Living life full of faith and grace - Sermon 27th October 2013

2 Timothy 4: 6-8, Luke 18; 9-14

I think a lot about what I would like said at my funeral.

I think it is an occupational hazard as I end up talking regularly with families about eulogies and people’s lives.

I often think I will write my own eulogy to let people know what I think I want them to know about me – but I guess that is just pandering to my control freak nature!
It is always interesting to hear what people do say about people at their funerals – what is remembered are often little things – memories of fun and love and then they might talk about the big thing that they achieved in their career, but the sense of relationship is more important than anything else.

Today in our two readings we see both Jesus and Paul talking about how we live in relationship with God and Paul particularly is thinking in the sense of what he wants to be remembered for when he came to the end of his life.

We see Paul here in prison in Rome and knowing that his life was ending – he talks about being poured out like a drink offering- these were very much done at a transition point of ending and beginning so Paul is telling us that he is at that transition from this life to the next.

And in that position Paul is really telling us what he feels he has achieved in his life – what he wants to be remembered for.

Paul says  - I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith, and now is reserved for me the crown of righteousness.

Paul is confident of his place in eternity but more than that he is confident that his life on earth had had meaning and purpose.

We spoke a few weeks ago now about running the race and I talked about running a marathon not a sprint.

And in this passage again we see this clearly as Paul is confident that he had finished the race- he had kept going to the end.

To be a successful runner you need not only to focus on the beginning of the race and the middle of the race but also the end.

If you don’t you wear yourself out and don’t leave yourselves enough resources to complete the race.

Paul knew that he had come to the end of his life and that he had managed to come to the end of the race too.

So how did he do this?

Well we can get a good idea from elsewhere in his writings how he had kept going – he had kept going despite all the things he had been put through for his faith and like most of us I am sure he had doubts siting on his shoulder telling him it would be much more easy to give up than keep going.

And I am sure one key to him keeping going was his determination to do things not in his own strength but in God’s.

Time and time again we get this message throughout Paul’s writings- whether he be talking about being rooted in Christ, or seeing yourself as part of Christ’s body or in deed talking specifically words such as: for his strength is made perfect in my weakness

Paul has a clear sense of keeping going not because of what he does as an individual but doing it all in God’s strength.  So Paul was faithful to this and he kept going.

So Paul had come to the end of the race – trusting in God’s strength.

But how would Paul be remembered – and in turn how will we be remembered – what would be a fitting epitaph for both Paul and us as Christians.

And I think in looking at this passage from Timothy and also at Jesus’ parable from Luke 18 we could suggest two words which I think would be a very fitting epitaph – he or she was full of faith and full of grace  -  faithful and graceful

Let’s look at being faithful first:

Paul was faithful because he had given his life in the discipleship of Jesus Christ. His faith had governed everything he had done and he had followed Jesus and been faithful in that.

But he was also faithful in the sense that he had never compromised on God’s word.

Earlier in chapter 4 of 2 Timothy we get these words: verse 3-4 for the  time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires and will turn away from the truth and wander away to myths.

I think these couple of verses are interesting because in many ways they speak very clearly to our own culture - people wanting to have teaching that justified their own actions, because the teaching of God and God’s ways were too demanding for them.

And Paul is urging Timothy in this passage to stay focused on God’s word and to teach and preach God’s word.  Paul was uncompromising in his faith despite living in a pluralistic culture.

When Paul in Acts 17  is seen at the place of the Aeropagus he speaks to the men – I see that you have an altar to an Unknown God – well let me tell you about the God who has made himself known in the person of Jesus.

He uses all opportunities to point uncompromising to the one true God.

So Paul kept the faith – he was faithful.

But he was also graceful – in a sense of he was dependent upon God’s grace to him.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 9:

⁹ But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

Paul was humble in accepting that it was only through God’s grace working through his life that he was able to stay faithful and to finish the race.

In our reading from luke and the parable we see clearly another man who humbled himself to God’s grace too.  He knew his place before God he was aware of the grace that had been poured out to him. He knew that God’s grace was bigger than him.

But the man in the parable is in contrast to another man who got things so wrong and who wasn’t at all graceful so let’s look at him first.

Firstly – he stood in the middle of everyone.  The reason he stood there was because it was where he could be heard the clearest and seen the best. He let everybody know just how wonderful he was.  We read that he fasted twice a week. Now the Old Testament only required a Jew to fast once a year on the Day of Atonement. But this man fasted a 103 times a year more than he was required.

Then we read that he tithed everything that he possessed. Now the Old Testament only required that you tithe your income. But this man tithed everything that he earned and everything that he bought. In other words, he was a double thither. Now there is nothing wrong with fasting more than once a week, and there certainly is nothing wrong with giving more than a tithe.

But the problem was, this man thought back then what a lot of people keep thinking today--he thought his goodness gained him brownie points with God. He thought God accepts a person based on what they do for Him, or in other words, he thought he could get to heaven by his good works. He was religious and proud of it.

If you put your trust in anything--church membership, church attendance, baptism, religion, good works—anything at all other than Jesus Christ, to make God accept you, you are fooling yourself. The Pharisee thought that God would be impressed with all that he was doing. So now we learn the first clue on what impresses God.

What impresses God is when you don’t try to impress God.

There is a story about a little girl  that came home very excited from school one day. She had been voted "prettiest girl in the class." The next day she was even more excited when she came home, for the class had voted her "the most likely to succeed." The next day she came home and told her mother she had won a third contest, being voted "the most popular."

But the next day she came home extremely upset. The mother said, "What happened, did you lose this time?" She said, "Oh no, I won the vote again." The mother said, "What were you voted this time?" She said, "most stuck up."

Well this Pharisee would have won that contest hands down. He had an "I" problem. Five times you will read the little pronoun "I" in these two verses. He was completely selfish and self centred and thought he could impress God with his action.
C. S. Lewis once said, "A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and of course, as long as you are looking down, you can’t see something that’s above you."

This Pharisee had fooled himself about himself. He says, "God, I thank You that I am not like other men."  But he was like other men, because "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." 

VERSE 13 tells us, 
"And the tax collector, standing afar off,"

The Pharisee went to the center of the court and stood in the sunshine where he would be noticed by the most people; the tax collector stood on the outer edges of the court of the Gentiles in the shadows, not carrying to let people see him pray. He just wanted to have a dialogue with the Lord God.

You could see his humility in his eyes. The passage goes on to say that he "would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven."

The Pharisee was too proud to look up; the tax collector was too ashamed to look up.

You could hear the sincerity in his voice. For he says, "God be merciful to me a sinner!"

Well, God heard his prayer, for in VERSE 14, Jesus said, "I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other."
The tax collector recognised his place before God – humble himself and recognised that it was all about God’s grace and not about himself.

He was full of grace and as such was close to God.
PSALM 34:18 says,
"The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves such as have a contrite spirit."

So the question to us then is are we full of God’s grace too – do we puff ourselves up before God or are we dependent upon him.- is his grace sufficient for us. And in turn then are we living by God’s grace.

And if we live by God’s grace how does that impact on our lives in sense of our own priorities – our time spent in a relationship with God, our use of our time, our money our possessions.
So what do you want your epitaph to be?  I would like mine to be similar to Paul because I would love to get to the end of my life knowing like Paul that I have kept the faith and lived by God’s grace.

And my prayer for us all is that we can do the same. Amen

Looking forward 6 - Investing in God's work

2 Corinthians 9: 6-15, Luke 12: 13-21

I have to say that one thing that really winds me up when I go to my parents house is their fridge.

When you look into it you will always see little pots with things like a tablespoon of peas in it.

Why? Because my mother having grown up in the war is very good at making sure she doesn’t chuck anything out – the problem is she is also not very good at making sure she uses up all these leftovers.

Now I have to say I am not very good at keeping left overs because I have grown up with apparent plenty.

This shows my differing attitude to things to my own mother.

Why start with this because today we are yet again looking at money as we come to the end of our looking forward series and we will be looking at our attitudes to our possessions and money and how we see giving as giving God our leftovers or our first fruits.

So let’s look at the passage from 2 Corinthians 9 and see what we can see from it to help us on this difficult subject today.

Firstly I want to look at what our attitude to giving should be and then move on to see how we should give.

So firstly our attitude to giving. And very starkly I want to say that our attitude to giving is directly related to our attitude towards God and our trust in him.

We saw that last week when we looked at priorities but I want to stress that again- we show the importance of God in our lives by how we see giving to his work.

We spend time and spend money on those things that are important to us – and we do that with God too.
But often unfortunately for a variety of reasons our attitude to God can be a bit like the leftovers in the fridge.

We save a little bit and then we give that away – because we can’t make any better use of it.

If a close friend was coming to dinner would you give them the leftovers or would you cook a new meal – most of us would cook something new and if food was a bit short it would be family hold back – hospitality dictates this doesn’t it.

So why   should our reaction to God be in this category of leftovers.

A story is told of a family that arrived at church and the father was obviously not having a good time.
The seats were too uncomfortable, the service was boring, the sermon well – you should have heard the comments he made over Sunday lunch. He was brought up short though by his son who had observed his reaction when the collection plate came round.” Dad I don’t know why you are complaining about it” he said –“ it only cost you a pound!”

Then this passage from 2 Corinthians 9 shows us clearly how we should see giving as sowing.

Now I think most of us don’t see it in this way.

Most of us think of giving as somehow loosing – we give away and so we can’t spend that money on what we want to – so we loose out.

But Paul here clearly says that this is not the right attitude at all, because he sees giving in terms of something much more positive.

He sees giving as sowing.

We all know the farming terms. What happens when you sow? You reap. You take a whole ear of corn and strip all the kernels off it, put each of them into the ground, and what happens? From one ear of corn, how many rows of corn can you plant? Each of those kernels will grow a stalk, and how many ears of corn are on each stalk? This concept of sowing is amazing. It is not something that is lost and gone forever. It actually multiplies.

This is what God says about giving. Giving is like sowing seed or planting a tomato plant.  One tomato plant can grow an amazing number of tomatoes. That’s like giving. Every time you give, you need to remember that you are sowing seeds and a harvest is coming. This whole concept of sowing and reaping is built into the very fabric of life.

By sowing through giving you are investing in God’s work and that has a tremendous harvest as we see changed lives, changed attitudes, peace and wholeness, community development.

So we need to think about our attitude to giving – how does it relate to the priority of God in our lives and do we see it as sowing or are we still thinking about what we loose out by giving.

So that’s the first challenge today.

Then I want to move on from our attitude to think about the practicalities of giving and how we should give.

In the old testament it is very clear that we should give a tithe or a tenth of our income to God.

It was expected that this would be the case, and it wasn’t just a tithe of the income but also the first fruits the best would be given to God.

Proverbs 3:9-10,
Honor the Lord with your wealth,
    with the firstfruits of all your crops;
¹⁰ then your barns will be filled to overflowing,
    and your vats will brim over with new wine.

What are those “firstfruits”? Just imagine that you went out to pick strawberries and you wanted to pick a basket full of berries. If you were to take the best berries in the row and put only those into a single basket and then when that basket is full, that is the tithe that you owe to the Lord.

This is what was expected in the Old testament.

What does the New Testament say about giving? The New Testament doesn’t mention a percentage. The reason is that because they felt ten percent was too limiting. People wanted to give more than ten percent, and they gave what God placed upon their heart.

But the New testament rather than giving us a legalistic view of 10% gives us clear guidance to giving: We are to give freely, we are to give generously, we are to give regularly, and we are to give cheerfully.

But I want us to look today at what this passage says about giving in terms of how we should give.

And firstly – clearly it says we should be conscious in our giving.

Verse 7 each should give what you have decided in your heart to give.
This isn’t about putting your hand in your pocket and pulling out what comes out and putting in the plate but this is about consciously planning what your giving is to be.

Bearing in mind our attitude to giving we should sit down in the cold light of day and prayerfully consider what we are going to give.

This will obviously be very different for each one of us because we all come here in different financial situations with different demands upon us. But God calls us to consider this prayerfully and consciously.

In the light of this it is good then to pledge to the church what you decide you can give – and if you are able to give by standing order then this makes the process so much easier for the church in terms of planning our ability to carry out mission and ministry here.

But even here in verse 7 it challenges us to think about how we give in terms of our attitudes—because we should give what we have decided but we do this not reluctantly or under compulsion – so we do this as a free decision.

Secondly we should give cheerfully- God loves a cheerful giver it says in 2 Corinthians 9.

So how do we give cheerfully – well basically we give with a smile on our face – not a grimace! – Again it’s about our attitudes but this comes deep from the heart.

We give cheerfully not expecting anything in return but knowing and trusting that God will bless us in return. We don’t do it because we are expecting God to somehow bless us but we do it in response to the blessings we have received and will continue to receive.

When you love someone you want to give of your best to that person because you know what you have received from them. And the same is with giving.

The cheerful heart doesn’t look at the five pound note going into the collection plate and want to hold on to it – or squeeze the pound coin until the queen’s face is almost obliterated – a cheerful heart gives freely and thankfully for what they have received from God and in trust of how God is going to continue to bless them.

So we are to give consciously we are to give cheerfully and then thirdly we are called to give in faith.

Our attitude to giving is a good indication of where are faith is. On a practical level if we consider giving cheerfully in faith then we can ask ourselves the question - how much can I give and still be grinning?

Then it pushes you and causes you to consider if you can be happy giving more.

Can we trust God enough to know that he will sustain us and provide for us or we still reliant on ourselves and our possessions.

 Can trust him at a level to give a little bit more? This standard meets me where I am and what I can give at this point in my life. It also challenges me to go one step farther and to trust God for this. 

So giving isn’t easy when we see it in these terms because it challenges us at very deep levels in our relationship with God and our relationship with our money and possessions.

But in the same way giving can challenge us to deepen that relationship with God as we use it to help us to step out in faith.

So to recap this morning – we give in response to God and our relationship with him.  

We give because we are sowing = we are investing in God’s work for the future and for others to receive the blessings that we have of a relationship with God and we give to invest in the mission of reaching out with God’s love into our community and the world.

But we are to give consciously – not just our leftovers but the first fruits – consciously planning what we can give thoughtfully and prayerfully.

We are give to cheerfully – not begrudgingly but with a heartfelt smile on our faces.

And we give because it is linked in with our faith journey and helps us to develop and deepen our faith, trust and dependence upon God.

May God help us all to take these steps of faith and move on in our thinking about money and possessions for the future.

Amen

Looking forward 5 - Our attitude to money and possessions

Readings Deuteronomy 8 and Matthew 6

If you had to list the top 10 priorities in your life I wonder what they would be.

For most of us – we just have to look at our diaries to see what our priorities are – how much time we spend doing things from our church life to our families to our sports and recreations to friends.

The amount of time we spend on something and to a certain extent the amount of money we invest in something shows a great deal about what are priorities are.

Today we come to the sharp end of our looking forward series and start to think about money – we have seen in the leaflet what the needs of our church are so today I want to start us thinking about our attitude towards money and see it in the sense of a review of our priorities.

So my teaching today may be challenging to us in sense of our attitudes to money and next week I want to think a little more about money in the sense of how we can use money to invest in God’s work before we have our gift day in two weeks time.

I suppose when I come to talk about money here I have to admit to being a little embarrassed, after all like most of us I was brought up to not really talk about money in public.

And I have to say I have found it over the years quite challenging to teach on money as I can’t remember too many talks from the pulpit about money either.

So we don’t like to talk about it – but it is a necessity of life and it is a necessity of life in the church and I want us to think about it in terms of our attitudes which leads us to set our priorities.

So what is a Christian response to money? And I want to start as we address that question to go back to the passage from Deuteronomy which to me speaks so clearly about attitudes to possessions including money.

We see in the passage from Deuteronomy how the people had been led throughout the dessert in to the promised land.

They spent 40 years in the dessert, and yet God took care of them amazingly.

We see how he provided them manna from heaven to eat.

He enabled their clothes to survive those forty years.

Now I’m sure they may have been fed up of their clothes after 40 years- some of us myself including like to change ours a little more often than that - but never the less, God provided for them the necessities for life.

God provided for them what they needed to survive in the dessert.

God knew what they needed and he provided.

Now we know that the dessert was a time of testing.

It wasn’t an easy time, in the passage it says how God had used the time in the dessert as a time of humbling for the people. The passage says:

“God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments.”

But at the same time in the midst of this difficult time they had the promise that God was bringing them into something better.

He was bringing them in to a land flowing with milk and honey, full of vines and olive trees, pomegranates, a land where bread is not scarce.

It’s difficult to imagine how this hope would have felt for the Israelites in the dessert.

Having lived on manna and quails they are now faced with the prospect of all these good things.

I don’t know whether you have ever been deprived of anything for a time.

But if you have you’ll know how eagerly you anticipate getting that thing back.

I remember spending when I spent a year in India at around 18.

What I missed most, wasn’t the food, but it was having a good bath.

All we had to wash with were buckets of water which you heated with an electric element each morning so we did have warm water.

How eagerly I anticipated the first bath on my return, and I know I spent a considerable time in the bathroom.

Those Israelites must have eagerly anticipated many things which they had been promised.

And yet God knew how they could react to this.

He knew that when they had plenty they would have a tendency to forget what they had been given.

He knew that when they had plenty they would see themselves as behind all the good things they had.

When they had only what they needed, they would acknowledge that what they had had been given to them.

That God had provided their needs.

When they had plenty, they would forget God and exalt themselves.

I think this is a stark reminder to us as affluent Christians today.

Do we exalt ourselves, like God said the Israelites would? 

We may pay lip service to everything coming from God but in our hearts and minds have we let that sink in.

Because we earn a wage we naturally think that what we have done has got us the privileges that we have – our homes, our clothes, our holidays, our treats.

Of course we have earnt it – BUT is this thinking at the detriment of seeing our dependence upon God.

It is only through his graciousness that we have these things. It is only because he has provided them for us in the first place.

It’s really difficult thinking for us but if we are not careful then we can fall into the same trap as God warned the Israelites about – that they would forget his provision to them.

You see if we do think only that we have got what we have got because of ourselves it is obviously going to affect the ways we view money and our possessions and of course our priorities with our money.

But if we begin to get a sense of God’s provision to us then we begin to see what we have in a different way and our priorities may change.

If we do the latter this is surely going to affect the way we view our money and possession.

Some Christians working fulltime in some form of Christian service choose to live by faith.
They do not take a salary but are reliant on God to provide things for them through other people.

They have that real sense of God providing for them.

I have to say I admire these people greatly and it is a challenge to me to think if I would be able to do the same thing.

I think it is a disease of affluence – perhaps affluenza that we have lost that sense of God’s provision for us and view ourselves as earning our right to our possessions and our lifestyle.

Do we view our possessions as a result of our own effort, or God given?

Jesus said in the passage from Matthew.

“Do not worry about what you will eat, or what you will drink, or about your body what you will wear. Is life not more than food, and the body more than clothing?”

For the God who clothes the lilies of the field with such glory will clothe you.

God know our needs, and he will provide for them.

All that we have is a gift from God.

So if this is the case how then do we respond to this?

How do we as Christians cope with what we have been given?

Should we all give up all we have and go and live by faith?

I’m not sure that’s what we are all called to do.

But I do think that the biblical teaching is quite radical and is something we all need to work out for ourselves.

In the early church in Acts we see the Christians sharing all they had in common with each other.

They were called not to hold back for themselves anything, and perhaps you know the story of Ananias and Saphira who when they did hold the proceeds of a sale of land back from the church, they were struck down dead.

The sharing of all goods in the early church continued into the third century.

We also see in Acts 11 the early church taking up collections for famine relief.

They were serious about their money.

They acknowledged that it was part of their faith and lived accordingly.

Within the early church there is also an emphasis on giving sacrificially as a response to the grace that God has given us.

It isn’t about giving what you can afford, but giving more than that.

I think as a church we may have lost that sense of sacrificial giving.

That we give of what we have because we have been given so much.

When the demise of corporate living happened, there was an onus of keeping only what you needed and giving everything else away as alms for those in need.

How far have we come away from this?

I think it’s interesting to see how money came to be separated from faith.

It was with the development of the monastic movement that ordinary Christians saw that bit of their faith taken care of.
That those in the monasteries who had taken vows of poverty would deal with the giving of alms. All they needed to do was give the monasteries a bit of money occasionally.

Of course when the monasteries were closed down after the reformation even this ended.

So how can we get back to seeing sacrificial giving as an integral part of our faith?

Because giving sacrificially shows that God is high in our list of priorities.

I want to suggest some factor we may want to consider in our attitude to money and giving.

Throughout the bible there is an emphasis on caring for those in need, in particular the widows, orphans and aliens.

If we look at the world we can see the gross inequalities between the rich and the poor.

I heard a statistic that said if all the Christians in America tithed 10% of their income, then we would alleviate third world poverty.

If we in England were to do this we too would make a drastic difference to the lives of many individuals.

Are we as wealthy Christian really helping the poor and needy?

And then there is also a question of the exploitation of those in the third world.

Can we help to combat this by buying fair trade goods?

And what about our attitude to our money and possessions.

I know I have been told since I was young to possess things wasn’t wrong as long as you had the right attitude.

I’m sure this is probably right.

But do we use this as an excuse to excuse ourselves from taking our attitude to sacrificial giving seriously.

Do we appease our consciouses by saying that we hold our possessions lightly, and yet don’t give more than we have too?

Next week we will be looking at giving as investing in God’s work but I want this week to leave you with a challenge to think about your own attitude to your money and possessions. With some questions to ponder.

How do the words of Jesus in Matthew 6 strike you – do not worry about your life?

Does God’s warning to the Israelites bring you up short in your own attitudes to money and possessions?

And how does your spending reflect your own priorities in life- and where does God fit in to this?

Let’s pray that God would continue to challenge us all in our thinking.

Amen