Money excites us and it also worries us. We work for it, spend it, give it, and even save some of it for a rainy day. And like our physical fitness, we seldom are really comfortable with our finances. The goal of this series is to whip us into Financial Fitness. You received two items as a part of this new sermon series inside your worship guide this morning. In the coming weeks, we’ll talk about How Wise People Build Wealth, as well as Three Attitudes of the Financially Fit, and Three Habits of the Financially Fit. You’ll receive a weekly handout that encourages you to take the conversation home as part of our Faith at Home series. Resources are available all this month in our Faith at Home resource room. Also, you received an anonymous commitment card – we’d ask you to prayerfully reflect where you are throughout today’s message.
Introduction to Proverbs
The Book of Proverbs is Principles from Heaven for Life on Earth. Proverbs is practical learning you’ll need for life. In fact, much of the book is designed for a father to teach his son. As you read it, you can imagine a son around twenty years old who’s just about to step across the threshold of adulthood. In front of him are the great themes of Proverbs … wisdom and folly, life and death, right vs. wrong. Proverbs will serve as a father to us where we’ll hear our dad’s voice (or the dad we wish we’d had ?) teaching and training on the danger, the value, and the limits of money.
Let’s do a thought experiment for a moment. Think with me about a room full of people where each person is a stoplight. Imagine with me, this morning, if you’re a stoplight. Your face shows one of three colors, red, yellow, or green, in response to the message. As a pastor, I can talk about faith, love, and forgiveness … and all I see is green. But for many, the very moment I mention finances all I see is red. People put the brake lights on when pastors talk about finances. You see, money exercises a power over us.
Make no mistake about it: this series trespasses on enemy territory. I want to invade the turf of a powerful adversary, attempting to cross a war zone laced with mines. I want to seek to recover strategic territory that rightly belongs to the true King.
Again, money exercises a power over us. And today, I want us to see how we can break money’s hold over us.
Today’s Scripture
My son, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments,
2 for length of days and years of life and peace they will add to you.
3 Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart.
4 So you will find favor and good success in the sight of God and man.
5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.
6 In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.
7 Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil.
8 It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones.
9 “Honor the LORD with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce;
10 then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.
11 My son, do not despise the LORD's discipline or be weary of his reproof,
12 for the LORD reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights” (Proverbs 3:1-12).
The ancient Aztecs used chocolate for money, or more precisely the cacao seed. A small isolated people on a Pacific island of Yap used an even more bizarre form of currency, money was the literally the size of a boulder. Money in this isolated people was a large, solid, thick stone wheel that ranged anywhere from one foot to twelve feet in diameter with a hole in the middle. Now with money so large it couldn’t fit in your pocket, one advantage was this: theft was very rare! It would take four big men to simply steal one stone.
No matter the time in history or what your currency may look like, the Bible is specific in this command: “Honor the LORD with your wealth” (Proverbs 3:9a). Let’s zero in on the powerful words in verse five for the next few moments: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5). There’s more here than I can cover but allow me to show you, Two Steps in Honoring the Lord
1. Trust the Lord
This is really a simple, straightforward command: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart…” (Proverbs 3:5a). Trust in God goes against our grain. It is in our nature to be independent, to cut our swath in life. The human heart is an idol factory and one of our favorite idols is money.
After the global economic crisis began around 2008, there followed a tragic string of suicides of formerly wealthy and well-connected individuals. The acting chief financial officer of Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, hung himself in his basement. A Danish senior executive with HSBC Bank hung himself in the wardrobe of his $750-a-night suite in London. When a Bear Stearns executive learned that he would not be hired by JPMorgan Chase, which had bought his collapsed firm, he took a drug overdose and leapt from the 29th floor of his office building. A friend said, “This Bear Stearns thing . . . broke his spirit.”
Again, money has a power over us.
And where ancients built shrines to worship today, we build office towers, stadiums, and spas and gyms where our worship of our favorite idol will hopefully produce the happiness we so desperately crave. We may not actually burn incense to Artemis, but when money and career are raised to cosmic proportions, we perform a kind of child sacrifice, neglecting family and community to achieve a higher place in business and gain more wealth and prestige.
Idols Must be Replaced. It’s easy to say you trust in God but how do you know you really trust Him? We must realize that idols cannot simply be removed. Instead, they must be replaced. If you only try to uproot your idols, they will grow back. Your idols have to be supplanted. And how do you do this? Your idols must be removed by none other than God Himself. But when I say God … I do not mean a general belief in His existence. Most people believe in His existence, yet your soul is riddled with idols. What we need is a living encounter with God to remove the idols of our lives.
1. Trust the Lord
2. Trust the Lord with Your Wealth
“Honor the LORD with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce” (Proverbs 3:9). There are two key components to honoring the Lord with your possessions.
2.1 Give to God First
“Honor the LORD with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce” (Proverbs 3:9). Firstfruits answers, “When Should I Give?” The idea of firstfruits is this: the minute your sickle hit the first blades of a grain of harvest, you were to take the best of the firstfruits of the crop to the Lord and offer them as a sacrifice to Him. “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you come into the land that I give you and reap its harvest, you shall bring the sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest to the priest” (Leviticus 23:10). You give your firstfruits because of verse six: “In all your ways acknowledge him” (Proverbs 3:6a). In fact, the practice continued in the New Testament as well: “On the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up, as he may prosper, so that there will be no collecting when I come” (1 Corinthians 16:2). Now, when you see the word “firstfruits” in verse nine, by taking the choicest and first of your crops into the Temple, you were saying two things: 1) God owns the field and I simply manage it; 2) God blessed me with a good crop and I am grateful for His kindness. They were saying in that firstfruits ceremony, “Thank you, Lord. You’ve taken good care of us. This good crop that we had this year, You gave it to us and we thank You for it.”
Everyone has their hands into your pockets! Back to school costs money, your health insurance premiums are skyrocketing, and the cost of college – I don’t even want to think about this! Financial worries are the leading source of stress for Americans, ahead of health concerns, work concerns, or even family concerns.
You may be sitting there with arms folded saying, “Why should I listen to you, pastor, when it is obvious you financially benefit from this message?” “Who are you going to cheat?” I have discovered this: very rarely is there enough money for everything. So the question you must ask is this: “Who are you going to cheat?” When I cheat God, I’m on my own. But when I place Him first in giving, I’m opening myself up to his help in every other financial matter of my life. To worship God with my money is to place God first and give Him the best. God should receive both our first and the best. He shouldn’t receive our leftovers. The firstfruits offering reminded people of God’s ownership. That may seem strange to you because you think, “I have worked very hard for what I have,” but you have worked very hard for what you have with abilities and opportunities and circumstances and health and various things God provided. Again, money has a power over us.
Money’s power is that it blinds us. In a recent study at a California University, researchers looked at different levels of generosity among selected participants. The study gave a variety of volunteer participants a $10 bill and told them they could keep it or share part of it. It turns out that those who had lower salaries (less than $25,000) gave 44 percent more to the stranger than those who made more than $150,000. Next, they studied showed footage of a crosswalk in California to determine that 50 percent of people in the most expensive cars would not stop for pedestrians, while those with the cheapest cars stopped every time. Here’s is what the researchers concluded: “As a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases.”
Here’s a second reason you should listen to me on giving: practicing generosity frees you from greed. And greed is a rattlesnake. Greed is a copperhead lying right under your pillow.
Firstfruits Teach God’s Ownership. So you may say, “Oh, I’ve worked very hard; I am what I am because I’ve worked very hard.” But if God had decided you were going to be born in a village deep in Southern Mexico, would you be doing as well, no matter how hard you worked? You’d like to say in reply, “It’s all a matter of my work.” No, friend, it’s a matter of your circumstances. It’s a matter of your abilities and opportunities, and God gave those to you. If you have more wealth than someone else, ordinarily it’s because you have had more opportunities and abilities and circumstances God has given you. Everything You Have is A Gift-Giving God what was first and not what was last was a statement of trust in the Lord.
2.2 Jesus Tells Us to Tithe
Now, there’s one question that always comes up when you discuss tithing: “Do Christians Have to Tithe?” The Bible gives us one guideline where you can check ourselves to see whether or not our understanding of giving and generosity to ministry is in the ballpark of what God thinks it ought to be. The Bible gives you to test yourself and it’s called the tithe. Tithe means ten percent. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others” (Matthew 23:23). Jesus says it is right to tithe.
Jesus says, “The trouble with you Pharisees is sometimes there’s a need in the community … There’s a need out there that needs to be met financially that love or justice demands you meet, but you have this legalistic limitation. You think, ‘As long as I’m giving my 10 percent, all the rest of it is mine…’” “…and you refuse to go beyond the tithe. You’re really just legalists and you’re not being run by love and justice but simply by a legalistic code of conduct.” The tithe is 10% of the money you make.
2.3 Beware of Pride
There’s a great danger for those who tithe. You think, “I’ve met God’s demand,” and so we smugly think, “The rest is for me.” If greed is a rattlesnake then pride is a great white shark. But don’t think by simply tithing, you have a spiritual cure-all. As we saw with Jesus, some tithed and it created big problems for smug and the proud. Beware of pride.
Tithing isn’t the ceiling for your giving. Instead, it is the baseline for your giving. It’s the training wheels for your giving. The New Testament rarely refers to tithing. First, “On the first day of the week each of you is to put something aside and store it up, as he may prosper” (1 Corinthians 16:2). Second, “they gave according to their means and beyond their means of their own accord” (2 Corinthians 8:3). And third, “Each one must do as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). And finally, “God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that you may always have enough of everything and may provide in abundance for every good work” (2 Corinthians 9:8).
The New Testament speaks of the Five habits of the Financially Fit: they give to God cheerfully, regularly, proportionately, generously, and lastly sacrificially. The question that Jesus drives us to ask again and again is not, “How much should I give?” but rather, “How much dare I keep?” Some of you should be asking, “How can I manage my money where I can give more?” Why not aim for twenty percent in your giving? Or even thirty percent? Honestly, there are some here who are so materially comfortable that if all you did was tithe, you are robbing God.
The Generosity Ladder
I want to share a little Insider information… this is for members only so don’t tell anyone… I asked our finance department to do a little work for this message, I was interested to see how generous we are… And this is what I discovered…
DISTRIBUTION OF TITHERS and NON-TITHERS
# Households
# Households That Give
That Give But NOT a # Households TOTAL
Nothing Tithe Tithe # Households
Number 323 189 515 1027
Percentage 31% 19% 50%
Three Questions for Every Believer
Where Should I Give?
Giving should start with your local Bible-believing, Christ-centered church, the spiritual community where you’re fed and to which you’re accountable. In the New Testament, even gifts that were sent to other places were given through the local church. When many of you have given 10%, you are free to go above and beyond this with other important ministries.
When Should I Give?
Again, give your firstfruits. You should at the first opportunity when you are paid. Online giving can be such a blessing because it helps you give with consistency.
How Much Should I Give?
The tithe is 10% of the money you make. Again, tithing is training wheels. Money has a power over us and tithing is the first step to breaking the blinding effects of its power.
PRAYER
Father, our finances give us so much stress in our lives. There is so much pulling and tugging at us in our day. We live in the most marketed culture in history, which only increases our desire to want more and more. Give us grace, Father, for our day.
Remove the shackles of greed from our lives and move us to a place of greater generosity. Give us the power to live lives of principles rather than moving only at every whim and fancy of hearts.
