Well I was going to call this sermon, “Your Money or Your Life”.  Do you remember, some of you, that old Jack Benny routine?  A robber with a gun comes up to Jack Benny, the comedian, and says, “Your money or your life.”  And Jack Benny doesn’t say anything.  So the robber says again, “Your money or your life.”  And Jack Benny still doesn’t say anything.  So the robber says one more time, “Your money or your life.”  And Jack Benny says, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”           

Well I thought about using that, “Your Money or Your Life”, in a more serious vein, as the sermon title for today.  I’ve used it as a sermon title before, elsewhere.  But then I heard about the experience of a friend of your former Senior Minister, now retired, Brian Bauknight, and this friend attended another church on its stewardship Sunday, and the title of the sermon was “Your Money or Your Life”, the only problem was that the title of one of the hymns for that day was “Take My Life”.  And I saw that that was going to be one of our hymns for today.  So I didn’t use that as the title.           

But I do love the words to this hymn, “Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee.  Take my moments and my days; let them flow in ceaseless praise.”  And in verse two, “Take my silver and my gold; not a mite would I withhold.”  The writer of this is talking about us taking various aspects of our lives, taking various things that are part of our lives, and using them to glorify God, or really it’s about God allowing us to be used, God giving us the opportunity to be employed to the fullest extent possible in this life.  It’s about us using our lives, using our life.  Take my life, O God, and let it be consecrated, let it be filled with your power and your purpose.           

I saw a cartoon where there’s a meeting of the Finance Committee of a church, and it’s obvious that they’re discussing the budget and the minister’s salary.  And one of the committee members speaks up and says, “Whatever we decide about the minister’s salary, let’s keep in mind all those sermons he preached last year on the simple lifestyle.”           

But it is a lifestyle, and it is a life that we are allowing God to form into something great and good; it is a life, it is our whole life that’s at stake; our whole life that we want to consecrate to God.  It is our whole life that we want to use to share God’s amazing grace with others.           

I heard of a minister who knew a man by the name of Tracy.  And this man, Tracy, committed a crime, and he admitted his guilt and was sentenced to prison.  I don’t know what the crime was, but Tracy went to prison.  When he was first arrested, Tracy called from jail and asked this minister to come and visit him.  He was depressed and suicidal.  And so the minister began to visit with him weekly, and pray with him, and tell him of God’s love and forgiveness.  And one day, this minister prayed with Tracy as Tracy finally believed in God’s love and placed his trust in Jesus Christ.  And he was a changed man after that.  And once he was out of prison and attending this minister’s church, Tracy would often say to this minister, “Thank you so much.  You saved my life.”  And the minister was obviously uncomfortable with his saying this, that he had saved Tracy’s life, so he always responded with, “No, Tracy, I didn’t save your life.  God saved your life.”  But Tracy always answered, “I know that God saved my life.  But you were the one who showed me God’s love.”  You were the one who showed me God’s love.           

I know that it’s not easy all the time, I know that there are other uses to which we might put our time, other ways we might spend our money, I have those demands on my time and on my money the same as you, but I desperately want to be a person who shows God’s love to other people and to the world, I desperately want that to be my life, and I desperately want it to be yours.  Take my life and let it be consecrated Lord to thee.            

This is the beauty of the church, I think, because we bring here all that we have to offer to God, all our gifts, all our talents and all our resources, and we place them here, and then we together as the church use these gifts to share God’s amazing grace with others.  As the church, we do together what we cannot do alone.  By ourselves, there is something always beyond us, something transcendent, something that we simply cannot reach on our own.  But when we are together, when we’re together, when we work together, when we put our gifts together, we catch little glimpses and gleams of this transcendence, we begin to see this transcendence, God, at work in our lives.           

One of my favorite lines in this hymn, “Take My Life”, is right there in the first verse, “Take my hands, and let them move at the impulse of thy love.”  Take my hands.  When I think of that verse I think of Beethoven.  There’s a story about Beethoven, the composer, who heard one day that a friend of his had lost his son to an illness.  Now Beethoven was never known for his social graces, and because he was going deaf later in his life, he found most conversation awkward and humiliating.  But when he heard of the death of his friend’s son, he hurried over to the man’s house, and overcome with grief, but with no words of comfort to offer, he simply went over to the piano that was there and poured out his emotions with his playing.  And his presence there with his friend was not only moving; it was eloquent.  Take my hands and let them move at the impulse of thy love.           

There is a church apparently in London, we’ve never visited it, but it’s an old church in London that was pretty heavily damaged during the bombings during World War II, and then after the war it was restored.  In the church, there was this statue of Jesus, and he was standing there with his hands out, as if to beckon people to him.  Well during the bombing, the statue was damaged, specifically the arms and hands of Jesus were broken off, the statue of Jesus was still there, but the hands were gone, destroyed. And after the war, when they were reconstructing the church, there was a discussion about what they should do with the statue.  Should they try to restore the statue?  And the decision was made to leave the statue as it was, without replacing the hands of Jesus, but then placing on the pedestal below the statue the words to that poem by Annie Johnson Flint: 

Christ has no hands but our hands

To do His work today,

He has no feet but our feet

To lead men [and women] in His way;

He has no tongues but our tongues

To tell of how and why He died,

He has no help but our help

To bring others to His side.           

Over these last few weeks or so leading up to Consecration Weekend, we’ve been talking about grace, this powerful love that God has for each one of us even though we’ve done nothing to deserve it, we cannot do anything to earn it; this relentless love that God blesses us with, that God shares with us.  And then the question becomes what do we do with this love that God bestows on us, what do we do with this grace that God shares with us?  Do we hoard it all for ourselves?  Do we bury it in the ground, so that hopefully it will be there when we need it?  Or do we share that love, do we share that grace, do we invest it, do we invest what we have, do we invest what we’ve been given, our time and our energy and our resources, do we invest these things, invest them in this church for example, invest it here, so it can be used to help people connect with God and follow Jesus, as our vision statement says.           

Mother Teresa used to say, “I am a little pencil in the hands of a writing God sending the message to the world that I love you.”  In the ways God has so amazingly graced us, in the ways God has so wonderfully blessed us, in what we have and in what we are, I don’t know about you, but I want to be a little pencil in the hands of a writing God sending the message to the world that I love you.