Becoming Servant Leaders:

The Disciplines—Money
By Parrish W. Jones, Ph.D.
©2005 All Rights Reserved

 

Malachi 3:6-12
Matthew 23:23-24

We've been thinking about becoming Servant Leaders for the past few weeks. I hope that to this point these sermons have challenged and lifted you up. Most important I hope they will result in deeper spirituality and richness for you. Last week I discussed the disciplines dealing with being in communion with our faith community and being in communion with God. I had thought I would deal with finances and being with the poor in the same sermon because next week is youth Sunday. However, it dawned on me that I would still be preaching to two of the services next week, so I would give each topic a separate consideration for reasons I hope will become clear.

I am going to talk today about what is the greatest spiritual challenge to the American people. We call it money. I would be negligent in my call if I were to avoid this subject, because how we relate to money is an important indicator of our spiritual health. Therefore, while we will not lose our salvation over it, the quality of all our spiritual relationships is affected by our relationship to our money. It is a subject about which Jesus spoke more often than any other subject.

When asked, most Americans consider themselves generous. By and large church going Christians are more generous than most other Americans. After the tsunami in southern Asia, Presbyterians gave more through the Presbyterian Church than President Bush first promised from federal funds.

While Christians are indeed generous by many measures, there is only one measure that matters and that is God's measure. Our plumb line says Paul for our generosity is Jesus who, our text for this morning tells us, "though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich."

I am aware of the difficulty of rising to this challenge that God lays before us. Yet in our lesson from Malachi, God calls us to tithe our incomes and bring them into the storehouse, which we can only interpret in our context as the church. The tithe is a few steps below the example of Jesus about whom the scriptures say, "[he] emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born as a human." (Philippians 2:6)

Why did God make such a demand? Because God knew that the most addictive thing humans had ever concocted was money and wealth, and Americans seem to be on a binge that is so addictive as to be spiritually devastating. God knew that financial discipline was a problem for humans.

Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament professor from Colombia Presbyterian Seminary in Decatur, GA, says that the church in America is faced with two types of promiscuity. The first is sexual and the second is financial. He says that we spend most of our time on the former without even considering the latter. However, it is likely if we deal faithfully with financial promiscuity, we may very well no longer have to deal with sexual promiscuity.

Why so? The reason goes back to relationships, one sort of promiscuity inevitably leads to another. An undisciplined life is directionless. Tithing at its roots is about discipline. It is also about saying no to a world that wants us to always say yes because the powers of this age survive by our subservience to their values. Talking about sexual promiscuity diverts attention from the root of evil as the Apostle reminds us in 1 Timothy 6:10 "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs." (NIV)

None of us wants to be undisciplined and many of us may resent being charged with promiscuity when we are very careful with our money. Notice though that being careful with your resources is not the same as being faithful with them. Tithing is a spiritual exercise that leads to faithfulness and thus to abundance as our lesson from Malachi indicates. The promise is not for abundance of material wealth but that God will provide us what is necessary for life as our tithes provide others the necessities of life.

Now I am only going to utter one sentence about the church's budget and that is this one: Tithing, living faithfully with your money, is about your budget not the churches. Your relationship with your money is about your spiritual state and your spiritual discipline. It is about the way you steward your financial resources, about your spiritual relationship to your money.

Getting from where you are in relationship to your money and to where God is calling you may be painful. Some of you may be able to begin next week. Others may need to make a commitment to working into complete faithfulness at some time in the future.

That's all right because polls show that a very large percentage of Americans are over committed financially. You may be one of those. Unless you've had a major disaster in recent years that drained you financially, which God certainly understands, you probably represent the charge of financial promiscuity. In fact, most of us are unfaithful stewards of our finances.

If you are over committed, one of the best disciplines for overcoming your problem is the discipline of moving toward tithing by steps over several years. You can do that by looking at what percentage of your income you are giving now and if it is one or two percent commit to increasing that by an extra percent each year until you get to the tithe. The rest of us should just do it. Commitment to financial faithfulness causes us to think seriously and spiritually about our money—to develop a spiritual relationship with our money.

I've tried to be gentle and approach the subject from a positive view. Malachi is not so gentle. He tells us two things:

1.     Those who are not tithing are robbing God. I think none of us want to be called thieves, especially when it's God's house we are robbing.

2.     Malachi says that if you do not believe God, then test God and see what happens. The implication is clear. You tithe as God has called you to do and you will receive the blessings of safety and security for life. As Jesus told us, "Seek first God's kingdom and God's righteousness, and all life's necessities will be given to you as well." Matthew 6:33)