Everything is a Gift - Psalm 24

Who owns it all?

Who owns this building? I mean — really. Who owns it? The bank? The denomination? The congregation? God? Does it matter? What about your house? You may have a mortgage. The bank technically has a claim on it until you don't. Or maybe you own it free and clear. Either way — is it yours? What about the company you work for? Most of you have a boss. Some of you are the boss. But even if you own the business — did you build it entirely alone? The roads that bring your customers. The schools that trained your employees. The family that backed you when it was lean. Ownership gets complicated fast.

I watched a movie recently — I won't spoil it if you haven't seen it — but the whole story swung on one reveal. The antagonist thought he owned the company. He built his whole strategy around it. He made enemies. He made decisions. He burned relationships. He did everything a man does when he believes he is the owner. And then the reveal hits: he never owned it. The guy we'd been rooting for — the one who'd been quietly, faithfully working in the background the whole time — he owned it. Had always owned it.

And in one moment, everything the antagonist had done — every decision, every calculation, every power move — collapsed. Because the story always belongs to the owner. And he had the wrong picture of who that was. Ownership makes or breaks a story. It always has. We live in a country where ownership is not just a legal category — it's an identity. The American dream is ownership. Own a home. Own a business. Build something. Leave something. My name on something.

There are countries — and this is not a political point, just a historical one — where that concept barely exists. Where land belongs to the state, or the community, or the collective. And the person living on it is something closer to a tenant than an owner. Most of us in this room have been shaped, whether we realize it or not, by a culture that says: owning things is normal. Expected. Even virtuous.

The Ultimate Owner

So what do we do with a Psalm that opens with a sentence like this?

Psalm 24:1 “The earth and everything in it, the world and its inhabitants, belong to the Lord;”

It’s kind of funny… I’ve read that verse a million times… we see that opening phrase and think… oh sure… that’s nature. The natural world. The Gulf of Mexico. The Rio Bravo. Air, the sky… that’s all owned by God. But that’s not what that verse is saying… it moves from earth to world… from everything to inhabitants… and it’s saying ALL. There’s nothing in the world, in history, that isn’t owned by Jesus. Think about that. What does that mean? Is that just some grand statement for effect? Or does he really own it all.

We’re starting a series for the summer on stewardship and generosity. And before we get anywhere else… we have to start right here. God owns all of this. That's you. That's me. That's the guy who owns the company. That's the homeowner who paid it off in 2019. That's the billionaire with the penthouse and the yacht. The earth belongs to the Lord and everything in it. Before we say the first word about stewardship or generosity.. we start with God owns it all.

Mythbusting the Barn Builder

There’s a story told by Jesus that unpacks for us what the Psalmist is getting at. The story of the landowner that we read moments ago.… this guy is not a terrible guy. I think that’s where this story goes off the rails. I remember the pictures from this story we were shown as a kid in Sunday school… and they always made the guy look evil. He looked sinister. He’s the Gordon Gekko of the first century… Greed is Good.. some of you know what I’m talking about. Not a nice guy. Jesus doesn’t say this. This guy is not sinister. This guy is US. He's not corrupt. He's not evil. He worked hard. His fields had a great year — and he had a plan. It was a great plan. He was setting himself up to be a success.

Here’s the rest of the story:

"What should I do, since I don't have anywhere to store my crops? I will do this: I'll tear down my barns and build bigger ones and store all my grain and my goods there. Then I'll say to myself, 'You have many goods stored up for many years. Take it easy; eat, drink, and enjoy yourself.'"  — Luke 12:17–19 CSB

He’s talking about retirement. Take it easy. Time for enjoying the benefits of the pension. Time to play a little more golf. Here’s why Jesus is telling that story: Count the first-person pronouns. What should I do. I will do this. I'll tear down. I'll build. I'll store. I'll say to myself. I have. I, I, I. My, my, my. 10 times here… and if you count the self-talk… a dozen times. It’s all about “me.”

"You fool! This very night your life is demanded of you. And the things you have prepared — whose will they be? That's how it is with the one who stores up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God."  — Luke 12:20–21 CSB

Fool. Not criminal. Not monster. Fool. That’s a word Jesus’ audience would have known… the fool is the one who lives as if God’s not really around. And here, the fool is the one who has God amnesia. Taking credit where credit isn’t due. Ever know someone like that? Taking credit that wasn’t theirs?

And again... here's the thing... those Sunday School pictures of the guy building barns looking all evil and sinister... that's a deflection at best, a denial at worst... that this is US. We do this. We do this all of the time. We always want to make sure that we're getting credit for something... Jesus says in the story that God's says... OK... you forfeit your life. That's just another way of saying... all this credit taking we do... it's damnable. We have nowhere to go with this. The original sin involved our first parents grasping at what wasn't theirs to take.... and taking credit is what we do. This is ours. This is mine. I did this. I want my skin in the game. I want the ledger to show what I've done. The ledger. That's the thing. We want a ledger that shows what we did. What we built. What we earned. What we deserve. Because if the ledger is right, then we're okay. Then we have standing. Then nobody — not even God — can tell us we don't belong.

“Rich toward God?”

One other myth about this story… that "rich toward God" is a giving argument. That Jesus is telling this story to get to the offering plate. That the punch line is — so tithe, give generously, put God first financially and everything will work out. No. That's not what's happening here. Look at the context. Some guy in the crowd just interrupted Jesus to ask him to settle an inheritance dispute. Standing in front of the Son of Man, hearing Jesus talk about ultimate things — and his pressing concern is making sure he’s in the will.. making sure he gets what’s coming to him from his parents… and Jesus says, you’re missing the point. The whole setup is about what you do with Jesus, not what you do with your wallet. "Rich toward God" is a faith statement before it's a financial statement. It means — do you know who the Owner is? Do you recognize the King when he's standing right in front of you? That's the poverty the Rich Fool dies with. Not an empty barn. A life lived as if Jesus wasn't the question on the table.

Obey with the wallet?

And that means — third myth — you cannot get to open hands by deciding to acknowledge God as owner and then figuring out the right percentage. That move is still the control quest in religious clothing. It's the self-justification project wearing a stewardship name tag. I've recognized God as owner, I've calculated the tithe, I've done the thing — now the ledger is right and I'm good. No. That's not rich toward God. That's rich toward your own sense of having handled the God question correctly. The prosperity gospel says give Jesus a dollar and he'll give you a million. The evangelical lite version says obey God instead of worrying about money. Both of them are still fundamentally about what you do — your decision, your obedience, your percentage, your control of the outcome.

And that’s the problem. We're working our way to Jesus...we're saving ourselves. And we can't. That's the thing we never say out loud. We can't save ourselves. The ledger is never quite right. There's always something on the wrong side. And somewhere underneath all the credit-taking and the barn-building and the 'I did this' — there's a person who knows the books don't actually balance.

And here’s the thing… you know why we want credit? That’s part of the myth here… You know why we want to say that we own it all on the one hand or obey God with the the tithe on the other? Control. The oldest sin pursuit in the book. Control. I want to control it all. I want to control God. I want to control how this salvation thing works. I want to control grace. I want to control my life, my bank account, other people… my whole life is a quest for control. I want to be an owner. I want to be THE owner. And that’s when God says to the barn builder… you don’t get life… because at the end of the day, I want to be God himself.

The obedience-with-the-wallet move doesn't dismantle the ownership project. It baptizes it. You've just built a bigger barn with a cross on the roof. The control is still entirely yours — you've decided what faithful stewardship looks like, you've calculated the acceptable percentage, you've determined what God gets and what you keep, and now you've got religious cover for the whole thing. The ledger still exists. You're still the one holding the pen. You've just added a God column.

And that's actually more insidious than the Rich Fool's version. At least he was honest about it. He didn't dress the control quest up in the language of obedience. He just said — these are my barns, this is my grain, this is my plan. You knew exactly what you were dealing with. The obedience-with-the-wallet version smuggles the same ownership claim past the border checkpoint with a religious passport. And it feels righteous. It feels like surrender when it's actually just a more sophisticated form of control.

The Law cannot produce the open hand. Stewardship doesn’t being with obedience. You can’t obey your way into generosity. And you cannot obey your way out of the ownership problem because the act of deciding to obey is itself still an ownership act. I have decided. I will comply. I will manage my resources in a God-honoring way. The subject hasn't changed. There are still a dozen first-person pronouns in the speech. The barn just has a steeple now.

The only thing that breaks the ownership project is the Gospel. And the Gospel in Psalm 24 is sitting right in front of us.

Grace for the owner wannabes

But there’s grace for the owner wannabes… verse 3 says:

Psalm 24:3 “Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place?”

The question of verse 3 is a trap — and the psalm knows it. Who may ascend? Who may stand? And every person who has ever tried to climb that hill on their own résumé already knows the answer before verse 4 finishes. Not you. Not with those hands. Not with what you've done with what was given to you. The control quest, the credit-taking, the barns — all of it disqualifies. The psalm raises the question not to give you something to aim for but to show you the door is closed from your side. You cannot ascend to the Owner. You cannot present yourself to the King with a clean ledger. The audit would take about thirty seconds.

Then verse 5:

Psalm 24:5 “He will receive blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation.”

Verse 5 does not say try harder, come back when you're cleaner. In fact, verse 5 is not waiting for us to ascend and stand It says the one who stands there receives. Receives blessing. Receives righteousness. From the Lord. From the God of his salvation. The direction reverses completely. What you could not bring up the hill comes down the hill — not as a reward for the ascent but as a gift to the one who couldn't make it on his own. That word righteousness is doing everything here. You didn't generate it. You didn't earn it. It's credited to you by the Owner himself, the King of glory who turns out to be not the auditor you feared but the donor you never expected. The owner wannabe — the one who has been white-knuckling the ledger his whole life trying to make the books balance — finds out at verse 5 that the books have already been settled. Not by him. For him. That's not a stewardship principle. That's the gospel hiding in the middle of a psalm about ownership.

And if the righteousness is a gift — if the one thing you most desperately needed and could not produce for yourself just got handed to you by the Owner — then what exactly do you think you earned on your own? The ground shifts under the whole project. Because the same God who gives righteousness as a gift gave you the breath you used to make it here this morning, the mind you used to plan your week, the hands you used to build whatever you built, the relationships you didn't manufacture so much as stumble into, the talents that showed up in you before you had any say in the matter. It was gift all the way down. It was always gift all the way down.

Psalm 24:5 doesn't just tell you that righteousness is a gift. It reframes every single thing above it — the earth, the world, its inhabitants, you — as gift. The Owner who gives righteousness is the same Owner who made everything in verse 1. And owners who give like that aren't running a collection agency. They're running an open hand. Everything is a gift because the King of glory is, it turns out, exactly that kind of King.

Open Hands are Receiving

The first move of the open-handed life is not giving. It is receiving. We want to start these conversations with a demand. Give more, hold loosely, be generous. And those things are true and they're coming. But they're the second sentence. The first sentence is Psalm 24:1. The earth and everything in it belongs to the LORD. The Owner is named. The estate is His. That's where we start. Because before you can hold something loosely, you have to know you were given it. Before you can give it away, you have to know it was never really yours to keep. Before you can pay generosity forward, you have to have received something from Someone who didn't have to give it to you.

The open hand begins not with your giving. It begins with His.

The Open Hands of Jesus

The most open hands in history were nailed open. That's where this ends up. The King of glory — the one who owns the earth and everything in it, who could have demanded the ledger be settled, who had every right to call the audit due — came through the gate and opened his hands all the way. Not to receive. To give. The cross is not a transaction where God extracts what he's owed from a substitute. It is the Owner absorbing the full cost of every ownership claim we ever made, every credit we took that wasn't ours, every control quest, every barn we built with his rain on his land with his hands — he took all of it and he opened his hands and he let it be nailed there. For you. The open hand doesn't begin with your generosity or your discipline or your decision to hold things loosely. It begins there. At the cross. With his. And because his hands were opened first — because the King gave everything before he asked anything — the open hand you're being invited into this summer is not a demand. It's an echo. It's what happens naturally, eventually, inevitably, to a person who has actually stood at the foot of that cross and understood what the Owner did with his hands. You give because he gave. You open because he opened. Everything is a gift because he gave everything first.

Let’s pray

The Table

Come to this Table with open hands. Actually open. And receive what the Owner is giving. The body broken for you. The blood poured for you. The one gift that makes every other form of generosity possible. Let that be the practice. Because here's what I've noticed about open hands: they can't really hoard. The posture itself is the theology. You can't receive with a closed fist. The earth and everything in it, the world and its inhabitants — they belong to the LORD. And here… Jesus says: you belong to me.