Tell Them the Story

Greeting

Good morning Lighthouse!

Today’s message is going to build on last week’s message.

Last week we talked about ordering our life. We examined Jesus’ words when he said to “Seek first the Kingdom of God…”

When we understand that principle we can then apply that principle to every area of our life.

One of those applications is to our finances. The Principle of Giving to God first. Whatever we have set aside to give to God, that we would give that to Him first. When we have given to him first, we have ordered everything else around that single and simple act of worship with our finances.

Now today, I’m going to ask you to lean in a bit as we unpack one of the greatest biblical principles in the Bible when it comes to ordering our finances.

Reading

Leviticus 27:30 (NIV)

“ ‘A tithe of everything from the land, whether grain from the soil or fruit from the trees, belongs to the Lord; it is holy to the Lord.”

Malachi 3:10 (NIV)

Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the Lord Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.

Tell Them the Story

Introduction

I love to read and study organizations with strong culture. I’ve read up on organizations like Nike, Apple, Google, Chick Fil A. What I’ve found when I read about each of these organizations is how they use stories to shape their values and actions.

They don’t just tell their employees what to do, but they share with them why they do it that way and the story about when they started to do it that way.

You see stories are such a great teacher.

They are a better teachers than information.

Our generation has a lot of information. As a matter of fact, we have too much information. We have information, but we lack wisdom.

Wisdom doesn’t come with information.

Wisdom comes from pursuing wisdom. And a big part of getting wisdom is hearing stories.

Transition

Just as organizational stories help shape understanding and values, the stories we find in the Bible serve a similar purpose. They are not just historical accounts but lessons that shape our faith and actions. Let me share with you a story from the Bible that illustrates this point.

Text

Israel had been in Egypt for hundreds of years before we get to our text in Leviticus. They entered into Egypt generations before to escape a famine in their part of the world. When they came into Egypt they were welcomed sojourners. They were immigrants who needed a temporary home while they rode out the famine.

Because their stay in Egypt was so welcomed, they were quite comfortable and they made it their home.

Unfortunately, over time the hospitality of the Egyptians changed towards them. They were first welcomed into their land, and then they were only welcomed if they would remain as servants to the Egyptians.

This was certainly not ideal, but to be a servant in a land with enough resources to go around was an accommodation that they were willing to make.

But in time, their status once again changed from that of a servant to that of a slave.

Now, they were forced into labor. The conditions were harsh. They were being held against their will and the land that once warmly welcomed them…

God’s people began to cry out to their Lord… it took a while for them to do this becuase when you spend 400 years in a foreign land, that foreign land begins to wash away your identity. As a matter of fact, you take on the language, the identity, and the culture of the land. The reason it took so long for them to call out to the Lord is because they had forgotten the Lord. They worshipped the God’s of Egypt. They knew that they had their own customs and their own heritage, but beyond the stories at the dinner table, and perhaps before bed, they were Egyptian Slaves.

When the Lord heard their cries, he raised up Moses to be his instrument to lead Israel out of Egypt.

What happens next is 10, can you all say 10?

There are ten plagues that the Lord sends on Egypt until Pharoah agreed to let the people go.

So Israel leaves Egypt 2 million people strong.

A nation was coming out of another nation.

And for the next forty years, they would wander in a dessert as God began to break their Egyptian identity and once more form them into the children of God who they were created and designed to be.

I need you to hold that truth tightly right now - the dessert was a place where God formed Israel back into His image.

Now, God gave commands to Moses to give to Israel in the dessert because the commands would be the practices that would form Israel back into His image.

We are formed by the things that we repeatedly say about ourselves, and the things that we repeatedly do.

OK, so we have a place, the dessert, and we have the commands, which are the practices. These things were used by God to bring His people back to Him. They are to heal what is broken. They are to correct what is incorrect.

And, I want you to remember this one last thing… all of these things happened to be examples for us today.

1 Corinthians 10:11 (NIV)

These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination of the ages has come.

The Tithe

God gives the command to Israel to tithe… So what is the tithe? The word tithe means a tenth, or 10%

When God commanded Israel to tithe, it wasn’t just any 10% of their increase, it was the first ten percent of their increase. These two things together, the first of, and 10% of, were to be brought to the Lord.

Why?

As the verse we just read states, it belongs to Him.

You see that statement checks the posture of our hearts. Do we treat our resources as provision or possessions?

When we treat our resources as possessions our hearts are tethered to our material things. We are attached to them. We give our things more of ourselves than God has ever intended for us to give to them.

And, just as a reminder to everyone in the room, you don’t get to be buried with them!

But when you treat your resources as provision, you are saying that all that I have was given to me by God. He has provided them to me. They are provision to be stewarded and to be used in a way that brings Glory to God, and I am able to share with others.

Recently I heard on a podcast this statement - “Things that are convenient, but have the potential to become a liability, require stewardship.”

Your finances, they sure are convenient to have! But they have the potential to become a liability, so we must steward them.

Think about your phone. Very convenient. But it could be a liability. You need to steward it.

A hobby. Same thing.

So if money has the potential to be a liability, I have to approach my money with a heart to steward it.

That’s why I believe the Bible calls the love of money the root of all evil. Money is neutral. Your relationship with money is not neutral.

Ok, so when that’s settled in our hearts - provision vs possession, then giving to God what is already his is not difficult!

If I were to ask you to hold a $100 bill for me for one week, and at the end of the week I told you just give me $10 of it and you can keep the rest. All of you would GLADLY sign up for that! You’d say ABSOLUTELY PASTOR. You might even be asking me if you could hold $1,000 or $10,000.

Why?

Because the money belonged to me to begin with, and since I was only asking you to return to me 10%, that was an incredible exchange!

Now, let me go a little deeper into what the tithe represents. The tithe is a tenth.

But did you know that the number 10 is the number of testing?

When you read in the Bible the number 10 it is associated with testing and there’s an application to be learned about that test.

God sent 10 plagues to Egypt to test Pharoah

God gave Israel 10 commands to test their heart.

God tested Israel 10 times in the dessert.

Jacob’s wages were changed 10 times when he served Laban

There were 10 virgins in Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25

The consistency of this number reveals to us that 10 represents testing.

So, is the tithe a test that God places on us? Is God now testing you and me to determine if we are able to pass the test? Is that what the tithe is?

Maybe you’ve heard of it that way, but that’s not actually how I read it. Let’s read this together and let’s see how the test is being applied:

Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the Lord Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.

Test who?

Test who?

Who is speaking?

So who is me?

God invited Israel to test Him.

Sometimes we hear this kind of preaching and we’re like, “Bruh, why is the Pastor talking about money?”

First off, I’m quoting the Lord.

Second, if the Lord was giving his people the opportunity to test him, I want you to know about it.

Do you know how many times the Lord told His people they could test Him?

Just once. As a matter of fact there are scriptures in the Bible that say DO NOT TEST THE LORD.

It’s like if you do, you are going to mess around and find out.

But then comes this passage of scripture, and this is the one area where God says the test is on me.

Some of you need to shift your perspective on the tithe. God isn’t testing you. He is telling you to step into a life where you give back to God the tithe, and you watch Him bless you and provide for you and do more with 90% than you could do with 100%

Law vs Life

Now, I realize that there are some people in the room that are going to quickly point out that tithing was a system of the Old Testament, and it was under the Law.

Yes, and Amen.

Kind of… it was lived out before the law, and then lived out within the law, so it does not originate with the law but was adopted into the law.

All of the law was fulfilled in Jesus. He is the fulfillment of every requirement and now he asks that we live by and that we walk by faith.

So, is the tithe still a law for us today?

Giving is not law, but it is life.

You see, in the New Testament, when you look at the model of the early church, the people willing gave to the advancement of the church. There was no assigned amount to what people would bring to the church to further the message of the gospel. Acts records that people were selling their properties and bringing all of the money to the feet of the disciples. They gave significantly above and beyond just 10% They were giving supernatural and sacrificial gifts!

So today, you are under no obligation to give.

But, as we said very early in this message, their are principles of the Old Testament that we should be applying to our life.

We should still ask ourselves the question, do I have possessions or do I have provisions?

Do I have an attachment to things that I can’t take with me into eternity?

Am I stewarding the resources God has given me?

Let me conclude this thought by saying this, Tithing is Personal.

Because tithing is giving to God it is a deeply personal act of worship.

I don’t say personal as in “you do whatever it is you want with it…” but I am saying that “You should have a conversation with the Lord and obey what He is telling you to do.”

I’ve said this before, we will never tell you to give by compulsion. That is not what we do here at Lighthouse. But we will unapologetically ask you to pray about it, and to obey what you believe God is leading you to do.

Growing in Generosity

Now, let me briefly talk to you about growing in generosity.

I believe that God wants you to grow in generosity because He is generous! But for some of us in the room, we need help getting out of our financial hole. We’re in debt and we’ve made poor financial decisions that don’t allow us to step into a lifestyle of generosity.

As we said last week, we are either being intentionally formed into the image of God, or we are being deformed into the ways of this world. And, in the world in which we live, debt has become a deformation of God’s design. God has never designed us to live in debt and under the bondage of the financial system of the world in which we live.

What it is causing is people who are compared to the rest of the world living in prosperity, but yet they do not have money.

How would you live if you had no debt? How could you give if you had no debt?

This is why we want for you to go to Financial Peace University. We want to expose the lies of the worlds system so that you will no longer be formed in your finances by the way of the world.

We started FPU last week and the response was overwhelming. If you missed it, let me just stick my neck out here and say that you MIGHT be able to join if you can come this week. But you really can’t come in after this week. This door closes and we will offer it again in the future, and I want you to keep this same energy and join it.

But I also want you to know that we have this small little resource for purchase. It’s a small book called Worry Free Finances. We have these outside available for $3. I get it, you might be thinking, “Pastor that’s just $3, why not give it away?” Because if I give it to you for free, you won’t read it. It’ll go on the shelf right next to your Elf and because you didn’t make even the smallest investment into yourself, you won’t read it.

But let me just say this, if you need this and at this time you cannot afford the $3 then I will give it you. But only if this is a real strain and if you promise to read and start applying what is in this book.

So please hear me Lighthouse that we want for you to move into the place of financial freedom.

And, now I also want to show you how you can grow in generosity.

[Generosity Chart}

We give this out and we talk about this in Growth Track, but let me once again walk you through how you can grow in generosity.

Tell Them your Story (Conclusion)

As I come to a close, let me bring you back to where we began.

I told you about the story of Israel before I talked to you about the act of tithing.

That was important, but more importantly it is Biblical.

Let me read to you a passage that explains just that when God is giving his people the command of tithing:

Exodus 13:14–16 (NIV)

“In days to come, when your son asks you, ‘What does this mean?’ say to him, ‘With a mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. When Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the Lord killed the firstborn of both people and animals in Egypt. This is why I sacrifice to the Lord the first male offspring of every womb and redeem each of my firstborn sons.’ And it will be like a sign on your hand and a symbol on your forehead that the Lord brought us out of Egypt with his mighty hand.”

You see, when we bring to God our first, we are doing so in response to all that He has done for us. It’s not just an act of obedience, it is an act of worship. I am worshipping Him with my first.

And when your children ask you why you worship this way, you stop and you tell them, Son, I used to be in Egypt. I was bound by drugs. I was bound by addiction. Your Mother and I had a rough marriage. I struggled with some things.

But when God stepped into my life, he rescued me from the life that I was living.

Then he put His spirit on the inside of me.

It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s been worth it!

So worshipping this Lord is what I do! Sacrificing for the Lord is what I do!

And son, I hope that one day you are able to do the same! I hope that one day you too will order your life around the work of Jesus and join Him in bringing His Kingdom to our City.

Tell your children the story!

Don’t cheapen what God has done for you by saying this is a heartless act. Tell the story of all that God has done for you!