Honor the Lord with your wealth, with the firstfruits of all your crops; (Proverbs 3:9)

Honor the Lord with your wealth

• It’s an amazing request for you and me
• He gives us wealth to get the job done

How do you feel when someone takes you aside and says: “I have an important job for you!” What comes to mind?

When it’s someone we respect, our boss, a close friend, our pastor or church leader, we pay attention.

But we may have questions: Am I capable? We don’t want to let people down. We will also want to make sure we have access to the resources to get the job done.

Now when the person we respect is confident we have the capability to do that job and promises the resources to make it happen, we can feel pretty good about the request and our ability to get it done.

Our text today is an important request. God says:

Honor the Lord with your wealth

• It’s an amazing request for you and me
• He gives us wealth to get the job done

This is an amazing request for you and me

With this verse we can imagine God calling us into his office. That’s an amazing thing. But we might be a little concerned.

If I picture God asking me into his office, I’m wondering. Is he going to want to talk with me about what I’ve been up to? Which one of my missteps is he going to bring up: Is he going to tell me I’m too lazy, is he going to tell me I’m living too much for myself, or that I’m lacking in self-discipline?

But as I picture myself going to God’s office this is what I know. He’s not going to be talking to me about any of those things. That’s because he’s already talked about them with his Son. Jesus has been to his Father’s office before me. There they discussed my missteps and all my sins. They have discussed yours too.

As they did, you can imagine the Father leaning over his Son and saying, “I have an important job for you.” They worked out a rescue package for you, and me and the world. They launched their plan to carry out the most daring and powerful act of love in the history of the world. The Son would come to earth as a true human being, live the perfect life that you and I could only dream about. Then Jesus would take all the responsibility for my laziness, my too much about me attitude, my lack of self-discipline, and yours too. He’d pay for them with his suffering and death on the cross.

The result: all of your missteps and my sins have been taken away from the relationship between us and the Father. With our sins out of the way, our God can come to us and ask us to do his important work.

It echoes what Jesus said to his disciples on Maundy Thursday as he prepared them for what they would see on Good Friday: I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. (John 15:5)

So, we ask: how do we do the Father’s business? Think of the time Jesus’ disciples asked him to teach them to pray.

This, then, is how you should pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. (Matthew 5:9-10)

The Lord’s Prayer identifies our work, that we keep God’s name holy, that his message of salvation be proclaimed to build his kingdom and that his will is carried out. That’s our job.

In the Scripture we learn one way we do this: Honor the Lord with your wealth.

Look at that again. It’s an amazing word the Lord choses when he says Honor the Lord with wealth. Honor is a powerful word. When God teaches us about our relationship to our parents, he uses the word honor. He says, Honor your father and mother. (Exodus 20:20)

Honor means more than obey! Obey speaks to what we do. Honor speaks to the heart by which we do it. It’s as much about the why as it is about the what! He’s teaching us the vital truth that a God-pleasing relationship to wealth is first and foremost an attitude.

And what’s the attitude? Thankfulness, recognizing that all our wealth and the means to earn our wealth comes from God!

So, when he’s asking us to take up his important work, it’s the way we show our gratitude. With that heart, we can get started.

But do we have the resources? Yes, we have a powerful resource.

Wealth is a powerful tool to get the job done

Imagine if you had the power to walk in a store, pick up an item and walk to the counter, and buy it. That’s the power of wealth!

Imagine if you could take some of your work that you do today, and store its value so you can use it at a later date. That’s the power of wealth!

Imagine if you could use what you have stored to buy land and equipment to farm ground, or buy some equipment or a store and start a business to feed your family. That’s the power of wealth!

Imagine that you could provide for your family with an education or training to help them stand on their own feet when they are adults.

Imagine if you could use what you saved and invested so that you had money set aside to confidently support yourself in retirement. That’s the power of wealth!

Imagine if you could leave stuff to your family through an inheritance. That’s the power of wealth!

Wealth is powerful! But here’s the problem. It’s so powerful that people can like it to too much!

That’s why God warns: Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless. (Ecclesiastes 10:5)

Listen to him when he teaches us that wealth isn’t for loving.

When Jesus talked about love, he said this: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ (Matthew 22:37-39)

Notice where wealth lies on God’s list of things to love. It’s not on the top; it’s not on the bottom. It doesn’t make the list at all!

But more than warning us about the dangers of loving wealth, he does what a good parent does. He gives us a clear view of how to use wealth in a good and positive way. He wants us to find the joy of using it to do the job he’s asking us to do.

His words: Honor the Lord with it! He wants us to understand that wealth is a tool to carry out his plan.

He wants us to use wealth to take care of ourselves and our families. Do we need food, and clothes and a place to stay warm and safe? Yes, God wants us to use wealth to take care of our needs!

He wants us to use it to help our children stay healthy and learn how to take care of themselves in adulthood, for themselves and your grandchildren.

He wants us to use it to save for our retirement so we don’t become a burden to others.

He wants us to use it to help others, friends, even strangers with their needs because there is great strength in helping one another.

These are all God-pleasing ways to use our wealth. It’s how we keep the second of the two great commandments of loving our neighbor as we love ourselves.

But what about the first and greatest commandment. How do we use wealth to love God with all our heart, soul and mind? It comes from receiving it with gratitude, recognizing that he’s the one who gave it to us in the first place.

He taught that to his Old Testament believers in a very concrete way.

He told them to bring the first fruits of your crops.

The practice of giving the first fruits was the system that the Lord used to support the education of the Children of Israel in the ways of God.

Remember when God divided up the land of Canaan to the Children of Israel, there were actually 13 tribes. If you look at a map of how the land was divided, you will see areas for the 12 tribes to live, but you won’t see a place on the map for the tribe of Levi, even though they were 3-4% of the population of Israel. Why? God appointed the tribe of Levi to work in the temple. When they weren’t working in the temple, they were living in the cities scattered among the 12 tribes. What was their job? First of all, they were part of the legal system of the day. But they were also there as teachers to remind everyone of their relationship to their Lord.

But no one in that tribe was allotted any land. So how would they support themselves and families as teachers? They were to live by receiving a tithe of the crops and flocks. 10% of the increase from the wheat and barley harvest and 10% of the grapes, figs and pomegranates were to be set aside for the Levite community. The Levites were in turn to take 10% of what they received (1% of the total) and bring it to the temple when they took their turns working there.

So, when God teaches us to us to honor the Lord with your wealth, with the firstfruits of all your crops; (Proverbs 3:9). He is teaching us to support the ministry that brings the Word of God to you, your family and to the world.

Wealth can do that!

Money can’t buy a lot of things. It can’t buy the forgiveness of sins or eternal life.

Forgiveness and eternal life are God’s free gift to us because of the way Jesus lived for us died for us and rose again that we might be with him.

However, this is important! What Jesus did for us and the world needs to be communicated for it to be of any benefit.

So, when God calls us to his office and tells us, I have an important job for you, this is what he’s talking about. He calls you and me to be proclaimers of Jesus work, and preachers and teachers to lead us and train us to do that.

And when he teaches us to honor him with our wealth, he is assuring us we have the resources to get it done.

You’ve all heard “you can’t take it with you.” We know it’s true. We are born into the world with nothing and when we leave the world, we leave with nothing.

But what we can take with us are the people who have heard about the Savior through the ministries of the word, the ministries we make possible by using our wealth to build it and support it.

That’s God’s plan! We know is a good one. He knows we can do it.

Amen.