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- heart for His people and how we are to obey Him in every facet of our life.
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- We don't believe that 75 % of the Bible is now unusable or somehow no longer relevant.
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- We believe that all of God's Word is useful for teaching and for aiding us in our life and walk with Christ.
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- So today, we're going to be on, I can't remember if it's the 7th or the 8th, the 8th.
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- You shall not steal. I should have wrote that down. You shall not steal. It's just four
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- English words. It's a short fence, but it surrounds a vast field, as it were.
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- The 8th commandment is not merely about protecting someone else's wallet from you. It's also about protecting the
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- God -ordained means by which wealth is created, distributed, and stewarded.
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- It's not only a prohibition against burglary and fraud. It's also a holy summons to honesty in how we gain wealth, righteous work, diligent hands, productive lives that glorify the
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- God who gives us the strength in order to labor. Theft, after all, comes in many disguises.
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- Now, of course, there is the overt theft of criminality, breaking into homes, hijacking cars, defrauding clients, skimming money with a software that you created that will only take fractions of a penny, you know what
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- I mean. Pirating digital property, these are visible acts of theft. But Scripture does not allow us to leave it there.
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- God sees theft not merely in what is taken, but in also what is withheld.
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- You can rob a man with a crowbar or with a time card. You can rob a man with, or you can rob your neighbor by picking his pocket or by giving him less than what he is owed.
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- You can rob your family by gambling or grifting, but you can also rob your family by sloth or by half -hearted labor or by laziness in your vocation or by failing to build the kind of future and inheritance that God blesses in His Word.
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- Proverbs 11, 1 says, a false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is
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- His delight. In the ancient world, a false balance meant corrupt business dealings. It meant dishonest scales that gave the appearance of fairness while cheating the customer.
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- But the image runs even deeper than that because God is not just angry at corrupt merchants.
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- He is abhorring the corrupt men, those who do not pursue excellence in their calling.
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- Those who shortchange their employers with idle hours and minimalistic effort because everyone else is doing it.
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- The ones who build careers without character, the ones who use their sloth to extract resources from a company, that is theft.
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- It robs employers, it robs co -workers, it robs companies, it robs the economy of vitality.
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- But more than that, it robs God of His glory because in whatever you do, whether you eat or whether you drink, we do all to the glory of God.
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- So when we do anything half -heartedly, we are robbing from the very epicenter of where all things belong and originate, which is
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- God. So brothers and sisters, my prayer today is that we would have a much wider definition of theft, that in whatever we do half -heartedly, wickedly, sinfully, in whatever we do, even with crooked motives, that we would recognize that that sin is not just a sin unto itself.
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- Your lying is not just a lie. It's robbing from the glory of God.
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- That that wicked business practice, that that secret thing you did, that whatever it is, it's a kind of theft.
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- So in that sense, everyone here is burglars and everyone here, because we've all fallen short of the glory of God, needs to repent.
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- And repentance, let it not be a hurtful thing. Let it be a helpful and a joyful thing, because the greatest thing that can happen to you if you have a cancer is to have it cut out.
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- So go before the Lord who doesn't come at you with a shank, but comes at you with a scalpel and cuts out the things that need to be cut out.
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- Let us together go to the Lord in prayer. Holy Spirit, all of us are thieves and liars.
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- The minutes that I stole this week in idleness or in throwing sanctified pity parties or in being frustrated that an
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- F -350 almost killed me or in whatever, those are moments that I have a responsibility to use for the glory of God, and I didn't.
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- And Lord, we didn't. All of us, all of us have a ledger of theft.
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- All of us have an account balance of things we've taken. Lord, forgive us, please, and help us to live for you joyfully and unto your glory.
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- And Lord, let us live joyfully because we know that on the basis of Jesus Christ that our sins are forgiven.
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- So let us come joyfully to the throne of grace once more this week as we do every week, knowing that in a covenant relationship, there's two parties, and we are the party that always breaks the terms.
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- We're the party that always breaks covenant with you, and every week you welcome us back and you restore us back because of what
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- Jesus did. Lord, let that thought thrill us from our toes to our hair follicles.
