“Where Is Your Treasure?”

Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
On November 7, 1999

 You yourselves know, brothers and sisters, that our coming to you was not in vain, but though we had already suffered and been shamefully mistreated at Philippi, as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in spite of great opposition.  For our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts.  As you know and as God is our witness, we never came with words of flattery or with a pretext for greed;  nor did we seek praise from mortals, whether from you or from others, though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ.  But we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.  So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.

         I Thessalonians 2: 1-8

Here’s a story about direct lines to God, Billy.  I guess the pastor can’t help but love the stewardship chairman.  I have grown to love Billy Anderson even more in the time that he has served the session in this position.  I am so grateful for his leadership and for the enthusiasm that he has brought to this work. 

A reporter was in Alabama to announce a football game one weekend.  He was sitting on the bench with the Alabama team, and as he sat there he noticed that there was a telephone, a red telephone, with the line running out and up to the top of the stadium.  He turned to a player and said, “What’s that for?”  The player said, “That’s the Alabama direct line to God.”  The reporter said, “Can I use it?”  The player said, “You can, but the coach charges a hundred dollars for anyone to use that phone.”  The reporter thought about it for a minute and decided, “Well, there are a few things I want to ask.”  So he pulled a hundred dollars out of his wallet and picked up the line and was connected with God.  That week when he wrote his sports story about the game, it was the best story he had ever written in his life.  The next week he was in Athens, at the University of Georgia.  He was seated with the team so he could write his story while watching the game.  He noticed there was red phone on the bench with the cord going out.  He turned to a player and asked, “Is that a direct line to God?”  The player said, “It sure is.”  The reporter asked, “Can I use it?”  He answered, “The coach charges a hundred dollars for anybody to use that phone.”  The reporter, remembering his experience the week before, pulled out his wallet and a hundred dollars.  He used the phone and was connected to God, and that week he wrote the best story he had ever written, even better than the week before.  The third week he was in Gainesville.  He was seated at the bench in Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, and he looked and, sure enough, there was the red phone all over again.  He turned to Coach Spurrier, seated there with him, and he said, “Is that phone a direct line to God?”  Spurrier said that it was.  The reporter said, “ I want to give you a hundred dollars so I can make a call.”  Spurrier said, “Oh, it’s just thirty-five cents.”  The reporter said, “Well I was in Alabama two weeks ago, and Georgia last week, and it was a hundred dollars each time from those two places!”  Spurrier said, “When you’re calling from Gainesville, it’s a local call!”

What is God’s telephone number?  It’s 1-800-PRAY.  Billy’s right.  God is just a prayer away.  Last week we remember the book of Deuteronomy taught us that the Bible says that God is very close to us, as close as our mouth.  As close as our heart.  Some of you may be feeling at times like you’re dialing and you keep getting a busy signal.  But the Lord told me to tell you that you are getting through.  Jesus assures us that when we pray, God listens.  Even when we are not sure our prayers are being heard, God hears us.  Because God desires a personal relationship with us.  God desires to be connected to us.  God desires a relationship that speaks of a profound personal knowledge and connection.  A relationship like the one that Paul describes in this letter to the Christian community there in Thessalonica.  It’s a community he had lived with for a number of years.  Not only had he lived there with them, but he had worked there in their midst, making tents.  And while he had been there with them, he had preached the gospel in the synagogue.  Now, at a distance, Paul is writing these people that he had shared life with.  He is saying to them, “I was there with you.  So deeply did I care for you that I was determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our very own selves.  Because you were so dear to us.”  In other words, Paul had been working there with them, and preaching amongst them.  And now he reminds them, “Remember when I was there with you, I wasn’t just preaching to you, but I was personally involved with you as your friend, sharing my own energy and care in the things of your life.” 

So it is with God.  So it is with us.  God is closer than a phone call away.  As close as a prayer.  And desiring to have something more than just a formal see-you-in-church-next-week relationship, God desires to have a relationship marked by commitment and personal familiarity and giving.  On the one hand, this giving relationship involves God giving to us; so we know that the heart of God’s gift to us is the gift of Jesus Christ, in his life, in his death, and in the life everlasting.  God also gives to us each day the gifts of his word, and God gives us his encouraging and his guiding spirit, and God gives us his promise of life to come.  On the one hand, in this relationship, there are God’s gifts to us.  On the other hand, the relationship speaks of our gifts to God.  It involves our giving enough of our own time and our own energy to seriously cultivate our relationship with God.  It involves giving in our lives, in service, in giving our very lives in service and purpose to God.  It means our being the responsible agents, the stewards, of what God has entrusted to us during this relatively brief life we have here.  It means our being good stewards of what God has entrusted to us.  It’s so easy for us to forget this.  It’s so easy for us to think in terms of what will we give God out of what we have.  But of course, the truth is that everything we have, including this life, including our families, including all of our financial and material resources, comes from God.  We’re just kind of managing it until God calls us back home.  It is all going back to God.

Naked I came into this world, says the Bible.  Naked I will return.  The Book of Job says, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

The question is not “What will God get from us?” because by design God gets a hundred percent back of everything God gives.  By design, every human that God gives unto the world will return to God.  The question is not “What will God get from us?”  That was decided at the event of creation.  The question is “What will we do during the relatively short time that we are the managers of it, with the lives and things that God has entrusted to us?”  Will we act like we are willing to share our things with God and with the people of God?

So Paul said to the church in Thessalonica, “I am ready to share with you not only the gospel but even my very own self.”  Even we ourselves.  And Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” 

Where is your treasure?  Where is your heart?  What is precious to you?  Have you placed your treasure in a CD down at the bank? 

Across the centuries, the Christian community has learned that God has given us some tools to help us in our giving.  Tools that enable us to be the best stewards we can be.  Tools that enable us to enter into this relationship with God.  One of those tools is the gift of proportionate giving.  The principal that when we give, it ought to be proportionate, and classically the measure of that proportion has been a tithe, or strictly a tenth.  But the notion of a tithe is supposed to be broader than that.  It’s tied to giving some regular proportion in the way in which we have been blessed.  What does it mean for Bill Gates to give a tenth of his resources?  What’s more substantive is the notion that our giving to God ought to be some proportionate percentage of what God has entrusted to is a sign that we know from whence it comes. 

The Christian community has learned that giving is healthy.  Giving is strong when it is regular giving.  When it is an ongoing, habitual, disciplined pattern, not just a sporadic move out of the generosity of the moment occasion, but rather regular giving when we feel like it and when we don’t feel like.  It seems to build up our relationship with God and our connection with God. 

The Christian community has learned that giving is best and richest when it is faithful giving.  What does it mean to be faithful in giving?  Giving that involves some act of faith.  Giving that involves some risk, some sacrifice.  Some venture on your part.  It takes something of what’s precious to you and turns it over to God for God to use.

When I was in Haiti in September at the Presbyterian and Episcopal Medical Clinic there, on Sunday morning I had the privilege of going to worship.  I thought that the administrator of the hospital, who is a Haitian gentleman we call Dickens, would take us to one of the churches there in the villages, and there several -- one of the either mud walled churches or one of the concrete block churches there . But instead, we got in the land rover and went out down the road, through the village, up the side of the mountain, up the dirt road, past the banana and orange trees, up until the road got smaller and smaller.  Then he parked on the side of that dirt road and we got out, the three of us who went with him.  We hiked through a path into a clearing.  There, on a wooden frame, was a kind of a sanctuary.  The roof was covered with palm branches.  The sides of the sanctuary were made of sheets and old towels that the congregation had tied up.  There were spaces in between where the sun and the air were coming through.  Inside there were logs set up as benches.  We went in and there were about thirty-five people there – they were all dressed better than I was.  They were all dressed in the finest clothes they had, and it was very humbling.  The service lasted for about two hours, and the whole thing was in Creole.  I could make out parts of it.  The preacher preached on the story of the prodigal son.  The children came forward and shared together in a kind of a children’s sermon.  They took up the offering and I thought, “How can these people, who are so desperately poor, have anything to give?”  They prayed and they sang hymns – the words I didn’t know, but the melodies I understood.  Then they took up another offering!  I thought, “How embarrassing!  The pastor forgot he had already taken up the offering!”  So I leaned over the interpreter and said, “This is the kind of mistake I would make back in Tampa.”  She said, “No, they are supposed to do this.  The first offering they take up is for the support of the church and this facility and their work.  The second offering they take up is for the poor.”  I thought if these are not the poor, then who are the poor?  In my confusion I turned to the translator and said, “Where do they get it from?”  She turned to me, a little confused herself, and said, “Well, they get it from God!”   And that’s the truth!

Naked I came into this world and naked I shall return.  Faithful giving is giving as an act of faith, involving some risk or sacrifice.  Jesus said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”  And the Christian community has learned that the richest relationship in giving comes when giving is personal.  Paul says, “I am ready to share with you not just my preaching but also my very own self.”  Which means to share your care, your energy, your time, to make yourself vulnerable, to be willing to call on the phone, to pray for each other, to be willing to eat lunch together, to spend your time together.  The stuff your life is made of.  To make your treasure available to each other.

A friend of mine from North Carolina shared a story with me this week.  He said there was a Floridian who left Tampa and came up to Black Mountain.  While she was there, she was doing some antique shopping.  She went around to the shops, and at one shop she found a chair that reminded her of a chair that had been in her home when she was a little girl.  A chair just like the chair her father had sat on.  It was well crafted, and a simple wood, but a beautiful chair.  When she looked at the price tag, she saw that it was more expensive than she and her husband had agreed she would spend on any one item while she was there.  So she went back to the hotel, and in thinking about it, she sent her husband a telegram telling him about the chair and how it reminded her of her father’s chair, and she wanted consent to go ahead and buy it.  A telegram came that night, and she was thrilled when she opened it and inside it said, “No price too high!”  How pleased she was.  She bought the chair and had it wrapped.  It went back with her to Tampa on the train.  After she got home, they went inside.  She unloaded her luggage and was showing her husband what she had gotten.  She unwrapped the chair and said, “Here is the chair!”  He looked at it, and she noticed his face seemed a little upset.  Then when he looked at the price, his face got bright red.  She said, “Why are you angry?  You sent me the telegram that said ‘No price too high.  I was so thrilled by that!”  He said, “That’s not what I said.  What I said was ‘NO!  Price too high!”

It’s amazing what a little punctuation will do, isn’t it?

There’s this wonderful line in Thessalonians where Paul says, “I would not have you ignorant, brethren.”  I always had a professor who translated it, “I would not have you, ignorant brethren.”

No price too high.  We can look at the opportunity God gives us in the year ahead, the opportunities to give.  We can look at the proposed budget at the church and all of the opportunities to be agents of Jesus Christ in the world and the funds that will take.  We can look at that and say, “No!  Price too high!”  Or we can step out on faith, proportionately, prayerfully, personally, as people who have the privilege of walking with Jesus Christ.  We can enter into this great Christian adventure of giving in the pattern of Jesus Christ, who gave his life that we might have life. 

Billy says he ends most evenings with that wonderful prayer, “Lord, I’ll meet you here.  Same place.  Same station.  Tomorrow night.”

I want to be known as a Christian giver, because there will come a time in all of our lives when the Lord will answer back, “No.  Tonight, John, we’re going to meet at my place.”  And when that happens in my life, and I go to join the Lord, I want Jesus Christ to be able to say about me  “Here’s someone who learned about the character of my giving, even while he was a steward there on earth.”  So may it be with you.  So may it be with all of us. 

©  John T. DeBevoise, 1999.