Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Good Morning Church, how are we doing this morning?

So when you woke up this morning and you remembered it was Sunday and you were coming here to Church I bet you didn’t realize how fortunate you were that this Sunday of all Sundays you would be here.

Because today’s message is about the one thing that every person who comes to Church hoping that the message will be about.

If you only knew what we were gonna be talking about today then you would have had a little more bounce in your step on your way in here today.

Because today we are going to talk about what God says about your money!!!!!

I know, it’s exciting isn’t it.

You were hoping the pastor would talk about money.

Some of you are so overwhelmed you might even start heading for the door right now to try and compose yourself and contain your excitement…

or more accurately to get in your car and rush back to bed again.

Because if you somehow missed how my words have been drowning in sarcasm…I am well aware that the idea of a message about money is not one that we are too often excited about.

In fact , it is one of the consistent complaints that those who dislike the Church lodge against it.

Because of this, most of the pastors I know do everything that they can to avoid having to talk about it and I would too…if I thought I could do it without abandoning my responsibility as your Pastor.

And ever since we began this series called “Ekklessia, the unstoppable movement of God” we have been striving to discover what it is that Jesus wants for His Church.

How is He building it.

How has He been building over the past 2000 years.

Remember, Ekklessia means “gathering” and there have been many gatherings that have called themselves “The Church” and yet they operate in very different ways.

One of the big distinctives is in how these various gatherings relate to, understand or talk about money.

Tension

Have you ever stopped to consider what money really is?

For most of my life, when I have thought of money I have pictured either pieces of paper in my wallet or round metal disks in my pocket.

That was money and it had writing with numbers to tell us how much each one was worth and you would gather a bunch of it together to buy big things or you would get a bunch back in you bought something little.

That was money.

But have you noticed how seldom we deal with this kind of “money” today?

For so many of us, when we spend our money it is just a number going either up or down on our Credit Card and Bank Statements.

We don’t use “Cash” nearly as much as we used to.

I was standing in line for cheese curds at the food truck on the 4th of July Fireworks show this past week, and the first thing that the teenage girls in front of me asked was if they took credit cards and they were just like “Sure, why wouldn’t we”…at the food truck.

The deep fried Oreo’s they walked away with were weird enough - but these teenagers were just swiping their card at the food truck out on a street corner.

Because at the end of the day, money is just an agreed upon way of exchanging one valuable thing for another.

At one time that value was held inherently in gold and silver coins, then it was supposed to be representative of that gold and silver somewhere but now we all know it is mostly just a number that goes up and down.

Anyway you look at it, it is still just a way to exchange the value we have placed on one item for another item that holds that same value for us.

In the Old Testament, when God first asked His people to use their “exchangeable value” to honor Him, it wasn’t measured in dollars and cents, it was measured by their flocks and fields.

That was one form of currency back then, but even back then it was not to be approached like you were exchanging something of equal value in order to pay off your dept or settle your contract.

All the pagan nations that surrounded God’s people tried to please or appease their gods with contractual offerings, but our God has never worked that way.

He is and has always been about calling us into a relationship with Him.

A relationship where He is God and we don’t have anything valuable enough to pay our debt.

It has never been a relationship of equal exchange, like the food truck vendor who needs to get paid, so he can pay his debts.

It has always been about God inviting us into a relationship that sees the greatness as God as something that we could never truly value enough.

Listen to what God has said to His peope in Psalm 50:

Psalm 50:7–15 (ESV)

7 “Hear, O my people, and I will speak; O Israel, I will testify against you.

I am God, your God. 8 Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you; your burnt offerings are continually before me.

9 I will not accept a bull from your house or goats from your folds.

10 For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills.

11 I know all the birds of the hills, and all that moves in the field is mine.

12 “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine.

13 Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?

What God is saying here is that He has not asked for our first and best because He needs it.

He is not dependent on us.

He is not a food truck vendor, asking us to pay our bill so He can pay his.

This is His world.

It’s all his in the first place.

He spoke it all into existence - do we really think that we are going to somehow meet God’s needs in our giving?

He has not asked us to give Him our first and best because He needs it, He requires us to give Him our first and best because we need to give it.

14 Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and perform your vows to the Most High, 15 and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.”

This is the right posture when it comes to our money.

God does not need our money.

It doesn’t change Him or His circumstances one bit…but the principle of giving our first and best to God holds great value…in how it can change us.

So as we have over the past several weeks, lets take a look at how this played out in one of the early Christian Churches, the Church in Corinth.

To read along with us, open up your Bibles to 2 Corinthians chapter 9, it is on page 968 in the Bibles in the chairs.

I’ll pray and then we will take an offering…just kidding…you will see it is not about that.

We are just asking God to set our hearts and minds right when it comes to our attitude toward money.

Let’s pray.

Truth

I am amazed once again at God’s perfect timing for our message this morning.

You see some Pastors feel this pressure to break out their “generosity sermon” when the annual budget meeting is coming up and the giving is really behind, but by God’s grace that is not where we are at as a Church right now.

In fact, we had our annual budget meeting a couple weeks ago and your actually exceeded the budget for last year.

We didn’t even spend everything that we budgeted for, but even if we had your giving exceeded that.

So you still may be asking, “If we are doing so well in this area, then why are we going to have to sit through a message on about money?”

That is a great question, and I am so glad that you asked it.

Especially because it seems to be a question that the Church in Corinth could have asked.

As we have been walking through these letters we have seen this Church being corrected on many things, but apparently they were rocking this one.

In the last part of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians he gave them instructions on how they should be collecting money for the Christian who were suffering persecution in Jersualem, and it appears that the Church in Corinth had done especially well in following them, because here in his second letter, 2nd Corinthians, we read Paul saying:

2 Corinthians 9:1–2 (ESV)

1 Now it is superfluous for me to write to you about the ministry for the saints, 2 for I know your readiness, of which I boast about you to the people of Macedonia, saying that Achaia has been ready since last year.

And your zeal has stirred up most of them.

“superfluous” is a fun word, but other translations say it was “not necessary” or “there is no need” for me to write to you on this issue, an issue that he calls here “ministry for the saints” which we know to be the financial giving that he called them to in the first letter.

He then goes on to tell them the plan for collecting the money they have agreed to give.

This is not an additional call to give anything, but just a plan put in place so that they would be ready when he comes.

2 Corinthians 9:3–5 (ESV)

3 But I am sending the brothers so that our boasting about you may not prove empty in this matter, so that you may be ready, as I said you would be. 4 Otherwise, if some Macedonians come with me and find that you are not ready, we would be humiliated—to say nothing of you—for being so confident.

5 So I thought it necessary to urge the brothers to go on ahead to you and arrange in advance for the gift you have promised, so that it may be ready as a willing gift, not as an exaction.

In our culture today, most people give like they spend––with little prayer, planning, or preparation.

Our focus this morning is not really aimed at personal finance principles, but I will just say that when we spend the money God has given us without a plan, it gets us into trouble.

In the same vein, when we give without planning and preparation, we can miss the blessing that God intends for our giving to be in our lives.

Paul doesn’t want that to happen to the Church in Corinth and we don’t want that to happen here.

Corporately, that is why we do a Church budget and present our plan at our annual budget meeting.

We are not telling God what we are going to do with His money - we are just making a plan so that we can work together to invest the Kingdom resources He has given us in a responsible God-honoring way.

This brings us to our first theme for the week:

1.

We can expect a great harvest of God’s blessings in our lives when we give hilariously (2 Corinthians 9:6-9).

2 Corinthians 9:6–9 (ESV)

6 The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.

7 Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.

8 And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.

9 As it is written, “He has distributed freely, he has given to the poor; his righteousness endures forever.”

Similar to our culture here in the greater Mondovi area, most of the world at this time was largely agrarian.

Even if they didn’t work on a farm, they understood where food comes from and how it grows.

So they would have understood that idea that “sowing” was planting seed in the ground and the more seed you sow the more yield you can expect.

They didn’t have the genetically altered seeds that we do today, so it was a simpler equation.

The more you put in to it, the more you got out of it.