Dare Series

Okay, so Jesus takes a break from the crowd and he and his guys sit down outside one of the 13 offering boxes in the temple. That ought to make you feel better about us, we only have 4. As they are watching rich people are throwing in wads of money and a poor widow finally comes along and throws in a few coins. Scholars tell us it’s wages for about 6 minutes of work. With minimum wage today that is about $1.20. So, the rich people put in large amounts of money, but Jesus said she put in more. Jesus always tells the truth. So, think about it. How can that be true? The only way that is possibly true is if this is what is really going on here...

JESUS DARES US TO THINK PRIORITY AND PERCENTAGE. If we really think about that it makes sense. It is what God has been doing with his people since the time they really became his people. Let’s take a look at it. This is Malachi chapter 3 beginning with verse 8…

“Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob me. “But you ask, ‘How are we robbing you?’ “In tithes and offerings. 9 You are under a curse—your whole nation—because you are robbing me. 10 Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the Lord Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.

So a tithe is 10%, 10% off the top. Yes, that is in the Old Testament. Yes, that is a specific conversation that God had with his chosen people Israel. A lot of people like to argue that because of that it has no application to us it’s an Old Testament thing. What did Jesus say to the Pharisees when he was calling them out in Matthew 23. We just read it. You should have practiced justice, mercy, and faithfulness without neglecting tithing. In other words, there is a presumption here, of course you are going to do this percentage giving thing. So, knowing that, what just happened? Do you see what just happened there? Truth or Dare actually now becomes Truth and Dare. Here is a whole lot of truth about your money and now Test me in this. I dare you to try it. I think we miss how significant this moment is. God commanded his people not to put him to the test in Deuteronomy. It is a commandment that Jesus himself repeated when he was tempted in the wilderness by Satan himself. And now we are given what, we are given the one exception to that. Here’s a whole lot of truth about money and now I dare you to do the one thing that I myself have commanded you never to do.

The Stats tell us that people outside the church give away or are generous with about 2.5% of their incomes and church people are right there too. The formula tends to be me first living with little if any left over giving. Giving and generosity for most of us if we do it at all tends to be sporadic, spontaneous, something that we sparingly do. Jesus is pointing us to something different here. We need to not only make generosity our first financial priority, we need to be thinking percentage too. There are lots of people around here that have tried what Jesus is pointing to here and found it to be true. I could point you to dozens but let me just tell you about two...