Today's Message
Do Not Steal

“Stealing is taking something that does not belong to you without permission or right, especially in secret or by force.”

Here’s the big idea: it’s not yours, and if you take it, you’ve stolen. That’s the big idea. It’s theirs, not yours. If you take what’s theirs and make it yours, you’re stealing.

Martin Luther & Stealing
Martin Luther said in his day that if they took all the people who were stealing and hung them, they’d run out of rope, and they’d need to start using men’s belts to hang the rest of the thieves. It was such a prevalent problem. In our day of technology, it’s only multiplied the amount of ways that we can steal from one another.

This is not the way the world is supposed to be. When God made the world, it was very good and without sin. All of this stealing and all of the countermeasures that we have to protect our goods is the result of sin, the Fall, and the Curse.

It just boggles the mind that certain people still say, “Well, people are basically good in their heart.” No, they’re not. No, they’re not. Leave your door unlocked and see what happens. People are not basically good in their heart. People are by nature sinners with self-interests in their heart that compels them to steal.

"You Shall Not Steal"
This is not like a legal contract where there are lots of footnotes and details. There are no footnotes. There are no caveats. There’s no exception. Just don’t steal. Don’t steal. And we do. We do a lot.

There are a couple of concepts that naturally flow out of this...

The Right to Private Property
First, this teaches us that the Bible believes in private property rights and ownership.

Some of you read the Bible almost like with hippie lenses and socialistic communistic leanings, saying, “Oh, they shared everything. We should share everything.” Nobody should have anything. No, the Bible says it belongs to them, not you, and if you take it, you’re stealing. This is private property ownership.

The Bible teaches private property ownership, that everything belongs to God, that God’s the one who distributes things among people, and that whatever he’s given you is yours, and they can’t take it. And whatever he’s given them is theirs, and you can’t take it. You see that? This assumes private property ownership and rights to those who have ownership.

God Loves Your Neighbor
Number two, God doesn’t just love you. Does God love you? Totally he loves you. He also loves your neighbor. And what has trended in Christian Bible teaching is an emphasis on you and not them. “God loves you. God wants to bless you. God wants to help you. God wants to serve you.” There is not as much talk about your neighbor. God wants you to love them. God wants you to serve them. God wants you to help them. God wants to bless them through you.

And so what happens is our faith becomes very selfish, and it’s all about me and it’s not about them. And Jesus comes and says to love your neighbor. And the last commandments, in large part, are about loving your neighbor.

One of the ways you can be loving your neighbor is by not stealing from your neighbor. If it belongs to them and you take it, it may bless you, it may benefit you, it may enrich you, it may be good for you, but it’s not loving your neighbor. It’s hurting them. It’s harming them. It’s taking that which is theirs. God believes in private property ownership and God believes in not just doing what’s best for you, but also what is good for your neighbor and God wants you to love your neighbor.

We Have a Right Not To Be Stolen From
Number three, then, we have rights, and one of those rights is to not be stolen from.

It’s fine to make laws based upon God’s good law that there shouldn’t be stealing and that stealing should be met with consequence and punishment. But in addition to our rights, which we tend to be very familiar with, by the way, we also have responsibilities, which we tend to be less familiar with.

If you go to the average person and you ask, “Should anyone ever steal from you?” They’d say, “No one should ever steal from me ever. That’s my right.” “Do you know you have a responsibility not to steal from anyone?” “Well, you know, there are circumstances: my life is hard, you don’t understand.”

We talk more than we should. We should say, “Yes, I have a right not to be stolen from and a responsibility not to steal from others.”

What starts to undermine an entire culture is when people are far more committed to their rights than their responsibilities and getting what they think they should get, rather than giving what God wants them to give.

We can all think of times we have been stolen from. We know our rights! We often have a terrible memory about our responsibility not to steal.

Employee Theft
According to a report in US News that was conducted by Hayes International Consultants, the average employee steals 5.5 times more than the average shoplifter. How many of you are employers, and you know this is true? Furniture goes missing, supplies go missing, stock goes missing.

It’s such a massive problem. It’s almost impossible to calculate the total loss, but the estimates are that companies lose $200 billion a year through employee theft of stock or supplies. If we went to your house right now—and just so you know, Jesus already sees it—what would we find at your house that actually should be at your work?

In addition to stealing items, employees are guilty of stealing time. Any of you ever wasted time at work? According to a report on Salary.com, the average employee wastes a little over two hours a day. OK, eight-hour workday, one-hour lunch, two hours wasted, 2.09 hours wasted. Some people look and say, “What’s the big deal? That doesn’t bother me.” It would if it was your company.

All right, if you went right now to the bakery like, “I would like eight doughnuts.” And they charged you for eight, and you got home, and you opened the box like, “There’s only five.” You go back to the bakery and say, “Where’s my three doughnuts?” “Hey, I’m just treating you like you treat your employer. You get to pay for eight doughnuts, but you only get to eat five.”

True or false, you’d be frustrated? We don’t like to be stolen from, but we don’t mind stealing. And we don’t think of time as stealing, but if we’re getting paid for our time, then wasting our time is stealing from our employer.


WHAT DO WE TEND TO DO WHEN WE’RE STEALING TIME?
What do you think we tend to do when we’re stealing time? What do you think the number-one way we steal time is? Doing what? Come on be honest, we’re in church.

1. INTERNET
The Internet. Forty-four percent say, “Yeah, that’s how I waste a lot of my time on the Internet.” Doing what? Social media, surfing, reading the news, watching cat videos, all right, finding the funniest cat video, sending it to the other employees so that they can waste two hours as well.

What are the two most popular websites that we go to while we’re wasting time at work? First one is, take a guess, Facebook. OK, second most common website we visit to waste time? LinkedIn. Everybody’s at work trying to find another job. Welcome to LinkedIn.

Just so you know, if the person spending all their time trying to get the job is doing so while they’re at their other job, might I submit to you, they may not be the best candidate for your job. “So, what are you doing today?” “Stealing from my employer and looking for work.”

2. SOCIALIZING
Number two, 23 percent of the time is spent socializing. Somebody’s trying to work; you’re supposed to be working. Rather than working, you go in and talk to them to waste both of your time. “What are you doing?” “Not working.” “Obviously, me neither. Let’s talk.”

3. PERSONAL BUSINESS
Six percent of the time, we waste our time on personal business, paying our bills, fixing our calendar, returning our emails. Some of you’ve got a consulting business on the side, you’ve got a contracting business on the side, and you’re trying to do two jobs at once so you can double your income stream. You want to keep your job because you have an office, you have a laptop, you have, you know, expenses that you can get reimbursed for. They give you a cell phone.


See, what happens is we think, “Well, everybody’s doing it, so it can’t be wrong.” Or, it’s an epidemic. Total annual cost to companies is estimated $759 billion a year.

3 WAYS TO LOOK AT YOUR WEALTH

So there are three ways to look at your wealth.

1. WHAT’S MINE IS MINE
Number one, “What’s mine, is mine. What’s mine, is mine.” With clenched fists you say, “I’m going to keep it. This is mine. Don’t talk about it. Don’t ask for it. Don’t expect me to share it or steward it. This is mine. I worked hard for it” or “I inherited it.” The private property thing I agree with. “This is mine. I’ll keep it. What’s mine is mine.”

2. WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE
The other view is, “What’s yours is mine; I’ll steal it. What’s yours is mine; I’ll steal it illegally or I’ll find a clever way to steal it legally.” False lawsuit, false insurance claim, overstate my billing. Bill two clients for the same billable hour. You can get really creative with this. Lie on my taxes, whatever. “What’s yours is mine.” That’s the heart of stealing.

3. WHAT’S MINE IS HIS
The third option is, “What’s mine is his, and I’ll share it. I’ll steward it.” Do you get that? And this concept of stewardship, it’s important. It’s a big theme in your Bible. In fact, when it comes to a pastor in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, the first thing it says is, “They must be a good steward.” Yeah, it talks about their family and their theology and their morality, but it talks about stewardship. They need to be good stewards.

Stewardship is a very otherworldly, countercultural way of seeing wealth as revealed by the God of the Bible, and that is that everything belongs to the Lord. Everything comes from the Lord, everything will return to the Lord, that everything is the Lord’s and that whatever we have, he has entrusted to us to steward.

Imagine if someone in your family died and they left a large estate, and they made you the executor of the will. And in that will it said that you got certain things and that other people in the family were to receive certain portions of the inheritance, and as the executor it was your job to follow the instructions of the owner to distribute the estate. A steward is like that. It all belongs to the Lord; it comes to me. I’m the executor. I get to spend some on my expenses and my family, the rest needs to go back to the Lord’s work. Some of it needs to go to the poor. It needs to be an investment in the future because Proverbs says that a wise man leaves an inheritance for his children’s children. What a steward realizes is, “This is not mine. It’s entrusted to my oversight, and I need to follow the agreement, the terms, that were laid down for the distribution of the assets.”

Christian Giving
A lot of Christians don’t give. Christian Smith did the biggest study on charitable giving in the history of the US. He’s a very noted, high-ranking sociologist. His book Passing the Plate reveals that of those who profess to be Christians, in an average year, one out of five give nothing to a church ministry, para-church ministry, mission organization, or charitable contribution. Nothing. Nothing. “Where your treasure is, your heart is,” Jesus says. Nothing. And a large number of Christians give very, very little.

WE’RE IN DEBT, AND IT’S WORSE THAN WE THINK
How many of you realize that you’re a thief, that you’re in great debt? It’s worse than you think. Not only have we accrued a financial debt to God and others, the Bible says there’s an entirely different category of debt that we’ve also accrued through stealing: sin in the Bible is stealing. It’s actually taught that all sin is a violation of the this commandment.

God made us to love. When we sin and don’t love, we’re stealing. God made us to serve. When we don’t serve, we’re stealing. God made us to share and steward our resources and when we don’t, we’re stealing. We’re stealing the time that God gave us. We’re stealing the breath, the days, the hours, the weeks, the months, the years, the dollars, the relationship, the words, the opportunities.

Every single time, every single time that we fail to invest our life as God, the owner of our life, decrees to give him a glorious return on his investment, we are in sin against God. We are stealing from God. We are accruing a debt toward God.

The Gospel in One Word
Literally translated the word tetelestai means, “It is finished.” The word occurs in John 19:28 and 19:30 and these are the only two places in the New Testament where it occurs. In 19:28 it is translated, “After this, when Jesus knew that all things were now completed, in order that the scripture might be fulfilled, he said, ‘I thirst.’” Two verses later, he utters the word himself: “Then when he received the sour wine Jesus said, ‘It is finished,’ and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”

The Greek word tetelestai was also written on business documents or receipts in New Testament times to show indicating that a bill had been paid in full.

In ancient times when a promissory note was paid, the one holding the note wrote “TETELESTAI” across it. A deed to property was not in effect until it was dated and signed, and when this was accomplished, the clerk wrote “TETELESTAI” across the deed. When someone had a debt and it was paid off, the creditor would write "TETELESTAI" on the certificate of debt signifying that it was "PAID IN FULL".

It is reported in several secondary sources that several years ago, archaeologists digging in Egypt uncovered the "office" of an ancient "CPA." In this office they found a stack of bills, with the Greek word "tetelestai" inscribed across each bill - "Paid in full"!

When Christ gave Himself on the Cross, He fulfilled all the righteous demands of the law and our "sin debt" was PAID IN FULL. The OT sacrifices covered sin but could never take sin away. Jesus accomplished what all of the old covenant sacrifices could not do.

The connection between receipts and what Christ accomplished would have been quite clear to John’s Greek-speaking readership; it would be unmistakable that Jesus Christ had died to pay the complete price for their debt of sin.

"TETELESTAI" conveys
“an ocean of meaning in a drop of language, a mere drop. It would need all the other words that ever were spoken, or ever can be spoken, to explain this one word. It is altogether immeasurable. It is high; I cannot attain to it. It is deep; I cannot fathom it. IT IS FINISHED is the most charming note in all of Calvary’s music. The fire has passed upon the Lamb. He has borne the whole of the wrath that was due to His people. This is the royal dish of the feast of love.”
~ Charles Spurgeon