It’s very tricky preparing a talk about money, particularly thinking about how our faith radically affects our attitude to how much we earn and how much we give. These are highly personal subjects for many of us and I am fully expecting some disagreements as I explore the standards the Bible sets us in these two areas of Christian living.
Over the last few days I have been reading lots of articles and listening to many online sermons on this subject – most of which challenge our notion of giving. The Bible lays out a baseline minimum principle of giving a tenth of all our earnings to God. The mistake many people make is thinking of the tenth as the limit (that’s all I must d0), when the spirit of these teachings is that this is the starting point. If you can give more than a tenth – then do it. We worship an outrageously generous God who inspires us to risk the joys of outrageous generosity.
The challenge we have at RBC is that the money we receive from offerings and gifts is barely covering our costs. This directly affects the ministries that we are able to support or initiate. I’m told that if each member of the congregation were prepared to give as little as £3.00 extra each week (the price of a coffee), we would be easily meet our projected budget for this year and be able to consider new community improvement outreach projects, new appointments and maybe even a few improvements around the premises, So imagine if people said, ‘I’m going to commit to giving an extra £6 a week – two coffees!….or imagine how many coffees we could not buy each week to purchase and convert the old Longmead Adult education centre into a thriving Christian community hub! (Just an example)
As I say- difficult and challenging – because this isn’t about money – it’s about our hearts- and no one wants to hear that their heart is not good.
Earning is even trickier. I came across this amazing sermon preached by John Wesley, back in the 1700’s he wrote, “Earn all you can with paying more for it than it is worth.” He goes on to say that any job that affects one’s healthy, physically, mentally, or spiritually, is not worth it. We should not continue in a business if it deprives us of time to sleep or eat. If we are earning all we can for God’s sake, then it is part of God’s will that we take care of ourselves and have whole and healthy lives, The two shouldn’t work against each other. So, earn all you can, but not at the expense of losing your soul.
He then goes on to say, “Earn all you can, but not at the expense of your neighbour”. What we do to earn money should give all people life- not death; not ill health; not make them poorer; not take away their livelihood. In other words, the golden rule of loving your neighbour as yourself is true with how we earn and spend our money too.
I’m sure you all have opinions on this and I am doing my best to stick to the Biblical teaching of earning fairly and giving generously.
I’ll be preaching on 03 June on earning fairly and 08 July on giving generously and hope to see you then