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The following message for the moment is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler-Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled, "The Most Remarkable Word in the Bible." The scripture reading of the morning is 1st Corinthians, chapter 3, beginning at the verse numbered 18 through chapter 4, concluding with the

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verse numbered 5. "Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, 'He catches the wise in their craftiness.' And again, 'The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are

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futile.' So let no one boast of men, for all things are yours, whether of Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future. All are yours and you are Christ's and Christ is God's." This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover, it is

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required of stewards that they be found trustworthy. But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore, do not pronounce judgment

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before the time. Before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart, then every man will receive his commendation from God. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this his holy word. Pray with me.

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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. What is the most remarkable word in the Bible? What is the word that speaks about the sovereignty of God and the infinite genius of his creation? What is the word that also has in it our understanding of the grace of God in Jesus Christ, of his

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mission, and of his message? What word contains in addition to these things the doctrine of the Church insofar as its nature and its mission are concerned? And then, above and beyond these ideas, what single combination of syllables also relates the story of human nature, its good and its evil, and speaks finally of

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the end times when Christ will return and all will know the reality of judgment? What remarkable word contains within it our theology, our Christology, our ecclesiology, our anthropology, and our eschatology? That word is stewardship. Now in the Scriptures, the steward is described as one who is the chief

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servant of his master, usually a person of royal power and authority. And this chief person lives as part of his master's own household. He is close and intimate with the master, yet at the same time he is also fully accountable and responsible for all of his efforts in the master's behalf. And finally, the New

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Testament suggests to us that the particular concern of the steward has to do with his master's finances. The word for steward in the Greek in New Testament is "oikonomos." That's the word from which we get our word, "economics." So the steward is the friend of the master who is accountable and responsible and

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who has particular concern for the financial interests of the one he serves. Paul sums it all up in the words of our text. He says, "This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful." Now look first at

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the theological dimensions of this word. The Bible calls us to understand through the concept of stewardship that God is the maker, the creator, and the sustainer of all things, that he's got the whole universe in his hands. Now the Communists say that the world belongs to the workers, and the Socialists say that the

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world belongs to the state, and the Capitalists say that the world belongs to those who are strong enough and smart enough and free enough to take it. But the Bible says the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. And even as it has only one maker, so it has only one owner, whom the psalmist describes as

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high and lifted up, the one who uses the earth as his footstool. This is the sovereignty and created authority of God. Of course, most people don't pay much attention to that authority today, and I could illustrate that from just about every dimension of life, as you very well know. Let me pick one that's very obvious.

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Take the field of ethics. A little boy went to his father and he said, "Daddy, what does the word 'ethics' mean?" And his father said, "Well, son, I don't know how to define it, but let me tell you a story and then you'll understand it. Suppose that your Uncle George and I owned a store, and one day your Uncle George was

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out and a customer came in and he bought an item which cost five dollars. But he made a mistake and put a ten dollar bill on the counter and turned and left. I looked and here it was a ten dollar bill instead of a five dollar bill. He paid five dollars too much. Now, my son, here is where the ethics comes in. I have to

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decide whether I will keep that five dollars or whether I'll give half of it to your Uncle George." And that is the state of ethics in our time. Ethics is a matter of convenience. Ethics is a matter of doing what is the best for us. And ethics is seen in the 20th century as something which is taught to us

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principally by the behavior of others. But the fact is, all things, all things natural and supernatural, all things moral and ethical and spiritual, all things mental and emotional, all things have been made and are sustained by God. And to go against these things is the course of folly. Now let's look at what

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the stewardship word means in its Christological dimension. It's an interesting thing to observe that Jesus is spoken of in the New Testament more often in terms of his being a steward than in terms of his being a master. He's always being described as one who does the will of his Father, who is perfectly

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obedient to his Father. And that's what a steward is. When Paul says, "You are Christ's and Christ is God's," he means you are to be stewards of Christ as Christ is the steward of God. We are to be like Jesus. And we must not forget that in the book of Philippians, Paul says that Jesus did not count equality

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with God as something to be grasped, but he emptied himself and took upon himself the form of a servant, that is, the form of a steward. And just as he emptied himself and served his Father, so we are to be the stewards of God. Gethsemane is the perfect model for us here. It was God's will that his Son

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should die upon the cross for us and for our saving. Jesus wished us to be saved, but could there not be some other way beside the incredibly grisly death of the cross? He earnestly beseeches his Father to be relieved of this. The Scriptures say he threw himself down on the ground and he cried out so loud in

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his prayer that Mark, the young teenager hiding in the bushes, heard it and years later remembered it and wrote about it in his gospel. And you know how that prayer ended. It ended with the words, "Father, thy will be done." That's the response of a faithful steward. We see it exemplified in Christ, always wanting to

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do the will of the Father. There's an old story about a Christian who owned a very precious diamond, and he had a visitor one day and the visitor asked if he could see the diamond. And the Christian got out the diamond and gave it to him to see. And the visitor said, "You know, I'd like to have this diamond.

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I'd like you to give it to me." And the Christian said, "All right, if you want it, you may have it." And the visitor went away very self-satisfied that he had gotten this stone simply by asking for it. But about ten days later he was back at the man's door again and he said to this Christian, "I want to give you your

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diamond back." "Oh?" said the Christian. "Yes," said the visitor, "I want to ask you for something even more precious than this diamond. I want to ask you how you came to be so generous." Well, the way he came to be so generous, of course, was he was a Christian. Jesus Christ was living in him. That's what Christianity is

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described as, and the Scriptures. "For me to live is Christ." And when Christ, the perfect steward, dwells within us, then we become stewards of God that are like him. This is what marks the real Christian from the unreal Christian, the reality of the presence of Christ as it is manifested in the act of stewardship.

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Let's look at the ecclesiological dimension of this word "stewardship." We've just noted that we as individuals are to be stewards, and just so in the Scriptures the whole church is called to be a fellowship of stewards. Paul writes to the Corinthian church, to the congregation, "You are the stewards of the

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gospel of God." The church, you see, does not exist for its own sake. It is to mirror God's love to all the world. Now we all know how many times discord can arise within a church. As I've observed this across my 35 years in the ministry, I've come to the conclusion that it most often happens in congregations which

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have lost their focus, congregations which have forgotten their stewardship. In this, a church is very much like a hive of bees. I don't know whether you're aware of this or not, but the bees in one hive have a different smell from the bees in another hive, and bees are sensitive to this smell. They can

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immediately tell whether another bee is from their hive or another hive, and if that bee is from another hive, they will immediately attack. Well, you say to me, "I haven't seen many bees attacking one another," and that's true, and the reason that you haven't is this. The bees are busy about their business, which is to go

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out and pick up the pollen that is in the flowers, and as they crawl in and out of those flowers, that pollen gets dusted all over their bodies, and that pollen has a very sweet smell. It covers up the smell of the individual hives, two bees can be on the same flower and they will not notice the difference

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between one another because the smell of the pollen overwhelms the smell of their difference. Now Paul says to the Christians who are at Philippi that churches are to be sweet fragrances in the nostrils of God. There is to be no stink of discord within the church, but rather the aroma of unity, and that what

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is that unity directed? It is directed at being faithful stewards of God. The anthropological definition of this word and dimension of this word is also interesting to notice. You see, when you are a steward, you are part of the master's family. You remember I pointed out the steward was very close to the

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master. Just so, a steward took on the image or the responsibility of his master, and we have all been made in the image of God. But too often we allow ourselves to wallow in the dirt. And of course Eden is the preeminent example of this. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were to serve as the stewards of God, and

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they did so, and as long as they did so, there was peace and joy there. But then, blinded by their own self-importance, they decided that they wanted to be gods. And the moment that they did that, the moment that they forgot the image of God which they were to reflect, and instead began to focus upon themselves,

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in the moment they exalted themselves, they lost everything. This is what Jesus is referring to when he says, "If you want to save your life, you'll lose it, but if you're willing to lose your life for my sake, you will most certainly save it." When we are in our full humanity, we are, as the psalmist says, "nothing lower than

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the angels." And the angels respond to God with the highest fidelity and dependability, and that's what we are to do. A friend of mine told me of a member of his congregation who was visiting in one of the church's members' homes. He was going from house to house seeking to get people to give their pledges to the

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continuing work of the church. And this particular gentleman on whom he was calling invited him in and gave him a seat, and then he began to criticize the church, and he ripped it up one side and he ripped it down the other, and he tore apart the ministers and the members and the mission and the program, and he

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concluded this tirade against the church with these words, "All you want is my money." And the caller looked at him for a moment and then said, "Yes, that is true, for that is all you have that the Lord can use." What a sad circumstance when somebody's money is worth more to God than they themselves are. Paul speaks of

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what the nobility of stewards is to be, he says, describing some faithful Christians. "Out of their deep poverty but their great joy, they abounded in their liberality, and this they did because they first gave themselves to the Lord and to us by the will of God." That's in the third chapter of 2nd Corinthians, and

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it says you're a Christian, therefore you are a steward, and when you are a steward you are reflecting God's wholeness, you are reflecting the image of God. Here is Christian anthropology in two sentences. We are nothing when we try to be something. We are everything when we surrender ourselves to whatever God

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would have us to be. And the word "stewardship" calls us to the remembrance of this. And finally, look at the eschatological dimension of the word. The word "eschatological" refers to the end times, to the conclusion of history, to the final judgment, and stewardship is related to that. In 1st Peter we read

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these words, "The end of all things is at hand, therefore love one another and use your gifts as good stewards of God's grace." Now we are not saved by our stewardship. We are saved by the fact that God in Christ has taken away the burden of our sins if we come to him in faith believing. This is what saves us. We

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often hear someone say, "It is faith alone that saves." True. But the faith that saves is never altogether alone. It always works itself out in good deeds, in stewardship. And this is what James means when he says that faith without works is dead. Jesus illustrates this parabolically in the 12th chapter of Luke.

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He tells there about a master who returns very suddenly and unexpectedly, and he's going to honor one of his stewards, one who has done the best for him, one he discovers to be doing his utmost when he makes his sudden return. And which one does he honor? Listen to what Jesus says in his story, "The

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faithful and wise steward whom the master will exalt is that steward who is laboring diligently for his master." You see, the God who gives much expects much. We all face three judgments in life. First, we are judged by other people, and that may be an accurate judgment, or it may be a very inaccurate judgment

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because people can be very evil. Then we also face a judgment when we judge ourselves, and that too may be an accurate judgment, or it can become very perverted if we are full of pride and self-satisfaction. But there is a third judgment, and that is the judgment of God. And that judgment is perfect because God

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knows all the circumstances of our lives and all the secrets of our hearts. This is what Paul means when he writes in the passage before us today, "It is a very small thing to me that I should be judged by you or by any human court. Just so I do not judge myself. It is the Lord who judges me. He brings to light what is

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hidden in darkness." And what is the Lord's standard? Paul tells us that, too. "It is required of stewards that they be found faithful." What is the most remarkable word in the Bible? It's the word "stewardship," because it holds our theology, reminding us of the sovereignty of God and our responsibility to him. It

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speaks of our Christology, pointing out that Christ was a steward and that we are to follow him as our model. It speaks to us of our ecclesiology, when it calls the whole church to be focused together in a fellowship of stewardship. It includes our anthropology, because it says that when we as humankind seek to

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save ourselves, we will be lost. And it's when we lose ourselves in the service of others as stewards that we will be saved. And it includes in it also our eschatology, for it declares that at the end of time we will be judged by God himself, and the measure which he will hold is the measure of stewardship. What

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a glorious privilege it is to be a steward of God. All those who are trustworthy in their stewardship will be marvelously blessed. Stewardship is, you see, the blossom of our believing. It is the flower of our faith. It is the rose of our religious commitment. And all of Scripture tells us that we are to lift

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that blossom, to lift that flower, to lift that rose to God, to our Father in heaven, for he is the one who gave it to us in the first place. So he is the one to whom we should give it as faithful stewards. Let us pray. [music]

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Take then this rose, this little tender rose, the rarest flower in all your garden care, and let it be while yet it crimson goes. And in the palm of love I proudly, proudly bear. [music]

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Take then this heart, the heart that loves me well, and let it play before thy shrine, my own. Make thou my heart, for all your dear eyes dwell. You passion live for me, for me alone. You passion live for me, for me, for me alone. [music]

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Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]