All Is Now Yours: Giving What We Do Not Have

answer was to the point: “The bread … is for the young men to eat, and the wine is for those to drink who faint in the wilderness.” Now that’s a welcome answer. David and his men needed nourishment and refreshment; bread and wine were good to have. And so when David found out that it was true that Mephibosheth was plotting against him, but this Ziba, once the servant of treachery was now turning into a servant of David’s, what did David do? How did he treat Ziba? He announced to Ziba, “All that belonged to Mephibosheth is now yours”. “All is now yours.” I am giving you everything that belongs to your master. It’s not mine, but I am giving it to you anyway. “All is now yours.” And Ziba’s response is exactly what you might expect, “I do obeisance”. “I am yours.” “I belong you now; you are my king.”

David, even while he was losing what he had, gave away what he did not own. How about that? Let me say it again. David, even while he was losing what he had, gave away what he did not own. And it bought Ziba’s loyalty. It won Ziba’s heart.

In times like these, when it seems that we cannot expect to keep what we think we have, guess what? God says, “All is now yours.” We are the recipients of grace, of grace abundant.
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Have you ever noticed how much time and energy some people spend on lost causes? Have you ever noticed how people give themselves to things that do not really matter? How they gather resources that are doomed to disappear?

Some folks in certain southern states are still fighting the lost cause of the Confederacy. They want to show the symbol of southern rebellion from statehouses and schoolhouses, and they get very heated about heritage and history. Give me a break! I’m sorry, but that is a lost cause. Get over it. Yet somehow some folks keep pouring energy into lost causes.

I’ve seen churches that operate like that. They keep doing what they’ve always done, even when it doesn’t pay off. They speak in a language that died years ago and sing songs that no one relates to any more, and when young people leave, instead of listening, these churches just crank up the old ways another notch and support the lost cause. I read the other day about the great debate within one branch of the Russian Orthodox Church – whether to do their worship in everyday language or in something called Old Church Slavonic, which nobody anywhere understands any more. Hello!? That’s a lost cause. Who wants a church that is nothing but mysterious mumbo-jumbo?

Whole denominations get embroiled in stuff like that. Some folks, I know, get bent out of shape because we here at Takoma welcome women as deacons and ministers. Fight about that if you want, but for us that is no longer an issue. We believe that both good Scripture reading and contemporary reality dictate that we not fight a battle about that. We have chosen to deal with reality instead of investing in a lost cause.

Mephibosheth is a sad and shadowy figure in this Bible story. He is sad because he wanted to take advantage of David’s distress, but he lost everything because he just could not see reality. He could not accept that the world had changed. And so David gave away to Ziba everything Mephibosheth had accumulated; he couldn’t keep it if it was going to be invested in a lost cause.

Let us be sure today that what we are doing with