Tag: money
Meeting Jesus – 3 Widows Part 2
Living Sacrifice Day 15 – Soli Deo Gloria
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Begin by reading Genesis 4:1-16
The great composer Johann Sabastian Bach wrote over 1100 compositions in his 65 years of life. It’s quite remarkable. These aren’t just simple three minute songs that we’re used to hearing on the radio; some are quite lengthy cantatas, chorales, and some are written for a number of instruments. Bach didn’t have Garage Band, recording devices, or some of the other fancy programs we might use to record and make musical notation. Living in the 1700s, he did this all by hand. Bach was commissioned by a number of various courts and churches to practice his art. However, no matter who he worked for, at the end of many of Bach’s compositions, he wrote three initials – S.D.G. They stand for the Latin words Soli Deo Gloria – To God alone be the glory.
As we’ve been talking about worship and Romans 12:1, we are now at the place where we are discussing what constitutes something as worship. Paul gives us two criteria. We discussed the first one yesterday – that the activity must be set apart. Today, we are talking about the second criteria – that the activity must be pleasing to God.
If you will recall, in the very first challenge I gave, I said that the beginning point to becoming a living sacrifice is to know God. If you don’t know God, you don’t know what pleases Him. This is extremely important. Today’s reading about Cain and Abel’s sacrifice gives us insight into this lesson. Abel knew what type of sacrifice God wanted and offered the first of his flock. Cain, a worker in the field, offered God some of his fruits and vegetables. God looked with favor on Abel’s offering but rejected Cain’s.
Let’s step back for a moment and ask, “why did God reject Cain’s offering?” In a sense, Cain’s offering was personal. He worked the field, so naturally he offered something that he worked to produce. While that seems reasonable, that isn’t how God saw it. God wanted them to bring an animal sacrifice – most likely to begin the understanding of what it meant to sacrifice and the cleansing of sin through the shedding of blood. Instead of rising up to give what God wanted, Cain offered what he wanted.
While we have said that we can offer any activity at any time to be worship, the truth is, not every activity can be worshipful. The criteria that Paul states is that it must be pleasing to the Lord. Let me issue a strong warning here. There is a lot of teaching and activity mulling around the church today – teaching that it’s okay to divulge in the carnal, sinful pleasures, and those that teach these heresies are framing it as something that’s pleasing to God. People are cheating on their spouses, engaging in promiscuous and shameful behavior, ignoring their families, and mistreating others and labeling it as pleasing to the Lord. This is nonsense. Do not confuse what’s pleasing to yourself as pleasing to God. In the same sense that we can’t rob a bank and legitimately call that worship, not everything is pleasing to the Lord.
At the beginning of each day, each activity, each thought, the discipline of being a living sacrifice compels us to determine to set it apart to the Lord. At the end of the day, we should look over our day, our activities, and our thoughts and give the stamp that says, “Soli Deo Gloria – to God alone be all the glory.” If we can’t, in good conscience, put that stamp of approval on something we did, then we should work hard to eliminate that thought or activity from our day tomorrow. The purpose of everything we do is to glorify and honor the Lord. That’s what it means to be a living sacrifice.
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Living Sacrifice Day 14 – Set Apart
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Begin by reading Colossians 3
About four years ago, my wife and I took a five week trip to Europe and Morocco. For the year leading up to the trip, we put away money each month that would be designated for this vacation. Even though there were times money was tight, we determined to do everything but dip into the trip savings.
Since we began, we have been talking about what worship is, based on Romans 12:1. It is a voluntary expression of love to God that can take on any form at any time. It’s not limited to a church building on Sunday morning or limited to singing and music. It’s not motivated by our emotions, rather it is a response to who God is and what He has done for us. Now, we are going to talk about the criteria that determines if an activity is worship or not. Paul gives us two of them. He tells us that in order for something to be worship it must be holy and pleasing to God. Let’s start with the first criteria – holy.
When we think of the word holy, we may think of majesty, splendor, other-worldly, or perfect. But that’s not what the word holy means. The word holy means “set apart.” In other words, Paul explains that worship must be an activity that is set aside or set apart to be worshipful.
This doesn’t mean that you have to set it apart days or weeks in advance. It may be that you decide at that moment that you are choosing to give the activity to the Lord. Sometimes even in a worship service, our minds start wandering, and we forget what it is we’re supposed to do. The moment you realize this and say, “God I’m going to give this activity to you,” you are setting apart the activity as worship. It’s as we talked about yesterday in the story of the widow giving her last two coins. Part of offering ourselves to God is setting apart the very thing He wants us to give and not holding back.
So what does it mean to be set apart? I think it can be summed up in two words – priority and purpose. First, it’s about giving God your first and best. It’s, as we talked about yesterday, refusing to give leftovers. It might be saying, “God I’m not going to take a job that offers me the most money and gives me little time to spend with my family; I’m going to take a job that maximizes the priority of my calling as a parent.” It’s as Jesus said in Matthew 6:33, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.”
Secondly, setting something apart is doing it with a purpose. Just as the purpose of that savings account was for our trip, Paul tells us that the purpose of our lives is to glorify God. Every action, activity, thought should be conformed to that purpose.
I remember getting an email from an older woman, asking me, “Why must I be a Christian? Why isn’t being good enough?” She was certainly a good person, involved in the community, giving to charity. But the answer to her question is purpose. She is doing those things for some reason – maybe to better herself, to better society, to follow instructions that her parents’ once gave her. But for a Believer, the purpose is much different. We set ourselves apart as a worship service to the Lord. We are no longer doing a job for money, or to please our boss, or to get a promotion, we are doing it as unto the Lord. This was Paul’s point in Colossians 3. Whatever you do, do it all as unto the Lord.
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Living Sacrifice Day 13 – The Last Penny
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Begin by reading Mark 12:41-44
Every year around Christmas, we hear the bells ringing outside the grocery stores and the occasional clang of coins dropping into the red can. It’s the campaign that the Salvation Army does every year to raise money for their cause. Have you ever been in a situation where there’s an opportunity to give, and you look in your wallet only to find you have one bill left, and so you choose not to give?
What is it about that last bill? Why not give it away? Is it really about the money, or is it about something else? Is it about security – the safety of knowing that at least there’s some cash in your wallet if you get into a bind?
Today’s reading was about the widow who gave her last two coins. There’s debate about how much those coins were worth, and some argue that it could have been worth as much as $1.20. Amazingly, she gave it all. While we don’t know the exact worth, we know that they could have at least provided her with the security of knowing that she had something for herself. There are three lessons that we should take away from this story.
The first lesson here is not about how much money you should put in the offering plate, the lesson is about trust. Whenever we give to the Lord, we are trusting Him. God required an offering, not just to maintain the Temple, but to teach His people about trusting Him. It’s as Malachi 3:10 says, “‘Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in My house, and test Me now in this,’ says the Lord of hosts, ‘if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows.’”
The second lesson is about giving without holding back. We don’t pass an offering plate often in our church, but I have to admit that when we do, I have at times felt the temptation to hold back. I dig through my wallet and see what I’ve got. If I only have one large bill, I feel the temptation to hold on to it. I have plenty of money in the bank, so it’s not like I’m dirt poor and that’s all I have to live on. It’s a security issue. Something about that $20 bill brings me security for whatever reason. However, when I give that money; I don’t miss it. I don’t get to the end of the month and say, “Man, I shouldn’t have given that $20! It’s more like, “Man, I didn’t really need to stop at Starbucks 10 times this month.”
The third lesson is about priorities. Jesus says in Matthew 6:21, “where your treasure is, there your heart will also be.” In 1 Corinthians 16, Paul instructed the Church at Corinth to set apart their offerings on the first day of the week. Why? Because then, it would be their priority and they wouldn’t spend it on other things. I think we as Christians often fall into the temptation of giving leftovers – our leftover time, energy, and finances, instead of giving our firstfruit and best to the Lord. Sometimes our possessions become our security, and we essentially say, “Let me make sure I have what I need first, and the rest is the Lord’s.” In fact, I wonder if this widow had money at the beginning of the week and had chosen to set apart these two coins. If such was the case, she came through on her promise and gave to the Lord what she had set apart, even though it was all that she had left.
In our quest to be living sacrifices, ask God what He wants you to give of yourself. Then set that thing apart – whether it’s time, energy, money, talent or something else. When it comes time to give. Do not hold that thing back. Bring forth your offering joyfully, focused on how Jesus poured all of Himself out for you.
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Living Sacrifice Day 6 – Offering, Not an Obligation
A friend of mine once voiced his objection to our Social Security System. “I’m more than happy to give to someone in need; I just hate that our government mandates it and takes it right out of my paycheck!” Sometimes that’s how we can feel if someone mandates even something that’s supposed to be beneficial and helpful. Think about your church for a moment. What if they began mandating offerings? How would you feel? You probably wouldn’t like that.
In Romans 12:1, Paul tells us to offer. He uses the Greek word paristēmi, which means to present or offer. The connotation is that it is a gift, rather than something you are doing out of obligation. Scripture is clear that God wants us to obey out of gratitude rather than obligation. The Law was meant to be a gift not merely a requirement. When we start seeing obedience as requirements, we start acting like children and asking, “How far can I go before being disobedient?” That’s human nature. Being in education, it never fails that when I assign a project, there’s always at least one student that asks, “what’s the least I can do to get an ‘A?’” Something about the word obligated makes us want to rebel, or at the very least, we feel threatened. Aren’t we more at ease when we hear a salesperson say, “You are under no obligation?”
The Holy Spirit is teaching us in Romans 12:1 the importance of offering ourselves. Are we required or obligated? I suppose in some sense we are. But we’re being asked to offer, to do it out of our own volition, not out of a sense of obligation. This is why Paul says, “In light of God’s mercy.” He is explaining that we ought to be so moved by what God has done for us, that we would be willing to give up anything to follow Jesus.
In Scripture, the Temple offering was distinguished between two different words – tithes and offerings. Tithes were the required 10%, but an offering was above and beyond that amount. In one sense, Paul is urging us to forget about the requirement, to pretend that there is no requirement, and instead, give everything as an offering. You may have some sort of sense of what God is asking you to do, but today I want to challenge you to not think that way. I want you to think of how you can bless the Lord with an offering – a voluntary expression of worship. How can you offer yourself to the Lord? Beginning to think of yourself as a gift you offer instead of an obligation you fulfill is an important step to becoming a living sacrifice.
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