Gift of Giving

Dan Fuchs

Stewardship • Sermon • Submitted 4 years ago

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Real Treasure is in Heaven

Notes

Transcript

The Text

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 6

19 “Don’t store up for yourselves treasuresF on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.g 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven,h where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves don’t break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So if the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness!i

24 “No one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.j

Where we’ve been

The last two weeks we introduced and have gone deep into the aspects of stewardship. Normally in a stewardship series all we’d hear about is money—but that fails to grasp a holistic view of the topic. It fails to acknowledge that as people we are more than just our finances. It is my goal that you have started to understand this deep reality, that our call to stewardship is a holistic call to give to God what is already God’s—namely our entire beings.

We are framing our exploration here around 5 aspects of what our membership vows mean to be a Christian. These are:

Our Prayers

Our Presence

Our Gifts

Our Service

Our Witness

We’ve talked about our individual and corporate responsibilities with each aspect so far: our prayers and our presence. If you will, open your Bibles with me today as we explore what it looks like to honor God with the stewardship of our individual gifts, but also what it looks like to steward God with our corporate gifts.

Matthew 6

Our first and last paragraph, while demanding on us, are fairly easy to understand. We’ll come back to them in a second. It’s this middle pericope that I want to spend our first few minutes together on:

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 6

Its little passages like this, tucked into seemingly clear passages that makes reading scripture so frustrating. What in the world does a discussion of our eyes have to do with how we interact with money and treat it here on this earth?

My best guess at this point is to suggest that this is some form of play on words that a simple English translation doesn’t capture well.

R.T. France has this to say about our passage in question:

The Gospel of Matthew 6. Treasure in Heaven (6:19–24)

this rather obscure little saying seems to be using a word-play28 which the English translator cannot reproduce without extensive paraphrase in order to commend either single-mindedness (in pursuing the values of the kingdom of heaven) or generosity, or more likely both, as a key to the effective life of a disciple. The final comment then underlines how spiritually disoriented is a life which is not governed by those principles, but rather aims to amass and hold on to “treasure on earth”.

With this possible translation in mind, listen to this passage again:

“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is generous, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is stingy, your whole body will be full of darkness. So if the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness!”

This final phrase being used under this context to compare our light, or lack thereof, with our generosity is rather sobering. “If your generosity is really stinginess or ‘meanness’ (common language in the time of Charles Dicken, etc.), then how deep is that stinginess.” Said another way—if the best thing we can say about ourselves, bragging about how generous we are, is really a statement of stinginess, how deep the darkness of our life must be.

Lets take this out of the realm of the church for a second and look for a secular example: This could be equivalent to a certain category of people, lets say the richest 400 Americans, complaining that they don’t have the money to live because of taxes imposed on them—or potential future taxes—while the reality is that combined they have more wealth than the lowest paid or lowest wealthy 150 MILLION Americans who actually can’t live because of their tax bracket—and because they don’t have the money to hire accountants to find and help use tax loopholes.

This is a matter of consistency and integrity. More than that, it is a matter of the heart.

If you listened last week to the invitation to give, you received a little preview of this sermon today.

In our membership vows, we have promised to uphold the church and support it by our gifts. While we’ve talked in the past that the word “talent” in original context was a measure of money and has since been coopted to mean the things that we can do, in the sense of our promises to God, this discussion is for another time. Namely, its for next week when we talk about our “service.”

So if we have already vowed to love God with our service (modern understanding of talents), then today must mean the traditional understanding of talents and some form of tangible gift.

And here’s where it gets sticky…no one likes talking about money. The reality, however, is that how we handle our money is not just a matter of personal finance it is also a matter of personal discipleship. If you don’t believe me, take an honest stock of your own emotions right now—something deep inside of you is either comfortable knowing that your heart is aligned with God when it comes to money or there is a level of uncomfortableness because of a misalignment.

So....if we can agree that how we handle money relates to how we live a life of discipleship—what in all of heaven and earth can we do in this arena of our life?

Jesus is clear—build up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroy.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN!??

As Jesus points out correctly, where we put value in our lives is where our heart will also be found. You value your vacation every year? Good! It’s a time away for refreshment and renewal with your family. You also probably spend a fair and comparatively reasonably large amount of money on your vacation—I know Lauren and I do. This isn’t bad—but honest question for you....your vacation is maybe a week long, but how much head space and energy is given to it before you go? Even if all that headspace is is dreaming, deciding, and then calling a travel agent and then not thinking about it again until you go. Oftentimes, we find that we put money into the things that are important for us, like vacations, perhaps, and then those things take up residence in our hearts and our head. We look forward to that time in the mountains, or on the beach, or at a resort. Then when we leave we start dreaming and planning about when we can go back. And then we start saving money so that we can go back. And then when we make plans to go back we start planning HOW to go back.

Where your treasure is your heart will be also.

So HOW does one go about storing up treasure in heaven…and how do we do that in such a way that our heart resides in heaven—there are a lot of ways to do this that don’t relate expressly to money—so to stay on point we’re not going to discuss those larger ways of locating our heart in heaven.

It’s not as simple as opening a bank account with the First International Bank of Heaven, Jerusalem Branch....especially dependent on how we view heaven....so:

Where is Heaven

The Bible instructs us in this rather frustrating doctrine of Heaven—just like our salvation is at the same time a physical and temporal place that both exists fully now and will exist fully different later.

Hang with me—all of the best things in life take a moment to grasp. One of my favorite quotes about salvation is that I was saved (2000 years ago at Calvary), I am being saved (as I work out my salvation in fear and trembling now), and I will be saved (either at my death or when Christ comes in final victory prior to my death). So....where and when is my salvation? Is it 2000 years ago, happening now, or coming still? Yes.

Heaven is the same way. Jesus is clear that there is a specific real place that He will go to and return for his people. It’s there right now, it already exists, and it will continue to exist. Heaven was created prior to the foundations of the earth—we don’t know when but, at least for our minds to comprehend, we need to have God existing in a place when he is creating everything else—make sense so far? So…we have heaven existing somewhere right now, and it has existed there since before time itself existed. But the Bible also teaches something more about Heaven—primarily that it’s not always going to stay where it is at right now.

The Bible teaches that, more than a physical place that exists—like my house or Washington, DC or Hocking Hills or the Grand Canyon—heaven is defined by its inhabitants. Primarily by one inhabitant—God the Father. Where God is Heaven is also. And because Heaven exists where God is, we are told that one day when all the fighting and strife is over, heaven is going to move because God is going to move. Hear these words from Revelation:

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 21

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. I also saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband.

Then I heard a loud voice from the throne: Look, God’s dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them.

Did you hear that? God’s dwelling place is with humanity! Heaven has come to where you and I are. This is the entire point of scripture, from the Old Testament speaking about the time when Christ would come and save his people, to when Jesus was here and was the full incarnation of God amongst his people, to the New Testament teaching about how to make ourselves ready for this final and complete transformation—God making his final dwelling place with and amongst people.

Y’all…heaven exists now, but to build up for yourselves treasure in heaven its as simple as building up Heaven here on earth now. Engage in activities that will usher in the new heaven and the new earth—this has always been our challenge as Christians, to prepare the world for the coming of God in final victory. But it starts with ourselves—preparing our own lives and our own hearts for the coming of God.

So what does that mean, practically, for our finances here and now?

As individuals: Give to your local church. Let me be clear about this that we give not because it’s our spiritual check mark for the day or week, and not because of what we get out of the church. We give because of what God has already done for us and because of what God is going to do in our community and our world. We give as an expression of the heart and get the added benefit of seeing our local church be able to do greater ministry together than we could apart and being a focal point for our energies there.

I need to take a moment and have an honest conversation with y’all here. COVID has not been easy on the church, both financially and just with our energies. It has taken more and more energy to do literally anything that we had done when we could gather safely together in March, and on top of that we’ve had to adapt and create new things because some things were just not possible to do. But what has been a real drain has been our finances. I know many churches that have saved 10s of thousands of dollars during this pandemic because so many of their expenses were tied to Sunday morning. Our church is already operating on a pretty minimal shoestring ministry and worship budget, so our expenses have continued as a congregation despite not being open for in person worship. In fact, in places where we would normally have not spent, we have had to shift those expenses to other areas simply BECAUSE of this pandemic.

And giving has been difficult and hard for our church members. Difficult because some of your finances have been hit directly due to loss of hours or jobs or other income streams or simply fear of not knowing how long this is all going to last. I get that and I understand it. Giving for some has been difficult because of a lack of trust for the online giving platform or just lack of desire to use it—I get it. I said in one of my videos a while back that when you give online, you could choose to cover the administrative fee charged to us so that the church would still get your full donation, but at tax time you would be credited for the larger gift. This turned some folk off, I know having had those conversations with you, and I get it. If online giving is something that you would be interested in doing, I would highly encourage you to engage in that or engage in some way that your giving is automated. It is the single best thing that you can do right now to help the long term health of this congregation. If you would like to give online—you can click the “giving” link on our website (theplainsumc.com) and follow the instructions there. If you would like help, we are working on some ways that we can also do that safely.

Giving has also been hard for some church members. There are some who believe so strongly in the need to physically put their offering in the plate on Sunday morning that they have decided to withhold their offerings until we are gathered back for in person worship. Friends, if that’s you—your commitment to the gathered worship space is to be commended. But right now your church is hurting and suffering because of this insistence. Giving should not be a matter of where we sit on Sunday morning, but a matter of where our heart is. If you find yourself in this camp, please find a way to remain true to your commitment to God and bless the ministry of the church you’ve committed yourself to.

As a community: we give back. We always have and always will. The way we’ve normally operated in the past is giving back into the community by means of designated gifts that you all as congregants have given. Our finances and the books that Madelon runs and keeps for us reflect that methodology strongly. I don’t see us changing that anytime soon—but what I do see us changing is moving to a stronger reliance on God and committing to that reliance through our general fund and the finances there.

I’ve challenged our leadership team that this year when we prepare our budget to set ourselves on a 3 year path towards tithing 10% of every dollar that comes in to our general fund—in addition to what we do now. This does not include our commitments to our District or Conference in our UMC connection. These would be funds designated to go to mission work locally or abroad, a community organization outside of our walls, scholarships for those entering into vocational ministry, or even another church and an effort they are working on.

Tithing is a journey that we should all be on, and that is no different than our local church as an organization. This year, I am challenging us to commit that 4% of our giving will go out into missions that we cannot claim as direct ministries of TPUMC. As a people committed to seeing the Kingdom of God come on earth, the financial responsibility for that doesn’t just fall on individuals, it also falls on your church. And the efforts created by this will potentially grow exponentially.

Storing up treasures in heaven—if talking about real time finances, means giving to the expansion of the Kingdom of God and Heaven here on earth right now. As members, we have all vowed to support this body of the church by our gifts. Will you recommit today to that commitment to God through this church?