here. What happens to them? Well they are judged. They are judged.
You notice also that his slaves are examined and it says that those who make use of their opportunities are what? Are rewarded. That's right. They are rewarded for what they have done and they are rewarded according to their opportunities. To one he gave ten, to one he gave five. That is his sovereign choice. But because he made use of what he was given, he was rewarded appropriately. And then there was one who had but one mina and what happened to him? Well he blew it, didn't he?
He only had one mina to watch out for in the first place but he did not use that opportunity to make more for his master and so his master took it away from him. What is the kingdom Jesus is talking about? What do you think he means? He's coming back, a kingdom, rain over cities. Certainly there is a principle here but there is I think more than that, what is that? The kingdom of God. When he comes back to reign upon the earth.
I believe that is the application here that Jesus is saying that if we are faithful in our stewardship of things now that when he comes back he is going to allow us to reign with him in his kingdom. And we will be given responsibilities and opportunities then to serve him based upon our faithfulness of stewardship now. And so the point is that it is our personal responsibility to manage our trust, our stewardship from God.
We can compare this with Romans chapter 14 from where we read earlier but we will turn back to look at verse 12. It says in Romans 14, 12, so then each of us, each one of us shall give account of himself to God. We are not going to have to answer for somebody else. We probably are better at judging other servants of the Lord than we are judging our own responsibilities, aren't we? But when Jesus comes it is not going to be a matter of our telling him what somebody else did.
We are going to stand before him to give account of our own responsibilities, our own stewardship. And we will not share in another's reward. We will have our own reward that we will receive from the Lord. And so that brings me to the final principle of stewardship and that is that we must give account of our stewardship. Someday we will stand before him and as we said at the end of the service this morning, that day has its joyful aspect and it really does.
Tonight I was driving down to the office and I heard on KTIS an arrangement of, oh that will be glory for me. Did any of you hear it by any chance? It was absolutely beautiful. It is one of the old hymns Charles Gabriel wrote. Oh that will be glory for me, glory for me, when by his grace I look on his face. That will be glory for me. And we anticipate that day that we are going to be with the Lord and see him. But there is another side to that and that is that on that day we will be examined.
And surely all of us on that day want to be able to stand before him and give a good account. I know you do. I know I do. And we can. And the Lord is going to be gracious on that day. But he is going to examine. And we are not going to be examined for our sins. Pastor Sulak is teaching in some setting here.
He just told me this morning that he was making that statement to a group of people a couple of weeks ago, some of whom were kind of shocked because they always thought that when they got to heaven they were going to give an answer for their sins. That is not true. Thank God our sins have already been dealt with at the cross. Our sins are dealt with at the cross. They will never be brought up at the judgment seat of Christ. But we will be examined there for the way that we have served the Lord.
And when we have done well in serving him, he will commend us. Where we have not served well, then there will be some tears at the judgment seat of Christ. But we get beyond that point and we are able to give him the glory and honor and lay our rewards at his feet. But we will give account of our stewardship. And that is sobering. It is sobering to me, believe me. So as we close tonight, I guess just two or three points of application. First of all, to realize God's ownership in our lives.
Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, says Paul, who is in you, whom you have of God and you are not your own? You are bought with a price. We are not our own. God owns everything. God owns your body. God owns your abilities. God owns your children. It is all his. To realize that on a daily basis.
Secondly, then, to do an inventory of our lives, of our abilities, our money, our time, our influence, our citizenship, and to say, Lord, how am I doing in this area of my stewardship? How am I doing with my time, Lord? I didn't get into that in this letter that was written earlier, but the person said, I've learned that not only is it important to tithe my money, but it's important to tithe my time. That was a concept that God laid upon his heart. How are you doing in your time?
In using some of that for the Lord and serving him. In your money, how much do you keep? How much do you give away? In your abilities, are you using some of your abilities for the Lord? In your citizenship, Tuesday is a wonderful opportunity to be a good steward of citizenship in the influence God has given you. Then finally, what decisions do you need to make? What commands do you need to keep in order to be ready for your accounting?
Because we really don't know when the end is that we talked about this morning. I don't suppose I would want to know. Would you like to know when the end would be? If you could ask God to tell you when you're going to die, would you want to know? Some of you, I think, are already dead. You're sitting there. There will be a funeral tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock for all the people who are dead here. We'll do a mass funeral. Would you like to know when you're going to die? I don't think I would.
I don't think I would. But the uncertainty of when I'm going to die then causes me to need to examine every day. One thing we can say is that we ought to live every day as if it were our last, so that if that should be the day that we're called to be with the Lord, we would be ready to go. It was during a very difficult year in Dallas, Texas, before we came to Minnesota, that we got a letter from Uncle Sam from the uncle's IRS department. Have you ever had one of those?
And it said, you have been chosen. Isn't that a wonderful statement? A chosen person. You have been chosen to come in for a complete audit of last year's taxes. And so my wife, being the one who at that time was writing most of our checks and who was keeping our records, began to prepare for that day. I stayed home and was with the kids. I did my part. We have one of those marriages where we share responsibilities.
And in this particular case, somebody had to watch the kids and somebody had to go to the IRS. And since she has memory that is far better than mine and had kept the records, she's the one who went to meet with the agent. We started off about 930 in the morning, as I recall. Went all day long. She came home for lunch to get a couple of pieces of information. Went back. Came home that night. I met her at the door. I have to go back in the morning, she said.
And so she pulled some more stuff together and went back in the morning. And you know what the bottom line was? They owed us money. Oh, praise God. I mean, they owed us money. It wasn't much, but that's a whole lot better than the other way, I'll tell you that. And she had done such a good job, and I say this to her credit and none to mine.
She had done such a good job with the records keeping that the guy said, if ever you're called in for an audit again, you just tell them you went through this time and they'll not ask you to come in again. And I hope that that will always be the case. I hope that's always the case. But you feel so good after the audit, you know? Whew, man, got through that one. It's just great to be examined, to be found, you did it right.
Well, I think that's the way that we're going to feel when the judgment seat of Christ is finished. There will be things that will weep about undoubtedly all of us, because none of us serve perfectly. We all have areas where we have not used opportunities that God would have us to use. But the fact is that when it's done, we will say, God, thank you. Thank you for the opportunities that you gave me. Thank you for what you did in my life.
And there we'll see it all, be laid out, and we'll just be able to look at the Lord and say, Jesus Christ, I thank you for saving me and for what you were able to do in my life. And Lord, yes, there are these areas, and I'm sorry about those, but thank you and thank you, Lord, for this sense of accomplishment and for this reward. And Jesus, I give this back to you. Jesus, I want you to have this, because all that I am and all that I have and all that I've done comes from you. Let's pray.
Lord, help us to live with that end in mind and to live wisely as good stewards, recognizing your ownership that we have a sacred trust that we're responsible for and that someday we'll be examined for. And help us to understand the opportunity. Sometimes, Lord, it's difficult to know and to discern. Thank you for your grace in our lives, for your patience with us. Thank you for the new beginnings that all of us have taken advantage of many, many times.
And right now, there may be some of us who want a new beginning, a new start. We want to begin this week afresh and be responsible as a steward. So bless that new beginning, I pray. And may we walk this week in the joy of knowing that we're doing what you want us to do. In Jesus' name, amen. Well thanks for coming tonight. May the Lord bless you. Is that Bill back there? I keep trying. Is that Bill? I keep trying. I look back there and I thought, no, he looks too young for Bill.
No, it's good to see you, Bill. Still living in Houston? In Austin, rather. Excuse me. In Texas. Good to have you back. May the Lord bless all of you, and good night.