"This Land is Mine"
Rev. Harvey Brink, Bellevue CRC, Bellevue, WA
Text: Leviticus 25:23
The deacons have asked me to prepare a series of messages on the subject
of stewardship. As soon as you hear that subject announced, you may reach
for the financial statement, you may reach back in your memory for a discussion
of how the financial situation in the church has been over the last year.
You may want to recall some conversations that occurred at congregational
meetings and you may be saying to yourself "Well, I thought we were in
pretty good shape". The fact of the matter is, the time to talk about stewardship
is anytime. Particularly, when the church is in good shape. Because if
we talk about stewardship when there is financial difficulty, then we assume
that stewardship is a conversation that has to do with what we give to
the Lord. The fact of the matter is, stewardship has to do with everything
that we are, and everything that we have. That's stewardship! The foundation
stone of stewardship is trust.
I'm going to try to lead you through this rather complex scriptural
teaching having to do with Israel's possession of their land. But I would
like for you to stay with me so that we can reach some conclusions at the
end of this message that would allow you to see some of the practical applications
of what it means to be a steward of what God has given to us.
You see our vocabulary begins rather slowly. We learn one word, one
concept at a time. One of the first concepts that we learn is no. It's
easy to say and we've heard it a lot. We practice saying NO and we say
even when there are things going on that we rather enjoy just to see if
it works. Somebody offers us an ice cream cone and we say no and then we
realize Oops, big mistake. No always works. Soon after we practice the
concept, NO, we begin practicing the concept, MINE. We say mine about the
most bizarre things. Climbing behind the wheel of the car and say to dad
or mom, "mine". Come into a nursery room setting our eye falls on some
toy that we don't even care about, but it's a toy that someone else is
playing with and we waddle over and say, "mine". It starts so early because
it starts so deeply within us. We carve out the space of our existence
by identifying what is ours.
Now lets tune in to an Israelite family that has been wandering in the
wilderness for 39 1/2 years. We sometimes think that the Isralites were
families consisting totaling of adults. Adults with keen understanding
as to what God has said and what He meant and their obedient response to
what He has said and meant, but the fact of the matter is the Isralite
families consisted of all sorts of people. Adults who were strong in their
faith and willing to trust and obey the Lord and younger people who were
a little uncertain as to what it meant to trust and obey the Lord and older
people who were just plain sinful. So we tune in on this Isralite family
you recognize that after 39 ½ years of wandering in the wilderness
they had clothes that were still in pretty good shape but the colors were
exactly the same as they had been 39 ½ years ago. The sandals hadn't
worn out but they were the same styles they started out with. They always
had plenty to eat, but it was exactly the same thing morning, noon and
night 6 days a week and the 7th day they got enough on the 6th day in order
to eat exactly the same thing. We are close enough to this tent to hear
a 16-year-old strapping young man say, "So, what's for supper, mom?" "Well,
we're going to have fricassee quail tonight." "I can't stand it anymore!
For 16 years, I've been eating quail and manna, isn't there anything
else
we can eat?" "The fact of the matter is son, we're in the wilderness and
if it weren't for the faithfulness of God, we wouldn't even have quail
or manna." "The faithfulness of God. Big deal! I wish he had a little more
creative sense. It is all exactly the same stuff!" "Well, why don't you
speak to your father about that." Dad comes in the tent. Hands dripping
from having just washed them, he lifts his nose and says, "Ah, fricassee
quail. Dear, you always do wonders with our food."
"Dad, what's with this, always the same stuff? How come we've got to
eat the same food all the time?" "Son, you need to recognize that the Lord
is making provisions for us, and it's miraculous provisions He makes. No
one else surrounding us has this kind of food and He is constantly faithful
to give us manna and quail everytime we need it. All we have to do is go
and gather it. It is a wonderful thing. But, son, I heard something today
that's going to lift your spirits. We are so close to our land, we can
just about smell the Jordan River. Once we cross that, once we start farming
our own property, once we start raising our flocks on our own dirt, once
we start building our own homes, son, I have to tell you, we're going to
have a variety of foods. You know the rumor is that the grapes growing
on that land are so huge that it takes two men to carry a single bunch!
The people who've lived there all their lives have grown so huge say they're
giants compared to us. They have lived so well, you just wait boy, by the
time you are 18 years old, you will be enjoying such variety, such richness,
we will be on own. Won't that be fantastic!" "Well, I suppose. In the meantime,
isn't there something besides fricassee quail?"
It was the people who anticipated the possession of their land with
such appetites that God spoke and said, "When you come to your land, this
you must remember above all. This land is my land. When you live in that
land, my dear people, you will live in that land as blessed inhabitants.
You will not live in that land as worthy inhabitants."
Stepping back now just a bit, let's be prepared to remind ourselves
as we think about stewardship that the world that God has created is His
world. That He pronounces His authorship of it because He has made it,
and His will is to prevail in His world. The earth is the Lord's, the Psalmist
says the fullness therein, the seas and ALL that dwells in it. There is
nothing in this world that does not belong to our Heavenly Father and because
it belongs to Him, He has the right to declare how it is to be used. There
are folks whose personal creed includes the fact of a Creator God all the
time. I believe that God, the creator Almighty is the maker of heaven and
earth. Their personal creed affirms that God is the creator of the heavens
and the earth, but their practice--their practice--makes them full blown
atheists. People have a tendency to act as if the decisions they make about
their stuff are theirs alone to make. If I go to the store and I want that,
I may make that decision about getting that based on my own ability to
pay and my own ability to carry the thing home and find a place for it
there. It is MY decision to drive what I want to drive. It is MY decision
to live in what I want to live in. It is MY decision to wear what I want
to wear. It is MY decision to deal with my resources as I choose! A little
bit like Israel. Coming into their land and saying, "this land is OUR land.
It's all OUR land. From the northern regions to the southern desert, it's
OUR land. From Edom on the East to Philistine on the West, it's all ours
and when we set down stakes, it will be our land to manage and our way
to deal with it". And God said, "Don't live here as if I don't exist".
Stewardship messages must be repeated because we find ourselves in an
age of consumerism that has a tendency to turn human beings, created in
the image of God, into slaves. Personal debt is on the increase. Frustration
with hours worked and income earned is growing. More and more frequently
two incomes are not enough. We need to have two and a fraction incomes
in order to make ends meet and the circle that we inscribe with those ends
gets bigger and bigger. We can't keep up!
I was in the hot tub last night. I started the conversation with a stranger.
He said, "You know, I've got four teenagers in my house. I lie awake at
night wondering where in the world the money's going to come from!"
Does this sound like a satisfied, free, joyful human being? Sounds like
the voice of one crying in the wilderness. God says to His people, "When
you come into your land, remember that it's MY land and when you do business
in MY land that I give to you, when you operate in MY land that I give
to you when you interact in MY land, when you eat and enjoy MY land that
I give to you, in everything that you are doing, as you look at all that
you possess, remember that it's MINE first of all. So the 16-year-old boy
that is now about 18 when he gets that FirstFruits
, that first harvest? Oh
man, and they've heard stories about the festivals that the pagan people
around him had with the FirstFruits
, they slaughter the fattest of the
little piglets, they harvest the grain and take the biggest and the heaviest
of the heads of the wheat and they have one bodacious party because this
FirstFruits
is the proof that the harvest is going to be fantastic. They're
going to eat well for the rest of the year. The FirstFruits
is a time for
indulgence, self indulgence on the part of pagan people. God says to
His people, "When you come into your land and you harvest the FirstFruits
,
bring them to me". An 18-year-old son and his dad make the journey from Bethseda
to Jerusalem to bring the FirstFruits
. Now those of you who are not chronologically
challenged realize that Jerusulem doesn't belong to Israel when this child
is 18 years old. Bear with me.
Symbolically, they're actually going from Bethseda to Shechum, but symbolically
now to the temple, to the place where the Lord has caused His name to draw,
they bring their FirstFruits
and this 18 year old is just salivating because
these are the most precious produces of the land. He can't hardly believe
it, they can't eat it. They've watched this stuff grow, they watched the
sun bless it, they've seen lots of rain, watered it, they've seen it increase
and can't hardly wait for that wonderful food. He can just about taste
it and his dad says, NO. No, this we have to bring to the Lord. All the
way on the road the boy is grumbling. "Come on dad, can't we grab a little.
Who's going to know? That priest up there when we harvested, he doesn't
know how many sheaves we took. What's the big deal, dad. How come we can't
eat that? It's good food!" "I just explained that. It belongs to the Lord.
It doesn't belong to us."
"I can tell you that when I have kids, we're going to take those FirstFruits
and boy we're going to have them. Did God really say that, dad?"
There's another law that God gave His people. We can read about that
in Deut. 23. Interesting commandment. Recognize that Deut. covers much
the same territory as preparing the people of Israel for their attitude,
their lifestyle before the Lord as they come into the land. In Deut. 23:19, "Do not charge your brother interest, whether on money or food or anything
else that may earn interest." Well, that's a pretty straight forward commandment.
Its been taken out of it's context. It's been used to badger people. It's
been used by Protestant people and Catholic people to badger Jewish people.
Left in its context, we recognize the power with which God speaks to His
people in verse 20, "You may charge a foreigner interest, but not a brother
Isralite so that the Lord your God may bless you in everything you put
your hand to in the land you are entering to possess." This whole thing
about interest had to do with Israel's awareness of the fact that the land. They lived in was the Lord's land and they were to manage everything
they possessed as unto the Lord, and so the charging of interest was a denial
of the fact that the Lord would care for them. It was a way of gouging
someone else in order to put their trust not in the Lord, but in the interest
that they could charge. The law of the tithe. We're going to have to come
back to this law because it is a powerful demonstration of the fact that
the tribe of Levi (who was not to possess land as such, but was to live
in designated cities throughout Palestine)was to trust not only that the
Lord was going to give provision to His land, but that the Lord would raise
up a generosity in the heart of their fellow Israelites so that the 10%
that was given to the temple would be given to the tribe of Levi so that
they would have something to live on.
What about this thing about the law of the Sabbath? An 18-year-old son,
an 18-year-old daughter, who recognizes that the next meal may be the most
enjoyable part of living, is invited to recognize that the harvest that
is enjoyed on the 6th year will be the last time that fresh food is brought
into the house from the harvest. The harvest from the 7th year doesn't
take place because there was nothing planted the beginning of the 7th year.
For 3 years, Israel was to live on trust. The produce that they ate was
to be provided by the Lord. It was the wild stuff, it was the stuff that
grew all by itself, the volunteer. The great thing about having a compost
pile is that every once in a while you get volunteered in the compost.
You use these itty bitty tomato seeds that you can't get to grow if you
do shaloms over them. You put them in the pea pots and you have them across
the kitchen sink and the sun shines on them just right and you spray them
with exactly the right amount of water and 6-weeks later you look at them
and say, "there's absolutely nothing happening here". But in the compost
pile, where you haven't done a thing, it's just been out there in the rain
and the weather, there they come. Surprise! You've got tomatoes and the
Lord put us here! Israel was to live with that kind of surprise for 3 years.
To underscore the fact that living with the Lord's provision to live in
His land, to live with His blessing, to know that His favor rests upon
His people, to live with that kind of awareness, was to live with satisfaction
and fulfillment and authenticity, a kind of freedom that allows us to experience
what Jesus was saying in Matthew when He said, "You can't love God and
stuff". It doesn't work.
Trusting God for all of our stuff is a graduate level course in spirituality.
We're generally able to manage in courses 101 or 102 and maybe 202 and
203. We're able to manage a small amount of trust for certain things. We'll
let God deal with that aspect of our lives, those kind of things that we
do on Sunday. We'll trust God for our Sunday stuff. We may even be willing
to trust God for our Wednesday night stuff. We may be willing to trust
God for our Monday night stuff--that's when the committees generally meet--
and when the structure of the church has its operation; when we need to
talk about our missionaries; when we need to do spiritual kind of things;
when we need to deal with the budget that belongs to the church, then we
will trust God. But this business about trusting God for all of life, having
to recognize that He is the source of our provision for 90% of our income,
as well as the 10% that we acknowledge before Him, that's a quantum level
leap. It puts us in graduate school. It puts us on our knees. It puts us
at the supper table in month 32 and we say, "What are we going to eat?"
You wrap all of those 7 year cycles into 1 bundle and you've got the 49th
year and every piece of property gets returned to it's original owner.
You see the Lord wanted to underscore the fact that this land that He gave
to His people, which was a provision for their understanding of who He
was, their exercise of His redemption, their practice of His shalom, that
birthright that was to be given to every family in Israel was never to
be taken away from them. As a matter of fact, He put up with all kinds
of nonsense, from Jezebel and Ahab, but when Ahab took Nahab's birthright,
God said, "that's it! Don't you take his birthright because the land is
mine and I have given it to my people so that they may understand who I
am and may experience my redemption." When our lifestyle, my dear brothers
and sisters, when our lifestyle begins to separate us from our sense of
redemption, when we begin to lose our awareness of peace with God, when
our shalom is shattered because of crummy financial decisions we have made,
then it's time for us to exercise some control. We need to ask ourselves what
it means to be a fully devoted disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ when it
has to do with the 90% that He has given to me to manage? Each one of us
has a different answer to that question. Let me make a couple of suggestions.
One of the things that we have to deal with is this matter of impulse
buying. Consortium with business people in the local area put together
a package marketing spectacles that consisted of a cardboard disk and a
hole in the center that was guaranteed to correct near-sightedness. They
had some fourth world country citizens produce these things. It cost them
$.15 a piece to make. They sold them for $19.95 on one of those big channels
on TV late at night. Their target was to sell a million. They bought the
time, 30 minutes, and they paid for a very impassioned, slick, accented
speaking person. I don't know why it is that we Americans buy from British
speaking people like there's no tomorrow. All somebody has to do is say
"Cheerio" and we're lining up. They didn't hit their goal. They didn't
sell a million of these things. They only sold 500,000. Their were 7 involved
in the consortium, you do the math. They made about $5,000,000 a piece.
Why were they able to do that? It's because the people that do these info-mercials
know perfectly well that they have to get people to buy within 29 minutes.
Those things are carefully paced so that by the last part of that program
the pressure is building on you to buy this product. Incidentally, these
things work. The field of vision isn't real big, but they will correct
near-sightedness. So they could offer a guarantee and they could talk about
repairing your vision for $19.95. How in the world could you go wrong?
Moneyback guarantee. Blah, blah, blah. Twenty minutes? twenty-two minutes? twenty-five
minutes.. They are increasing the heat under the watching public to buy
these things because we have convinced ourselves that if we are not instantly
gratified, there is something wrong with the system. What I want, I've
got to have right now! There are times I can't even wait to let it come
in the mail. If I go to the store and I see something and they don't have
my size right then, I won't buy it. I am so screwed up about that, but
you know what, I'm not alone. There's a whole world out there of folks
who haven't learned to delay their gratification for 30 minutes. I think
you and I need to be prayerfully presenting this to the Lord and saying,
"Father, I'm having a tough time managing the 90% you've given to me to
manage because I've got this crazy notion that unless I have what I want
when I want it, there's something wrong with me. You need to be telling
me that you've redeemed me, you've given me a place and a purpose, you
have set me free, you have equipped me to be your son, you have brought
me into your family, you are doing for me everything that could possibly
need to be done and YOU need to give to me the gift of waiting." You and
I know perfectly well what happens when we put 24 hours between our need
to have something and our actual purchase of it. We find out we don't need
it at all. Do you understand why we are groaning under a burden of consumer
indebtedness? It's because we've got these little plastic things in our
pocket that allow us to order things over the telephone and that cheerful
person on the other end of the line tells us that it will be the mail that
very same business day. If I had that kind of a radio to listen to, I'll
be a real person. If I have that kind of a deodorant to put on, I'll be
a real person. If I had that kind of stuff to clean my teeth with, I'll
be a real person. If I can drive that kind of a vehicle, I'll be a real
person. If I can?? Being a consumer is not bad. The Lord said, "I have
created you to enjoy the fruit of the land". But when you turn into a consumerist,
then you have succumb to the siren voices of those who suggest that unless
you have certain things, you don't count for much. Pray for the strength
to delay gratification. If you're well into this graduate level thing of
trusting God, you may ask for strength to delay gratification for 30 days.
If you've just started with the introductory courses, then walk around
the store for 30 minutes before you plump down your plastic, OK? Pray for
that level of distance between what you've got to have and paying for it.
Can I make another suggestion? Sit down with the significant person
in your life with whom you make these decisions and decide what comes first.
You know what that assumes, don't you? It's that you're talking about finances
with anybody. We need to talk about finances. You know what's going on
with finances in our family? Control, and control drives us wild. An older
gentlemen who has considerable resources comes to a younger gentlemen for
whom he has a paternal concern and he says to the younger gentlemen, "You
know, I recognize that you've have some financial difficulties in your life.
I tell you what. You bring your checkbook and we'll go over your financial
situation." The younger gentlemen said, "Sir, with all due respect, that's
a great idea. I'll bring my checkbook and we'll go over my finances. You
bring your checkbook and we'll go over your finances." End of discussion! When we open ourselves up to someone else to talk about the order in which
we spend our resources, what we're saying is, this stuff that God has given
to me belongs to me and to you. We are part of a community. We have responsibilities
to each other. This matter of managing our finances is a community deal,
and I do not have the last word over what I spend. We share this thing.
As soon as that door gets opened and there is a possibility for mutual
discussion, this precludes hidden bank accounts. Somebody
has got $5,000 away in some bank in Chicago that the spouse doesn't know
about. This precludes buying stuff that the other person isn't aware of.
It precludes the sense that I am unto myself answerable alone. Then
when we open that door to set the priorities of what we spend and where
we spend it, then we have a chance to let the Lord look at where we set
our priorities and we say to ourselves, "Now, if this is His land, if this
income is His, if all that I have and all that I am belong to Him, then
I can be set free from the tyranny of my stuff owning me." If I say to
myself, I cannot live in this hubble any longer, 2500 square feet might
have been good enough for my parents, but it's not good enough for me.
If I don't have 3,000 square feet to rattle around in, I am not a really
successful person. So, you trade up and low and behold, that notorious
government of which every party is responsible, messes around with the
interest rates and you wind up facing a mortgage payment of $1,600 a month
and you say to yourself, "Ugh? it's not what I planned on". Your house
owns you. Set yourself free, take a deep breath and let the tension melt
out of your neck muscles and say, "Lord, this land is yours and the house
that you provide for me is going to be just fine because I'm willing to
trust you. The income that I had is going to go as far as it needs to because
I trust you. Inner sense of satisfaction that I so much crave as an image
bearer of yours, you are going to supply. I trust you and I start that
level of trust when I'm young."
That's why God was listening to this conversation between the 16-year-old son of Israel and his parents. This bottomless pit young man who couldn't
think past the next meal, the Lord said, "Don't worry, son. You'll have
enough to eat, Trust me."
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