Sermons

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Testify!
November 24 , 2002
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
Stewardship Sundy
Acts 4:13-20

This is the first Sunday in a long time I will NOT say “Turn with me to Genesis…!” Last week we completed our series on the early chapters of Genesis.

We have just this one Sunday, and then next week we plunge into Advent. Today, we are going to pause to look at one passage from the New Testament very briefly, and I want to give you a little context for this story.

The story comes from the book of Acts, and the setting is this:

The resurrected Jesus has gone to heaven for the final time, but has sent the Holy Spirit to come upon the early church…and some amazing things begin to happen. One of those things happens to Peter and John, two of Jesus disciples and leaders in the early church.

In Acts 3, a man who has been crippled for many, many years is healed just outside the temple in Jerusalem through the ministry of Peter and John, and in the name of Jesus. This creates a huge stir amongst the people, and folks come running to gather and see what had happened.

This, in turn, gave Peter and John opportunity to share the message of Christ with many people, and in fact some 5,000 people ended up believing! Because of this, the Jewish authorities there in Jerusalem were very disturbed. They called Peter and John in on the carpet, and grilled them. Peter and John stood in front of them, and told them the same things they had told the large crowed. Read with me now in Acts 4:13-20.

As Phil mentioned, it is Stewardship Sunday at Bethany. Historically in the church (any church), Stewardship Sunday has meant the Sunday that the community of God is called to be faithful in their financial giving, so the ministry of Christ through the church can continue …and so, on a practical level, the leaders of the church can prepare a budget and dream about the following year... And so, we have this way of bringing our “pledges” for the following year, an estimate of what we feel like God is leading us to give.

It’s important, and we are going to do just that in a little while.

Through the years, I’ve given many sermons on Stewardship, on Stewardship Sunday. I’ve always tried to be careful to talk not JUST about stewardship of our money, but the stewardship of all of our lives. I had a message like that started. In fact, it was going to be good. Maybe even scintillating!

This month, I’ve been reading through the Bible. This was motivated by our trip to China. In China, at each of the underground church leadership schools we visited, we were struck by the fact that many students would introduce themselves with two names. They’d say, “My name is such and such (Chinese), and my Bible name is…(Caleb or Joshua or Peter).”

After we’d heard this a few times, I asked our interpreter (Peter!): How do the students get a “Bible name?” Did they just choose a favorite character? Peter said that’s how it used to happen. But now, they have to EARN the right to choose a Bible name. And the way they did that…was to read through the Bible, the entire Bible in one month. For twelve months! So in one year, they would read through the Bible twelve times. Then they could choose a name.

So, in November, I decided I’d try to do that just for one month. I confess to you, I am woefully behind. However, I have read through a good portion of the Old Testament, and I have been struck over and over by the sense of stewardship that is communicated there.

The strong stories, the admonitions of Israel’s leaders, the repeated calls form God Himself might all be summarized like this:

• DON'T just bring God the surplus.
• DON'T just bring God the leftovers.
• DON'T just bring God the 2nd or 3rd best, or what you don’t really want anyway.

No, bring the First, bring the Best, bring what you WOULD want…bring it to God. In the Old Testament, that meant the first sheep, the best of the flock, the best crop, the first of the harvest, the first of one’s wealth. They even had a special way of dedicating the first child of the family to God. So there is an element of stewardship that means we bring our tithes to God out of sheer OBEDIENCE.

And that’s what I started working on for this morning. But I stopped and couldn’t keep going, because I was so struck by something else. We give our money, our time, our lives…not ONLY out of OBEDIENCE…but also as a GRATEFUL RESPONSE for what God has given us. We respond to the ways in which God has found us, the times and places he has met us.

And if there is one thing I have been overwhelmed with here at Bethany this fall…it is story after story of how God has met people in this community recently. It’s one of the huge privileges I get as a pastor, to hear the stories of where God has met YOU. All sorts of different stories. People coming to Christ for the first time, people finding God in the midst of pain and difficulty, story after story.

And what seemed right for this morning … was to share just a few of these stories together, to TESTIFY to God’s work in our lives, to POINT one another to Jesus. Listen again to what Peter and John said: “For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” And neither can we. So this morning, there are a few friends who have said they’d be willing to share a bit of their “story,” of the places God has met them recently.

Thank you to Mig Schaaf, Keith & Sara McMahon (in their dedication of daughter, Faith Emilie), Laurel Mackintosh, John Compatore, Agnes Coit, Nancy Woodland, Tom Croteau, Jeff & Meredith Kind, and Patti Croteau for sharing with us.