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CONNIE: Is it really possible to “have it all” as some television programs advertise? Is it better to be content with what you have than always striving for more? What’s God’s advice?

Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for more than 75 years, this is the Voice of Prophecy.

CONNIE: Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I’m Lonnie Melashenko.

CONNIE: Thanks for joining us today on Voice of Prophecy, as we continue our series looking at God’s Ten Words to the Wise, the Ten Commandments.

LONNIE: We’re on Commandment Number 8 today, “Thou shalt not steal.” And on the surface it seems like a simple command to obey. Just don’t get sticky-fingered when you go into the store. No “five-finger discounts” for you, and you’ve got this commandment nailed, right?

CONNIE: It does seem like a fairly simple commandment to obey, at least on the surface. But I think there are some deeper aspects of it that we’ll want to focus on as well today.

LONNIE: That’s right. I like to think of each of these commandments as a challenge—there’s more than meets the eye in each of them. Jesus gave us some good examples of how to delve deeper and apply the spirit, not just the letter of the law.

CONNIE: That’s right, and as we were discussing this commandment, we looked around for someone who had taken it a bit deeper; I guess you could say—someone who has let this commandment change their life on a deeper level than just not physically stealing. The man I spoke with is Gerald Straub, and he’s a real inspiration to me.

LONNIE: I understand that Gerry was once a “big-time” Hollywood producer, but he’s put that all aside and dedicated his life to helping the poor. And you spoke with him about what made the change in his life. Let’s listen in.

CONNIE: Gerry Straub, welcome to the Voice of Prophecy! We’re so happy that you joined us today.

GERRY: I’m glad to be with you.

CONNIE: You know, Gerry, you’ve had quite a riches to rags story. You’ve been quite a well known Hollywood producer; you started out as a 21 year old intern on the Ed Sullivan Show, then you we’re the executive producer of several soap operas, including General hospital, during the Luke and Laura years. Something happened in your life, take us through your experience and tell us what sort of conversion experience you had.

GERRY: Well, I think that when I was producing network television shows I slowly began to become disillusioned with what I was doing, not from any spiritual or religious point of view, but just realizing what we were doing for ratings. We would do anything that we could get away with and that really began to wear me down. I finally realized that I was putting too much time and effort into something that I really didn’t believe in. I had drifted kind of far from my spiritual roots, I was raised in the Catholic Church and I just really took some time to reconsider my life and I knew that I had to leave net work television and go into writing. Eventually I was working on a novel which explored the creativity between nature and spirituality and I was exploring, in a fictional realm, the life of Vicente Van Gogh, whom represented creativity and St. Francis who represented spirituality and I personally was more interested in Vincent than Francis. I worked for a couple of years on this book and it was really going nowhere, so I thought that I was going to have to go back to Hollywood where I could earn a very good living. But before doing so, I thought that I would retrace the steps of the main character in the novel I was writing. From Rome to the south of France to where Vincent had his most creative and productive years and on to Amsterdam. In the novel the character traveled on a train, so I decide to do that. When I was in Rome, I went into an empty church. I hadn’t gone in to pray, I had lost my faith, although I do think that for a long time I had been desperately searching for God, I had just seen no real evidence for a God. I mean, people can claim to believe in God and engage in behavior that seems ungodly, so…

CONNIE: And when you went into this chapel to pray, you opened your Bible to Psalms chapter 63, what happened to you then?

GERRY: Well, I just opened the Bible randomly and it came to Psalms 63 and said, a soul searching for God. I read the Psalm and something happened! I felt as if I were immersed in the sea of love, that God was real and that God loved me. I didn’t hear any voices, I just knew! I knew in a twinkling that God was real and that whatever my intellectual search was it really didn’t matter and I was just struck with the idea that God existed and that He loved me. My whole life changed in that moment and I no longer wanted to write this book and…But what I became interested in was the life of St. Francis, which prior to this experience was just a pious fairytale which had no connection to my modern skeptical life. The more I explored his life the thing I came face to face with is St. Francis’s love for not only the poor but the poverty itself. Which made no sense to me, I didn’t even know any poor people, and I went and lived in a soup kitchen for a little while run by Franciscan Friars in Philadelphia, one of the worst slums in America. That experience so changed me, I got some friends of mine together and we did a little film and the film made onto PBS and has aired on many stations around Thanksgiving time and people of all faiths and no faiths sent money to this soup kitchen and they were able to build a new soup kitchen and...

CONNIE: Well, you know, we only have about two minutes left, but you actually spent a year and a half living with poor people in 19 cities in 9 different countries, you’ve made several films now about the poor. Can you tell us a little bit about how this ties into the commandment that we are talking about today, thou shalt not steal?

GERRY: For me, in one of my books I have a line that says, consuming more than you need. I believe that everything in life we have is a gift from God and it’s not something that should be held to ourselves. We need to share it! Also in the New Testament and the Old Testament we see that our love for God is expressed in helping the poorest of the poor. You see it all through scripture, that’s how you show your love for God. I’m saying that not sharing is in effect stealing from the poor what is there’s. I know that is a rather radical perspective, but I‘ve really come to believe it!

CONNIE: That’s right! It’s something we must explore further! If people would like to get in touch with you, you do have a website…

GERRY: www.sandamianofoundation.org,

CONNIE: And people can find out about your many films there as well. Thanks so much Gerry for being here with us at the Voice of Prophecy today, Gerry!

GERRY: Well, thank you!

“Love One Another”, Del Delker, from Forever Grateful CD.

CONNIE: Amen! That was our dear friend Del Delker, with a beautiful reminder that love is what life’s all about.

LONNIE: Our thanks to Del, who’s been sharing her music with us ever since 1947! And I want to send my special thanks to Gerry Straub for sharing his testimony about how God changed his life for the better as he learned the lesson of that song—that love is more important than things!

CONNIE: Gerry’s organization is called the San Damiano Foundation, and you can find them on the worldwide web at sandamianofoundation.org

LONNIE: And of course you can always find us at vop.com, so if you can’t remember Gerry’s address, just check the transcript on our web page at vop.com.

CONNIE: You’ll find lots of other great resources there as well, including of course our Discover Bible Guides, which will take you on an exciting journey of discovery as you study the Bible’s main teachings.

LONNIE: Stop by any time, to read transcripts, listen to past programs, or just go exploring, at vop.com

CONNIE: But right now let’s turn our attention to Pastor Lonnie’s message for today, we call it simply “Mine!”

Mine!
They were known as the Reno Gang. Their lives were a testimony to the effects of greed on the human spirit. But their fates proved to be a testimony to how deeply ingrained the Eighth Commandment is in the human heart. We really won’t tolerate people who take it lightly—or will we?

In the days following the close of the American Civil War, the Reno Brothers, Frank, William, and Simon gathered a gang of desperadoes around them and began raiding banks and county treasuries in Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana. By 1867 they had expanded their repertoire to include the newly-invented crime of train robbery. But that’s where they got in over their heads. Their greatest—and last—claim to fame was the great train robbery they pulled off on May 22, 1868. Lying in wait for the train when it stopped to pick up cordwood at Marshfield, Indiana, they quickly made their intentions known by firing shots into the air. When the conductor returned fire, they shot him and left him for dead. The engineer and fireman were beaten up and thrown from the train.

Disconnecting the engine and express car from the rest of the train, the robbers headed up the track and broke into the express car, which was carrying nearly $100,000 in cash. When the messenger inside resisted, they threw him from the speeding train.

A crime of such magnitude made headlines all over the country, and the Pinkerton agency determined to put an end once-and-for-all to the Reno Brothers’ crime spree. One by one they hunted down the gang members and captured them.

But what happened next gave a clear and certain picture of how the Reno Brothers’ neighbors felt about the gang. Perhaps you’ve heard the story of the brothers’ great train robbery. But have you heard the rest of the story—the part about their jail break?

Not that they broke out of jail. No, their neighbors broke into the New Albany, Indiana jail where the brothers Reno were awaiting trial, and strung them up from the rafters! That’s right. On the night of December 11, 1868—just seven months after the Renos had robbed the train—men from their hometown formed what they called a “vigilance committee,” got on the train and made the 50-mile trip to New Albany, just across the river from Louisville, Kentucky, tied up the jailer, stole his keys, and proceeded to take justice into their own hands.

The Reno Brothers, who had so long terrorized their neighborhood, would never do it again. Six other members of the gang had already been lynched months earlier by the same “committee.”

Well, it’s an amazing story of wild west justice from nearly a century-and-a-half ago. But as we were researching this story, we stumbled onto the story of another great train robbery that happened 95 years later. Britain’s Great Train Robbery of 1963 netted a London-based criminal gang 2.6 million pounds. Scotland Yard soon had most of the perpetrators in prison, but the thing that really caught our eyes about this case was the way the public’s reaction to train robbery had changed in a little under a century.

Consider “the rest” of this story. It involves a jail break too, but from the normal direction—from the inside, that is. On August 12, 1964, Charles Wilson, one of the kingpins of the gang of thieves, made a daring escape from a maximum security prison. And here’s the amazing thing. If you go to the BBC website and research the story of the Great Train Robbery, you’ll find your way to a page reporting on his escape. And you can click on a link to a video where a BBC reporter went out on the street and interviewed Britons about their reaction. Asking them: Who are you rooting for—the police, or the escapee?

And here’s what got my attention: about half the people confessed they were rooting for the escaped criminal! They admired his panache and cleverness, and openly expressed their hope that he’d get away with it!

And Wilson did in fact get away with it for about 4 years. When he was finally captured in Canada in 1968, he went back to jail, served out his term, and then moved to Spain where he took up drug peddling. He finally met his end in 1990 at the hands of an underworld hit man who shot him as he relaxed beside his swimming pool.

You know, friend, the thing that caught my attention about these two stories of train robbers, was the public’s change of attitude. Does it seem to you that there been an erosion of moral backbone in our society?

Now, I don’t think any of us want to go back to the days when lynch mobs roamed the countryside taking “justice” into their own hands.

But I sense that we’ve lost the ability to be morally outraged at dishonesty in the way that our ancestors were.

Is it just because we’ve seen enough clever criminals portrayed in movies and on television that we’ve started rooting for real criminals? Or have we actually lost touch with the issues that make honesty important to us?

Back in 1868, the people of Indiana had directly suffered at the hands of the criminals in their community, and they wanted no more of it. Neither panache nor derring-do, nor unemployment were adequate excuses for turning to a life of crime.

And most of us wouldn’t consider doing it ourselves. We’re good, law-abiding citizens. When we hear the Eighth Commandment, it seems pretty simple and straightforward. “Thou shalt not steal.” And we don’t have a problem with that.

In the supermarket, it never crosses my mind to slip a pack of gum into my pocket while the checker is distracted. And I’m certainly not attracted by the prospect of pulling a gun on a bank teller.

But I wonder. Are there other ways in which my sensitivity to the demands of this commandment may have been dulled. Are there ways in which little thefts are slipping under my radar?

Here’s what I mean: is it possible that even as circumspectly as I try to live my life, I may be robbing God or my fellowman in ways that I don’t even recognize as theft? Malachi 3:8 comes to mind here. The prophet accuses His people of grand theft, for doing something they didn’t even consider a crime. Here’s the text: Malachi 3:8. God is speaking to His people through the prophet:

“ ‘Will a man rob God?

Yet you have robbed Me!

But you say,

“In what way have we robbed You?”

In tithes and offerings’ ” (NKJV).

Now, friend, this text challenges me. Because it moves the concept of the Eighth Commandment up to a whole new level. God doesn’t only ask us not to take what belongs to others. He challenges us not to keep what we ought to give to others.

In Malachi’s day the issue was tithes and offerings that ought to be brought into the temple to carry on God’s work in the sanctuary—supporting the priesthood and carrying out the sacrifices that taught the people about sin, righteousness, and forgiveness.

In the Christian era, the apostle Paul issued the same sort of challenge to the people of the church. There’s a fascinating passage in 2 Corinthians, chapter 9, where Paul reminds his friends in Corinth of how eagerly they had seized upon the opportunity to take up an offering to help their impoverished brothers and sisters in the church in Jerusalem. One of the main goals of Paul’s third missionary journey was to bring back an offering, collected from among his Gentile converts, to help the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem who were suffering for their faith, and by so doing to help to cement the bond of unity between the Gentile and Jewish Christians.

“ ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’ ” Jesus said (Matthew 6:21, KJV).

Did you sit in front of your television screen in shock and awe when you saw the destruction and havoc wreaked by the Asian Tsunami of 2004? When you saw New Orleans and Biloxi submerged under the waters of Katrina in 2005? Did your heart go out to the survivors?

Did you go to your computer or to your phone and make donations to aid agencies to try to help—to show that your heart and your treasure were in the right place? I hope you did, [¿I know I did?—say a bit more if appropriate]. It’s important to open our hearts to others in times of need.

In our world today, the opportunities presented for helping those in need are literally limitless. Whether near or far away.

Did you know that in the time it took Hurricane Katrina to roll across New Orleans, about 3,000 children died of malaria in Africa? And that the World Health Organization calls malaria a totally preventable disease—if only there were enough money available to combat it? And that’s just one example of places where the generosity of Christians is needed to help make the world a better place.

These are things that challenge me as a Christian. Things that I take to the Lord in prayer, seeking ways to use whatever resources God places in my hands to help others—to make sure that I am not keeping for myself the things that God would have me share with others. I know I can’t solve all of these problems, but I can do my small part to help those in need.

I know that if you are a Christian, your heart is touched by the needs of others. I know that your heart strives to come more and more into the likeness of God each day.

And I just want to challenge you. We’ll soon be entering the Christmas season—a time when we think about gifts and giving, and especially about God’s great gift to our world.

Take some time, won’t you, to consider the needs of those closest to you, or of those in far off lands. Remember that God in His faraway heaven didn’t forget you or me. He sent His Son to live and die for us. That’s what God is like. “God so loved that He gave.” We’ve all heard and recited that text.

Not to give takes our heart farther away from the heart of God. Giving helps remake our hearts in the image of God. And what a privilege it is to be made over in His image day by day.

As we think of the Eighth Commandment, let’s take it to heart. Not just to avoid taking what belongs to others, but to take it a step farther and be sure we’re sharing what God would have us share.

Has there been a moral decline in our world—a loss of ethical backbone? Well, if the world has indeed changed for the worse, let’s you and me do our part to change it back for the better!

“Gentle Like You”, Christian Edition, from Daystar CD.