Consecrated Stewards Start In the Right Place
Ephesians 2:8-10
Greetings from your brothers and sisters in Christ at Zion in Painesville
That’s a lot to digest if you haven’t heard it before. It’s important though as you think about Christian Stewardship to start in the right place. Let me tell you about something that happened in my ministry that helps to illustrate the importance of starting in the right place. When I was on my vicarage, the pastor I worked under had back surgery and I was left to take care of everything for a few weeks. A family had scheduled a Baptism for one of the weeks when the pastor was recovering and the congregation got permission for me to do the Baptism. This would be my first Baptism. Early that morning, I got a call from a member of the congregation telling me that her daughter had delivered a baby that morning and the baby was several weeks premature. They wondered if I could go and baptize the baby in the hospital that afternoon. Wow. I had never done a Baptism before and now I would do my first ones on the same day. Things went well in the morning service as I baptized the first baby. When I got to the hospital in the afternoon, things were all ready for me at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. What an amazing place. Those babies are tiny! The family was waiting for me and took me in. Everything was ready. I had to put on a gown, a mask and the rubber gloves. The nurse gave me a small container of water and a dropper. Obviously they had dealt with this situation before. What an awesome experience it was for me to bring the blessings of Baptism to that tiny infant!
Both babies grew up to be big strapping boys who are now in their thirties. The comforting thing to know is that these boys started out in the right place. On this Consecration Sunday, I want you to think about your Baptism and remember that, like those little boys I baptized, you were saved by grace, freed to serve and called to commitment.
As you think back over that text that I read before from Ephesians 2, you have to remember how it starts out. “By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” This is the place to start. It’s a hard place for many people to start because your human nature would rather have you look to your own accomplishments when it comes to your salvation. You have a tendency to look at your life and what you want to accomplish and you judge yourself by how well you have done. You may have a list of things that you want to get done each day and instead of rejoicing over what you did, you get down on yourself because of the things that you didn’t do. You add those to the to-do list for the next day and so on and so on. You want to be a good, reliable person but you get frustrated when you realize that you just can’t live up to your expectations. The danger in that kind of thinking is that it often carries over to your life as a child of God. You wonder if God could still love someone like you when there are so many things that you have done wrong or so many things that you didn’t do that you should have done. When that kind of thinking gets you down, you need to go back to the beginning and remember your Baptism. It’s said that when Martin Luther was feeling down because of his sins, he would say to himself, “But I’m Baptized.”
Rather than being motivated in your life by guilt, which is often the way of the world, you can be motivated by God’s grace, His undeserved love for you, with an emphasis on undeserved. He has declared us righteous, not guilty, by His grace because Jesus took my place under the Law and kept it perfectly and then died on the cross as the punishment for my sins. Certainly guilt can be a powerful motivator. Humorist Garrison Keillor has said, “Guilt is the gift that keeps on giving.” The problem is it keeps us enslaved. God’s love on the other hand is an even greater motivator because it frees us from that slavery to guilt and frees us to serve, not because I have to, but because I want to.
You have probably seen or experienced this in your life. A teenage boy mumbles and grumbles when his mother asks him to help clean up after dinner and help with the dishes. But that same boy will go over to his girlfriend’s house and when asked to come into the kitchen and help with the dishes, he responds, ‘Sure, I’d love to.” Love can be a great motivator.
God’s love frees you to serve, not because you must, but because you want to. Your life belongs to Him, and it takes on a new meaning when you use it in His service. The freedom that you have is a freedom from the slavery to sin and the Law, and that leads you to use that freedom in service to others as a joyful response to God’s love. It is only as you invest yourself in others that you are truly free. It is only as you give up control of what you think is yours that you are free to enjoy the blessings of being a servant of the Lord.
Here is where the last verse of our text is very important to the whole picture and gives real meaning to the term Consecrated Stewards. Verse 10 adds, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” What follows this blessing of God’s grace, that becomes ours in Baptism and through hearing the Word and receiving the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper regularly, is a life of good works, that God has prepared beforehand as the way in which we live our lives. It often takes some training and direction to know how to live out that life of good works and you have to realize that you also have the devil, the world and your human nature trying to influence you to ignore that important part of your life. That’s why regular use of the Word and the Sacraments, the Means of Grace, is an essential part of your life. We teach that in our Confirmation Classes. It is taught in Bible Classes. It is preached from the pulpit. It’s all part of your Christian training. That would also explain why you would have a special emphasis like Consecrated Stewards and a special Sunday like this. It helps you to root out all of the worldly ideas that make their way into your thinking and it reinforces the Biblical teachings about God’s grace that leads to freedom that leads to commitment and joyful service in your life.
Commitment is a part of your life whether you realize it or not. When you are young you probably had some ideas about what you wanted to be when you grew up. You committed yourself to those goals and you pursued the education and training that it took to achieve your goals. When you got married, you committed yourself to love and cherish your spouse till death parts you. When you made major purchases you committed yourself to payments over a period of years until you paid off your loan. You are now part of the Body of Christ and you have the opportunity to express your freedom through a joyful response to God’s love in your commitment to regularly demonstrating your love with a portion of that which God has placed in your care as a Consecrated Steward. The Commitment process is a way of reminding you of all the blessings that God has given to you, both physical and spiritual. It also is a way for you to think about how you will respond to those blessings. By God’s grace, through the sacrifice of His own Son on the cross, you have been set free to serve and, as a joyful response, you are called to committing yourself and all that God has placed in your care to be a blessing to His church, to your family, to your community and to the world.
It’s not unusual at a time like this that people have questions or reservations about the commitment process. Sometimes people are reluctant to commit themselves. There is a great story from the life of Jesus that speaks to that. It’s the story of Jesus inviting Peter to come out of the boat and walk on the water, just as Jesus was doing. Getting out of the boat was not a matter of figuring out all of the variables about walking on water. He didn’t calculate his weight and the wind and the depth and all the other factors. He simply stepped out in faith. He was actually able to step out to his surprise but as soon as he doubted and took his eyes off of Jesus, he began to sink. Today it is your chance to step out in faith. You begin by starting in the right place, with your Baptism and remembering who you are by God’s grace. The Lord was with you then when you had nothing to offer. He is with you today as you consider how you will commitment yourself to faithful stewardship of all that He has placed in your care. He has already prepared good works for you to do. Consider how you will carry out those good works, not to earn your salvation. That is already yours in Christ. Now you have the opportunity to live out the freedom you have in the Gospel, freedom to serve and freedom to grow in your faith and freedom to commit your life and all of life’s resources to serve the Lord’s purposes. Amen.
Rev. Gerald D. Matzke
Guest Preacher
Grace Lutheran Church
Thompson, Ohio
March 23, 2014
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