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[Music] People Moving Power presents Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. His message, "Concerto for a Bass Drum." [Music]

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[Singing] Lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, Where moth and rod, stock or rug, And where chains break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in the sky, For where your treasure is, there will your

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heart be also. Let us give reverent attention to the reading of God's word as it is recorded in the second book of Corinthians, a portion of the eighth chapter and a portion of the ninth chapter, beginning in both chapters at the verse which is numbered one.

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We want you to know, brethren, about the grace of God which has been shown in the churches of Macedonia. For in a severe test of affliction their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of liberality on their part. For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means of their own free will, begging

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us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints, and this not as we expected. But first they gave themselves to the Lord and to us by the will of God. Accordingly we have urged Titus that as he had already made a beginning, he should also complete among you this gracious work. And then reading from the ninth chapter, "Now

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it is superfluous for me to write to you about the offering for the saints, for I know your readiness of which I boast about you to the people of Macedonia, saying that Achaia has been ready since last year, and your zeal has stirred up most of them. But I am sending the brethren so that our boasting about you may not prove vain in this case, so that you

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may be ready as I said you would be, lest if some Macedonians come with me and find that you are not ready, we be humiliated, to say nothing of you, for being so confident. So I thought it necessary to urge the brethren to go on to you before me and arrange in advance for this gift you have promised, so that it may be ready not as an exaction, but as a

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willing gift." The point is this, "He who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must do as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that you may always have enough of everything

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and may provide in abundance for every good work. As it is written, 'He scatters abroad, and he gives to the poor, his righteousness endures forever.' He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your resources and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way for great generosity, which through

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us will produce thanksgiving to God." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his holy word. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The last word of counsel which the minister gave to those going out on the Everymember canvas was, "As you go up the walk to make the call, be sure

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to pray." That afternoon, one of the ladies who had been making visitations called him on the telephone and said, "You know, Pastor, you told us to pray as we were going up the walk. I'm just calling to tell you that it worked. I prayed as I went up every walk that there'd be nobody home, and nobody I was supposed to call on was home." Well, I can understand

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how the lady felt. It's a difficult thing to talk to people about their stewardship, about their offering of themselves, their time, their treasure, their talent to their God. It's not hard to do this because there's not much about it in the Bible, because as a matter of fact, there's a great deal about it in the Bible. Jesus spoke more about our

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use of our material blessings than he did about prayer, or about the kingdom of heaven, or about repentance. And it's not difficult to talk about stewardship because it's an abstract concept which is difficult to concretize. Again, Scripture is very precise, one might say painfully precise. God expects of every obedient child the gift of the tithe. He expects

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one-tenth. That is spelled out so indelibly and so indisputably that no one can legitimately dispute the claim. It's very clear. And it's not hard to talk about stewardship because it's difficult to find illustrations of how it affects a life, because some of the most exciting things that happen in any congregation happen in the lives of tithers and are, to

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a very large degree, dependent upon their stewardship as evidenced in that tithe. That's not what makes it hard. What makes it hard is that people get uptight when you start to talk to them about their money. The pulpit has a double function, you know, to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. And I don't think any minister who isn't

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somehow sick down inside enjoys that latter role, even though sometimes he is called upon to perform it. So when it comes time every year for me to preach stewardship sermons, I throw myself with particular zeal upon the Holy Spirit. Of course, we are always to depend upon the Holy Spirit in the preparation of our messages. A little girl was watching her

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father write his sermon. She said, "Daddy, does God tell you what to say?" He said, "Yes, dear, he does." Well, then she said, "Why is it when you're writing your sermon you erase so much?" Well, we all erase too much. But I'm earnestly hoping and very zealous that I don't erase too much today. See, it's especially difficult to talk to you about

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stewardship this year. It's always hard, but it's particularly hard now because, well, in the first place, because of the wonderful campaign in April for the new building. Your response to that was nothing short of fantastic. And it's hard also because you're doing so much better than most congregations. The level of giving in this congregation is much beyond

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that of the average Presbyterian congregation and of the average congregation of any denomination across the face of this country. But the plain fact of the matter is that the vast majority of our people are still not tithing. They are still not offering to God what God asks of them. And so I have to speak of the matter. And I determined that in order to be especially

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close to what the Holy Spirit would have me say, that I would go to the Scriptures and I would seek out the fundraising methods of the Apostle Paul. Now, Paul was the greatest Christian who ever lived. Paul bore on his own body the marks of his stewardship. Paul could say, "Be ye imitators of me," and not blush when he said it. When most people would

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say something like that to us, we would think them frightfully arrogant or pompous. We don't think that of Paul when he says it. So I thought if I could isolate out of Scripture the things that Paul said to people about their stewardship and then repeat those things to you, then surely this would be the most effective way in which to present the claims of God in Christ

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for you to think about as you approach your stewardship for next year. There is an instance in Scripture, you know, in which Paul's techniques are made very clear. Some of the members of the Church in Jerusalem were in very dire financial straits. And the Church there instructed Paul to go out and seek to raise some money for their relief.

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And in the second chapter of the book of Galatians, we read that he undertook the task with great zeal and enthusiasm. He had a goal, and he liked the goal, and he had the grit to go after it. So all that was necessary was for me to discover what the secret of the fundraising methods of Paul was. I mean, here was a man, you see, who could thrill like a trumpet when

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he said, "I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto..." And here was a man who could ring like a bell "Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory? Thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus." And here was a man who could hum like a harp,

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"Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the..." And here was a man who could sing like a violin, "And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three, but the greatest of these is..." So if I could isolate, you

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see, the way he sounded when he talked about stewardship, I'd have precisely the right approach. Well, to put it very bluntly, when the Apostle Paul talks about stewardship, he is as subtle as a Mack truck, and as gentle as a bulldozer. And to be very frank about it, if one is to

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describe what he says in musical terms, it's not a symphony, it's not an etude, it's not some gentle and sublime sonata. My brothers and sisters, he comes across like a concerto for a bass drum. Let me illustrate that. Take this book of 2 Corinthians, and specifically the 8th chapter. He's writing to the Corinthians about this fundraising campaign on which he's

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engaged, and in the first four verses of the chapter, he tells them about what a wonderful job the Macedonians have done. He actually says that they have begged him to take their money. That's how anxious they've been to give. Then in the 6th and 7th verses, he says, "Now you exceed those Macedonians in just about everything. You exceed them in faith,

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you exceed them in utterance, you exceed them in knowledge, so I'm expecting you also to exceed them in generosity." And he concludes the argument in verse 8 where he says, "I've seen the generosity of these others, now how about you?" Now you see what that is, don't you? That's putting the keeping up with the Joneses principle to work in the area of fundraising.

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That's saying you've got, that's like me saying to you this morning, "Now look, you're not going to let those Grandview Presbyterians outdo you, are you?" I mean, everybody knows that your faith and your prophecy and your utterance and your knowledge are better than the First Methodist Church up here. Aren't you going to be better than they are in utterance

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too and in giving too? If you tried to put that kind of an attitude to music, it might come out on a bass drum in a march cadence. Mark Servan will show us what a march cadence is like. There it is, get in step everybody, you don't want anybody to get ahead of you, they're marching right down the street and you've got to keep right up. And there's the

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man at the front of the parade beating out the time. Look what they're doing and aren't you going to do better? I know a Presbyterian church that publishes how much money everybody gives every year. That's so everybody can try to do better than everybody else. Suppose, putting it in terms of our stewardship emphasis for this year, that I were to say to you,

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"Next year we hope to make advance in mission," which is true. I am going to be presenting a proposal to our missions committee about a man named Bob Scott who is working in the center of the Belgian Congo in a particularly remote area. A man who had a very successful engineering and architectural firm in the southern part of the United States, gave it

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up and went to the Congo about four years ago and has been sick almost entirely since he's been there because of the many diseases that can be so easily contracted in that part of the world. He has poor equipment, he has practically no supplies, he is caught up in a society which steals as much from him as it possibly can, he is rejected even in the

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face of his love, he is seeking in every way he possibly can to serve and is being rebuffed for it and is not getting adequate support from the church or from any of those to whom he is seeking to minister. Yet, I could go out and sit with him in front of his house which has no electricity and no running water, where he and his wife and their three children

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live, and he could tell me of his dream for this conference center at Lake Mounkamba where those in the community who do love Jesus Christ are anxious to come together to serve him. Now suppose I were to present this mission claim which we will be trying to include in our budget for next year in this way. Suppose I said to you, "Until your standard of living

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equals that of Bob Scott, until you are sacrificing as he sacrifices, until you are ready to go out and give up everything as he has given up everything in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, don't talk to me about your stewardship. I mean, I expect you to go beyond him." You're not going to let yourself be outclassed, are you? I don't think you'd appreciate that kind

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of approach. It sounds like something out of a concerto for bass drum. Or look at another method which the apostle uses. This one is in the ninth chapter of the same book. Here he says in the fifth verse, "Now this gift that we're going to get from you is to be a willing gift. I don't want to apply any pressure." But then in the sixth verse he

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says, "But remember, if you don't give, God won't give anything to you. Little seeds get a poor crop. A lot of seeds will get a good crop." And he rounds it off in the eleventh verse where he says, "If you do give, God will abundantly bless you in every way." Give a little and you'll get a little. Give a lot and you'll get a lot. Well, here's the way

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to a surefire investment, isn't it? I was sitting at the table with about eight folks one night and we were talking about investments. One man nodded across the table to his wife who happens to be very big and fat. And he said, "That's the only investment I ever made that grew." Well, here's another one that you can take for sure. "If you don't give,

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God won't give anything to you." All you have to do is give a lot and you're going to get a lot. Now, if you scored that for bass drum, you'd have something that would include both the beating of the drum and what they call a rim shot, which is hitting on the edge of the drum. Show us what that would be like, Mark. See? Tap, tap, tap and you

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get a tap, tap, tap. Boom, boom, boom and you get a boom, boom, boom. Give a little, you get a little. Give a lot, you get a lot. Well, how would you like that kind of approach? Give on the basis of the reward you will receive. Like that nurse that always worked at night. I thought that was very admirable to take the night shift, year after year, that difficult

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shift and to give up her nights. Night after night, I asked her, "Why do you do this?" And she said, "It's because every night I work, I get another jewel in my crown in heaven and after tonight I'll have 7,126 jewels in a row." And somehow that took a lot of the beauty out of it. We desperately need a minister of counseling on our staff. If you were to

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call my office tomorrow morning and ask for an appointment with me about a counseling matter, the earliest date that we could give you is a little over four weeks away. And the schedules of my colleagues are almost as crowded as my own. There are people who are in need. There are also people whose needs are deeper than I or my colleagues can meet.

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They need professional counseling. And professional counseling is extremely expensive. So we would like to add a minister of counseling. We have been studying this program now for about a year and a half and we are going to be proposing that in June of next year, that is after half the year is gone, we will add such a man to our staff. And this man will be available

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to people in accordance with their need. That is, if they have need for counseling, he will be ready to serve them. If they are people of affluence, then they will be expected to contribute toward the cost of this, although much less than you would have to pay if you went out to some professional counselor somewhere else. And if they do not have much of this

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world's goods, then they receive the service for nothing. It is in accordance with their ability to pay. Now suppose I were to say to you this morning, "Now folks, I want you to get behind the campaign for next year because if each one of us now will give a little bit more, you see, then when you need counseling or some friend of yours does, you will be

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able to get it cheap, much less than it would cost you somewhere else. So let's all kick in now and then when our time of need comes, it will be right there." You would not think much of that kind of appeal, and I would not think much of it either. Or let's take a look at another method which is utilized. This one is in the ninth chapter

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also, but it is early in the chapter. Paul says to the Corinthians, "Now I know how ready you are to give." And then in the third verse he says, "As a matter of fact, I have been boasting about how well you are going to do." And then in the fourth verse he says, "So now I'm going to send a few fellows ahead to take up the collection in advance because

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I'd be embarrassed, and so would you, if you didn't come through like I've told everybody that you would." Now, you know, you wouldn't think that anything like that could be said, but read any translation that you want. You know, go back to the St. James Version or any other version that you would like to select and read it, and there it is, just that plain.

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"Lest if some Macedonians come with me and find that you are not ready to give, we will be humiliated to say nothing of you for not coming through." You know, if you compare the eighth chapter of the letter with the ninth chapter, you discover this. Paul said to the Corinthians, "I expect you to give as well as the Macedonians." And Paul said

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to the Macedonians, "I expect you to give as well as the Corinthians." And you know it makes me very happy to find Paul talking like that because I always think of him, you know, as so austere, holy, high and lifted up. And right here I discover him as an old Jew trying to pit one church against another church and get as much out of him as he can.

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And that's very human, and I like that. But how would you like it? How would you really feel about it? If we set that, that appeal to pride, which is what that is, you know, we don't want to be embarrassed, we want to live up to our image. If you set that to a drum, to a drumbeat, there's only one sound you could get and that's the sustained roll.

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Show us what a sustained roll is. And that's all there is to it, just loud and louder. We have an excellent music ministry here at the Glendale Presbyterian Church. As a matter of fact, I can say that I have never heard a better one in any church of our size. Now, the plain fact of the matter is that we pay those who assist us professionally considerably

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less than other churches do. We conducted a survey of all of the churches in our area who are our size, and we discovered that we paid, in some instances, only half as much as these other churches are paying. As a matter of fact, we found many churches with as many as a thousand members less than we have who were still doing better. This is the reason

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that some of our professional musicians are so regularly accosted by my brothers in the ministry who are trying to hire them away from here. Strange kind of fellowship, that. In any case, these people have stayed with us out of allegiance to this church and out of their affection and regard for you. But I want to ask this question. How long can

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we expect them to do that? Now, mind you, they are involved in the financial support of the church. There are members here who are giving just as you are giving and giving their time, just as many of you are giving your time. But here is a way in which they have a special talent which they can use also to augment their family income situation.

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How long can we expect them to stay here at considerably less than they could receive elsewhere? Recognizing, of course, that we could never hire anything of equal quality for what we are paying now. The Bible says, you know, that the workman is worthy of his hire. But how about that? Did you hear about the man that went to sleep and woke up in

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1999? Kind of a modern-day Rip Van Winkle. One of the first things he did was to call his broker. He said, "How's my General Motors doing?" He said, "It's worth $22,000 a share." "That's fantastic," he said. "It's marvelous. How's my IT&T doing? It's worth $64,000 a share." "Well, that's... I'm a rich man. How's my IBM doing?" He said, "Oh, that's worth

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$128,000 a share." He said, "I'm a millionaire. I've got hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's just marvelous." And just then the operator cut in and she said, "For three more minutes, we'll be deposit $5,000." Yeah, we're all caught in a thing called the inflationary spiral. As a matter of fact,

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80% of our budget increase for next year is eaten up just by inflationary items in the area of maintenance alone, trying to keep up the facilities as they should be kept up because they are used constantly now with our program. Well, how long can we expect these people to ignore this? We are called in Scripture to match the excellence of God

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with our excellence. We are to praise him in the beauty of holiness. And how long are we supposed to profit off this beauty of holiness and to be cheap with regard to it? And suppose I were to come on this morning and to say, "Your pride ought to lead you to the place where you wouldn't want anyone to have a better music ministry than good old GPC, so let's

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cough up the gold that's necessary to keep these people here." You wouldn't like that, and neither would I. You see, folks, these three methods which Paul uses, the method of trying to get people to outgive one another, the method of trying to get people to give for what they'll get out of it, the method of trying to get people to give in order to

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inflate their pride and to protect their image, he does not use those methods in any other place in his letters but here. And he uses them in brief mention here because Corinth was the wickedest city in the ancient world, and because he knew full well that he was writing to individuals, some of whom were saved and some of whom were unsaved. And these

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suggestions are put in here to try to reach the hearts of those who have not yet opened themselves to Jesus Christ. But Paul goes on beyond these passages to say, not in a few sentences as is said here, but to say again and again and again with a ringing testimony that once a man is authentically the home of Jesus Christ, that is, once Christ has

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taken up residence in him so that his life is aglow with the power of Christ within, you don't have to argue that man into stewardship. You don't have to use fundraising techniques with such an individual. He is so captured by the love of God that he pours himself out in love for God. The whole essence of Paul's fundraising ministry isn't very good because

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Paul never had to raise very many funds. He was dealing in large measure with Christians who were more ready to give than he was even ready to ask. And it was only when he sought to deal with the world that he adopted for a little while, for such brief compass in the whole corpus of his letters, such brief compass, these techniques. For Christian giving

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comes forth out of Christian loving. And love is born in the heart of a Christian when Jesus Christ is born there. When faith is within, it demonstrates itself in deeds. And if there are no deeds, then that faith is not real. Faith without works is dead. It is like James said, a body without a soul. It's the reason in our giving here at Glendale Presbyterian

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Church we don't hand in pledges. You know what a pledge is? A pledge is one of those things where you look over what you think you'll get next year and you set aside a certain portion of it and you write that portion down on a card and you sign your name and you send it in and we send you statements four times a year to let you know how well you're keeping

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up with what you had pledged. That's a pledge. Any businessman can do that. He can estimate what he's going to make for next year and then make his determination. Anybody who can count can do that. Even the federal government is ready to recognize that kind of giving. You can give three times the tithe, 30%, and they'll give you credit for it. They won't

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hold it against you. It's a legitimate deduction. But we are seeking to reach Christians, those in whom Jesus lives. So we have what we call a faith promise. Faith is built on Him. It's His gift. And a faith promise is where you put down on that card not some proportion of what you think you're going to get next year, but how much the love in you wants to

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give. There may be, as you see it now, no possibility of your being able to give that much. But this is how much love in you says it wants to give. If I could give this much, this is what I'd give. And then you don't sign your name to that. That's a commitment that you've made with God. You just hand in the card with the amount on it. Just that.

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And then throughout the year you pray and you work to ask God to make possible to you what you wanted to give. And to an amazing degree, He does this. We're seeing this every week with the fantastic way in which the money is coming in from that building fund campaign. And anything we had imagined or dreamed of, we're so far ahead of schedule on it because

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God is blessing these faith promises that have been made. These commitments which are nothing other than love responding to love. I guess I don't know any other way to say it, except perhaps to mention that outside of Pittsburgh there's a little hospital called the Suburban General Hospital. I had a friend who had an emergency appendectomy and I was

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visiting him a couple of days later. And just shortly before I arrived there had been an automobile accident just a matter of a block or two from the hospital. A little girl had been hit and was seriously injured. She was dying. And she had to have a blood transfusion. But she had a very rare blood type. And they didn't seem to be able to come upon it. This

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was 20 years ago now. Well, they tried to locate her parents but they couldn't. The only one who was with the child was her little brother, who it happened had the same type of blood. Now, medicine does not take blood from a child. But in this instance it was a question of life or death. And so the little boy was asked and he gave his blood for his

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sister. And after the transfusion was over they wheeled him out into the hall on one of those little carts, you know, that they use. He was as pale as the sheets on which he was resting. His eyes were wide, wide I think with fear, anxiety. A nurse was trying to calm him and comfort him, saying gentle little things to him to somehow ease the tension.

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And he looked up at her and he said, "Nurse, when do I croak?" She said, "What?" And he said, "When do I croak, you know, when do I die?" And he said, "When do I die?" And he said, "When do I die?" We laugh. I guess there's a sense in which it's funny. But that little boy loved his sister so much he was ready to give his life for her. And he said,

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he was ready to give his life for her. And somehow when you view it like that, it isn't so funny. It's love responding to love. You know how that would sound if we put that into a concerto for bass drum? It wouldn't be a rim shot or some strong martial cadence or sustained roll. It would sound like this. You know what that is? That to me is the sound

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of the beating heart of God. That's the love of God shed abroad in the world. Now add to that this sound. That's the heart of a Christian beating in time with the heart of Jesus. That's the blood that's thicker than water. That's the unifying love which can save the world. That's the only kind of beat that leads to the kind of stewardship the servants of Jesus

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know. Let us pray. Oh God, help us to hear the voice of the Lord. Let us pray. Let us pray. Oh God, help us to hear the beating of thy heart. And help us to bring our hearts into time with thee. And with thy love living in us, thy love being shown through us, may the world be saved. And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his love known

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to you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love his peace. you