Giving as Worship
Notes
Transcript
Everything we have comes from God, who graciously provides for His people, therefore, our giving should be a joyful act of worship, reflecting gratitude to the One who has given us all we have.
Introduction:
Introduction:
A couple weeks ago, I started my Sermon with an illustration about me buying Whitney tickets to an expensive football game as a Christmas gift.
The point of that Illustration was to show that doing something to show love does not count when it is selfish and done in a way that does not honor the person, but rather ourselves.
I want to start this Sermon with a Simalar illustration to prove a simular, but different point.
What if instead of me buying Whitney these tickets, I bought them for myself.
What if I also bought myself a pair of AirPods.
This whole time, I am buying my wife absolutely nothing.
Christmas comes, and I figure I need to buy her something, so I buy her a coffee mug.
Now imagine if she was the only one making money?
That would mean that I am not only spending all this money on myself while ignoring her, but I am doing it all with money that I owe all to her.
Now I think you can all see the problem with this.
Our modern world and economies have made giving almost transactional, but giving has always been a means of showing love and honor to those we care for and respect.
This is true in our relationship with God as well.
This is not because God needs us to give for His plans to be made,
or for His glory to be shown,
but rather He has sovereignly allowed us to take part in the joy of His Glory,
in part by giving.
So that is what we will be talking about today,
as well as in small group on Tuesday, so I encourage you to come out then.
The main idea of today’s Sermon is
Everything we have comes from God, who graciously provides for His people, therefore, our giving should be a joyful act of worship, reflecting gratitude to the One who has given us all we have.
As always, we will do this by going through the story.
The main points we will draw out of the Story are...
The Source of our Giving.
The Heart of our Giving.
The New Testament affirmation of our Giving.
The source of our giving.
The source of our giving.
To look at the source of the Israelites giving, we actually have to back up to Exodus 12:35-36.
This is during the great exodus.
The people were on their way out,
after God had shows His strength and power over the gods of Egypt and over Pharaoh.
God had Moses instruct the people to simply ask the Egyptians for their valuables and God gave favor to them in the eyes of the Egyptians.
35 The people of Israel had also done as Moses told them, for they had asked the Egyptians for silver and gold jewelry and for clothing.
36 And the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. Thus they plundered the Egyptians.
You see, everything they had to give, they had because God gave favor upon them.
It would be easy for the Israelites to forget this though,
and begin to take comfort and security in the riches,
and not on the source of their riches.
This is the same for us today though, is it not?
We may begin to think, hey, I worked hard for this money.
Maybe you think I
work a 9-9-6 job , I have earned this money, nobody gave it to me.
This is an easy trap to fall into.
I come from a very hardworking family who often sees what they have purely as what they worked for and earned.
They have sacrificed a lot, and worked for many years to get what they have, and although it is not much, there can be great pride in it because they worked hard for it.
A hardworking mindset is good and healthy, but it stops being good at all when we forget that the reason we have anything we have is through the Grace of God.
Our ability to work,
the wisdom to save,
the fact that a natural disaster or economic calapse has not taken it all
is by the Merciful hand of God.
You see, we could have nothing that we have without God giving it to us, and this includes all that we have worked for.
We see God warning Israel, and ourselves of this tempting mindset in Deut 8:11-18
11 “Take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today,
12 lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them,
13 and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied,
14 then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery,
15 who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock,
16 who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end.
17 Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’
18 You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day.
So we see that the source of what Israel gave was from God,
and in the same way,
the source of what we give today is also from God.
This leads us to our next point being drawn out of our Exodus story, which is the heart of our Giving.
The Heart of our Giving.
The Heart of our Giving.
We saw a couple weeks ago how Israel gave sacrificially to worship God,
but they did so in an improper manner,
worshiping Him with a graven image,
as well as alongside false gods,
which were violations of both the first and second commandments.
They used what God had given them for wrong worship, instead of Holy Worship.
We then saw last week that God showed Moses His Glory, so that He would know the majesty and greatness of whom He serves.
But He could not show Moses His face, because that would kill him.
Do you see the imense importance here?
God is so great.
His Glory is so great,
That we would drop dead if we saw the fullness of it.
So God showed Moses just a portion of Himself, and what was the result of this?
8 And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped.
what else are we to do when in the presence of a Holy, righteous Glorious God, but to fall down in Worship?
I pray that this is our response at Hutong Church.
That we be a church that sees the goodness of God,
Sees the power of God,
sees the love of God
sees the Justice of God
sees the righteousness of God,
and can do nothing else but fall on our face in humble worship before Him.
Did Moses’s worship remain with Himself on his face?
No, it continued with a recognition that they are a sinful people.
9 And he said, “If now I have found favor in your sight, O Lord, please let the Lord go in the midst of us, for it is a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.”
The reason I am reminding you of all of this is so that you can see how the story fits together.
Israel’s giving must be seen in light of them reciving their wealth from the blessings of God,
failing to give this wealth for His glory but rather in direct disobedience,
and God’s great forgiveness and showing of Himself to Moses.
Their giving was an act of worship in response to Who God was and what He had done for them.
With that foundation,
we get to Exodus 35:4-9, which is what Adjan read earlier.
I encourage you to have your Bibles opened to this chapter since we will reference it a few times here.
So after seeing the Rightousness, forginvess, justice, and Glory of God, what was the heart of giving that the Israelites had?
A) Giving was a command by God.
A) Giving was a command by God.
4 Moses said to all the congregation of the people of Israel, “This is the thing that the Lord has commanded.
There was a command to Give.
God had given generously to the Israelites and He Commanded that they give back to Him as a sign of their trust, dependence, and worship of Him.
Next we see that…
B) Giving was to be done by those with a generous heart.
B) Giving was to be done by those with a generous heart.
You see, although there was a command given to Moses to have the people give,
He did not say a specific amount to be given by each family.
It was to be given by those whom saw the Glory of God and was stirred in an act of worship to give.
5 Take from among you a contribution to the Lord. Whoever is of a generous heart, let him bring the Lord’s contribution: gold, silver, and bronze;
There was no quota given.
It was expected that those who have had this encounter with God, those whom had seen the great forgivness of God,
those whom had seen a small glimpse of the Glory of God would be stirred to worship, and this included giving freely of what God had given them.
A few verses later in verses 20-21, we see the same thing again.
20 Then all the congregation of the people of Israel departed from the presence of Moses.
21 And they came, everyone whose heart stirred him, and everyone whose spirit moved him, and brought the Lord’s contribution to be used for the tent of meeting, and for all its service, and for the holy garments.
And that is just what they did.
Coke can
C) Giving was to be in abundance.
C) Giving was to be in abundance.
So much so that we see in chapter 6 that Moses had to tell people to stop giving.
That was the abundance in which they gave,
not out of compulsion,
but out of a sincere worship to the One whom forgave them of their sins,
and made a covenant with them.
3 And they received from Moses all the contribution that the people of Israel had brought for doing the work on the sanctuary. They still kept bringing him freewill offerings every morning,
4 so that all the craftsmen who were doing every sort of task on the sanctuary came, each from the task that he was doing,
5 and said to Moses, “The people bring much more than enough for doing the work that the Lord has commanded us to do.”
6 So Moses gave command, and word was proclaimed throughout the camp, “Let no man or woman do anything more for the contribution for the sanctuary.” So the people were restrained from bringing,
7 for the material they had was sufficient to do all the work, and more.
But some of you may be asking the question in your head, sure Charlie, but this is the Old Testament, does that apply to us today?
Great question.
The New Testament affirmation of our Giving.
The New Testament affirmation of our Giving.
The New testament says alot about giving, and the heart of giving.
We could do an entire series on what the New Testament says about giving, which could be good since there is a lot of confusion on the topic.
I have even heard it said that the New Testament doesn’t teach giving, which is just not true.
I do agree that the tithe is not taught, but giving absolutely is.
We see Jesus speaking in Matthew 6:3
But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,
Did you catch that? He said “WHEN You GIVE”.
The underlying assumption is clear.
YOU will give because You should give.
I propose that the same response to God’s
love,
power,
forgiveness,
justice,
and Glory
that Israel had in Exodus 35-36 is the same response that the early church modelled in Acts 4
and is the same response that we should have today,
because it is simply a natural response to a Holy God who has forgiven a sinful people.
This is shown even more so when we see how much is given in the New Testament about how to give.
We see Jesus speaking on giving in the Gospels.
We see Paul speaking multiple times on giving in His Epistles.
We see John speaking on giving in His epistle.
And we See the Early church modeling giving in the book of Acts.
So it would seem that throughout the New testament,
it is being assumed that we would be giving,
and therefore need to be giving with the right heart.
Again, this makes sense when we see giving as a proper worship response to what God has done.
It could be tempting for us to think that we have not seen God act in the ways He did in Exodus,
and we did not see the back of God as Moses did,
or the face of Moses shine as the people did,
but that mentality would be a mistake.
We have something far greater to worship God in than they even had, and that is the first coming of Jesus Christ.
You see, Most of what we see in Exodus,
that we think is greater than what we have today,
were merely images of what was to come.
As we discussed a couple weeks ago,
The people rebelled against a Holy and rightous God, and God rightfully could have wiped them off the face of the earth for their sin.
What we did not have time to discuss however is how Moses went before God, and mediated for the people.
He went to God and sought how He could atone, or make right the sins of the people.
Unfortunately, there was nothing Moses could do to pay the price of these sins.
But he was an image of one to come who had the power to pay the price of their sins, and our sins as well.
That is what the entirety of scripture is pointing us to,
and what so much of Exodus is an image of.
It is the fact that we are a stiffnecked people,
fully depraved and sinful,
Unable to please a Holy and righteous God because of our sin.
God would be fully righteous and Holy to wipe us out, or let us go in our sinfulness and pay the price ourselves.
But He is a God of imense forgivness and in His infinite wisdom, made a way for us to have a relationship with Him.
But for this to happen, our sins must be paid for.
The Wages of sin is death.
This is physical death, but also spiritual death,
spiritual death being eternal seperation from God.
So God came down in the form of man, being 100% God and 100% man and died on the cross, taking on the wages of sin upon Himself.
He took the rightous wrath of God for our sin upon Himself.
So now, when God looks at me, He does not see my sinfulness,
He does not see my shame,
He sees the perfect righoutsness of Jesus Christ.
This is the God that we worship guys.
What we have is the fullness of the Gospel, and what the Israelites in today’s story only had an image of.
If you have been forgiven by God, then you have the Holy Spirit living within you.
Did you catch that?
You have the God of the universe living and working in You.
You are a Temple of the one true God.
Your sins have been forgiven.
You have been made righteous.
Oh the Glory of God that is His rich and infinite forgiveness.
This is why the early Church at the end of Acts 4 were freely selling and giving all they had to the work of the church, and for those in need in the church.
Their natural reaction to the work of Christ in their life, to the revelation of the Glory of God living within them was to freely give sacrificially what God had given to them.
So what are some practical ways we can worship in our giving?
Change how you see what you have.
it is from God.
Be thankful for what you have.
See it as a tool for worship.
Give to those in need
lukimia kids.
Homeless man
Natural disasters
Etc.
But be wise
give to the church
Give to missions
we shall conclude the sermon with a time of corporate small group prayer.
Get in groups of 3-5 people around you, and let us lift up our worship to Him for what HE has done for us.
Let us lift up our worship to Him for His saving Grace.
Let us Humbly proclaim His praises.
Let us repent of our sins before Him.
And Let us seek Him in how we can show our worship to Him in our giving.
