Firstfruits

Good morning, welcome to NHCC, please open your Bibles to Proverbs 3.

Proverbs as signposts.

Wisdom as skill in ever area of life- living life the right way.

Look outside of yourself for the answers- specifically, honor and respect and revere and seek after God in order to find wisdom.

Read Proverbs 3:9–12- “Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine. My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.”

Pray.

The entirety of Proverbs 3 concerns itself with trust.

Father speaking to a son- passing down wisdom.

V. 1-4- Trust the wisdom that I am passing down to you.

Don’t forget what I tell you and reap the reward.

V. 5-8- Trust in the Lord with all your heart.

This wisdom passed down from father to son culminates in trusting God.

Don’t lean on your own understanding.

Temptation of Jesus- Trust God or trust the world.

Now, the author gives real life experience of what it looks like to trust God in some of life’s various circumstances. What is coming ahead and how must life be altered as a result?

Trust God in the good circumstance of life and the bad- when it can be most difficult to trust God.

Proverbs 30- Help me walk the middle road- Agur.

1. Trust God when life is good.

Remember, trust God’s path, don’t lean on our own understanding.

Honor the Lord.

kabad- Honor, glorify, make something heavy.

Losing that which is light because it is no longer on the mind- keys v. bags of salt.

With your wealth.

hon- Wealth, riches, substance.

The substance that makes up your life. Who you are as well as what you have.

From rather than with.

Honor God with your wealth- I honor God by paying my taxes on time, by making my car payments on time.

Honor God from your wealth- give money to God, or more specifically to His purposes.

Matthew Poole- “Give according to thy abilities whatsoever is necessary for the support and advancement of God’s worship and service in the world.”

With the firstfruits.

The first and best of what we have.

Concept that continues on throughout the NT- Giving sacrificially.

Remember the widow with her two copper coins from Mark 12.

Reversal of the way that we tend to do life.

Notice the principle- Honor God from what you possess and give first to the work of God in the world.

For many, giving of what we have comes down to the remainder.

We tend to work our budgets, whether money, resources, time, etc. to figure out what must be spent and then figure what can be given to God’s work.

The author tells us to flip it. Give in many ways to the work of the Kingdom, then figure out life on what remains.

Isn’t this the point of Romans 12- Give your life as a living sacrifice. Why? Because Christ gave His life as a sacrifice for you.

This is not a foreign concept- when you don’t think it’s possible to live in such a way, remember the payment that was made for your life.

But I’m too busy for that, I’m worn out, I’m stressed. Maybe it is because we have been doing life backwards when it comes to time and resource allocation.

Notice the result that this father tells to his son.

Barns will be filled.

God will reward your efforts to make much of Him.

Careful here. The idea is not that we give in order that we would become wealthy for our own purposes and glory.

Instead, God sees the faithfulness of those who are willing to make much of Him from all that they have and gives them even more opportunity to do so.

Matthew Henry- “God will bless you with an increase of that which is for use, not for show, for giving away, not for hoarding. Those who do good with what they have shall have more to do good with.”

Remember, anything we find ourselves to be blessed with is given in order to make more and more of God.

Here is the principle to be remembered- We cannot out give God.

Kevin DeYoung- “The next time we are wondering whether to be generous, whether to give to the church, give to that Christian organization, give to those missionaries, don’t think about your shrinking bank account, think about the Lord’s inexhaustible treasury… When we don’t give to the Lord’s work, it not only betrays a stingy heart, worse it suggests we have a stingy God.”

What does our giving of our substance teach others of our trust in God?

2. Trust God when life is hard.

Now we come to the difficult parts of life, in particular, when God is actively causing difficulty in order that course correction might be made.

Life is filled with correction- earliest days, schooling, work.

God continues such a trend in our spiritual lives. He introduces difficulty in order that we, His children, might be made right.

Psalm 119:67- “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word.”

The question here- How will we respond to the difficult and trying times in life?

Do not despise.

Refuse or reject.

To be disgusted by something, the way that we might be disgusted by food or drink gone bad.

Such an attitude causes us to reject God’s purposes outright.

We have no desire to see what God is doing, or even to consider why it might be happening.

Do not be weary.

Become distressed, become grieved.

To be dejected and overwhelmed by something. To not be able to see beyond current circumstances.

Eva- 2 minutes is forever.

See the discipline of God in the right way.

“...the Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.”

When God disciplines His people, He does so as a Father lovingly caring for and concerned for the well-being of His children.

He does not remove his loving-kindness in order to discipline, rather, His loving-kindness is the fuel of His discipline.

Maybe we are having trouble visualizing such a reality. C.S. Lewis illustrates such a truth beautifully in The Problem of Pain.

C.S. Lewis- “Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble; he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life… he will take endless trouble- and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and recommenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumbnail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny, but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.”

We end where we began. How will we live in times of greatness and in times of distress?