The Bethany Bullet - Week of September 25, 2016

“Follow the Leader…Lead the Followers”

Text: 1 Timothy 6:6-10, 17-19

Can you picture Archie Bunker or Pete, Goofy’s neighbor, saying, “I brought you into this world and I can take you out of this world!”?  This would have been said in order to intimidate.  Paul says, “We brought nothing into the world and we can take nothing out of it.”  In order to have us imitate our Lord. 

Yet, more than likely, we tend to act like the scoundrel in Luke’s parable.  The one in chapter 16 who was about to get fired from his job because he had been cheating his boss; then just before the proverbial axe fell he renegotiated the debts of all his masters debtors so that he might gain pleasure with them and protection for himself.   At least one truth to be told in this parable is that, by nature we are inclined to do just about anything to take care of ourselves even if it means causing pain to others. 

Not so with our God, He acts on His own - in order to take care of us, at tremendous cost and pain to himself, He does the only thing that can be done; and He is the only one who can do such.  In Jesus, God pays our debt.  Not gold or silver at that, but the holy, precious blood of Jesus and His innocent suffering and death. 

It was after Paul told Timothy that, “We brought nothing into this world and we can take nothing out of it” that he reminds Timothy this truth, “You belong to God.”

Those words were not written about Timothy alone!  You too, by grace through faith, belong to God!  If we belong to God, what does that say about that which “belongs” to us? 

It’s His…all His!  In our “Blueprint” here at Bethany we’ve set Giving Proportionately as a core value among us.  When we return to God a first fruit gift, off the top, from that with which we start upon payday rather than that which we have left at the end of the week, we are confessing that it is His, all His; and is there any better way to imitate Him who gave everything for us and the world, “into which we brought nothing and from which we can take nothing.”?

-Pastor Kevin Kritzer