Many people over the two centuries of our nation’s history, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq, have written only the first chapters in the story of this nation’s history of freedom in the ink of their life’s blood.  The test of our character will be found in how we finish what they started.  It’s always that way.  Others have started so much for us, given us a beginning.  How will we finish what was started for us?

Maybe that’s a good place for us to start this morning, in discovering how we finish what someone else started.  Let’s give it a try.  How would you finish this statement?  “God helps those who . . ..”  Now, be careful.  The instinctive response might be to finish by saying, “God helps those who . . . help themselves.”  Really?  After all these years of hearing, studying and celebrating the gospel, is that how we would finish “God helps those . . ..”?  Let’s think again.  Is that the way God works?

It’s certainly easy to get confused.  Our culture worships self-motivated success.  Watching the U.S. Open recently, I was fascinated to hear the announcer make the comment that Tiger Wood’s viewing gallery was beginning to shrink.  The crowds were starting to hang around Phil Mickelson in greater and greater numbers.  Woods is still the number one ranked player in the world, even made $83 million last year.  But, right now, his game is a little off.  And, in this world where you are only as good as your last show, his crowd is beginning to dwindle.  It’s easy to believe that we’re on our own to win or lose. 

Let’s compare that only-as-good-as-your-last-show mentality to the gospel and see what we find.  Jesus is having dinner with tax collectors and sinners, even calling one of them to be one of his followers!  What’s that about?  Unless it’s about something else other than God only helping those who help themselves. 

I have no idea who started the “God helps those who help themselves” line of thought, who said it first.  Whoever said it first, it caught on.  Over time, like so many popular sentiments, it got read back into scripture and then quoted back as scripture until, over time, people have come to believe it to be biblical truth.  When I ask people in public gatherings to share their favorite verse of scripture, someone invariably says, “God helps those who help themselves.”  Yet, in truth, that bumper sticker one-liner is hard to find in scripture.  For good reason.  It’s not in scripture.  It’s just one of those sentiments we’ve wanted to believe so badly that we started believing until we actually held God accountable for promising it, even though he never did.

For the four Sundays in July, we’re going to take a look at the promises God never made.  We’ll hold these popular sentiments up against the Bible and see what’s left standing.  This morning, we’ve found a good place to start.  “God helps those who help themselves.”  Really?  Let’s see what the Bible says.

We started with a great text from the gospel that reveals Jesus’ penchant for hanging out with people whose game isn’t going too well, tax collectors and sinners.  It’s only one example in the gospel of what Paul later celebrates in his wonderful promise from the book of Romans.  We are all very familiar with Romans 5:8, “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (NIV).”  It’s meaning is given clearer definition two verses earlier.  “When we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly (NIV).”  “Powerless,” the scripture says.  It was while we were without any capacity to help ourselves that God, in Christ, helped us.  Here is the gospel.  God helps those . . . who cannot help themselves!

It is important to note that the scriptures do promise God’s blessing on those who wisely use his gift of life.  Matthew 25:14-30 contains the very familiar parable of the talents.  A man leaves on a journey but not before giving three of his servants different responsibilities in the form of talents, a measure of money.  He gives one servant five talents, another two and another only one.  When he returns, he calls each servant to give account of what he has done with the talents.  The one who had five talents and the one who had two had each invested their talents and doubled their value.  The one who had been given only one had buried his in the ground, out of fear of losing it.  The two servants who had doubled their investments received their master’s blessing.  The one who had buried his out of fear of losing it received his master’s very harsh condemnation.  Jesus tells the parable to warn us about the cost of not risking what God has given us out of fear of losing it.  It is a parable of judgment, for sure.  It is also a parable of blessing.

The servant who is condemned is the one who stands out most.  Yet, his story only stands out because it is in such contrast to the stories of the other two.  Their master blessed them by multiplying their gifts, not necessarily because of the wealth they returned to him, but because of their faithfulness to risk what he had given them for a greater good.

When we are faithful to take what God has given us and use it for his kingdom’s sake in this world, God is faithful to come alongside us and bless our efforts and make more of them than we could have made of them ourselves.  This July 4^th Sunday is a good Sunday to ask if we are being faithful with all that God has given us.

Bill Cosby has gotten himself in trouble with some in the black community of late.  Marking the 50^th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education and the 40^th anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights bill, Cosby has used his influence to chastise some for not taking greater advantage of the freedoms those two events have granted them.  It is almost certainly a conversation only he could have within that community.  But, his words challenge all of us.  What have we done with all this freedom we’ve been given, as Americans?

Thomas Friedman writes that he remembers being chastised by his parents to clean his plate by reminding him of all the starving Chinese children who would like to have what he left over.  Now, Friedman writes, he’s challenging his children to finish their homework because there are lots of Chinese and Indian children who will want their jobs someday and who are doing their homework now to get them (Thomas Freidman, “Doing Our Homework,” The New York Times, June 24, 2004).  Friedman only wants his children to be good stewards of their great blessings.  So does God.

Recently, our church has been moving forward toward opening our facilities to a local Charter School and a badly needed after school program.  These will not come without some adjustments and even some level of risk for us.  Yet, how else can we be good stewards of all that God has given us if we do not open the doors of our buildings to the children of this community?  I sometimes imagine God saying, “To some churches I gave five buildings, to others I gave two and to others only one.”  What will we be able to say to him when he calls us to give account of our stewardship of these facilities?

As for America, how will we use our enormous blessings?  More and more, the voices of leading American generals are calling for changes in the way we perceive the use of our military might.  Calling for what may well be the most radical paradigm shift in military thinking in a century, they claim that if we are truly going to defeat terrorism, it will not be by conquering nations but by using our power as an empire of influence to build the political and social infrastructures in which terrorism will not be able to thrive - to export empowerment and hope as much as if not more than bombs and missiles.  (Tom Clancy with General Ton Zinni, retired, Battle Ready, Simon and Schuster, Inc., 2004 and Rod Nordland, “David Petraeus’s Mission Impossible,” Newsweek, July 5, 2004). 

God has blessed America.  What will do with that blessing?  Will God hold us accountable?  No question, if we use it wisely, God will come alongside us to make more of it than we could have made of it ourselves.  Yet, that is not the heart of the gospel.

It may be true that God blesses those are good stewards of his blessing.  That is not the same thing as saying that God helps those who help themselves.  Here is where the gospel begins and ends. 

God helps those who cannot help themselves!  Someone once remarked to me how wonderful it is to watch how God blesses us when we are faithful to him.  What amazes me all the more is how God blesses us even when we are not!

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls on those who follow him to love and pray for their enemies, “that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:44-45).  He blesses those who bless him and those who do not.  To which I say, “Thanks be to God!”  Even I got a couple of inches this past week.  How about you?

Jesus also said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.  I have come to call not the righteous but sinners” (Matthew 9:12-13).  Again, Paul later reasserted the same truth.  Christ died for the “powerless” (Romans 5:6, NIV).  Again, God helps those who cannot help themselves.  That is the gospel!

We have no idea how blessed we all are because that is true.  Some years ago I was stopped at a red light at a major intersection.  I happened to glance across the intersection into the parking lot of a convenience store where the clerk was measuring the gasoline in an underground storage tank.  She’d taken the lid off of the tank and had lowered the long measuring rod into it.  She also had her head directly over the open hole of the tank, staring down into it – with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth!  And, we worry about weapons of mass destruction!  She never knew how blessed she was.  Do any of us?  How many stories are there in all of our pasts – that we don’t even know?  Stories of times God was looking out for and blessing us and we were never the wiser?  God helps those who cannot help themselves!

Years ago, I was sitting at Richard’s Café in Siloam Springs, Arkansas.  This group of local businessman gathered there every morning for coffee.  Most of them didn’t attend church anywhere but, they let me join them for coffee anyway.  They told their dirty jokes and stories, sometimes trying to embarrass me and I just enjoyed loving them and accepting them as they were.  One day, they got to making fun of how preachers are always begging for money and this one crusty old gentleman asked me, “Preacher, how much would a pew in your church cost me?” 

I have to admit that, at times like that, I rarely think well on my feet.  I’ve thought of so many things I could have told him since then.  “How much would a pew in your church cost me?”  I started to give him a figure!  It wasn’t until later that I finally decided what I should have told him.  The pew is free, I should have said, because, well, you know, Jesus paid it . . . ALL! 

That’s how the gospel answers the cost of the pew question.  That’s how the gospel finishes that sentence.  And, this is how the gospel finishes the sentence some unknown person started some long forgotten time ago.  God helps those who . . . cannot help themselves!