Stewardship and Giving

Big idea: Divine blessing is guaranteed when one understands and practices the biblical perspectives for financial stewardship and giving to the Lord’s work.

1. Giving finds its foundation in God’s ownership.
   1 Corinthians 10:26
   Psalm 24:1
2. Giving is an act of worship.
   Philippians 4:15-18
3. Giving is the fruit and evidence of God’s grace at work in us.
   2 Corinthians 8:7
4. Giving has many proper, biblical motivations.
   2 Corinthians 9:6
   Matthew 6:1-4
5. Giving sets the direction your heart will travel.
   Matthew 6:19-21
6. Giving is a divinely ordained investment strategy.
   Matthew 6:19-20
   2 Corinthians 9:6,8
7. Giving generously invites God’s abundant blessing.
   Malachi 3:7-12
   Haggai 1:3-6

• Automated Transcription

• 0:13
  It's a joy, serving with Chris and Kyrsi in the counseling ministry. They oversee our marriage class, and Dennis and Wendy are part of the college ministry. Super faithful there. So pray for pray for all of us. Pray for them on an ongoing basis. Dennis is such a good teacher that I went and played golf with him one time and had the best round of my life. So I'm never going to play with him again, because he thinks I'm pretty good. Grab your Bible. Stand with me. We are going to read Matthew chapter six. Preparation for our message this morning on giving. I'm going to read Matthew chapter six. This is in the Sermon on the Mount. I'm going to start in verse 19 and read to the end of the chapter there, Jesus says, Do not store up for yourself. Treasures on earth where moth and rust corrupt and where thieves break in and steal, But store up for yourselves. Treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in or steal, For where your treasure is there, your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. So then, if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness. How great is the darkness? No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. For this reason, I say to you, do not be worried about your life as to what you will eat or what you will drink, Nor for your body as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing. Look at the birds of the air that they do not sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they and who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow. They do not toil, nor do they spin. Yet I say to you that not even Solomon, in all his glory, clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow, is thrown into the furnace, will he not much more clothe you. You of little faith? Do not worry then saying, What will we eat, or What will we drink, or What will we wear, for clothing for the Gentiles, eagerly seek all these things for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things, But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness. And all these things will be added to you, so do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. This is God's Word. God, we just ask your help as we come to your word and consider what you have to say about our own generosity toward the work of the Kingdom God, humble our hearts, keep us with our noses in the text and our our desires and wills centered on you in every good way and for your glory, we ask, amen, amen, you may be seated. This has been a three week journey of stewardship, just a short little interlude in our regular preaching through Genesis, Dan talked in the first week about love for God and love for neighbor as the guiding principle of stewardship. Like, why do we care for all that we have and all that we do? It's so that we can love God and love our neighbor. Last week, he talked specifically about stewardship of our time and our calendars, which was super helpful. And then, in keeping with Brian drawing the short straw on difficult topics, I get to talk about the money. So I don't find talking about this topic awkward, because I think it is a very common topic in the Scripture. One preacher suggested that it is 15% of the recorded words of Jesus. I thought that was a little high, so I had a conversation with my friend chat GPT, who said, I think it's a little more like seven or 8% which is actually still very significant when you you think about that number in the same way that that Dan suggested last week. How you spend your time is a measure of what you value. It's certainly true that how you spend your money, how you think about. What you have, what you own, what you earn, is also a very real gage of what you value, what you love, perhaps what you idolize. So it's an important topic. It's important according to the Scriptures. It's important according to Jesus, it should be important to us. And I can, I can speak for all of the elders when I say I'm really thankful that we're not coming and talking about this in in light of a budget deficit or anything like that. We're extremely thankful that faith, Bible, church, is a generous congregation, and that the work of the ministry goes on here quite smoothly. You might know the story in Exodus 36 when the people of Israel were building the tabernacle after being delivered from from Egypt, and they were taking offerings, the materials and the gold and all the stuff that they needed to build the tabernacle. And in Exodus, 36 Moses and the elders of Israel have to say, stop, stop. We have enough. And he and actually says they restrained their giving. We're waiting for the day when we can apply those principles here at Faith, Bible, church, that day hasn't come. Nevertheless, very generous, and we're super, super thankful. We're recognizing, I mean, we can kind of recognize that there are churches or and or Christian ministries that kind of make this topic uncomfortable by misrepresenting things that the Bible teaches or or by being presumptuous, or perhaps even greedy in the way that they ask for money We're not really asking for for money at all. Our heart for you is very similar to what the Apostle Paul commuted to communicated to the church in Philippi. The church in Philippi had supported Paul in the work of the gospel that he was doing. He tells them in Philippians, chapter four, verse 15, you shared with me in the matter of giving more than once. And then he says, verse 17, not that I seek the gift itself, but I seek the profit which increases to your account. So he's saying, thank you to them for the gift, but understand, it's not about the money. I'm thankful that God is going to take your gift and increase your eternal reward. There is reward in your eternal accounts, and that's the profit that I seek. And so as we kind of approach this topic this morning, that's our heart for the people of faith, Bible, church, we seek the Prophet which increases to your account. I think as you, as you start to think about a topic like this, which is so practical, you recognize as well that it's it's also measurable, right? So it can be quite convicting to think in in definite and objective terms. We think about growing in our love or joy or peace or godliness, or those are, those are character qualities, and they're somewhat subjective. And so we, the way we measure spiritual growth is is different than how we might measure faithfulness in our giving, right, because we can actually put a number on that. We can ask, How much do I sacrifice for Christ and the work of the Kingdom. Oh, 2.1% right?
  
  8:27
  That makes it a little awkward, because we can actually look at something like that, and it's it's very objective and measurable. And so it can be convicting, and it can be awkward to talk about a little bit. Dan said this earlier, that it's so easy for our material goods to become elevated in their importance in our in our thinking and in our lives. And I appreciate what Don Whitney says in his in his book on spiritual disciplines, he says, because we invest most of our days working in exchange for money. There's a very real sense in which our money represents us, right? Dan said, we find our identity in it sometimes. Therefore how we uses it expresses who we are, what our priorities are, what's in our hearts, and so the loves of our heart, what we value, the weaknesses of our heart, can be painfully exposed when we start thinking about the specifics and the nitty gritty of how we share our material goods and give our finances to the work of the ministry. So our hope and goal is that we all profit spiritually through our giving, and profit eternally through our giving. And the big idea this morning is that divine blessing, that kind of divine blessing, is guaranteed when we understand and practice the biblical perspectives for financial. Stewardship, and specifically giving to the work of the Lord. And so we're going to look at seven biblical perspectives about financial giving to in order that we will experience know that blessing of God. Number one is familiar. We say it all the time here, giving finds its foundation in God's ownership. Paul in First Corinthians, 1026, he quotes Psalm 24 verse one, the earth is the Lord's and all it contains. God owns everything. God owns what you own. He owns it first and foremost, because He's the Creator, the Sustainer of the universe, and it's not just the possessions that he owns. It's not just the cattle on 1000 hills in the context of even the pagan nations around them, in Israel and Haggai two, chapter eight, or chapter two, verse eight, it says, The Silver is mine, and the gold is mine, declares the LORD of hosts, whether it belongs to his people or other people. God owns everything. And so giving finds its its foundation in that that this, this isn't ours to begin with. And so as we give, as we say so often we're just giving back to God out of the storehouse of what he has been giving us. That's why we would direct you the way that we do when we do take the offering here. And it's important to establish the point and remember the point, because of how easily our mindset can become it's mine, right? It's so very easy to think, This is mine. I worked for it. I earned it. This is mine. But we are just stewards. We are just we have been entrusted with what we have by a very good and a very gracious and a very generous God. And so as stewards or managers of God's possessions, our responsibility is to manage them for God's glory and for the purposes of God's kingdom. And so don Whitney takes this principle, and he says, Because of this, the question isn't how much of my money should I give to God, but rather, how much of God's money should I keep for myself? And I think that's a challenging way to think about the implications that giving finds its foundation in God's ownership. Number two, second perspective, also very familiar to us, is that giving is an act of worship. We say that, and that's why we continue to do it as part of our our gathering is because we want to be able to acknowledge and stay and show and remind us all that giving is an act of worship, as Paul was giving thanksgiving to the Philippians in chapter four, the passage I mentioned earlier for contributing to his his ministry, he uses language that clearly indicates giving his worship, giving to ministry. Specifically, he gets to the end of that section in Philippians 418, and he says, I am amply supplied, having received from Epaphroditus what you have sent. And he describes that financial gift as a fragrant aroma, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God. He He uses language reminiscent of the Old Testament, sacrificial system of worship, indicating how both he and God, who was inspiring him, saw that financial gift as a fragrant aroma, an acceptable sacrifice, an act of pleasing worship to God. The Old Testament teaches this principle as well. In Deuteronomy, 16, the people of Israel were called to go back to Jerusalem for three annual Feast days. And in Deuteronomy, 16, verse 17, during those three annual feasts of worship, it says every man shall give as he is able, according to the blessing of the Lord your God, which he has given you, it was part of their corporate worship as well. And that builds on the foundation of what Dan said week one, right, that all stewardship is governed by love, that we're giving back directly to God as an expression of gratitude, appreciation, love, affection for God's work in our life and in order to see others ministered to through God's people. Giving is just, I would say, remind us it's just one. Measure of love of many others, our service, our time, as we talked about last week, etc, but it is certainly a measure of our love and affection for Christ. Loving is always worship, and so if giving is an expression of love, clearly it's also an expression of worship when we don't see it that way, it is very easy to fall into the trap of seeing our giving as just a duty or just an obligation, just another bill to pay, as opposed to an expression of worship and a sacrificial gift for the sake of God's kingdom, if it's just another bill to pay, then when, when money gets tight, that's the first thing we're going to let slide, when really it should be the First thing that slips through our that goes through our account, if you will. If giving isn't worship in your mind, you'll probably not even develop the pattern of regular, planned, proportionate, cheerful giving. It could be that if our giving isn't already planned and systematic, it could be that our heart, in its deceptive ways, is already planning to just make it easier to neglect. So we were very prone to self deception when it comes to these to these things, but when we see it as worship, when we see our giving as putting on display the worth of God, the supremacy of God, the greatness of His kingdom, and our burden to see that kingdom advanced and expand, we make it a Priority.
  
  16:59
  Number three, the third perspective on biblical giving. Giving is the fruit and the evidence of God's grace at work in us. Giving is the fruit and evidence of God's gracious work in us. That's how Paul described the giving of the church in Corinth. We debated whether we should just go through Second Corinthians, eight and nine, sort of in a flash version, or do a message like this, which is a little more topical. Can't really talk about this topic without talking about Second Corinthians, chapters eight and nine in chapter eight, verse seven, Paul says this about the giving in the church there. He says, just as you abound in everything, in faith and utterance and knowledge and earnestness and in the love we inspired in you see that you abound in this gracious work also. And he's specifically talking about them giving financially to people in need and to the work of the ministry. And he calls that giving a gracious work. All the other things he mentioned, I think, are very easy to see that it takes the Spirit of God to motivate our proclamation, our our faith, our knowledge of His Word, our earnestness and serving. It takes God's energy to motivate and energize us to do those things. But we don't often think it think that way about our giving. Do we like God, God, I pray you would motivate me and energize me to give abundantly and sacrificially. That's not a prayer we utter often so, but it should be, because it actually takes God's grace, His favor, his strengthening, to give the way he's designed us to give and to overcome the tendencies of the flesh, which are again deceitful and tend toward greed or materialism. That's just our nature. Apart from God's gracious work, giving is also a part of that gracious work. Luke, 16, Jesus said, He who is faithful and very little is faithful also in much, and he who has a little and is faithful in it will be given more. Right? Why? Because, as they live out faithfully, that gracious work that God is doing in them, he honors that faithfulness, but yet he says at the end of that section, the same reminder we read in Matthew six, you cannot serve God and wealth. So either your your heart and your priority is going to be in serving God, or we will drift back toward what our sinful nature desires, and that's to claim our wealth for ourselves. We know the common story of the widow's might right the poor widow in Mark chapter 12. Jesus sitting down, and they're standing there in the temple watching people put money into the treasury, and rich people, it says, are putting in large sums. We don't get an accounting of it, but a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which amount to a cent. And calling his disciples, Jesus said to them, Truly, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the contributors to the Treasury. For they all put in out of their surplus. But she out of her poverty, put in all she owned, all she had to live on. It says that takes a gracious work of God to have a heart willing to give everything I have, because God is so precious to me. God's Kingdom is so precious to me. I do think that was a real event, but clearly, Jesus is using it to illustrate just the beauty of sacrificial giving, but also, I think the need that God would have to be at work in our heart to make such a sacrifice the church in Corinth, very similarly, as Paul describes their giving at the beginning of second Corinthians chapter eight, he mentions that They were as a body, as a group, as a as a local assembly, in in great in a great ordeal of affliction, and yet living with abundant joy despite their poverty. And he says, your deep poverty overflowed in the wealth of your liberality. For I testify that according to their ability and beyond their ability, they gave of their own accord. What motivates and energizes somebody to give more than they think they have? That's what he's saying. According to your ability and beyond your ability, you gave. It's because God is doing a gracious work in them, producing as as we said in week one, love for God and love for other others, that that supersedes their love for themselves or their love of earthly things. We we really need to think of it that way, so that we like them, like the widow and her might, like the church in Corinth would abound in this gracious work. That's the perspective we need to have, God. We need you to stimulate and motivate and energize this gracious work in us as well. Number four, the fourth perspective of biblical giving is that giving has many proper motivations. Has many proper motivations. So we don't need to get stuck on one reason to give or one way to give. We've seen how giving is an expression of worship. God, I desire to express my worship, and therefore I give. We've seen giving is an expression of gratitude. God, thank you for giving to me out of your abundant storehouses. I want to express my thanks for your generosity, not only in my material possessions, but in my spiritual riches that we were reminded of just a moment ago. God, I want to say thank you. Paul also says, though, that it is acceptable to be partially motivated even by the promise of God's blessing in return. This is where we got to be careful. We can say too much. We can go too far. But here it is, in Paul's words, Second Corinthians, nine, six. This I say that he who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. And he's, he's talking about the church giving financially to those in need and to the work of the ministry. And by reminding us of this principle, I don't think Paul's suggesting this should be our only motivation, but he's certainly pointing out it to be a proper motivation, that if I sow generously with my giving, God will bless me. I will reap bountifully. That is what he's saying. You can't you can't really escape it. So in Philippians four, again, when Paul was thanking them for their gift, it was an expression of worship. He says to them right after that, in verse 19, that's where he says, and My God shall supply all your needs according to His riches and glory in Christ, Jesus, and so he's he's really talking in that context about physical needs, material needs, and that as a response to their fragrant aroma and their generous gift to them, there was a promise that God would supply all. Of their needs. Isn't that exactly what we read in Matthew six, wasn't it? Why do you worry about what you eat, what you drink, what you wear, seek, first, my kingdom and my righteousness, Jesus says, or God's kingdom, God's righteousness, and all these things will also be added to you, right? That either means what it says or it doesn't.
  
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  I believe it means what it says. God really is promising that as we give to the work of the Kingdom, we can seek Him first, that He will bless another motivation that I think is proper, if understood right again, being careful, is that giving is a way to prove your love, to prove your love for for Christ and His kingdom, to show that that is what I value. Now again, being careful, but listen to the words of Paul again in Second Corinthians eight, when he says, abound in this gracious work, verse seven. And then he says in verse eight, I'm not speaking this as a command. I'm not telling you specifically what to give and or I'm not doing it in detail. I'm not speaking this as a command. But abound in this gracious work proving through the earnestness of others the sincerity of your love, also proving the sincerity of your love. Now, who are we proving our love to It better not be to like if I'm giving it better not be to you, right? That's not the thing I'm not putting we shouldn't be putting our giving on display to prove how generous we are to others, right? Jesus is super clear about that, don't don't give in order to be seen by men. And he even goes on to say, don't even let your own right hand know what your left hand is doing. Don't even really trust your own heart in terms of self evaluation. And yet, despite that, Paul says that this abounding in the gracious work of giving is a means of proving your love. And I think that is, I would say it this way. It does put on display for God to see when we give in secret, as Jesus said, it does put on display for God to see in a tangible way that we love him, right, that we value the work of His kingdom as we ought to, and as we do that with right motives in the right way, as Jesus described, it also reassures our hearts, right? So it becomes a reassurance, in a sense, it proves it to ourselves. And that is what Jesus said, even as he warns, don't sound a trumpet like the hypocrites when you give to the poor. He finishes that section by saying, yes, your giving should be in secret, and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you, right? So again, it puts it on display, and it is part of a it should be. It should be part of a dynamic personal relationship with the Lord as you give. That's that's why we call it worship. I was talking to one of the guys on the sermon prep team this week, and they like to practice their giving each week during the service. So they give electronically. So now they use a little tap tags, which is, I guess, convenient for them, but they they, he just said, That's my way of reminding myself that this is an act of worship and ensuring that I'm doing it as as as my heart and mind is centered on, focused on praising the Lord, I don't think that's a required thing to do, but I appreciate what his motivation is behind that. It's certainly more personal than getting an email that says, Hey, your transaction practice this month, bling that's what I get. I don't mind that. I'm just saying there's more than one way to think about it, either way, it's an expression of your your love, and there's lots of motivations to do it. And we've covered three or four, number five. I mean, if Dan, if Dan, gets stuck on four points, I have seven. I got to keep moving. Here we go. Number five, giving sets the direction your heart will travel. Giving sets the direction your heart will travel. This was in our scripture reading, don't store up treasures on earth that's temporary and will all be destroyed. Store up treasures in heaven that's eternal and will not be destroyed. And then he says, Matthew 621, for where your treasure is there your heart will be also when we keep our monetary material interests. Is earthly. It will keep our hearts tied to the earth like that's what Jesus is saying, Where your treasure is, wherever you invest is where your heart is going to be when we invest in the eternal work of God's kingdom that lasts forever in order to see souls come to Christ and be gathered around the throne together forever. When we invest in that work, that is what our heart is going to long for. More and more and more and more, your heart always travels in the direction of your investments. If you spent $100,000 on Apple stock tomorrow, are you going to keep up on the news about the Apple Corporation and the Apple stock price? Yes, you are, because you're invested in it now and it's important to you where your treasure is there, where your heart beat, also that becomes just another motivation. I want to continue to invest in God's work and God's kingdom. There's a sad statistic. Whitney quotes it in his book, that the more money Americans make, the less sacrificial their giving becomes. Even as people get richer and richer and richer and richer, the percent of the income that they give goes down and down and down and down. There is an inverse relationship between wealth and sacrificial giving. Now, I don't think that poll was taken, you know, a sample size of conservative evangelicals, but it tells us something about the human heart. Doesn't it that the more people have materially and they begin to use those that material wealth in worldly ways. It ties, it ties their heart to those things. I think that's, that's the warning, because our hearts travel in the direction of our investments. At some point, you know, you say, Wow, this is getting it's getting warm in here. Anybody else, and you do begin to think, Well, how do you expect anybody to ever get ahead? Certainly somebody has thought that. But the problem, according to Jesus, is that we think too much about getting ahead. In this life where moth and rust corrupt and thieves break in and steal. We think too much about that, and far too little about getting ahead in the next life. That's the calling. I want to invest as much as I can in the life to come, because my giving sets the direction my heart will travel, and I want my affections to be on Christ and all those are going to be gathered around his throne. And the beauties of that place, number six, six perspective, and this kind of overlaps a little bit, but giving is a divinely ordained investment strategy. Our giving to the work the kingdom to God's work to ministry is a divinely ordained investment strategy. And by the way, we're I'm talking specifically about ministry, but I think you can throw in giving to the poor. I was naked and you clothed me, right? I was in prison and you visited me. I think that those ministries of mercy, I think, fall into a very similar parallel category. Though, I'm talking specifically about gospel ministry and and whatnot, but giving is a divinely ordained investment strategy in Matthew six, Jesus is actually talking about how to get in, get ahead in life, right? He's speaking primarily of getting ahead of making investments in the imperishable, the unfading inheritance of the life to come, storing up treasures in heaven. You should invest in heaven so that your treasures are there. When you get there, your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you. A number of teachers have said you're either moving away from your treasure or you're moving toward your treasure. Either you're heavily invested in earthly goods, and you'll learn you can't take it with you. You never see a U haul attached to a hearse, right? Doesn't work. King Tut was wrong. We all have King Tut stuff now, right? He doesn't have it anymore. He couldn't take it with him.
  
  34:52
  An illustration from Randy alcorn's book The treasure principle. It's a great little book on this topic. If you want to want to read more kind of a. Adapt an illustration from his book to give it a local flavor. You work here in Spokane, but your company is requiring you to go to Seattle for three months and work there, and they put you up in a hotel. Obviously, you don't get to keep what's in the hotel. You're just renting the room. You would not if you were living in a hotel room for three months, you would not buy expensive furniture or artwork or drapes or a new throw rug or really fine linens for the bed. You would not buy that stuff to use and to leave in a hotel room? Would you? No, you're going to, you're going to do your job, and you're just going to stay there temporarily, and you're going to have all your money direct deposited here in Spokane, so so your wife can spend it on all those things for your house. No, you're get the illustration, though, right? It's the same with us. Just like that, hotel room isn't our home, this world is not our home, and we can waste our money outfitting a hotel room instead of spending our our resources to essentially outfit our eternal and lasting home where moth and rust don't corrupt and thieves do not break in and steal. And how certain is that it's as certain as what Paul said, right? The one who sows sparingly will reap sparingly, the one who sows bountifully will reap bountifully. It's an investment strategy, and that leads to the last principle, related to the previous one, that giving generously invites God's blessing. Giving generously invites God's blessing. God is able, second, Corinthians, nine, eight, to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance. For every good deed, you give generously, and God's going to make sure you have an abundance the one who, who's faithful and little be faithful in much. It's the same idea the one who sows bountifully is going to reap bountifully. Now, clearly, we're not talking about a prosperity gospel kind of thing here, right? We've all seen people messing with this principle and exaggerating it and using it for their own selfish, greedy ends and making promises that the Bible doesn't make, right? We've seen that. For your love, gift of just $100 I'll send you a little jar with some water from the sea of Galilee and promise you a 10 fold return on your investment. Anybody ever seen something like that on TV? That's not what we're talking about. That's not what Paul is saying, right? It's not promising a particular kind of bountiful blessing at a particular time or a particular way. It's nothing specific like that, and yet it is true New Testament. He who sows bountifully will reap bounty bountifully. That's what it says. Now, I love the Old Testament examples of this principle and the fact that Paul repeats it is super helpful. This is just who God is. It is his character and nature to reward you for your giving. In secret, Jesus said it, Paul says it to bountifully bless you when you sow bountifully in the book of Malachi. God, through the prophet, Malachi is confronting the people of Israel who had who had stopped being faithful in their giving, and he's calling them to repent and return to me. And they're like, how should we return? We're already here. God, you should love us. And he says, You should return to me in this way, Will a man rob God? Yet you are robbing me. And in their little dialog, how, how have we robbed you, God? And he says, In tithes and offerings, the Israelites were required in the Old Testament law as part of their worship, and to set aside a tithe, a 10% of all that they made and harvested and raised. That's what a tithe meant, and God says they were robbing him of that. I don't have time. Go into the weeds of the Old Testament principle. It's rooted in the laws of a theocratic nation. Do we have to give 10% today? I like what most authors say. Like it seems Old Testament people living under the law, that's a good starting point for Christians who are living under grace. So there's some nice call out boxes in your growth guide. I encourage you to read those and interact with your peeps on all that the point, the point here is to not miss out on what God is saying to the people in in Malachi. While it's tempting to say, Man, I can barely make my bills as it is. And here's, you know here, people have been like persecuted and who knows what, and perhaps your life is difficulty. God still calls it robbing him when they were withholding their tithes. But listen to what he says, because they were robbing him and not giving in their worship. He says, you are cursed with a curse. Verse nine, for you're robbing me, the whole nation of you instead, verse 10, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse. That was where they put it in the Treasury in the temple. 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, test me and see if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows. Man, it's pretty rare for God to say, test me. Try You shall not test the Lord, your God, Jesus said, right, here's God saying, I give you permission just as once, give abundantly and generously, and you will see that he who sows bountifully will reap bountifully, because it is in God's character to bless us. The opposite can also be true. There's a similar story in the book of Haggai, where the people had come back to Jerusalem and they were supposed to rebuild the temple. And instead of rebuilding the temple, they got distracted building their own beautiful paneled houses. And God says you're living in your paneled houses while my my house lies desolate. You know what happened as a result? He says they learned the painful truth that he who sows sparingly, reaps sparingly. He says you've sown much for your own purposes, but you harvest little. You eat. There isn't enough to be satisfied. You drink, there isn't enough to become drunk. You put on clothing, nobody is warm enough. And he who earns earns wages to put into a purse with holes. That's not an illustration. Actually, that's God describing historical reality. For some unfaithful people in haggai's day who were neglecting to give to the work of the ministry, it was like they were earning money and putting it in a purse with holes. Have you ever felt like, man, it seems like the more money I make, it just slips through my fingers. I've had periods of my life where I'm not being generous with the Lord, where I have felt that, and it is often a wake up call to say, Hey, are you thinking properly? Are you sowing bountifully? Now I don't think that's the only reason life can be difficult. I'm just simply trying to illustrate from God's Word that those those are operative principles in God's kingdom, because it's in the character and nature of God to reward those who give in secret, to let those who sow bountifully reap bountifully, and to chasten us, to open our eyes when Perhaps we get a field for a field of that.
  
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  Paul's prayer for the Corinthians was that they would have an abundance for every good deed. Malachi says, Test me in this and maybe you're thinking, I don't know how to do that. It just seems like things are just far too tight. So I'd encourage you make a commitment to the Lord before the Lord a certain amount or a certain percentage. I don't even care, just make a commitment and do what He said through Malachi. Test me in this test and see if you are gracious and generous in your giving, if God will not do what he said, and that is supply all your needs according to His riches and glory, that he won't allow you to reap bountifully when you sow bountifully. And I can, I can guarantee, as you do, that you experience blessing again, not always the blessing we're thinking. It might not be some massive. Financial windfall, but you will, you will begin to experience all the blessings that come through faithful, generous giving, and some of that is just being invested in eternity and blessed with the thought of knowing the gospel is being ministered here and around the world, through the through the missionaries that we support. The 10 years from now, you're going to be hearing about people getting saved in Southeast Asia when we send our next team to Southeast Asia, and you can be a part of that, and you participate in that blessing and and that joy, and that's where you're putting your investment. You may never meet those people, but you'll experience the blessing, and it will motivate you to continue to give and to give more and to give abundantly. Well. God needs to help us do that right. That was one of our principles. We need to pray that God would indeed stimulate us and motivate us and energize us so that we would abound in this gracious work without any specifics, right, just encouraging you before the Lord your heart, your family, making some commitments. What would it look like for us to test the Lord if need be or to or to stay the course and in sowing bountifully for the work of God's kingdom, let's pray God we do thank you most of All for your indescribable gift, the massive expression of grace and mercy and generosity, and sending your son to die, to pay the penalty for our sins, to take them as far as the east is from the west, to adopt us into your family and for us to be sharing in the riches and the inheritance that is unfading and eternal in the heavens. Thank you for that generosity. Help us as we think about how to respond to that in our practical lives, in our daily, weekly, monthly budgeting and giving help us be faithful to you and generous to the work of the Kingdom, not to be seen by men, but to set our hearts toward Heaven, to invest in eternal things that will never fade away. Pray You'd do that for your glory alone.

Brian Sayers

Brian is the Pastor of Counseling & Equipping at Faith Bible Church. He is passionate about the local church, and equipping the saints to effectively serve one another. Before coming to Spokane, he spent 14 years serving God's people as a pastor in rural New England (Vermont & New Hampshire).

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