Today’s Scripture Reading (September 22, 2019):
Proverbs 3
Walk into any church on a
Sunday morning and ask those gathered if they trust in God, and the answer is
likely to be yes. Ask them to prove that that is the case, and you are likely
to receive a questioning look. How can I prove that I trust in anything? It is
one reason why I sometimes question our listing of priorities. Often a
Christian’s priority list might look something like this:
1. God
2. Family
3. Job
4. Church
The problem with the list is
that making God our number one priority usually doesn’t require anything
practical from us. I can say that God is my number one priority and not change
anything that I currently want to do in my life. Church, on the other hand, can
often make significant demands on our lives and require that we rearrange some
of the desires that we have for our lives. So it is easy to say that God is our
number one priority, and significantly harder to say that the church is a
priority, and so we place church, the Body of Christ, lower on our lists.
So Solomon gives us a practical
way of showing that we really do trust in God; by giving to him and his work
from our material wealth. If we really trust God, and if we want to honor him,
we will give to God a portion of what he has already given to us. Giving to God
recognizes that God is the author of all of our wealth in the first place. We
are merely returning to him a portion of what he has already given to us. And
that we trust that what he has given to us in the past, he will continue to provide
for us in the future.
The act of giving also changes
how we interact with our money. I have always recommended that we work off a
10-80-10 relationship with our money. The first ten percent goes straight to
God. This is our firstfruits. It is a practical way that we trust God and
recognize that everything that we possess belongs to him. The eighty percent
reflects the amount of money on which we are willing to live. We budget our day
to day expenses according to that amount of money. And when that eighty percent
is gone, we are broke. The last ten is what we pay ourselves. It helps us build
up our emergency funds, save for significant expenses and wants that we might
have, and to help us prepare for our eventual retirement. If we build up these
funds, we will find that financial emergencies might disappear from our lives,
and reasons not to trust God with our resources would also fade into the past.
But all of it begins with a
practical expression of our trust in God and giving back to him.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Proverbs 4
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