Giving is about God over mammon
October 9, 2008
Even more thoughts about charity and giving…
No one can serve two masters, Jesus says in Matthew 6:24, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon ['mammon' is an Aramaic word for wealth]. One of those two masters loves you and seeks to bless you abundantly. The other seeks to enslave you and destroy you.
Wouldn’t the issues of charity and generosity be easier if God simply sent you a statement at the beginning of the year? He could attach a letter saying, ‘You owe ________ this much upon receipt of this invoice.’ It would be easier for God to say, ‘Here’s how much money you should live on, and don’t do the following things with your money…’ Why hasn’t God done the easy and efficient thing? Wouldn’t it be easier if the deacons required you to bring your W-2’s and 1099’s and 1040’s to the church so you could be assessed for the year?
I am convinced that God does not bill us and that his church does not assess us because our Father wants his children to go on an adventure of faith that requires communion with him and deepens relationship. Our heavenly Father wants his children to pray to him, to pay attention to his Word, to seek godly counsel, to be watchful and observant about needs that exist around them. Our heavenly Father isn’t after our money. He is after us. He is seeking to transform us from greedy, self-seeking, destructive people of darkness into large-hearted, open-handed, self-forgetting, life-giving children of light.
When you pay a bill, when you pay your taxes, you don’t rejoice in it. Many approach giving to the church and to Christian ministry in the same way. You do it because you have to—and since the church won’t hurt your credit score or shut off your water or put you in jail, you don’t give. And your eyes are bad, spiritually speaking. You can’t see anything rightly. God doesn’t want to give your 10% and say, “OK, God, I’ve met the obligation. Now I’m going to go about the business of laying up treasures on earth with the 90% you didn’t take from me.’
Pray for and seek wisdom over the next week as to how you might invest the money God has entrusted to you. How should you use it to lay up treasures in heaven through:
• giving to support the needs of individuals,
• giving to support the budget of your local church so it can fund and expand ministry inside and outside its walls,
• and giving to support the advancement of the Gospel?
Giving is light, not darkness
October 6, 2008
More thoughts about charity and giving…
“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! [Matthew 5:22-23]
There are some people who don’t see what’s in front of them. ‘The eye,’ Jesus says, ‘is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.’ Think about your eye as if it were a keyhole letting the light of the outside world into your soul. The eye focuses your energies and attention on certain things in life. If your eye is spiritually blind, it doesn’t matter how bright the world is, you will not see things as they are and thus you will be unable to choose the right treasure.
He is talking about two spiritual conditions. One is spiritual blindness, the other spiritual sightedness. If you are spiritually blind, you will chose temporal things as your ultimate blessing. You will confuse the gift with the giver. One of the most tragic things that can happen to a human being is to invest his life in pursuit of the wrong treasure. We rarely say, ‘I am going to set my heart on this thing and let it completely control my life,’ but that is what happens. The person you met and enjoyed being around becomes the person whose approval you can’t live without. The work you undertook to support your family becomes your primary identity and you are willing to sacrifice anything for success in it. The house you built for your family’s shelter and comfort becomes a temple for the worship of possessions. A rightful attention to personal growth and development becomes a narrow, self-absorbed existence. Your interest and willingness to serve the Lord in a church ministry morphs into an opportunity to seek power and approval.
Randy Alcorn writes in The Treasure Principle, “I’m convinced that the greatest deterrent to giving is this: the illusion that earth is our home” (p.44; see Colossians 3:1-3). Christ is our home. To live is Christ and to die is gain. It will be all the more gain as we learn to lay up treasures in heaven by giving.
Jesus is warning us about not just what we do with our money and possessions, but also what kind of heart we have as we give. Is a heart liberated or a heart enchained? Is it a heart enlightened or a heart darkened? May Christ give us freedom from fear and anxiety, deliverance from darkness to light, and a passion that Christ be exalted in sacrificial lives of generosity.
Treasures in heaven, not on earth
October 3, 2008
Stewardship is the faithful use of somebody else’s resources. An important part of following Christ is the use of the material resources God has entrusted to us for God’s purposes and to meet the needs of others. In fact, Scripture is clear that an authentic relationship with Christ will express itself in the faithful use of our resources for his purposes. That is what laying up for yourselves treasures in heaven is all about. Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven means not obsessing about being rich on earth but trying to be rich in heaven, that is, rich in God—what John Piper calls ‘treasuring Christ and freeing yourself from the drag of earth.’
In Matthew 5:21 Jesus says, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Did you get that? Everyone seeks some kind of treasure. If something is your treasure, you will seek to gain, maintain and enjoy it. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. In other words, I can look at my checkbook and my bank statements and portfolio statements and at the stuff that surrounds me and on that basis make an accurate diagnosis about the condition of my heart. If you gave large amounts of money each year to the Bulldog Club, you would care whether or not Mississippi State wins ball games. If you pay expensive tuition for your children to go to a private university, you care about the kind of education they are getting and the grades they make. If you gave 25% of your income to an orphanage in Honduras, you would probably read the newsletters they would send you. If you give to Faith Promise, your heart gets invested in the cause of spreading the gospel among the nations.
Your heart follows your treasure. Show me the money! And I will show you where your heart is! That’s not my opinion; that’s Jesus talking! Materialism, greed, selfishness, hoarding, anxiety over money—all of these things reveal where our heart really is. By the same token, generosity and faithfulness reveal that our trust is in the Lord, and we are confessing that God is the source of our life and joy, and that possessions and stuff are not. Put your treasures in heaven, and they’re in God’s hands—and they’re well-invested, completely secure, guaranteed a great, eternal, glorious return.
You’ve heard it said, ‘You can’t take it with you.’ I’ve said that to you. But I need to confess that in saying that to you I was telling you only half the truth—and that’s not a good thing! If I am to be faithful to what Jesus is saying in this passage, I ought to put it this way: ‘You can’t take it with you…but you can send it on ahead.’
That’s something wonderful and exciting about this passage. Jesus doesn’t call having treasure a sin. Can you find him anywhere condemning talents or possessions and the like? It’s not there. But make sure you get what Jesus is saying: he is saying don’t put your treasure in a bad investment. Don’t be stupid with your treasure. Giving, rather than accumulating, is the best investment. His argument for not laying treasures on earth is not because it’s wrong, but rather because it is stupid! It is not in your best interest to be a greedy materialist.
Those who are the best stewards, who have most carefully and prayerfully attempted to invest and to save and to plan for the future with the resources that God has given you, must be careful not to trust in those things. It doesn’t mean that you stop planning and waste everything you have. It means that you carefully and prayerfully make sure that your heart finds its rest not in the fact that there is a nice nest egg stored up, and you can already educate the kids, and you can already retire in ease that your trust is not there but it is on the Lord himself, and you recognize that those things are merely instruments. They are merely tools; they are not the ultimate satisfying point in life.
So the argument Jesus is making here is not that you must choose between two ways of life—the fun, joyful life of the laying up treasures on earth and being a sacrificial Christian who painfully goes through life giving and not having all the joy the materialist has while laying up for himself treasures in heaven. The right thing is always the smart thing and the good thing. Giving generously to kingdom of God, helping the poor and needy, and advancing the gospel are things that won’t fade. Stuff will! Giving is not simply right and helpful and glorifying to God. Giving is also always in our best interest. Do you believe that—that it is more blessed to give than to receive? We ought to give, even if it made us miserable. In light of the great needs in the world we ought to give generously, but not only does it not make us miserable, it makes us joyful. It strips the misery out of us! The giver is doing what is in his best interest!
There are two ways to live: you can live with a view to accumulating valuable things on earth, or you can live with a view to accumulating valuable things in heaven. Jesus says: the mark of a Christian is that his eyes are on heaven and he measures all his behavior by what effect it will have on heaven – everlasting joy with God, seeing others come to Christ, seeing ministries flourish, hearing him say well done at the last day, receiving a crown that will not fade away. He is not saying ‘Renounce your treasures.’ He is saying, ‘Relocate your treasures.’
God’s great and perfect wisdom in music
October 1, 2008
When man’s natural musical ability is whetted and polished to the extent that it becomes an art, then do we note with great surprise the great and perfect wisdom of God in music, which is, after all, His product and His gift; we marvel when we hear music in which one voice sings a simple melody, while three, four, or five other voices play and trip lustily around the voice that sings its simple melody and adorn this simple melody wonderfully with artistic musical effects, thus reminding us of a heavenly dance, where all meet in a spirit of friendliness, caress and embrace. A person who gives this some thought and yet does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God, must be a clodhopper indeed and does not deserve to be called a human being; he should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of hogs.
(Martin Luther, 1538, in his foreword to a collection of chorale motets)
