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Weekly Bible Verse – Honoring God with Your Wealth
Honor the LORD with your wealth, with the firstfruits of all your crops; then your barns will be filled to overflowing, and your vats will brim over with new wine. Proverbs 3:9-10 (NIV)
If you’ve read any Christian personal finance blogs or books lately, you’ve probably heard the term “steward” bandied about quite often (usually with the qualifier “good” in front of it). So, what does it mean to be a “good steward” of your finances? Well, there are a number of characteristics that go into being a good steward and I won’t touch on all of them here. I do feel that today’s verse touches on one very important aspect of being a good steward, allow me to explain…
As the verse states, we are to “honor the Lord” with our financial resources. In fact, we are to honor Him with the “firstfruits” of our crops (ok, if you’re not a farmer, substitute “income” there). How can we use our finances to honor God? What are firstfruits (and why does spell check tell me that’s not really a word?)?
Dedicating money to God’s Kingdom
Well, I think there are a number of ways that we can honor God with our resources. The most obvious way would be to give some of those resources to organizations or people that are furthering God’s kingdom – like your local church or missionaries or organizations like World Vision, etc. I do feel there are other things to consider as well such as not squandering your resources, especially on destructive items that certainly do not honor God.
Firstfruits? But I don’t have an orchard
So, how does the concept of “firstfruits” apply in our current day and age? I feel that the application lies in the concept of deciding beforehand how much of your income you are dedicating to God and then following through to cheerfully give that money away to support His kingdom. You’ve probably heard the team “pay yourself first,” well, I think this verse is actually telling us to “give to God first” instead of waiting around and seeing if you have a few bucks left at the end of the month to drop in the offering plate.
Is this a “Prosperity Gospel” thing?
I admit that I have not exhaustively studied the Prosperity Gospel – my understanding is that it purports the mantra that one should give to God so that God is obligated to provide financial blessing back to them. You can certainly use this verse to bolster your prosperity gospel argument, but I don’t fall into that camp so I’m not going to say that your motivation in giving should be to receive financial blessing back from God.
We are told here to honor God with our wealth and I feel that our motivation for doing so should be to simply support the church and provide means to spread Jesus’ gospel to more and more people. I think that the reason the second part of this verse is here isn’t to entice you to give money to get more back like some cosmic pyramid scheme. Rather, I feel it is God speaking to His people about their trust issues – if you are faithful to follow His directives and honor Him with your finances, there is no need to worry for He will take care of you. I’ve heard numerous stories about people putting their faith forward by giving money to God and then having that money replaced almost miraculously through unexpected means. God is good, you can trust Him.
God bless and have a great week…
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Putting God first always brings th best rewards. I firmly believe that God enables me to do more with the 90% that is left over than i would have been able to acheive with all of the original 100%
“You are always a valuable, worthwhile human being, not because anybody says so, not because you’re successful, not because you make a lot of money, but because you decide to believe it and for no other reason.”