Stewardship - Part Two

Many years ago, a young lad of 16 left his home in the country 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 was a Christian. He knelt down and prayed for the boy. And then he told the lad “Remember to give back to God all that belongs to Him, and make an honest soap.”

When the young man reached the city, he got a job in a soap-making company. On the very first dollar he earned, and every dollar after that, he tithed one tenth 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. This man’s name was William Colgate, the founder of the Colgate-Palmolive Co.

William Colgate understood the principle of stewardship.

At the outset of this new year, we have been looking at the subject of stewardship. And last week, we saw that stewardship is about character. It is when we recognize that everything we have comes from God and belongs to Him. He has entrusted these resources to us to manage on His behalf. So we are the managers of his property, not owners of our own.

Now this week, we want to look at that principle as it applies to money.

The Bible has a lot to say about money. One out of ten verses in the Gospels deal with the subject of money. Sixteen of the 38 parables of Jesus have to do with how we handle our personal possessions. In the whole Bible, there are 500 verses on prayer, less than 500 on the subject of faith, but over 2,000 on the subject of money and possessions.

God obviously 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 true priorities and values. How we handle money is a spiritual barometer of what’s going on inside our hearts.

So 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 placed under our management?

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

1. God gives money to us so that we can learn to give it away.

Look at 2 Corinthians 9. Paul is writing to the believers at Corinth about a gift of money that they had promised to send to the church at Jerusalem. (The church at Jerusalem was in bad shape. The believers there were poverty stricken. There were suffering from a bad famine and they needed help desperately.) And the Corinthian church had promised to help. They were wealthy; they were well-off financially and they could do it.

But even though they had promised to help, they hadn’t followed through on that promise. Almost a year had gone by, and still no gift from the church at Corinth. (In fact, another church—the church in Macedonia which was much poorer than the believers in Corinth—had already given generously and sacrificially to help the believers in Jerusalem.) But it seemed like these Christians in Corinth, with all their money, had forgotten how to give. They were just sitting on it. They were spending it on themselves.

So Paul says to these rich believers in v. 6… “Hey you guys, if you sow sparingly, you will also reap sparingly, but if you sow generously, you will also reap generously.”

God gave you that money so that you could sow it generously—so that you could use it to help others and to further the cause of Christ. And if you do that, you will reap a great harvest. God will bless you and take care of you.

Have you learned this lesson about stewardship? Have you looked at your finances this way? God wants to teach us how to be givers. Not because He needs our money. God could have directly given money to the church at Jerusalem. But he chose to give the money to the church at Corinth so that they could give it to the church at Jerusalem and in the process, learn to be givers.

God wants us to learn to be like Him. So that’s why He gives us money—so that we can learn to give it away.

Have you ever heard of John Wesley? He was a great Christian leader who lived back in the 1700’s in England. He was the founder of the Methodist church. But what a lot of people don’t realize about John Wesley was that he was very wealthy man. In fact, at one time, he had one of the highest earned incomes in England. When it came to finances, John Wesley had a three part motto:

1. Make all you can - there’s nothing wrong with working hard and making money

2. Save all you can - Wesley made £1,400/yr. but lived on just £30

Now if he had stopped there, he would have just been another wealthy miser.

3. Give all you can - Wesley had learned the grace of giving. He gave his money to the Lord’s work to help people in need.

And unless we learn to do that, we have failed Stewardship 101. God gives us money to teach us to how to be givers.

2. You can’t learn to give money away unless you first give yourself to God.

Look at 2 Corinthians 8:1–5…

And now, brothers, we want you to know about the grace that God has given the Macedonian churches. Out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity. For I testify that they gave as much as they were able, and even beyond their ability. Entirely on their own, they urgently pleaded with us for the privilege of sharing in this service to the saints. And they did not do as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord and then to us in keeping with God’s will.

You’ll never give your money if you haven’t given yourself. And your giving will reveal whether or not you have 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 grudgingly because we haven’t given ourselves to God. And so we look at our money as ours, not God’s. 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, then what you do with your money is irrelevant.

Listen to what God said about this through the prophet Isaiah…

ISA 1 “The multitude of your sacrifices—what are they to me? Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me…”

He was talking to people who were going through the motions of giving without having really given themselves to God.

Are you surrendered to God this morning? Does God really own your life? 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 for our offerings don’t mean a thing if we in this congregation haven’t given ourselves to God. That’s what God really wants.

3. If you give your resources to God, God will give more resources to you.

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.

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.

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 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 to bless others and do His work in the world.

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 of stewardship is that God blesses the giver so that he can in turn become an even better giver. God wants us, in our financial lives, to become channels of blessing, not hoarders of blessing.

I could regale you for hours with stories about men and women of God who have learned this concept. 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.

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. Giving should be done carefully, prayerfully, and cheerfully.

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.

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

Have you sat down yet at the beginning of this New Year and decided what you are going to give to the Lord’s work in 1998? And I believe in giving to the Lord’s work through the local church. One woman put it well. She said “I pay my bills where I get my groceries.” The local church is where you get blessed and you get fed. So it ought to be #1 on your giving priority list.

But have you actually planned what you are going to give and how you are going to give it? You should. Because if you don’t, then your giving will be haphazard, sporadic, and meager. Because you won’t have a plan.

And you know what they say: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” If you don’t do your giving in a deliberate, planned, organized way, you won’t be doing what God wants you to do. Remember, you are a manager of His resources, and He’s going to ask you to give an account at the end of this year as to what you gave.

Did you know that in this church, 75% of the money is given by only 25% of the people? That means that 75% of the people are only giving 25% of the money. In 1996, over 42% of our members (that’s almost half) gave a grand total of just 3% of our finances. I’m not talking about the entire congregation including children, etc. I’m talking about people with envelopes—people who are earning an income and can give. 42% of them give less than $500 per year, and contribute just 3% to our church’s overall budget.

You know what that tells me? It tells me that not a lot of people in our church have taken the issue of giving seriously. And as a result, there are a lot of people in our church who are missing out on the blessing of God in their financial lives.

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

That’s why God instituted the tithe in the Old Testament. He said “You want a plan? I’ll give you a plan. Take 10% of all that you earn and give it to me. And see if you can’t go farther on the 90% with my blessing than you can on the 100% without.

In the book of Haggai, God had to rebuke his people because they were neglecting the Lord’s work and the Lord’s house. They were not giving. They were not living as stewards. Instead they were spending all their money on themselves. And that’s why they were not getting ahead financially. Because God couldn’t bless them for living that way.

God said to them: “You have planted much, but have harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.”

One of the greatest areas of problems I see in Christian homes and families today is in the area of finances. Many Christian families are living chaotic financial lives. And it’s because they are not giving biblically. They are not tithing.

The first thing such people say is “Tithing? You’ve got to be kidding! I can’t afford to tithe!” Listen—whatever your income, or whatever your station in life—the Bible says “You can’t afford NOT to tithe!”

Why don’t you put God to the test? Why don’t you start small—let’s say 3% of your income—and give that to God this month. And at the end of the month, sit down and figure out if you’re further ahead or further behind financially. And if you’re further ahead, up it to 4% next month. And at the end of next month, take stock. And then raise it to 5%. And keep doing this until you get it up to 10%.

I believe that God will show you that it is better to have his blessing on your financial life than to try to go it alone without.

God said “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.”

My prayer for you is that 1998 will be a year in which together we will see beyond the shadow of a doubt that God is faithful in this area of finances. But if we’re going to learn that, it is going to be because we are faithful in the area of stewardship.