Test Me!
Stewardship • Sermon • Submitted
0 ratings
· 118 viewsNotes
Transcript
One of my wonderful wife’s greatest frustrations when we got together was my financial
Two years ago last week, I made an announcement on Facebook and then in the newspaper that I would be leaving my career as a newspaper editor to pursue full-time ministry.
There’s a story told about Billy Graham when he was just starting his ministry as an evangelist.
For those of you who have listened to me preach from this pulpit for the past 15 months or so — and for those of you who have gotten to know me personally during that time — it will not come as a surprise to you to
I hesitated to talk about this today, because I worry that some might take what I’m going to say as bragging. But as I’ve considered how to approach today’s topic I just kept coming back to the fact that my personal experience
Billy and his wife, Ruth, were guests at a church where he had been asked to preach. It came time during the service for the offering, and one of the ushers came to the stage where Billy was sitting and held the plate up to the evangelist.
Digging into his pocket, Mr. Graham brought out a bill and dropped it into the plate, but as it landed there, he realized it wasn’t the $1 bill he had intended to leave but the $10 bill he had been saving for travel expenses.
To make matters worse, the church treasurer neglected to pay him an honorarium for his speaking engagement.
As the Grahams were driving away from that church and on to their next destination, Billy told Ruth about his mistake, probably expecting her to sympathize with him.
Her response, however, reminded even this man of God about how our giving reveals something about our hearts.
Turning to him, she said that things were even worse than he’d thought. “Just think,” she said, “God will give you credit only for the $1, since that’s all you had intended to give anyway.”
Today, we’re going to continue our short series on the basics of church membership with a message about giving. I was asked by the deacons several months ago to do a couple of messages on stewardship within the church, and the topic fits quite well within our current series.
In the first message of this series, I spoke at length about the confession of faith that qualifies someone to be called a Christian. I said that neither baptism nor knowing all the stories about Jesus will save you.
Your path into the Kingdom of Heaven starts with your admitting that you are a sinner who deserves eternal separation from the perfectly holy God for your rebellion against Him.
But in His grace, God provided a way for your sin-debt to be paid, and that was the willing sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ, on a cross on Calvary. A sinless Jesus took on the sins of the world, suffering a death He did not deserve, so that we who believe in Him and accept His sacrifice on our behalf could have an eternal life we do not deserve.
And His resurrection from the dead proves that He can deliver on His promise that those who follow Him in faith will spend eternity with Him.
If you believe awefpijeanfpijbqedgpqjebgpqiwebfpiquwefnpwqefjpqwebfpiehwbfpiquwhefpijqbwef piunqwpriu bipqwurp
If you have repented of your sins, turned to Jesus in faith that only His sacrifice can save you and confessed that He is Lord, then you are saved. And if you are saved, we learned a couple of weeks ago, then your place while you are on earth is in the church.
And if you are in the church, we learned last week, one of the things you are called to do as part of this body of Christ is to use whatever spiritual gift you have been given by the Holy Spirit to build up the church in love.
So that’s a quick recap of what we’ve learned during the past three weeks.
Today, as I said, we’ll be talking about what’s often known as stewardship. I would make the case that we like to use that word, because we tend to DISlike using the simpler and more straightforward term, “giving.”
By talking about stewardship, we can allow ourselves the luxury of thinking that our giving to the church can legitimately come after we’ve taken care of ourselves. But to quote from the movie “The Princess Bride,” I do not think that word, stewardship, means what you think it means.
We’ll talk about that a bit more next week, when I give the message I don’t think you’re expecting. Today, however, I’m going to give the message on giving that many of you probably expect.
Turn with me, please to the Book of Malachi, Chapter 3. It’s the last book of the Old Testament, so if you’re having trouble, turn to the beginning of the New Testament and then turn back a few pages.
Now, this book of prophecy is written as a series of disputations between God and His returned remnant in Jerusalem and Judea. Throughout the book, God chastises His people for their wrongheaded assumptions about Him.
The recurring theme is the nature of God and the responsibility of His people to treat Him with reverence and obedience.
Picking up in Verse 7 of Chapter 3, we hear God speaking through His prophet, Malachi.
7 “From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from My statutes and have not kept them. Return to Me, and I will return to you,” says the Lord of hosts. “But you say, ‘How shall we return?’
The people who received this prophetic word had come back into the Promised Land from their time in exile, and they had resumed their worship in the rebuilt temple. But here we see that, though they might have returned to Jerusalem and even to the temple, they had not truly returned to the Lord.
And now He was telling them again that thei
“How shall we return?” they asked.
8 “Will a man rob God? Yet you are robbing Me! But you say, ‘How have we robbed You?’ In tithes and offerings.
God had laid out the Hebrew system of tithing through Moses. The idea was that one-tenth of the crops and one-tenth of the livestock they raised was to be devoted to the Lord.
9 “You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing Me, the whole nation of you!
We see this in the Book of Leviticus.
30 ‘Thus all the tithe of the land, of the seed of the land or of the fruit of the tree, is the Lord’s; it is holy to the Lord.
31 ‘If, therefore, a man wishes to redeem part of his tithe, he shall add to it one-fifth of it.
32 ‘For every tenth part of herd or flock, whatever passes under the rod, the tenth one shall be holy to the Lord.
This tithe was to be given to the Levites, who were in charge of maintaining the tabernacle or the temple, and then they would tithe one-tenth of the tithe to the priests, who had no other way of earning income.
So what we see here in Malachi is that these people who professed faith in God were failing somehow to demonstrate that faith in their giving.
Look at the next verse.
10 “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in My house, and test Me now in this,” says the Lord of hosts, “if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows.
They were giving PART of their tenth, but not the whole tenth. I suspect that what they were doing was giving God whatever they felt they could spare once all the bills had been paid.
And that’s not very different than we see in the modern church.
Let me give you some statistics I found while researching for this sermon. I imagine this will be convicting for someone here today.
Only 10 to 25 percent of the members of the average church tithe to their churches.
37 percent of regular evangelical church members do not give anything to their churches.
Christians give an average of about 2.5 percent of their annual income to the church. And lest we think this has something to do with the economy, during the Great Depression, that number was actually higher, about 3.3 percent.
Churchgoers actually do WORSE in their giving than non-churchgoers. Three out of four people who do not attend church give to nonprofit organizations.
Now someone out there is thinking right now that we don’t have to tithe anymore, because Jesus fulfilled the Law, and we are no longer under Law but under grace.
And it’s true that Jesus never said you have to tithe.
Here’s what He said about giving when He was asked by the rich young ruler about how to have eternal life. You’ll recall that the man said he had kept all the commandments from his youth.
22 When Jesus heard this, He said to him, “One thing you still lack; sell all that you possess and distribute it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.”
Now the point here is not that giving everything you have to the poor will earn you a place in heaven. Following Jesus does that. The point was that the man loved his money more than he loved God.
And it wasn’t his money, anyway.
David knew this when he wrote
1 The earth is the Lord’s, and all it contains, The world, and those who dwell in it.
Everything you have, everything I have — it all belongs to God. That’s why God described the failure of His people to bring in the WHOLE tithe as robbery.
Whatever we have been given here on earth, we have been given as a loan. We have received our blessings as an investment into our Kingdom work here on earth.
We have been blessed so that we can be a blessing to others. And in the context of the church, that means we are financially blessed so that we can aid the church financially in doing its Kingdom work. Not just to keep the lights on and the heat running, but to fund missions, to send people out into Suffolk and even into Haiti to tell the world about our Savior, Jesus Christ.
In fact, I would submit that the work of missions is MORE important that keeping the lights on. That’s why some of us have pushed so hard to cordon off 10 percent of the church’s income from giving for missions and evangelism.
That money should come off the top of whatever we raise from week to week.
In fact, that’s what we should be doing individually, as well. If you are giving to the church out of whatever you have as excess at the end of the week or at the end of the month, then I can assure you that the devil will work things so that you don’t have enough excess to honor God by bringing the whole tithe into the storehouse.
Tithing requires a commitment that you will give at least a tenth to God no matter what. And the only way to ensure that is to take that money and set it aside right from the start.
There’s a story about William Colgate, who founded the company that makes the toothpaste and lots of other products now.
He left home at 16 and went to New York, where he began making and selling soap. He had recently dedicated his life to Christ, and he joined a church in his new home.
“The first thing he did with the first dollar he earned was to give 10 percent of it to the Lord’s work. From that point on, he considered ten cents of every dollar as sacred to the Lord. In fact, he soon began giving 20 percent of his income to the Lord, then he raised it to 30 percent, then to 40 percent, then to 50 percent. And late in his life, he had become so successful that he devoted the whole of his yearly income—100 percent of it—to the Lord. (Robert J. Morgan, Nelson’s Complete Book of Stories, Illustrations, and Quotes, electronic ed. [Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000], 344.)
You see, William Colgate tested the Lord in his giving, and he found that God was faithful to his promise here in .
The first thing he did with the first dollar he earned was to give 10 percent of it to the Lord’s work. From that point on, he considered ten cents of every dollar as sacred to the Lord. In fact, he soon began giving 20 percent of his income to the Lord, then he raised it to 30 percent, then to 40 percent, then to 50 percent. And late in his life, he had become so successful that he devoted the whole of his yearly income—100 percent of it—to the Lord.
I have to tell you that I have experienced the same thing.
Robert J. Morgan, Nelson’s Complete Book of Stories, Illustrations, and Quotes, electronic ed. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000), 344.
Some years back, Annette and I had a conversation about our giving. Since we had become Christians, we had been careful to give 10 percent of our income to the church and other nonprofits, but I became convicted about this idea of bringing our tithe into the storehouse.
The storehouse here in Malachi was the temple. In the modern context, it is the church. And I realized that we were robbing God by not supporting our church with at least 10 percent of our income. So we committed to giving the church the first 10 percent, but we didn’t reduce our other giving.
Guess what happened. We never even saw the difference. Didn’t have to turn the heat back. Didn’t have to cut out restaurant visits. God provided the increase so we could increase our giving.
And then, a couple of years later, we talked about what 10 percent of our income really meant. Should it be 10 percent of our gross income or 10 percent of our net? As we talked, I realized that this was a matter of faith. Would we have faith that God would provide or would we take a legalistic view of what a tithe really was?
So we started tithing from our gross income, and then we found some other causes to support outside of the church. Haiti. The Crisis Pregnancy Center. The Salvation Army and others.
And guess what happened. We still didn’t notice any real changes in our lifestyle. In fact, our income grew, and our ability to give grew with it.
And then I felt a call to ministry, which would require attending one of the most expensive seminaries in the nation. Oh, and quitting the job that provided more than half of our income.
Here’s where it gets crazy.
I had figured we’d have to take out a second mortgage on the house to pay for school. But then a friend from college called and said he and his wife were going to pay for the whole thing.
I had figured I’d have to sell my car to pay for my six months in Haiti, but Annette’s company gave me a check for more than I was asking for the car.
You see, my resources are limited. But God’s resources are not.
He said to test Him in the matter of giving, and I can tell you that He has been lavishly faithful in keeping His promise.
Now, I do not tell you these things to brag, at least not about myself. If I’m bragging about anything, I’m bragging about the God by whose grace our bills have been paid no matter how we’ve given back to Him.
He has opened the windows of heaven, and He has poured out a blessing on us that has overflowed. We have learned that we cannot outgive God.
Henry Crowell was saved as a young man. When he went into business — he was the founder of Quaker Oats — he committed himself to honoring God in his giving, and as his business grew He steadily increased his level of giving.
After more than 40 years of giving 60 percent of his income to the Lord, he was quoted once as saying this: “I’ve never gotten ahead of God. He has always been ahead of me in giving.” (Robert J. Morgan, Nelson’s Complete Book of Stories, Illustrations, and Quotes, electronic ed. [Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000], 344.)
I’ve never gotten ahead of God. He has always been ahead of me in giving.
Yes, things changed when Jesus came onto the scene. Now, we are called to make 10 percent our base and to look for opportunities to give SACRIFICIALLY to His work here on earth.
I mentioned earlier that I’m not a huge fan of the term “stewardship” when it comes to this matter of tithes and offerings.
That’s because the idea of sacrificial stewardship isn’t something that makes a lot of sense to us. But sacrificial giving is something we can understand, even if most of us don’t really demonstrate it very well or very often.
But as we look at what we can do to make this the kind of Holy Spirit-filled, Jesus-proclaiming church that we see in Acts, Chapter 2, sacrificial giving is exactly what we see.
45 and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need.
These church members weren’t just giving what was left over at the end of the month. They weren’t even stopping at 10 percent of their income. They were selling their property and possessions to help meet one another’s needs. They were sacrificing their property for the glory of God, because they understood that it all belonged to God anyway, and they believed Him when He said He would bless their faith in Him.
Now, we have government programs and the like that they didn’t have back then. And I think that we often use those programs as an excuse for not doing what God has commanded us to do. But I challenge you to show me in Scripture where it says that our tithes can be split between taxes and the church.
Jesus said, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”
I do not know where you stand financially, though I know many of you are on fixed incomes. What I can tell you, though, is this: You cannot expect God to bless you financially when you are not honoring Him in your giving.
Robert J. Morgan, Nelson’s Complete Book of Stories, Illustrations, and Quotes, electronic ed. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000), 344.
And I can tell you what God says. And what God says is this: “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse.”
What God says is “Test Me now in this” and see “if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows.”
Tithing is not a financial matter.
Tithing is a matter of the heart. Tithing is a matter of what you treasure.
21 for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
The problem with the rich young ruler was that he treasured his money more than he treasured a right relationship with God, and his choice revealed his heart.
Your choice will do the same.
Choose to be a cheerful giver. I promise you that God will honor that choice.