The Gospel begins where thieves are caught and cry out for mercy. Christ came for robbers like us—the ones who squandered their hours, wasted their gifts, and mortgaged eternity for moments of ease.

The Thief in the Mirror

Most burglars hide beneath the cloak of darkness, prowling in the shadows like rats in a pantry. But the thief living within us is far more cunning—he thrives in the light of day. He sits beside us at breakfast, sipping our self-same coffee and he lies down with us on our pillow in the evening. That crook is not a covert stranger slipping in through an unlocked window in the dead of night; he is the man looking back at you in the mirror.

And maybe you would retort: “But I aint no thief,” and in one sense you could be quite right since you do not have any criminal charges on your record. Yet in another, and perhaps more ghastly way, you would be very very wrong. You see, we curse the man who smashes store windows and plunders a local Target—and rightly so, for that kind of behavior is truly repugnant. But we are also strangely gentle on ourselves when we waste time and resources that could have been given in the service of God.

And you might say to me: “How is this stealing?” Well, the answer lies in who our time belongs to. If I am the master of my own universe, and all time and space belong to me, then I can do with my time whatever I please. But, if “my” time belongs to someone else then I am accountable to them on how I use it. And since our time is owned by the infinitely wise and all powerful God, given to us as a gift to steward for His glory, then when I waste God’s time on things that do not matter, in a very important sense I am stealing from Him.

And we all do this. We rob Him of prayer in the morning by sleeping in instead of going to the throne of grace. We commit grand larceny in worship by scrolling endlessly on YouTube to drown out our boredom instead of taking our passions to God in praise. We steal our best service away from God by chasing a million comforts instead of giving God all of our heart, soul, mind and strength. And we become thieves in matters of devotion, by filling every quiet space of our life with a litany tasks, entertainments, food, drink, and a laundry list of responsibilities so that (at least we claim) we have no time left to serve our God. Even in the matter of money, we believe our money belongs to us, and cannot possibly consider that our lack of generosity to His Kingdom, while we are perfectly happy to fund our own, is yet another kind of larceny from God (Mal. ?) It is as the Grinch once said, our lives are filled with: “all the noise, noise, noise, noise, noise!” And it is that noise that makes us burglars of time. We take the time He gave us to steward for His glory and we foolishly spend it on ourselves and that is a kind of stealing that we rarely consider or repent of.

When it comes to defining the act of stealing, the Eighth Commandment says, “You shall not steal” (Exodus 20:15). Simple enough—until you realize that the line between what’s mine and what’s yours doesn’t begin with us at all. Scripture insists that ownership starts and ends with God. “The earth is the LORD’s, and all it contains, the world, and those who dwell in it” (Psalm 24:1). “Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory… indeed everything that is in the heavens and the earth” (1 Chronicles 29:11). Everything in our pockets, our houses, our lungs, and our calendars already bears His name. Which means theft is not merely taking from another person—it is mishandling what belongs to the King. And Paul drives the point home: “You are not your own; you were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). Every possession, every minute, every breath is borrowed. To steal, in any form, is to pretend the borrowed is ours.

This truth is even clearer in our shared confessional heritage. The Westminster Larger Catechism presses this law into our ribs, teaching that it requires the “lawful procuring and furthering of the wealth and outward estate of others and ourselves.” God expects fruit, not merely the absence of theft. He wants builders, not loiterers—men and women who turn five talents into ten, who till the soil of their short lives until it yields glory. Anything less is theft with clean hands.

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