Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction:

Nothing drives me mad like someone who doesn’t keep their word!

How about you?

I cannot stand it when someone says that they will meet me at a certain time and they never show up, never call, never text.

I also cannot stand it when you go to a restaurant and expect a certain level of service and they barely serve you at all.

I consider this to be a way of not keeping your word.

When you advertise something that you don’t provide, that is a lie and not keeping your word.

We recently had a bad experience with this on vacation where the condo we stayed in failed to let us know that the balconies were going to be painted and that the pool and hot tub would not be available and then later on in the week, we had the furniture from our balcony put into our living room for a couple of days making it unusable.

We also had one of our two elevators taken down for maintenance.

All of these are examples of people not keeping their word.

We can all go on and on about our experiences with people like this in our society, and it certainly seems to be getting worse by the day!

No one values honesty and integrity.

Our culture is a “me-first” culture and only seems to care to do things when it directly benefits the individual person.

We don’t work hard because we value our name and reputation.

Proverbs 22:1 says,

You and I represent Jesus and our families and should value our word.

We need to get back to the times where a good word and a handshake were all you needed.

But what about all of the times that we fail to keep our OWN word, especially to the Lord?

How many times have we made promises to God only to renege on them?

How many times have we lied to God about what we will do if God will only bless us?

Well, the Bible has a lot to say about that.

We also see a lot about generosity in this last chapter of the Book of Leviticus.

Can you believe it?

We are almost through the book and you have done something that so many people will never do in their lifetimes in church!

Let’s take a look at few verses that the Bible says about our vows.

We are going to look at vows that were special vows to the Lord.

These vows consisted of valuing people, animals, homes, crops, and even tithes.

None of these vows are required.

They are all voluntary vows to God for some special purpose that the person wanted to give.

Now, one of the first things we should note is.. that

1.

There are different levels of service to the Lord (v.1)

You see, all of us should serve the Lord.

We all live for the King and are His subjects and so there is a minimum level of service that each of us should give to the Lord.

We call these spiritual disciplines.

Let me give you an example of a few of these.

We should all read our Bibles.

We should all pray.

We should all share our faith.

We should all tithe and be generous to other people.

All of these are examples of some of the basic things that we should do in serving the Lord.

However, we might want to promise to do even more than the bare minimum for the Lord.

Why might we want to do that?

Why not!

Think of all the things God has done for us.

He has saved our souls from Hell.

He helps us in our time of need.

He helps with everything we need in our life and is far more worthy of our time, energy, and possessions than the markets of this world in order that we might satisfy our own desires.

In these verses, there are different valuations that were given for different people.

There were men, women, young children, old people.

All of them had different values.

This value was not based on the worth of the person’s soul, but rather it was based on what they could do in serving the Lord.

In other words, what about of work can they do for the Lord.

I think the principle that we should take away from this passage is that our work has value and also we all can contribute in different ways at different levels.

Our service to God has value.

Now another aspect of this passage that we should bring out is that these people are ones who want to serve the Lord, but for some reason cannot in person serve the Lord.

Maybe they are not Levites and the Law required that only the Levites could serve the Lord.

So in the Old Testament, if someone wanted to serve the Lord in the Temple that wasn’t a Levite, they might choose to give money in the place of the work that they could have performed.

Now, that brings up another point of application.

Today, there is not restriction of only a certain group of people serving the Lord in the church.

Anyone could serve depending on the task.

Of course some offices are restricted, but general service can and should be done.

We should have a whole church teaming with people that want to use their gifts to give back to God.

And yet the reality is that we don’t!

We usually have to beg people just to come to church, much less to serve.

Would you join me in praying for God to change our hearts concerning this?

But there may be times where we legitimately cannot serve ourselves and so we give money to help others serve.

We do this with extra giving to our church on top of our tithe, which I will get to in a minute.

But we also do this with missions giving.

Missions giving is never to be a substitute for our service and sharing the gospel, but sometimes we don’t have the ability to go to a certain place, and so we give so that others can go in our place.

One last thing about this point is that notice in verse 8 that there is never someone too poor to give something.

The priest was to estimate the ability of the person and make a valuation, even if they seemed far to poor to give the normal amount.

We all have value that we can add to God’s kingdom and should serve as God has blessed and give in order that other also may serve.

2. We can give of our blessings to the Lord (vv.9-25)

In these verses we have animals that could be given to the Lord, both clean and unclean.

We also have houses and finally crops.

Remember that God actually owned the land, so the Israelites couldn’t give the land, but they could give what the land yielded.

All of these were things that carried value and were counted as blessings for the Lord.

It is also interesting that some of these things might be given to the Lord, but perhaps redeemed if the person changed their mind.

Think about this scenario.

Let’s say that you pray to the Lord and somehow say, “Lord, if you will give me a big house, I will use it to serve you by hosting a missionary in one of the rooms.”

Now suppose God does this and you decide you don’t think you can host anyone or something changes in your life.

You could actually change your vow to the Lord by buying back what you gave for it’s value and adding 1/5 to the price.

This was done for two reasons.

2a.

We should take seriously our commitments and what we give to the Lord.

Once we give something to the Lord, be it through the church or some other means, it is not ours anymore.

Have you ever seen someone give something and then they stipulate how and when and where it can be used?

If you are going to give like that, don’t give!

That’s not biblical giving!

We should also not be careless in our vows to God.

2b.

We should not give in such a way that it ruins our families.

Sometimes we can get a little overzealous in what we promise to God.

God always gives a way out for those times.

However, we should not take things lightly when we make a promise to God, so the extra 20% was a way to prevent someone from being careless in their promises.

Now there are two examples of this to take note of in the Bible.

The first is Jephtha’s foolish vow were he promises to give whatever comes out of his door first to greet him after his victory to the Lord.

It is his daughter that comes out first.

Jephtha could have redeemed her if he knew the Law, but the people were in such a state of affairs having forsaken and forgotten the Law of God that it seems that Jephtha goes ahead and offers his daughter to God, possibly even as a human sacrifice (which obviously is not what God would have expected him to do!)

The second exampe is Hannah and Samuel.