A Heart For His House

A Heart for His Building

He walked across the dusty, stony ground, kicked a rock and bent and drew in the dirt. He looked around at the desolate land scape and down at the city below and wondered if his dream would ever be a reality. Would it really happen, someday would the people of God worship on this ground? Would songs of praise fill the air? Would the word of God be read aloud? Would prayers be uttered and heard?

He had a dream. A dream of a building called a house of God. A dream of a building where his people could worship. A dream of a permanent home for their services. And now as he stood on the empty lot he wondered just how long it would be until the doodling he made in the dirt would actually become a building.

It was later. The dream had taken on a substance and as he stood and watched the men and women exercise their talents and gifts, his dream was becoming a reality in front of his very eyes. There were those who had doubted, and those who had scoffed, but now they could see what before only he could see, and the doubters had been silenced.

So much had been done, but so much more still had to be finished. He hadn’t realized that the transition from dream to reality would take so much time, sacrifice, and so much talent. There were times that he knew that whatever it cost, it was worth it, while other times he wondered if it would be worth what it cost.

His days were consumed with building and during the night he tossed and turned with a thousand questions racing through his head. His life revolved around the construction, and he began to bore his friends with his obsessive talking of the progress. He stepped through the rubble of construction and listened to the saws and hammers and his mind drifted back to how much simpler this had been as simply a dream.

It was later. Much later, it seemed like a thousand years later, but it couldn’t have been that long and he stood and looked at what had once been a dream. He could hardly take it all in. The size and the splendour of it. Just like he had dreamed. It had come true and was now a reality. He wished his father could be with him to see this accomplishment.

No more would his people worship without a permanent spiritual home; no more would they feel like nomads. God had given him a vision for what could be done and had given him the strength to do it and it was finished. As a matter of fact, we are told in 2 Chronicles 7:11 So Solomon finished the Temple of the Lord, as well as the royal palace. He completed everything he had planned to do in the construction of the Temple and the palace.

It is March at Cornerstone, and that means that it’s Money Month.

Here is a little insight for those of you who have become a part of our church family in the past year.

It was 23 years ago that we decided to take a different approach to dealing with finances at Cornerstone.

We decided that instead of dealing with the crisis of finances. That is harping at you every time things got tight financially in the church; that instead, we would teach stewardship once a year.

Because our church year ends in April, we decided March would be a good month, so here we are.

And so, if you can handle a few messages on stewardship each spring, then you get a free pass on the preaching team harping at you about money for the rest of the year.

As part of that process, we adopted what we call “Step-up Cornerstone.” Each year, at the end of March, we ask those who make Cornerstone their church home to step out in faith and fill out an “estimate of giving” card. We collect those cards at the end of that service, and we use that figure to plan our budget for the new church year.

And there are benefits to that, both for the church and for you as individuals. For the church, it gives us a responsible way to plan our budget for the upcoming year.

For you, it allows you in a very practical way to determine what type of church you want to have in the upcoming year. A church in its own building with full time staff will always cost more than a church meeting in a community centre with part-time staff.

For the first twenty years of my ministry, the churches that I led did what most churches do. Each year the leadership would pull a budget out of the air. It may have been based on the previous year’s budget with a slight increase for additional expenses, or perhaps department heads had submitted their wish list for the new year.