Date Preached _________
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Why Do We Do What We Do?
Why Do We Take up an Offering Each Week?
1 Corinthians 16:1-4
When things are tight financially, you do what you have to do. A particular circus was having a bad year, and one Friday the owner called his troupe together to make the dreaded announcement. He said, "I’m sorry, but there is only enough money to pay three of you this week. It was a tough choice, and have given it a great deal of thought before reaching a decision. The three people who can pick up their checks are...Benny the Bone Crusher, Sampson the Strong Man, and Ivan the Knife Thrower."
Let’s look at our scripture this morning and ask the question, “Why do we take up an offering each week?” Look at 1 Corinthians 16:1-4: “1Now about the collection for God’s people: Do what I told the Galatian churches to do. 2On the first day of every week, each one of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with his income, saving it up, so that when I come no collections will have to be made. 3Then, when I arrive, I will give letters of introduction to the men you approve and send them with your gift to Jerusalem. 4If it seems advisable for me to go also, they will accompany me.”
Every week without fail, in thousands upon thousands of churches, at some point during their worship experience, ushers or servers move through the rows of the people and pass a plate to take up an offering. Why do we do that? Simply answered is that our giving is an act of worship!
Today, as we have over the last few weeks with the other aspects of our worship, we ask the question: Why? Why do we provide the opportunity for us to give financially? Equally as important, why do we give of our offerings when we have the opportunity?
I want to give you three reasons why we take up an offering each week. All of these reasons are important, but when we get to the 3rd reason, I think that you can see why it may carry a little more weight than the others.
1. First, we give and receive offerings in order to provide ministry through the church.
God set it up this way. This is how we survive as our congregation by going through this process. We see this in the Old Testament with what they called the Levite offering that they used to provide for the ministry of the Temple. We see that in Deuteronomy 14:28-29. Listen to this, “28 At the end of every three years, bring all the tithes of that year’s produce and store it in your towns, 29 so that the Levites (who have no allotment or inheritance of their own) and the aliens, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns may come and eat and be satisfied, and so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.”
And in the New Testament even in the passage from 1 Corinthians 16 that we read today the early church took up offerings to provide for the needs of the newly formed congregations. Without the people of the church giving, the church would have a very hard time even existing.
I hope that I get this right, but if it is not exactly right then it is close. Out of every dollar that you give 41 cents of that goes for salaries, and 47 cents goes toward ministry and upkeep of the building. We are an independent Christian Church, which means that we do not answer to any organization other than to the Bible and God Himself. We do not have to answer to some headquarters. But it also means that if we are going to do anything that involves money then we need to take it from the offerings each week. We are self supporting.
Not too long ago I read of a young woman who brought her fiancé home to meet her parents. After dinner, her mother told her father to find out more about the young man. The father invited the fiancé into his study. "So what are your plans?" the father asked the young man.
"I am a Bible scholar," he replied.
"That’s great,” said the father, “But what will you do to provide a nice house for my daughter?”
"I will study," the young man replied, "and God will provide for us."
“And how are you going to buy her a beautiful engagement ring?" asked the father.
"I will pray," the young man replied, "and God will provide for us."
"And children?" asked the father. "How will you support children when they come?"
"Don’t worry, sir, God will provide," replied the fiancé.
The conversation proceeded like this through several more questions. Each time the young man insisted that God would provide.
Later the mother asked her husband about the conversation.
“There’s good news and bad news,” said the husband.
“What’s the bad news?”
“He has no job and no plans.”
“What is the good news?”
“He obviously thinks I’m God."
Sometimes, with the church, we respond like the young man. We just expect the support of the church’s ministry to happen. But it doesn’t. Yes, God will provide but that provision comes through each one of us, praying, serving, and giving so that ministry can take place here.
2. Giving makes a difference in those who give and in those who receive it.
Most of us probably don’t know the name of Kenneth Behring. But Newsweek magazine told his story in December of 2003. A man who’d made a fortune as a construction tycoon, Behring seemed to have everything—money, family, the respect of others. But something transformed him during a trip to Vietnam in 2000.
While helping a relief organization bring food and medicine to a village there, Behring personally delivered a wheelchair to a little girl, a 6-year-old polio victim. The girl’s reaction changed his life. "She got a big smile on her face,” Behring later reported. “She couldn’t believe somebody would help her that way." "It was a sensation of joy I’ve never experienced with anything else," he continued. ”And I knew that couldn’t be the end of it.”
Inspired by the sense of making a difference for that little girl, Behring created the Wheelchair Foundation, an organization that today delivers 10,000 wheelchairs a month worldwide to people who need them.
You know the most wonderful thing about what he did? It changed her life and it changed his. His generosity of time, money and energy gave her a way to get around where before she had none and it made him a more joyous, more fulfilled, more complete person.
Giving brings the opportunity to do that every time. It changes the one who receives the gift and the one who gives it. When we pass the plates each week, we give you the opportunity to take part in ministering to someone else. Right now 12 cents or more out of each dollar given goes to missions. It goes to our benevolence fund, it goes to our local missions and also to our foreign missions.
What you give in the name of God carries the potential to change another person’s life and by doing that you change your own. Giving makes us more generous. Giving makes us more gracious. Giving makes us more faithful. Giving makes us more hopeful.
I love the way 2 Corinthians 9:11 says it as Paul speaks of what a person’s generosity does for him or her. Paul says, “You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God.”
God makes us better people when we give. When we take an offering each week, we provide the opportunity for each of us to make a difference in the lives of someone else and in our own spiritual growth.
3. Finally, and most importantly We give our offerings because it allows us to express our gratitude to God!
Go with me to Psalm 66. Here we listen to a grateful man as he speaks of God.
“Come and see what God has done, how awesome his works in man’s behalf.” (v. 5)
Notice the Psalmist didn’t praise God for a life of ease and comfort; a life without hardship and struggle.
Instead, he wrote, “You, O God, tested us; you refined us like silver. You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs; You let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and water; but you brought us to a place of abundance.” (verses 10-12)
Sometimes we seem to believe that God deserves our praise and our offerings only when God blesses us with good things, only when our path stays smooth and easy. But the Psalmist praises God even when tough times come; when the day grows dark; when the journey becomes steep.
Here’s how he responded, in spite of the hardships of life. “I will come to your temple with burnt offerings,” he said. “And fulfill my vows to you; vows my lips promised and my mouth spoke when I was in trouble. “I will sacrifice fat animals to you and an offering of rams. I will offer bulls and goats.” (verse 13-15)
This man brings his offerings to God because of what God did for him; the way God brought him through the difficult hours, the way God provided for him every day of his life. Listen to verse 16. “Come and listen,” he says. “Let me tell you what he has done for me. . . .God surely listened and heard my voice in prayer. Praise be to God who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me!” (verse 16, 19-20).
Giving an offering is about gratitude, honor, sacrifice, and love. Giving an offering is not about duty, need, pressure, or guilt.
Rick Stacy puts it this way, “I believe in tithing or giving 1/10 of your income, not because of a law God decreed but because it is a principle of life that is right and works when it is done cheerfully out of love and gratitude.
I believe in giving sacrificial offerings not because of the need for a new building, salaries for the staff, or new materials for the Children’s ministry but because it is how I can give to God part of my life with an attitude of humility as I am allowed to participate in the work of His kingdom.
I believe in giving not because of what I will get back, which really does happen, but because of the privilege of participating in something that is so great when I am so small.”
Let me say this as gently as possible. God doesn’t want your token or pressured gift. What he wants is for you to love Him, worship Him and give him the gratitude he so richly deserves from us. We at Spencer Christian Church want you to choose to give as an act of love and worship - out of gratitude and a desire to honor God.
Giving - real offering giving - is an act of worship that comes from the depths of our inner being.
I would like for us to be so overwhelmed by the love of God, so in love with Him for what He has done for us that we will be giving and giving and giving where ever, however much He wants us to.
What has God done for you? This week, Last week, Through your whole life, In the good times and the tough ones?
Hear this today. Every good and perfect gift come from God and when we pass those plates and give you the opportunity to give something and it’s more about your thanksgiving to God, your love for God, your gratitude to God more than anything else. Yes, we do it every week, take an offering. But may God have mercy on us if we ever see it as routine.
An artist was once asked to paint a picture representing a decaying church. To the surprise of many, instead of putting on the canvas an old run down building, the artist painted the exact opposite - a great big beautiful building. Through the doors, you could see the richly carved pulpit and pews, a magnificent organ and beautiful stained-glass windows, but it was at one point that the artist’s idea left with what most understood as to be a decaying church. He made his heart known, when suspended from a nail at the back wall of the church there was a square, wooden, ordinary box - and on that box was painted the label: ’Collection for Foreign Missions’. But over the little slot where the money should be contributed there was a huge cobweb that had been there for weeks. That was his impression of a decaying church, a church perhaps that through materials and resources has everything going for it, the church perhaps that has more people on the pews than others, yet this item of sacrificial stewardship and giving of grace before the Lord and to the Lord’s work is relegated to almost unimportance.
