Honour the Lord with Your Wealth
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Proverbs 3:9-10
Proverbs 3:9-10
9 Honor the Lord with your wealth
and with the firstfruits of all your produce;
10 then your barns will be filled with plenty,
and your vats will be bursting with wine.
This Sunday we are closing out our vision 24/25 preaching series by turning our attention to the subject of Biblically faithful financial stewardship. A subject which is of vital importance to the mission God has given us. We can have all the good will in the world to get out there and see souls saved, to see people maturing in the faith and to see the whole church active in mission, but without financial stewardship that mission will lack effectiveness.
Think of the RNLI, they could have the most motivated team of volunteers, they could have the best trained team in the world, but none of that matters if they don’t have a team of people who give financially to purchase and maintain the lifeboat.
Now it’s fair to say that this is a subject that is often either completely ignored by preachers, or misrepresented. Some Christians go their entire life without hearing a sermon on giving, others never hear the end of it! The prosperity gospel is a false gospel which spiritualises greed and materialism in the name of Christ. It teaches financial giving as an investment programme rather than as the right response of a heart that trusts in God’s goodness and faithfulness. It turns giving into greed!
But the proper response to this error isn’t to avoid teaching on the subject of money and of giving, it is to address the subject properly from the word of God. If we neglect to teach the whole counsel of God on this subject all we are doing is leaving God’s sheep vulnerable to wolves who are only too willing to distort God’s word for personal gain.
What’s more is - if we neglect to teach on giving then actually we are holding back a key avenue of God’s blessing from His people. The Bible is full of promises concerning giving, scripture isn’t silent or shy about the subject and over and over again scripture attaches promises of God’s blessing and favour to those who faithfully give. That’s not the prosperity gospel speaking, that’s the Bible speaking.
Now last week we were looking at 1 Peter 4 and what it had to say about using our gifts to serve one another. Not many people think of giving as one of the spiritual gifts, but it is listed as one of them in Romans 12:8. So todays message is really part 2 of last Sunday’s theme.
Sowing into gospel ministry is to be a participant in that ministry.
15 And you Philippians yourselves know that in the beginning of the gospel, when I left Macedonia, no church entered into partnership with me in giving and receiving, except you only.
John Wesley said, “The last part of a man to be converted is his wallet.” Martin Luther said, “Every man needs two conversions: the first, his heart, the second, his wallet!”
Now, as we study this passage from proverbs today it’s possible it may bring us some level of challenge, perhaps even a level of conviction, but one thing that there ought to be none of is any condemnation. Remember - God is gracious, compassionate and slow to anger, and he is unfailingly patient with us as we seek to conform our lives to His precepts.
I’m going to divide up this short passage before us this morning into two premises and a conclusion:
If you will honour the Lord with your finances
If you will honour Him with the best of all that you have
Then He will give you back more resources than you need
This sounds a bit like a prosperity gospel pitch but it’s not. It’s straight from the text!
Honour The Lord with Your Wealth
We often play a game over dinner called ‘who am I?’. One of us thinks of a personality or a Bible Character (or often an animal!) and the rest of us have to guess who they are by asking questions that can be answered by yes or no answers.
Now, just imagine a game of ‘who am I’ where instead of asking questions all you got a copy of their monthly bank statement and you had to work out who they were on the basis of that alone. I wonder what they’d be able to deduce about me from my statement?! Oooh this person loves coffee, reeeeallly loves coffee. Oh and takeaways too!!
But would someone be able to tell that I was a Christian just from my bank statement? Would there be enough evidence to convict?!
Our financial practices speak. They speak about our values, our cares and our convictions. What really matters to us will be reflected in how we choose to use our money.
Verse 3 says honour the Lord, כבד The Lord with your wealth. That word cavod has the sense of weightiness. We have a turn of phrase in English ‘to make light of something’, to make light of something is to trivialise it, to make it of little concern. To Cavod or to honour something is to do the opposite of that. We are to use our finances to make weighty the name of the Lord. We are not to make light of him in the way we use our money.
Interestingly most translations here have it as ‘honour the Lord WITH your wealth’. But a literal translation would actually be ‘honour the Lord FROM your wealth.’ Why might this be significant? Well someone may say I certainly do honour the Lord with my wealth - I treat my family, my children and myself with the best that money can buy, I pay all of my bills on time, I make sure I look after my home and my car. With my money, I am honouring and stewarding what God has given me. But this isn’t what the text is addressing, actually the text is speaking of honouring God out of your wealth. It’s speaking of an act of worship which comes out from your finances and up to the Lord.
The practice of tithing in the Old Testament was as an acknowledgment of God’s ownership of all things and of His provision for His people. The people would give a tenth of their produce to the Lord each year as an acknowledgement that all of it came from Him. When we honour The Lord with our wealth we are saying; all of this came from you, God and I am thankful for it. I trust you to provide for me and my family.
2. Honour the Lord with the best
I’ve been in churches where giving was spoken of so little that even even if I had wanted to give I wouldn’t have known how to! Some would think this was a wonderful thing but the reality is that it actually brought about a kind of spiritual complacency in me. Giving wasn’t something that I felt I needed to do, and so if when the offering plate was passed around I threw in a few coins and some pocket fluff I felt rather good about myself!
It wasn’t until I was at university that I really heard a sermon on giving - the Rector, Charlie Cleverley was telling us about an offering that would be taking place the nect Sunday and as he began to speak about giving I began to drift off into my own thoughts thinking, this isn’t relevant for me, I’m a student he won’t be expecting us students to give. And then he actually spoke directly to us undergraduates and invited us to consider what we might give. Not to just rock up and hand over whatever loose change we had from our weekend beer money but actually plan to give something.
That word honour or כבד is connected to the concept of sacrifice in the Old Testament. And here it is being linked with generosity - what is being said is that our giving is to be sacrificial - it is to cost us something.
21 And Araunah said, “Why has my lord the king come to his servant?” David said, “To buy the threshing floor from you, in order to build an altar to the Lord, that the plague may be averted from the people.” 22 Then Araunah said to David, “Let my lord the king take and offer up what seems good to him. Here are the oxen for the burnt offering and the threshing sledges and the yokes of the oxen for the wood. 23 All this, O king, Araunah gives to the king.” And Araunah said to the king, “May the Lord your God accept you.” 24 But the king said to Araunah, “No, but I will buy it from you for a price. I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God that cost me nothing.” So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver.
The concept of ‘firstfruits’ comes from the law too. Each year God’s people were to give a ‘firstfruits’ offering to the Lord, they were to offer to God the first and the best of their produce at the time of the wheat harvest. Before they enjoyed the fruits of their labour, they gave first to God. The Lord was the first consideration in their budget so to speak, before anything else. God was not an afterthought.
No of course we are not under the law, and none of us to my knowledge have fields of fruit to be harvested! However the principle stands even for Christians. God’s work is not to be an after thought in our budget but our first thought - we are to give to Him the first fruits of our income as a sign that he is our provider.
2 On the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up, as he may prosper, so that there will be no collecting when I come.
3. God will prosper those who diligently give
The reason that I decided to use this passage rather than something from the law of Moses was to show that this Biblical principle about giving isn’t strictly reserved to the mosaic law - this is a principle that still stands today. When we sow into God’s work, when we give to gospel ministry and to those in need we are enjoining God to come through on this promise
That our storehouses would be filled with plenty and that our vats will be bursting with new wine. That’s all well and good I suppose but most of us don’t have barns or vats to fill so what does this mean?
‘Overflow’ comes from a root word meaning to break through, break down, break over, or burst. God is able to burst wide open any storehouse you can manufacture. God’s ability to give exceeds your ability to receive and retain by as much greater a measure as infinity is than finitude. You cannot outgive God. - John Kitchen
If we will faithfully give and sow into God’s work he doesn’t just promise us that we’ll have enough or that we’ll survive, but that we will have more than enough.
God actually invites His people to test him on this very principle in the book of Malachi:
10 Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.
Now this overflow which God promises is not for us to just hoard - it’s so that we can continue to be a vessel for blessing others. The more that we show ourselves to be good stewards of His blessings, the more he will entrust us with.
6 The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. 7 Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.
This Biblical principle of blessing upon sacrifice runs right through the very core of God’s word. Whether we’re talking about money or livestock or our own lives - God calls us to a life of sacrifice, He calls us to follow the Lord Jesus Christ our passover lamb, who was sacrificed for our sins before the foundation of the world.
Ultimately we can take nothing with us out of this world, so why not use our money to sow into something that will last for eternity - God’s kingdom!
