First Fruits

I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like we study and teach and preach from the New Testament a lot more than we do from the Old Testament. Is that something you guys have noticed or is it just me? I was thinking about that on my drive back from a circuit meeting this past week and I think we might spend more time in the New Testament because we have this idea that it’s more applicable, more relevant to our lives. I want to push back on that a little bit though, because I don’t think the New Testament is more applicable or more relevant. I think it’s just more easily accessible, it doesn’t necessarily have more for us, it’s just easier to get to. The epistles are written to Christians, the Gospels tell the story of our Savior, and we kinda just don’t get into Revelation too much - it’s easy to read these things and know what they say to us today. But the Old Testament is the story of Israel, the history of a nation that we aren’t a part of, the laws that we don’t need for our salvation - we have to work a little harder because these stories don’t come out and say the things that are relevant to us. Instead, we notice in the stories the character of God and what He leads His people to be like. And the character of God doesn’t change, His ultimate design for His people is consistent - so the Old Testament is incredibly relevant to us because it shows us these things, we just have to work for them a little bit.

God Gave to Us

And in our reading today, we get a window into how God and His people interact. Ultimately, this text is about giving gifts to God but that’s the last step in a longer process. The first thing that we can learn here about how God interacts with His people comes from the involvement of the priests. And the priesthood is a gift to Israel, they are supposed to guide Israel and point them constantly to God. And our individualistic nature maybe says “you don’t need an outside voice to do that,” but in Romans 10:14 Paul says

Romans 10:14 (ESV)

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?

God still gives us these outside voices to lead us to call on Him. I want you to think of the first person who talked to you about the faith, who connected you to the Gospel. Maybe it was a parent who raised you in the church, maybe it was another family member who talked with you about God, maybe it was a friend at school who reflected Christ in their lives, maybe it was a pastor or a teacher or a DCE or another leader in the church. And beyond that, I’m sure many of us have family members, friends, teachers, and leaders in the church who have impacted your faith in powerful ways. I think of my friend Jason in college who went to church with me and talked through issues we had at Vanderbilt with a Christian perspective, I think of my parents who raised me in the faith, I think of my brothers - my literal, biological brothers - who point me back to God when I’m struggling, I think of my best friend Sean who prays with me and talks ministry with me. Like God gave priests to Israel, He puts people in our lives to connect us to Him.

And I think it’s a shame that a lot of times, we don’t explicitly thank those people for what God has done through them. So what I would like you to do, if you are able, is to pull out your cell phone - see, I’m pulling mine out too. I want you to send a quick text message to that person just to say “God has used you to build up my faith, and I want to thank you for that.” I’ll give you a few seconds to do that.

God Gave to Us Some More

So the first thing in this process of giving in Deuteronomy that we can take away is that God gives us people in our lives to point us to to Him, then the Israelites are told

Deuteronomy 26:5–9 (ESV)

“And you shall make response before the Lord your God, ‘A wandering Aramean was my father. And he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous.

And the Egyptians treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard labor.

Then we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.

And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders.

And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

Notice, they’re responding to what God has already done for them. His blessing wasn’t contingent upon their offerings. In the same way, God has done incredible things for us that don’t depend on what we’ve done for Him at all. And we remember those things when we speak the creed together every week, this week we’re going to speak the words of the Nicene Creed together to remember the story of what God has done for us.

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried. And the third day He rose again according to the Scriptures and ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father. And He will come again with glory to judge both the living and the dead, whose kingdom will have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets. And I believe in one holy Christian and apostolic Church, I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins, and I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

We say the creed to remind us what God has done for us, to remember why we praise and thank Him. Ultimately, we say the creed to remind us of our God who created and loved us, of Jesus who lived and died and rose again for us, and of the Holy Spirit who creates faith in our hearts.

We Give Praise

So this process starts with God giving to us, then continues with God giving us even more and reflecting on that. And then we get to the response God expects of the Israelites. They are to give back in thanksgiving to God.

What we can learn from this is that our response to all that God has done in our lives is to give Him thanks. And an important part of that is here on Sunday morning. Let’s just walk through what your last 18 hours looked like. I would imagine that your night last night was shaped, at least a little bit, by what you are doing this morning. Maybe as the night got later you opted to not open one more drink or start one more episode or play one more round - you chose to do something different than you maybe wanted to so that you could get to bed and wake up in time. As you woke up this morning, if you’re anything like me, the bed is extra comfy when the alarm goes off. There’s that voice in the back of your head that says “maybe I’ll just sleep in this morning,” but you decided to get up, to get dressed, to brush your teeth - I hope, to get breakfast - maybe, depending on how comfy the bed was, and drive here this morning. And we open our service with praise for our God, giving thanks to Him for all that He is and all that He does.

We understand that as God’s people, we thank Him, and a big part of how we do that is with our praise and worship on Sunday mornings.

We Give Back

But more than that, we give thanks to God with the first and the best of our time and our relationships and our resources. The Israelites here are called to give the first, the best of their harvest to God, they are called to set it down before Him and worship Him. They are reminded that they are just stewards, just caretakers of these gifts, and that ultimately all of it comes from God. And we can and should give thanks in a similar way today, with the first fruits of our time, our relationships, and our paychecks.

And this lesson hit me really hard personally several years ago. I was sitting at my desk in my dorm room in St. Louis, writing a sermon about giving. And my W2 happened to be sitting next to me, it was tax season. So I saw everything I had made in that year as a part time worker at the Seminary. And I looked over and saw my Xbox, the shelf of games I had for it, and my TV - and I realized that in the past year I had spent over 11% of my income that year on entertainment. That’s definitely more than I had been giving to the church. So for that sermon I did some digging, here were some of the details I found for that sermon.

In 2019, according to MarketWatch the average American spends $2,913 a year on entertainment and nearly as much on eating out. That’s a total of between eight and nine thousand dollars a year - wasted on entertainment. The average American only makes $32,000 a year. That means, my goodness, the average American wastes around a quarter of their income on entertainment! According to those same sources, less than 10% of Americans give 10% or more of their income to church or charity. As a culture, as individuals in this room, we have decided that entertainment is more important to us - at least twice as important to us - than supporting the mission of the church and her social work. That should make you feel ashamed, that makes me feel ashamed for when I don’t prioritize supporting the church and embarrassed about my culture that does the same! If our money is any reflection of our priorities, then our priorities are in the wrong place. The priority isn’t on Jesus, isn’t on the proclamation of the Gospel, isn’t on the church and the fellowship of believers.

It’s not just our resources though. Let’s talk about the time we dedicate to our churches. Now let’s assume that there are 16 waking hours in the day - because the National Sleep Foundation recommends seven to nine hours a day of sleep. That means 80 waking hours a week. And we spend three hours of it in church, maybe four if you go to a community group during the week. That’s six percent of our waking hours a week spent fostering our faith and Christian fellowship. Maybe a little more if you faithfully do daily devotions. To get to ten percent of your waking hours you would have to spend at least 30 minutes daily in personal devotion.

Let’s just be honest with ourselves, we do not lay our first or our best at Jesus’ feet. Not a single person in this room, not me, not you, consistently lays our first or our best at Jesus’ feet. We are ungrateful, and we are called to better than that.

So think about what you spend your money on, think about where giving to the church is on your priority list - is it the first thing out of your paycheck or is it an afterthought with the leftovers. Think about where you dedicate your time, think about where worship and devotion and Christian community are on your priority list. God has done incredible things for us, and doesn’t require anything from us to do them. Our salvation, His gifts to us, come completely freely. All that’s left is our opportunity to show a little gratitude. Amen.