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Colin Smith: I want to begin by suggesting a definition of stealing that I think will be helpful for us to take in the challenge of the eighth commandment. It is simply this: stealing is trying to get as much as possible while giving as little as possible.

Steve Hiller: Welcome to Open the Bible Weekend with Pastor Colin Smith. Colin, already I can tell with a definition like that, this is going to be a program that takes us beyond what we normally think of the eighth commandment.

Colin Smith: Stealing the pencils out of the office and that kind of thing. No, I don't do that. The eighth commandment, "Thou shalt not steal," goes way beyond that kind of thing. This is about the issue of being a giver or being a taker. At the very heart of it is this whole business of trying to get as much as possible while at the same time giving as little as possible.

Now, that goes everywhere in the workplace. How many folks who are employed are trying to get as much salary as possible for doing as little work as possible? That's addressed by the eighth commandment. Guess what? How many employers are in the business of trying to get as much as possible from those they employ while giving them as little compensation as they possibly can?

The Bible speaks to that as well. This is right into the real world. What does it mean to steal? What does it mean to take rather than to give? If we can see the application of this into working life, into our worship life, into our church life, and into family life, we're going to see it go all kinds of places that are really very powerful and very searching.

Steve Hiller: It certainly is a much bigger issue than what you may have thought just moments ago. If you can, join us in Exodus chapter 20, verse 15 as we begin the message, Your Struggle for Integrity. Here is Pastor Colin.

Colin Smith: Now, if I was to draw a picture of what comes to mind first with this commandment, and some of the children might like to draw this picture this morning, here is what it would look like. It would be a man climbing out of a window with a hooped shirt and a mask over his eyes and a big sack over his back with the word "swag" written on it. You shall not steal.

I can honestly tell you this morning that I have never in my entire life burgled a house. So, my first instinct is to think that I have kept the eighth commandment. I keep hoping that we're going to get to one of these commandments that will give us an easy ride, at least for one week. But it doesn't seem to be happening.

We're discovering that the Ten Commandments do represent the ten greatest struggles of our lives. We're going to see this morning that this one speaks to our struggle for integrity. It touches our attitude to money, possessions, and work. It speaks to our struggles with greed and our struggles with laziness, as well as our natural reluctance to give.

So, I want to begin by suggesting a definition of stealing that I think will be helpful for us to take in the challenge of the eighth commandment. It is simply this: stealing is trying to get as much as possible while giving as little as possible. Stealing is simply trying to get as much as possible while giving as little as possible.

Remember that each commandment, as we are discovering these, speaks not just to one sin, but to a whole category of sins. We know this from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus explains the inner meaning of several of the commandments. We know this from the Old Testament itself, because if you read the rest of the laws in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, you will find there that they are basically an exposition of the Ten Commandments, filling out or coloring in the full meaning of these very short summary statements.

I've found it helpful to think about the commandments, each one being like a railway track. There are many stations down the line. If you go to the station at the end of the line of the eighth commandment, you've got the burglar climbing out of the house. Now, we may never have been to that particular station at the end of the line, but we have all traveled on this particular line that is addressed by the eighth commandment. We've all been in that position of trying to get as much as possible by giving as little as possible.

It's the line of taking advantage of other people, of using other people. It's the line of being a taker without being a giver. As we look at that definition, it will quickly become obvious to all of us, I think, that there's a lot of stealing that goes on in marriage. If you look at that definition, there's a lot of stealing that goes on in church, a lot of stealing goes on in our community. Every attempt to have much and give little is a breaking of the eighth commandment.

So, this commandment speaks to two fundamental struggles within our lives: first, the great propensity that we have towards greed, and secondly, the struggle that we often have with laziness. I want simply to ask two questions today. The first is, what does breaking this commandment look like? The second is, what does keeping this commandment look like? It doesn't get much simpler than that. Then at the end, we're going to look briefly at a model or example of breaking and keeping the commandment.

First, then, what does breaking the commandment look like? Let me give five practical areas in which we may too easily fall into breaking the eighth commandment. The first is in the whole area of work. I'm going to say something that's addressed both to employees and to employers. I know that this is one of these issues where it's much easier to hear the other side.

It's like when you talk on marriage, and you get to the bit on wives, and the husband gives her a dig in the ribs, "This is for you," and then you get to the bit on husbands, and it goes the other way. This happens in church. So, we don't hear what God has for us. Let me ask you this question: are you employed? This bit is for you and for me.

Working, if stealing involves trying to get as much as possible while giving as little as possible, then we have to conclude that there is a lot of stealing that goes on at work. If you have a job, as I have a job, your calling is to give value to your employer. You earn your living from a person or from a company that values what you do and pays you to do it. That involves a relationship of trust that you will give this value to the organization or the person who hires you.

So, the question I have to ask as one who is employed is, how can I give such value to the one or ones who employ me that he or she or they will think that they are receiving great value? Now, here are just some very obvious ways in which we can steal from an employer: arriving late. That's stealing if you're employed. Leaving early, stretching lunch or break times, expanding the work to be done to fill the space available. Have you ever done that? That's stealing. It's not giving full value.

Doing what you like in your work and consistently avoiding tasks assigned that you don't like. That's stealing. Using work time to do your own thing, that's stealing. By the way, be very careful about evangelism on work time. Your employer didn't pay you to evangelize. Well, actually, mine did, but I'm serious. If your employer paid you to evangelize, go ahead and do it on work time. If you can speak in conversation while you're giving full value in your work, that's just fine.

But sloping off your work in order to do what you call evangelism is not actually honoring to God if what you're doing is taking work time for which you are paid and diverting it to another cause. I'll never forget one summer when I was a student, I had a job as a night shift cleaner. I worked with a team cleaning the David Hume Tower in Edinburgh, about a 20-story building that's used by the university there.

It was a fascinating experience. The city has a whole other life that goes on through the night. I worked with a team of men who could hardly ask you for milk and sugar in their tea without using the foulest imaginable language. We had three breaks in the tea room, as they called it, each night. Over the weeks, I had some opportunities when we're sitting in the tea room in these breaks to talk about the gospel. They knew that I was a theological student, and you can maybe imagine that this gave plenty of scope for what I could only describe as overripe jokes.

After tea, we would spread out over the building. Each of us would work on a different floor. We would normally take two floors' responsibility in each of the sessions and so work the length of the building in a fairly systematic fashion. In one of these sessions, I got my couple of floors done in particularly good time and so decided that I'd use the time until the next tea break to read a few pages. I carried, as I often do, a little book in my pocket and thought I'd read.

So, I found myself a nice little perch in one of the windows, with my feet up on the laboratory table where we had just cleaned for that laboratory, and not a soul within two floors. Stuck deep in the book, the supervisor walked in. I mean, he never, never did that. But he did that night, and I'll never forget it. All he said was, "Is that a good book?" I muttered something about getting finished the job early.

But it was no use. My credibility was shot to bits. I'd finished my work, truly, but there was more that I could have done. I could have offered to help someone else on another floor. I could have come back to the tea room and undertaken another task. I wasn't paid by that company to read the book. I was stealing.

Having a job involves a relationship of trust, and the trust is that you give full value in what you were hired to do. Here's a second area: the whole area of paying. Now, many of us, of course, are on the other side of this. We are employers. We run small businesses or we are in positions of considerable responsibility in larger companies. We have responsibilities to a company; we also have responsibilities to the people that we employ.

There is as much stealing goes on amongst employers as there is stealing that goes on among employees. So, if you employ someone or have responsibility in this area, this now is for you. When we read the eighth commandment, we tend to think that it's all about poor people stealing from the rich. But actually, it's equally about rich people stealing from the poor.

If you read the Old Testament, you may find that there is a compelling argument to say that the Old Testament prophets primarily applied this commandment to the obscenity of those who have much showing meanness towards those who have little. The Apostle James speaks about it in the New Testament. "The wages," he says in James 5:4, "the wages that you failed to pay. The wages you failed to pay your workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord."

Here are these harvesters. They've worked hard day after day. It's been backbreaking work. They've given full value. They've brought in the harvest, and the value of the harvest is fantastic. The landowner is living in the luxury and the blessing of what has come to him, but he has not shared this benefit with those who brought it to him. He has kept it to himself, and he has sent them home with scarcely enough to sustain their families.

God says that cries out to me. He would not have what he enjoyed apart from these harvesters, but instead of asking the question, "What is their value to me?" he just asked the question, "What can I get away with paying them?" So you see, as we go back to our definition, employers also face the temptation of trying to get as much as possible by giving as little as possible, and that is stealing.

God will hold Christian employers responsible for our stewardship in paying appropriate salaries to those who generate the wealth and the blessing that we enjoy. Then while we're thinking of paying, there's the whole issue, of course, of late payment. Bills that hang out there, either from the home or from the business, long beyond the time that they were due to be paid.

The Bible speaks to this. We are to give, Romans 13, verse 7, to everyone what we owe them. If you owe money on a bill, it's no good to say, "Well, this is a big company and they won't miss it." It is what you owe, and your responsibility is not the company; your responsibility is your bill. If someone gives you a loan and you do not repay it, that is stealing. It's no use saying, "Oh, he doesn't need the money back." Whether or not they need the money back is none of your business. Your responsibility, my responsibility, is to pay what we owe.

Then as we try and turn this definition in our minds and say, "Where else does that take us?" there's the whole issue of charging. The Bible speaks about false weights and measures, and Dr. Jim Packer points out, I think helpfully, that the modern equivalent to that would be what we call overpricing goods and services. That's stealing.

If stealing is trying to get as much as possible while giving as little as possible, then the eighth commandment does speak to this issue of overpricing goods and services. It also speaks to cutting the quality of our work. You're paid to do a certain job, and it may often be the case that folks don't really know if you cut corners or not. There's other work to do, so the pressure is on you to say, "This will be good enough. They'll never know the difference."

But my calling as a Christian believer in the light of the eighth commandment is to provide the best value for a fair price. Fourthly, there's the whole issue of copying. Boy, here you come to a sin that I have to say is too common among pastors: plagiarism. Taking other people's material and speaking it as if it were your own.

Then, of course, there is the whole issue of copyright in relation to computer software or copying a music CD from your friend at high school so you don't have to buy one. That is taking what is due to the artist. You say, "Well, the artist doesn't need it. He's already a millionaire," which is probably true. But think about that.

What you're then saying is that it's okay to steal from someone who has more than you do if you think they've already got enough. If you go with that logic, that would mean that most of the world has the right to steal from every one of us, including our high school students, because half the world owns less than a high school student in America. Copying is stealing.

Then think of this. I've called the last one shallow Christian living. If stealing is about trying to get as much as possible by giving as little as possible, I think that the eighth commandment speaks very powerfully to the way that many people approach the Christian life. Remember the question that a very rich person once asked Jesus, "What must I do to get eternal life?" You see the whole tone of that question? What's the minimum I've got to give to make sure I get in? How can I get eternity's blessing at the minimum price?

Doesn't that show a whole attitude of heart? See, this commandment is like an x-ray of the soul. It shows up what we are really like. We want to get much, and we want to give little. As I've looked into my own soul, and I guess as you look into yours this morning in the light of the Word of God, maybe we'll confess that this is indeed one of the ten greatest struggles of our lives.

Well, that's enough about breaking the commandment. Our aim is to encourage keeping the commandment. So, let's move on quickly to the question, what does keeping the commandment look like? Remember, the best way to avoid a wrong road is always to choose the right road and to go down it as fast as you can.

So, let's turn over to Ephesians chapter 4 and verse 28, where Paul gives us the New Testament exposition of the eighth commandment. Notice that in Ephesians 4:28, he gives us the negative and then the positive on which we'll focus. First, the negative: "He who has been stealing must steal no longer." Well, what are we to do instead? Notice what he says, "But must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need."

So, if I ask the question, what does it mean to keep the eighth commandment, the very obvious answer is going to be that it means working and it means giving. Working and giving. Don't steal. Instead, this is what you do. To keep the eighth commandment, you work, and to keep the eighth commandment, you give.

The opposite of stealing is working. The word that Paul uses for "work" here means labor to the point of fatigue. Isn't that interesting? He commends labor to the point of fatigue. That's the meaning of the word that he uses. So, if you know what it is to flop into your bed at night and feel pretty well spent, Paul is saying that's a good thing. You've given yourself. That's a worthy thing.

The Bible always takes a positive view of work. This is a good gift from God. Tracing the times when the Apostle Paul speaks of working harder than those who wanted to have an easy life in ministry is very significant. He speaks about this in 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Corinthians 11. He talks about laboring and struggling. These are the kind of words that reflect what authentic work ministry actually looks like. "In everything that I did," he said, "I showed you that by this kind of hard work, we must help the weak. Work with your hands," he says. So, the Bible commends to us the value of working hard. I think that's a note that we need to hear. It's a fundamental biblical principle.

Steve Hiller: What a great reminder that if you are a Christian, you are to work for Christ. You're to find that work to do and then to serve Him, working as unto the Lord and not for men. You're listening to Open the Bible Weekend with Pastor Colin Smith and a message called Your Struggle for Integrity. Unfortunately, we do have to pause right here, but we'll continue this message on our next broadcast here on Open the Bible Weekend. Obviously, you can be listening to the radio, but you can also listen online when you come to our website, openthebible.org.

You can stream the program or download an MP3 for free. You can also listen if you have the Open the Bible app, which you'll find for free at your app store. Or you can order a copy of the entire series on CD. Ask about "The Ten Greatest Struggles of Your Life" when you call 1-877-OPEN-365. Or you'll find ordering information online at openthebible.org. Well, Open the Bible is able to be on the station, we're able to make the podcast, the app, and all the other resources available because of your generosity. And as you give a gift of any amount this month, we want to send you three copies of our first graphic novel inspired by Pastor Colin's book "Heaven, How I Got Here," the story of the thief on the cross. Plus, we'll send one copy of the original book. But Colin, what is one thing that you'd like people to take away from this new graphic novel?

Colin Smith: Well, without any question, it's that when God draws near, He comes to give us what we do not have. And you know, the default assumption of the fallen human heart is that if God draws near, He's going to place some demand on us that we can't meet. And there are millions of people who have never understood the wonderful truth of God's grace. Their whole idea of Christianity is that they're going to be told what they need to do and what they need to be, and they have neither the desire nor the ability to do it.

And as long as folks think that God is placing demands upon us, well, they're never going to open the doors of their hearts or of their lives to Him. So, here is a marvelous opportunity to share the story of the thief on the cross that tells us that God gives to us what we do not have. It explains God's marvelous grace.

Is there someone in your life, maybe a young person brought up in church, but they have never really understood the love, the mercy, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ? This graphic novel is a simple way in which they could grasp the most important truth in all of the Bible. Could you place it into their hands? Could you give them a copy of this? Is there someone that you know who's trying to live a life that's pleasing to God, always feels that they're failing, and needs to understand God's grace?

Well, that's who the graphic novel is for. We want to communicate the very center of the gospel to as many people as possible, and I hope that you'll take these copies of the graphic novel, that you'll put them into the hands of people who will benefit from them and will be released in seeing the marvelous good news of the grace of God that brings hope for every single person.

Steve Hiller: Well, we want to send you three copies of the graphic novel, plus the original book, "Heaven, How I Got Here," the story of the thief on the cross, as our way of saying thank you for your financial support this month. You can give at our website, openthebible.org, or when you call 1-877-OPEN-365. That's 1-877-673-6365, or openthebible.org. For Pastor Colin Smith, I'm Steve Hiller. Thanks for listening, and I hope you'll join us next time. Open the Bible Weekend is a listener-supported production of Open the Bible.

Guest (Male): At Open the Bible, we're grateful for like-minded organizations committed to sharing the gospel around the world. And to that end, I'd like to commend the work of Global Fingerprints. You know, in the book of James, God calls us to help orphans in their distress. That's a clear command, but it's not always clear how we should obey it.

And this is where Global Fingerprints comes in. Through Global Fingerprints, you can sponsor a vulnerable child to help meet their physical needs and ensure they hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. I want to commend Global Fingerprints to you. They're focused on equipping the local church to care for children, and where there is no church, they help to plant one. If you'd like to help a vulnerable child, you can find more information on Global Fingerprints at our website, openthebible.org/gf. That's openthebible.org/gf.