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Mike Brummel

You Shall Not Steal

Scripture Texts: Exodus 20:15; Leviticus 19:11-13

Heidelberg Catechism: Lord’s Day 42

In our evening sermon series on the Ten Commandments we come tonight to the first of two sermons on the Eighth Commandment, You Shall Not Take Other People’s Stuff.

I have here in my pocket eight daily reminders that I live in a sinful fallen world and that I am a sinful fallen man.  Every time that I have to lock or unlock something I get another reminder of the fall and the universal effects of the fall.  It’s constant and it’s around us all the time.

There won’t be any keys in heaven.  Jesus doesn’t have a huge set of master keys for all the doors in heaven.  No keys, no locks, no codes and passwords.

I have about fifty on-line accounts that all have to be protected with user names, passwords and security questions.  Identity theft is the new stealing and it is huge.  Every password I enter is another reminder that I am a sinner and everyone around me is a sinner.

Four simple words, easy to understand, but not as easy to do as we might think.  The Eighth Commandment is a huge deal.  We are never far from it.

God cares not just about our life (murder) and our purity (adultery, sexual immorality), but also about our possessions.  God has something to say about them, positive and negative.

Many sermons on the Eighth Commandment start out with either a bunch of crime statistics or a bunch of news reports of robberies, business fraud, or corporate crime.

Rather than bore you with a bunch of statistics, I am going to start out with one statistic, the only statistic that matters.  We are all thieves.  Everyone steals.  Every last one of us, and yes that means you and me.  I know we think we are pretty clean on this commandment because we don’t steal from stores or rob our neighbors, but the point of HC Question 110 is to show that when the net is cast it catches all of us.

So now comes the unpleasant part of the sermon.  I have to show you how I know that we are all thieves, that we have all sinned against God in this and we are guilty.  No one gets off the hook tonight.

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What Paul Wants the Romans to Know

Scripture Texts: Romans 1:1-4

Introduction

“Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that He was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.” So said Martin Luther in the year 1545, recounting how he habitually sunk in terror and dread at the thought of the righteousness of God, knowing he was entirely unworthy, that all his works were but hay and straw before the blaze of God’s holiness. But when the Lord opened up the true meaning of salvation to him, that this righteousness was a free gift given to sinners who lay hold of Christ by faith, then all was made new for him and he could not stop speaking about the justifying love and grace of Almighty God. The Lord quite literally changed his tune. And we have something similar, though to a greater extreme, with the apostle Paul. He hated and opposed and persecuted Christ and His church. If you remember Jesus’ words to him at his conversion, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me.” To persecute Christ’s body was to persecute Christ Himself. But this was his life; this was his mission. But what happened? The scales fell from his eyes and he was never the same. Now Paul, with all of his spirit, until the very end of his life, would proclaim the name of this same Jesus to all nations, never tiring of living for and speaking about his blessed Savior. The Lord changed his tune as well. And we see the fruit of this in Paul’s return to Jesus over and over again in this Christ-saturated, gospel-filled introduction to the letter to the church in Rome.

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