Be a Giver

When you raise the subject of money in the church, some people look at you as though you had just thrown a live hand grenade at them. It isn’t polite to talk about money in Christian circles. It’s just not spiritual. And it sure isn’t proper for a pastor to tell people how they should give their money, is it? Or is it? I’ve always been under the impression that whatever God wants His people to know, He wants their pastor to tell them. So I’m going to talk to you today about money. And if you would like to squirm, please feel free to do so.

When you look closely at the Bible, you’ll find that it has a lot to say about money. There are detailed laws in the Pentateuch concerning money: handling money, giving money, lending and borrowing money. And in the book of Proverbs, there are numerous verses which give us practical advice on our financial affairs. Several of the prophets - men like Haggai and Malachi - wrote about money and giving money to the Lord’s work.

When you come to the NT, you find that out of the 38 parables that Jesus spoke, 16 of them had to do with how we handle our personal possessions. That’s almost half of Jesus parabolic teaching devoted to the subject of money. In the writings of the apostles, and in the life of the NT church, you find several sections devoted to the subject of money. Who can forget the story of Ananias and Sapphira, who had a piece of land, sold it and gave the money to the church. They pretended to have given it all, but they had secretly kept back some of it for themselves. And when they were confronted with their deception in front of the church, they both literally died of embarrassment!

It’s pretty clear when you read the Bible that God wants to tell us something about money and our relationship to it. Because money, perhaps more than any other thing in our lives, reveals our real priorities. The way we handle our money is a spiritual barometer of what’s going on inside our hearts. You can tell an awful lot about someone just by looking at their checkbook.

What is it that God wants us to know about money? What can we learn from the Bible about how to handle it? How can we become good stewards of the money that He has allowed us to have?

Today, I’d like to bring to your attention from the Word of God four things that God wants us to know about money.

1. God wants us to give our money.

I want you to think with me of three incidents which took place in Jesus’ life. They involve a tax collector, a former prostitute, and a widow.

Remember Zaccheus the tax collector? Despised by his fellow countrymen for serving the Roman government, Zaccheus not only collected taxes, but robbed the people blind. He was in the process of amassing a small fortune until that day when he met Jesus Christ. Totally transformed by the encounter, Zaccheus immediately gave half of all that he had to the poor, and with the other half, he paid back all the people he had embezzled four times the amount he owed them. Because he was saved, he had a heart that gave.

Remember the sinful woman who anointed Jesus’ feet with perfume? Luke chapter 7. Jesus was sitting in the house of a Pharisee. The Pharisee had invited him for dinner. But he had not shown Jesus any of the traditional Middle Eastern hospitality. He hadn’t had a servant wash his feet. He hadn’t given Jesus a kiss of greeting. He hadn’t anointed Jesus’ head with oil, as would have been customary for the guest of honor. But then this woman - a former prostitute - came forward weeping with an alabaster jar of perfume in her hands. Perfume was exceedingly valuable in those days. A jar like this would have been worth perhaps a year’s wages. She wet Jesus’ feet with her tears, wiped them dry with her hair, and anointed not his head, but his feet with the precious perfume. She did this as an act of worship and gratitude for the fact that God had forgiven her sins. Because she was saved, she had a heart that gave.

And remember the widow at the Temple? As Jesus sat across from the offering receptacles, he saw many wealthy folk come by and pour in their bags of coins, with much jangling fanfare. But then the widow came and quietly placed in the only two coins she had. Two lepta. A lepton was worth one sixty-fourth of a day’s wage. She had two of them, and she gave them both. And Jesus said that her gift to the Lord amounted to more than the gifts of all the rich people. She loved the Lord so much that she gave all she had. Because she was saved, she had a heart that gave.

God wants us to give. Not because He needs our money. But because He wants us to remember who we belong to. He wants us to remember that He owns all that we have. And we can’t do that unless we give.

2. Don’t give your money unless you’ve first given yourself.

A man and his wife were visiting a church one Sunday. It came time for the offering plate to be passed. The man dug into his wallet looking for the smallest bill he could find. To his dismay, he found that the smallest bill he had was a twenty. He made a sour face and muttering under his breath at his bad luck, slowly and reluctantly began to pull the bill out of his wallet. But his wife, a wise and godly woman, reached over and gently made him put it back. She whispered to him “Honey, the Lord doesn’t want your twenty bucks if you’re going to give it to Him like that.”

But isn’t this the way that so many of us give? We give as though we were doing God a favor. We give as though what we are giving is ours and we’re losing it by giving it to God. We give as though we are paying our union dues - a distasteful duty we have to do if we want to belong to the church. Many people give as though their offering was a holy hand-out, a pious payoff to keep God off their backs for another week. I actually believe that some people think they are giving God a tip for services rendered.

True Biblical giving is the grateful response of a life surrendered to God. We can only give biblically if we have first given ourselves to God. That’s where biblical giving begins. If God doesn’t have you, He sure doesn’t want your money.

The prophet Isaiah spoke to a people who tried to give to God without first giving Him their lives. Listen to what he tells them…

ISA 1 “The multitude of your sacrifices—what are they to me?” says the Lord. “I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats…Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me…wash and make yourselves clean…”Come now, let us reason together,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.

Does God have your life this morning? Have you presented yourself to Him a living sacrifice? That’s the real bottom line when it comes to giving. The figures in the bulletin or on our Treasurer’s report don’t mean a thing if the people in our church haven’t given themselves to God.

3. You get by giving, but you don’t give to get.

Several years ago, educators introduced a new concept in arithmetic. They called it the New Math. Actually, it was just a cleverly designed plot to cause parents, who had learned their arithmetic the old way, to go insane!

When you come to the Bible, you have something else again. You don’t have the Old Math or the New Math, you have God’s Math. Heaven’s arithmetic doesn’t work the way you’d expect. With God’s Math, when you want to add, you subtract. The Bible is full of verses like…

Luke 6:38 Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

Matthew 10:39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

The principle behind God’s Math is that God cannot and will not bless you unless you have learned to be a giver. In the passage we read in 2 Cor., Paul was challenging the Corinthian church to complete the collection of a love offering they had begun for the church in Jerusalem. There had been a bad famine in Jerusalem, and the Christians there needed help. The Corinthians had decided to give their money to help them. It is in that context - the context of learning to be generous givers - that Paul writes

2 Corinthians 9:10-11 Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness. 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.

When you give generously to the Lord’s work and to the Lord’s cause, you are putting yourself in a position where He can bless you. And when you do that, having first given your life to Him, you gain a whole new perspective on money. Money no longer becomes something to be hoarded and protected and spent on selfish ends. It becomes a tool in the hands of God who, through you, can use it to bless others and do His work in the world. Your bank account, rather than being a repository for your money, becomes a clearing house for God’s money.

This is a lot different than the notorious health and wealth false gospel that is being preached in our land today. The idea behind that is that God wants to make you rich, period. It is selfishly motivated. It suggests that you can use God to get what you want. It is nothing more than the American Dream all dressed up in church clothes. The principle that I am talking about, and that is given in 2 Cor.9:11 is that God blesses the giver so that he can then become an even better giver. God wants us, in our financial lives, to become channels of His blessings, not collectors of them.

I could regale you for hours with stories about men and women of God who have learned this concept of God’s Math. People like R.G. LeTourneau, the engineer-inventor who designed great earth-moving equipment. He learned to live on one tenth of his income, and gave nine tenths to the Lord’s work. LeTourneau said “The question is not how much money I give to God, but how much of God’s money I keep for myself.”

Or Stanley Tam, the founder of United States Plastics, who literally made God the owner of his business. He set up a foundation to channel the profits of that business to promote missionary work overseas. And God blessed him. The company grew so fast that the IRS audited it for ten straight years.

Another young lad of 16 left his home to seek his fortune. All he had was the shirt on his back. On his way to NY City, he met a canal boat captain who asked him about himself. The boy told him that his family was poor and that the only trade he knew was how to make soap. The old captain then knelt down and prayed for the boy. “Remember to give God all that belongs to Him, and make an honest soap.” the old man prayed.

When the lad reached the city, he got a job in a soap-making company. The first dollar he earned, and every dollar after that, he tithed to the Lord’s work. Soon he rose in the company to become a partner. Later he became the owner. The business grew, so he decided to give 2/10, then 3/10, and 4/10 to the Lord. Finally, he was giving all of his income to the Lord’s work. The man’s name: William Colgate.

Instead of being slaves to the almighty dollar, these people had learned to be servants of Almighty God. And God showed them how to use dollars to further the Lord’s work.

4. Give what you have decided before God to give.

So many of us give haphazardly. We give on the basis of what happens to be in our pocketbook at the time. We give in response to the emotional pressure of a cunning pitchman. We give to causes we have not carefully investigated, simply because they have used the right marketing strategies to reach our “generosity button”. This is not biblical giving, and I do not believe that God will bless this kind of giving.

Biblical giving needs to be deliberate. It is a matter for serious and prayerful contemplation. It needs to be a rational act of the will, a decision you carefully take before God, having first given Him your life.

2 Corinthians 9:7 Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.

There is no place here for pressure or manipulation tactics. No place for crisis appeals for funds. God wants us to make our giving a matter between ourselves and Him, so that our attitude in giving will be proper. He wants us to be cheerful givers. And you can’t be a cheerful giver when you wake up the next morning saying “Why in the world did I do that?”

When I came to Lynbrook, one of the things I had to get used to was having offering receptacles rather than passing the plate during the service. It wasn’t something I was used to, and at first I had questions as to whether it was really the best way to be doing it. Think of all the people who forget to put in their offering, with no plate coming around to remind them. And think of all the offering we don’t collect from visitors to our church who have no idea where the offering receptacles are.

But you know, I’ve come full circle in my thinking about this. I’m glad we have the offering receptacles. Because those receptacles make giving to the Lord’s work more deliberate. You have to decide to go back there and put your offering in. And it’s something that you have to do with pre-planning.

Most of the offerings we get are in the form of checks. We get very little loose cash. Not much “spur of the moment” kind of money goes into those receptacles. And that’s good. We don’t want any twenty dollar bills in there that have been given grudgingly because the plate is coming down the aisle. We only want happy dollars in our offerings. Because happy dollars come from cheerful givers.

I’m sure that some church growth consultants would come in here and the first thing they would recommend is to start passing the plate again. “Get more money that way” they would say. Listen, I want to go on record as saying that here at Lynbrook Baptist Church, we are not interested in getting large offerings. What we are interested in is teaching you how to give Biblically. Because Christian living is closely tied to Christian giving.

Suppose you have two churches. Church A has a wealthy congregation and they always make their budget every year, but the people don’t give out of hearts full of gratitude to the Lord. They give with a ho-hum attitude. They just throw in their extra cash and it all adds up to a met budget.

Church B has a working class congregation that struggles to make their budget. Sometimes they don’t make it. But the people are learning how to give to the Lord. They are giving sacrificially. They are giving cheerfully.

Which church do you think the Lord is going to use more? Which church is He going to bless more? Which church would you want to be a part of? Which church would you want to be the pastor of?

Which church is Lynbrook Baptist Church?