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God and Your Money
Week 1: Stewardship
Introduction:
Good morning once again.
It's so great to be here in person with you and share the Word of God with you.
Go ahead and open your Bibles or devices to Matthew chapter 25 .
Before we get going I want to stay a few words about this series of messages.
During the next month I'll be preaching through a series about God and Money.
Really it's about us stewarding the money we have been entrusted with in a faithful manner.
I'm going to be covering this in a topical manner.
Most of you know that normally I preach through books of the Bible, which I believe should be the main preaching diet of the church.
However, every now and then there are occasions when the church body needs to hear on specific topics in specific times.
I am indebted to Capitol Hill Baptist Church for their stewardship material that was majorly helpful in the preparation of this sermon series.
After looking at our financial picture as a church and with some challenges that we have had, I wanted to take a few weeks and really walk though a biblical view of money.
This will help us in four significant ways:
1.
It reminds us that our money, our health, our time, and even our skills are not unrelated to our spiritual life.
2. It will put us on the same page as a church with how we view personal finances and giving in relation to our spiritual lives.
3. It helps us because people in churches are vulnerable to idolize and misuse these things that God has so graciously given us.
4. It will call us to deeper faith and trust in Jesus Christ.
As Christians, if we are going to talk rightly about money then we have to begin with the true gospel.
There are a lot of counterfeits out there and right now one of the primary ones making waves in the world is something called "the prosperity gospel."
If you joined us last Sunday night for the movie, American Gospel: Christ Alone, then you heard quite a bit about the false gospel called the prosperity gospel.
The prosperity gospel teaches that God rewards faith with material blessings.
This is false because it's not based on grace.
It ends up looking a bit like a contract where if you do this thing for God, then God will do this other thing for you.
Sometimes it looks like us trying to somehow put God in our debt by reminding Him of all the things we did for Him as if He owes us anything.
It teaches that those people who say and do the right things secure good health and financial blessings from God as their reward.
But Biblically we know that poverty or blessings or bad health are not linked to a person's righteousness.
All have sinned.
God is holy.
Sin separates us from a holy God.
Something had to die to pay the price for sin.
Jesus lived a perfect, sinless life and gave it willingly in the place of sinners as a substitute.
He bore the wrath due us and freely gives us his righteousness.
He died and three days later He rose from the dead by the power of God.
Salvation: It is not based on our merit.
It's not based on our desires or choice.
It's based solely on His amazing grace.
It's a free gift.
I don't deserve it.
You don't deserve it.
And yet He freely offers it to us.
And to those who trust in Him He gives eternal life and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
If we are going to talk about money, we have to start with the true gospel, whereby Jesus purchased a people of His own.
If you don't know Jesus, why would you care about what He wants you to do with your money?
But if you do know Jesus, if you're submitted to Him, then you care very deeply what He has to say about your money.
One word of caution to you as we dive into the passage for this morning.
Some of you are rule-mongers.
You want the bottom line rule of how much you should give or how much time you should volunteer or how much time you should allow yourself to use social media.
You want a rule to follow.
You’re likely going to be disappointed with today.
The Bible doesn’t give us that many rules in regards to these areas of our lives.
There is a good amount of Christian liberty here.
Different consciousness are going to react to different situations.
What scripture does give us are some goals in these aspects of our lives.
The Bible shows us how we can use these good gifts that God gives to show off the worth and excellence of our redeeming God.
We get to use them to show off King Jesus.
So the question should not be, “How much money can I keep for myself?”
Instead it should be “how can I use all of my money and all of my time and all of my talents to pursue Christ as much as possible?”
Our finances, our talents, our time, and our health are all areas where we have opportunity.
So really the aim of this series is to get us to see how we can do “everything in the name of the Lord Jesus.”
Let's begin by reading from Matthew 25:14-30.
Read
This is the Word of the Lord.
Let's pray and ask God to help us understand and apply it.
PRAY
I.
The Master: God
The first person in this parable that Jesus told that I want us to look at is the Master.
We don’t want to assume that everything in Jesus's parables stands for something else, like an allegory.
But if we want to apply this parable to our lives, then who could we see playing the part of the Master.
I hope in your mind you thought, God.
Because God is master over everything.
If we are going to have a proper understanding of wealth and money it has to be begin with God and His relationship to His creation.
That relationship is:
A. God owns everything.
It’s all His to do with what He wants.
He’s the owner of it all because He created it all.
He has a claim over everything He created.
He owns the patent.
God doesn’t owe anyone anything.
God has true, outright ownership.
He has the right to do with the wealth of the world, anything He wants to.
At creation, God called it good.
He assigned value to creation.
Sin entered the world but it did not destroy the goodness of God’s creation.
Did you know that we can bring glory to God by enjoying His creation?
Paul basically kills the idols of wealth and poverty with one fell swoop.
We shouldn't idolize wealth and we shouldn’t assign some sort of higher spiritual value on being poor either.
The secret to managing things God has given is not running from them but to understand why He has given them to us in the first place.
Which leads right into this next subpoint:
B. God gives people their wealth.
If God owns everything then it logically follows that everything we have comes from Him.
The famous King David of Israel even recognized this.
In order to help build the temple, the Israelites were giving things they personally owned.
But David’s prayer in response was:
In our parable from today, did you notice that the master gave the servants different amounts to manage?
So God doesn’t see inequality of wealth as evil in an of itself.
God gives to each as He deems.
The important thing is how we steward what God has given to us.
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