Hillsborough Reformed Church at Millstone
Preached at South Branch Ref. Ch. As Guest steward
Pentecost XX October 17, 2004 Mt. 6:19-21, II Cor. 9:6-15
“Giving with Attitude”
This morning I would like to talk to you about a few of the Bibles principles of stewardship. For some, they may come as a surprise. For the rest of us, who have heard it all before, these principles will challenge us once again.
I think the problem with most church giving is that people look at the needs of the church…they look at the budget and say, what part of this am I responsible for?
That is how things work in Rotary or Kiwanis or the Masons or the Elks or the Country Club. People know they must pay their fair share.
If that is how we are looking at giving to the church, then we are making a big mistake.
Consecrating Stewards…the program you have undertaken here at South Branch encourages you to do something different. Instead of looking at the budget and saying, “What part of this shall I give?” Consecrating Stewards asks us to look at our personal income and wealth and ask, “What part of this belongs to God?”
Now if you are a faithful Bible-believing Christian, you will know the answer to that right away. It is one tenth. We are supposed to tithe, to give ten percent of our income to God.
But if that’s what you are thinking, then you are wrong. If you look at your personal wealth and income and ask Jesus what portion belongs to God he’ll say, “One hundred percent. All of it.”
And if we can’t agree with that answer, we have a serious spiritual problem.
Notice I didn’t say you should give one hundred percent of your paycheck to the church. I said one hundred percent of it belongs to God.
The principle is that we are stewards, that is managers, of God’s property. We have nothing, but God has given us oversight of his goods. And it is true. When Aristotle Onassis, the fabulously wealthy Greek who married Jackie Kennedy, died, some men at his funeral were talking about him. They were asking, “How much did he leave?”. One profound man said, “All of it. He left all of it.”
We cannot take it with us. It is not truly ours.
Some of it will go to the church. But after all you have to live. You have to pay a mortgage. You have car insurance to buy, which in NJ is no joking matter! There may be a college tuition. You should also be putting some away in savings and investments. Everyone here should be debt free and saving for the future. In other words, you should be living BELOW your means. If we are not, we have a serious SPIRITUAL problem.
Since all of what we own and earn belongs to God, it matters how we spend any and all of it, and how we save and invest all of it, not just ten percent.
Why do I keep saying “spiritual” problem? Because in over one half of everything Jesus said and taught, he was speaking about money and material possessions. He knows what a hold they have on us, what power they have over us. So much so that he said, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” Mammon is the Aramaic word for money. Our Lord said, “You cannot serve two masters. In fact, Jesus said more – “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”
If talk of money in church makes you mad, then you are proving what Jesus said and it is time to stop whatever you are doing, drop to your knees in prayer, and examine your heart, and ask whether or not your God is money and that’s why you resent hearing about it.
So principle number one is that everything we have belongs to God. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”
The second principle is that we should rejoice in our giving. We heard this morning that God loves the cheerful giver. The truth is we are made to give, not to hoard or squander. The principle is all around us. Your marriage is successful not if you are all of the time receiving from your spouse. Your marriage is a success if you are giving love and devotion to your wife, or husband. Raising children is all about giving love. There is nothing more heartbreaking than a young person who has a baby out of wedlock because she just wanted someone to love her. Parenting is about GIVING love. It is a self-sacrificing task.
We are happiest when we are giving.
God loves a cheerful giver.-.that’s what the Bible tells us. When we die and join our Lord in heaven, we will be entering “the joy of our master.” He will say, Well, done thou good and faithful servant.” If we are not joyful about our giving, then we have a spiritual problem. I personally have witnessed people gleefully and recklessly spend more money than they really should on a new car, a vacation home, a piece of jewelry, an expensive piece of furniture, and antique, books, boats, you name it. When it’s something we really want, no price is too much.
Our giving to the church should be a joyful act.
Don Troost, who was the synod executive in Albany Synod used to say, as part of the consecrating stewards program, that money problems in the church should be the easiest problems of all to solve. That surprised me the first time I heard it, but mulling it over, I realized it was the truth. To solve the financial problems of a church all people have to do is write checks.
It’s like the church that decided they needed a new roof. Money was tight in the church budget and the consistory didn’t know what to do, but the pastor did. That morning he stood before the congregation and said, “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that we need a new roof for this church and we have all the money we need to repair it. The bad news is, the money is still in your wallets!”
Financial problems are the easiest to solve because all you have to do is write a check. When your church asks you to go and witness about your faith to your co-workers, that is a different matter! That is truly scary to most people. But money? All you do is put it in the offering envelope and put the envelope in the plate.
The stewardship principle here is that giving should be an occasion for joy. We all know about joyful giving. A young man will give the young woman he adores and wants to marry him a diamond that cost him lots of money. He is happy if she rejoices at receiving it. Moms and dads spend lots of money on the kids for Christmas. They want to see the gleeful looks on their kids faces when the open their presents.
When we give, we should rejoice that we are pleasing God.
Notice in the passage this morning Jesus does not ask us to give from the heart. Jesus knows how fickle are our hearts! He knows that given the choice between taking on payments for a new fishing boat as opposed to making a special gift to mission, our heart may lead us to the fiberglass and horsepower. So he doesn’t say follow your heart. Jesus says...”store up treasures in heaven” Why? Because where your treasure is, their will your heart be also.
That’s not what we expected is it? Jesus says give sacrificially, and your heart will follow your money. Hm. The heart follows the action.
I remember back in the times of the Civil Rights movement, psychologists were studying bigotry and prejudice. They found that a way of getting people to change their attitudes was to get them to say something unbigoted. Thus if you could get people to say that whites and blacks are equal and should have the same rights, gradually, the prejudiced beliefs would change. In other words, the heart would follow the action.
Jesus is saying that. Don’t wait till you feel like giving more, give more then you’ll feel like!
Isn’t it true that where our treasure is, our heart follows? If you buy a sleek automobile, you grow attached to it and you spend your time caring for it. If you give generously and sacrificially to the church, then you will feel good about it. It is a stewardship principle.
The question of stewardship is not, “How much can I afford to give to the church?” The question is, “What offering will please God?”
The church is God’s chosen vehicle for telling the world about Jesus Christ. We are called the “body of Christ.” Nothing is more important than the ministry and mission of your church. Giving to your church is the same thing as giving to God.
I have mentioned the word sacrifice a few times this morning. The word itself teaches us an important lesson about stewardship. The word comes from the Latin. The first part of the word, the letters S-A-C-R-I- mean, as is obvious, “sacred – that is, holy. The second part of the word, the letters F-I-C-E mean “to make.” It is the same root as our word facilitate, or factory. So when you give the church a gift or an offering and call it a sacrifice, it means to change the nature of the gift; to make it holy.
So when you fill your offering envelope, you are not so much losing something, as you are changing the nature of something. You take that amount of money and make it holy, by offering it to God.
I wish God’s blessing on each of you in stewardship. The final thing I’ll ask you is to be prayerful, thoughtful and deliberate in your giving.
Three clergy from the area were having lunch a Charlie Brown’s in Hillsborough, a priest, a rabbi and protestant minister. The conversation got around to how they give to their churches or synagogue. The priest went first. He said, “When I get my paycheck, I go to the bank and cash it and take home all five dollar bills. I get apiece of chalk and draw a circle on the church parking lot. Then I throw all the money up in the air, and whatever lands in the circle, I give to God as my offering to the church. The rabbi is sitting listening shaking his head in affirmation. “I do the same thing,” the rabbi, said. “I get my paycheck in small bills, go home and in my driveway draw a star of David. I toss the money in the sky and whatever lands in the Star of David, I give to the temple. They look at the Protestant minister to hear what he does. The minister says, “You guys are awfully capricious and arbitrary in something as important as your giving to God. On payday, I take my check to the bank, cash it for small bills. When I get home, I toss it all in the air. And whatever God catches he can keep.”
Well, what’s wrong with that?
It isn’t deliberate.
I urge you to be deliberate. The final principle of biblical stewardship is proportionality. That is, instead of deciding on a dollar amount to give to the church, figure out what percentage of your income you are giving now, and work from the there. The biblical model is the tithe. If you are not a tither, set that as a goal. I’ve known people who start at say, three percent and increase it by one percent a year until they reach the level of tithing. If you have a really good income, you should be giving more than ten percent. Bill Hybels tells of a member of his Willow Creek church who was a president of a Fortune 500 company. The man asked Bill Hybels about giving and when Bill told him about tithing the executive calculated what his weekly gift to the church would be he said, “No way!” Neither his heart nor his treasure was in the right place. Bill Hybels said in his sermon, “That man needs a heart check.”
But from what Jesus said this morning, what he needed to do was start giving at an acceptable level, in his case maybe forty to sixty percent. Then his heart would follow his treasure.
I encourage you to ask God what you should do about your commitment to the church – not in terms of money only, but time, talent and treasure.
God wants all of you…heart, soul, mind and strength. This morning say with me….”We belong to you, O Lord.”
Because the most important stewardship principle of all is this – we give because God has given to us. He gave us Jesus, and held nothing back, so that we could be forgiven of our sin and be born to life eternal. And that, my friends, is truly priceless.
Fred D. Mueller
