Generosity

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here today. We're in the middle of a series called Fearful Faith, which I know maybe at first glance you go, huh? How does fear and faith go together? I think they actually do. They do. Your relationship to the God who's created everything is not simply one of like, he's my buddy. You know, he's not somebody that's just... You see throughout the scriptures, whenever anyone encounters the living God, in both Old and New Testament, it's not like they're going like, oh wow, isn't that wonderful? You have more of a woe. The woe is me. I'm ruined. Woe. This is too much. I mean, I've been studying a bit in the book of Exodus and Numbers, and you find when God comes to the Mount Sinai with all the flashing of lightning, thunder, everything, the people are like, Moses, you go up. God asks them all to go up into the cloud and into the fire, and they say, not so much. You go up, Moses. We'll see how that goes for you. But there is that sense of approaching the living God that should make you kind of tremble in your boots or your knees knock or something, but not because he doesn't want you to come close. Not because he is to beat you to be afraid of him, but you to honor and fear him in that sense and trust that he's still inviting you and drawing close to you today. So today we are looking at another commandment. We're going through the 10 commandments in this series, and today it's the simple but profound commandment, thou shalt not steal. You shall not steal. Boom. And like we said with murder a couple times ago, you know, you shall not murder. Well, I haven't killed anybody. Often people will say, you shall not steal. Well, I haven't robbed a bank, and think, OK, I fulfilled this one, right? Not so fast. We will not necessarily talk about all the times you've cheated on some test or kind of clocked out of work a little early compared to when you're supposed to or how you borrowed something from someone and never quite returned it or how many songs or videos you've downloaded. Without, you know, we know. It's kind of like, I think it was Wyatt telling me this morning about the NCAA men's basketball tournament right now. Any of you complete a bracket for that? Any of you have a perfect bracket yet? Nobody does. Nobody does. Zero complete perfect brackets. I think that's kind of like when you go, you list the Ten Commandments. Nobody does. I'm not one up here saying, oh, yeah, I've never, you know, this is. And so you have to understand that the commandments are given because they're telling you you can keep them. They're not given for that. They're given to try to keep us safe, but they're not given saying you'll never break these. You can handle it. No, you can't. No, you can't. In fact, the prophets in Israel, Amos as an example. Many of us think, well, Israel went off into exile. They were finally banned from the land and went to Babylon or to Assyria, the two different times this happens in the Old Testament texts. And it was because of all of the idolatry and all these terrible things that were going on in Israel. And the prophets come back, actually, and talk about the very ordinary, everyday kind of sins that don't even make us blush because we think this is just the way human nature is. And so, like for the prophet Amos, he writes this in chapter eight, hear this, you who trample on the needy and bring the poor of the land to an end, saying, when will the new moon be over, that we shall sell grain in the Sabbath, that we may offer wheat for sale, that we may make the ephah small and the shekel great and deal deceitfully with false balances, that we may buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals and sell the chaff of the wheat the Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob, surely I will never forget any of their deeds. So the merchants in their day were using false scales to sell, you know, give them less and charge more. I don't know if anything's ever changed, have you, you know? When have you, I mean, I'm not trying to pick on anyone, but when have you gone to a car dealer, sorry if you're a car dealer, I understand there are honest ones, but, and felt like you got a fair square deal, right? You just know, this whole system is set up to try to rip each other off in some form or get more out of it, but Amos is saying as well as for us, this is not so, this is not the way God intended. In order to have shalom, in order to have the peace, that word shalom means a lot more than just, you know, absence of hostility, it means wholeness, completeness, such love and community and kind of the fabric being woven through society. You treat each one absolutely fairly, and yet Israel didn't even do that. So we could focus on just the negativity that I've just started with, you know, and yeah, I need to know that I can't keep t...