Last Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, marked the beginning of Lent. It’s traditional in many circles to give up something during these forty days before Easter. Some people give up coffee. Others give up meat. Catholics in Germany are being urged to give up driving this Lent. What have you given up? Perhaps you’ll continue to give up your money when we pass the plate after the sermon. But is that a good way to think of Christian stewardship? Are we "giving up" money or do we "offer" it? There’s a difference. "Giving up" money is something done grudgingly, like surrendering your wallet to a mugger, while "offering" it implies a willing act of worship.
Our text this morning gives us three reasons why we want to put our money in the plate as an offering and not a surrendering. We’ll happily carry out this act of worship because God chose us, he saved us, and he blesses us.
Our text is taken from the book of Deuteronomy, which records Moses’ last words to the Israelites before they entered the Promised Land. In our text Moses told the Israelites that once they were settled in their new home they were to bring God a firstfruits offering. In the same way God has commanded that we give him our firstfruits. That means before we spend our money on anything else, we are to set aside some of it to give to the Lord. What will motivate us to do this? Well, as the Israelites gave their offering they were to confess: "My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous" (Deuteronomy 26:5b).
The Israelites were to give their firstfruits in an act of worship because God had chosen them in spite of their humble beginnings. The Israelites were not descended from people who were known for their military might. Their forefathers were not inventive geniuses who developed new ways of farming or building cities. They were not even spiritually superior to the people around them. Take the patriarch Abraham, for example. He was a man of faith - even willingly offering his son as a sacrifice because God told him to - but Abraham was this way because God had made him this way. Abraham hadn’t always been so trusting. He lied not once but twice about Sarah being his wife. He even slept with Sarah’s maidservant, Hagar, in an attempt to fulfill God’s promise that he would have a son. Even though God knew Abraham would act this way he still chose him as his child.
Like Abraham God has chosen us to be his children in spite of our failings. Sure, we too have moments where we show brilliant God-given faith in the Lord’s promises. Maybe you declined, at great social cost to you, an invitation to a party where you knew alcohol would be served to those underage. Or perhaps you turned down a promotion so that you could continue to be close to your family and your church. But then again we also have moments of tremendous unbelief like when we added hours to our timecard so that our paycheck would be higher, or when we gossiped about our classmates so we could get in with the cool crowd.
If we fail to remember our humble beginnings, we’ll start to think that God owes us something. We’ll start to think that everything we have is a result of our hard work instead of God blessing our efforts. Because that would be a temptation for the Israelites once in the Promised Land, Moses wanted them to confess their humble beginnings whenever they brought the Lord an offering and to remember that they were blessed because God had chosen them, not because they had chosen God.
God did more than choose the Israelites; he also saved them. When Abraham’s descendants ended up slaves to the Egyptians, God did not forget his choice of them as his people. When the time was right he saved them in dramatic fashion. And so when the Israelites brought their offerings to the Lord in the Promised Land they were also to confess: "the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, putting us to hard labor. Then we cried out to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression. So the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with miraculous signs and wonders" (Deuteronomy 26:6-8).
It’s important to note that although the Israelites were God’s chosen people they, like all of God’s people, had to endure tough times. One way Moses described the suffering was as "oppression." That Hebrew word is the same one used to describe what happened to Balaam’s foot when the donkey he was riding crushed it against the wall to avoid the Angel of the Lord. Perhaps you feel a bit like Balaam’s foot this morning. Pressure is closing in on you from all sides. If it isn’t work demands scraping you against a concrete wall, your family responsibilities are weighing on you so that you can’t sleep at night because it feels like a heavy burden sits on top of your chest. Don’t worry; there’s help. The Israelites knew this and so cried out to the Lord who answered them when he delivered them with an "outstretched arm" (Deuteronomy 26:8). Isn’t that a neat picture of God’s concern for us? He doesn’t stand idly by with his hands behind his back as we flounder in our problems. No, like a dad watching his child learning how to walk, his hands are out, ready to react and save us from any peril that comes our way.
When we think about the dangers from which God has rescued us, we dare not forget how he saved us from our sins. God taught the Israelites how he would save them from that danger when he told them to put the blood of a lamb on the doorposts of their homes so that when the angel of death passed over in the last plague, they would not be harmed. This blood from the Passover Lamb foreshadowed what Jesus’ blood would do for all people. The blood that Jesus shed on the cross covers us so that God, in his just wrath against sin, passes over us. It’s like when the teacher asks the class a tough question for which you don’t have the answer. What do you do? With heart pounding you sink into your chair and hide behind the student in front of you. You’re hoping that when the teacher looks your way, she won’t see you and will call on someone else. While these tactics don’t actually hide us from a teacher’s eagle eye, the blood Jesus shed on the cross does hide our sins from God’s eyes of justice. The blood doesn’t just hide our sins; it erases them so that we no longer have to cower in God’s presence.
Now it’s one thing to save people from oppression, but quite another thing to give them a good life. Aren’t we finding that to be true in Afghanistan and Iraq? Sure, the people there have been "freed" from the Taliban and Saddam Hussein but are their lives more peaceful and productive now? It’s not that we’re not trying to help them have a better life. Billions of dollars are being pumped into those nations but it still hasn’t brought peace and prosperity. God, on the other hand, is so great that he not only rescued the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, he took them to Canaan where they found a wonderful home. And so when the Israelites brought their firstfruit offering to the Lord they were also to say, "He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; and now I bring the firstfruits of the soil that you, O LORD, have given me" (Deuteronomy 26:9, 10a).
In the same way we too will gladly worship the Lord with our offerings when we remember our present blessings from him. We Canadians continue to be some of the richest people in the world. Our problem is not finding food to eat in the morning, it’s deciding whether we’ll have Cheerios, Cocoa-cocoa Puffs, or Fruit Loops.
If all these blessings are from God, have you ever paused to consider why God demands offerings from us? Obviously God doesn’t need our offerings to survive like most Japanese think their stone idols do. The reason God demands our firstfruits is to give us the opportunity to consciously put him first in our lives, and to express our trust that he will continue to bless us, no matter how much we give back to him. This truth demonstrates how Christian stewardship is not "$tewardship" but "stewardship" (the "t" in the second "stewardship" should be made to look like a cross). It’s not about raising money; it’s about raising people and their trust in God (illustration from Cornerstone Ministries).
To help the the Israelites remember that stewardship was about worship and not bill-paying, God instructed his people to bow before him when they gave their offerings. And so when we present our offerings to the Lord may we do so reverently, not flippantly tossing our offerings into the plate the way we might indulgently flip a loonie to a child. We don’t do God any favors by giving him our money. He doesn’t need our money. The truth is it’s his money anyway so when we give to back to him we’re only expressing our trust that he will continue to bless us.
If you were planning on giving up something for Lent, I hope Moses has convinced you not to do so. What I mean is God doesn’t want us to give up something, like money, as if surrendering it to a bill collector. No, he wants us to offer it in a thankful act of worship. We will do this, even with our hard-earned cash, because the Lord chose us, he saved us, and he continues to bless us. Amen.
