Leadership Thought: Up Close and Personal-Your Giving.

Dear Friends,

"How’s your giving?"  Now that’s a pretty personal question, pastor. Yes, it is,  but it’s an also a pretty good indication of your spiritual health. Perhaps it would have been wiser of me to have first asked you  "How is your spiritual health," and then looked at your giving as one of the measures of that health. Either way, talking about giving is a touchy subject. It has gotten a lot of pastors in a whole lot of trouble.

But as one who many years ago taught on stewardship on Mothers’ Day,  I can take the heat. If sermons are good, they are generally memorable, and this sermon was just that-memorable. People still are talking about it, albeit not always for the best of reasons from my perspective.

For the next couple of days, I would like to explore with you what the bible has to say about giving. Let me warn you. What I share may be hazardous to your pocketbook but trust me it could make a marked difference in your spiritual health, so hang on and bear with me.  

Perhaps you have heard someone say, “I go to a spiritual church where our pastor never has to talk about money. Well,  if this is the case than Jesus must have been pretty unspiritual, for he was never embarrassed to discuss the use of our possessions. In fact, 16 of his 38 parables address the use of our possessions. One in every 10 verses in the New Testament have to do with one’s use of money or  possessions. Jesus talks more about money than he does heaven and hell and faith combined.
As we will see, Jesus talked a lot about money matters, because He knew that “money matters.” Jesus knew that when a man gets rich, either God gets a partner, or a man loses his soul. Just read the portrait of the rich man who came to Jesus in Mark 10. He was close to faith, but in the end, it was his money that kept him from the kingdom.

In 2 Corinthians 8:7, Paul tells us that we are to excel in the grace of giving. The idea of excelling assumes that like playing the piano, we can get better, and that with spiritual growth comes growth in spiritual giving 

"The world asks, "How much does he give?" Christ asks, "Why does he give"? We will talk more about that tomorrow.

Yours in faith and friendship,
Tom