Alex Huggett: So when Andrea and I were younger, we went to see a financial planner.
Alex Huggett: We were both on part-time incomes, and so we really wanted to do the best we could with the money we had.
Alex Huggett: We had a young family and money was tight.
Alex Huggett: One of the recommendations the planner sort of made was a suggestion he said I know you're Christians, but you need to look at your giving.
Alex Huggett: Now, when you're trying to stay afloat in a sinking economy, which is our theme at the moment, your expenses are growing faster than your income, so you're essentially going backwards.
Alex Huggett: One of the first things you'll look at is your discretionary spending.
Alex Huggett: One of the things you need to look at, so that's your hobbies and recreation gym fees, netflix subscription, coffee not coffee.
Alex Huggett: Coffee is a necessity, not a discretionary item.
Alex Huggett: So one of those discretionary items is charitable giving and church giving.
Alex Huggett: Now, andrea and I have always made it our goal to give at least 10% to the Lord.
Alex Huggett: That's what a tithe is is 10%, and so when the financial planner made that suggestion to us, suddenly put us in this well, what are we going to do?
Alex Huggett: This question, what would you do?
Alex Huggett: Well, the people of Israel were facing a similar question over tithing and now reading today from Malachi, chapter 3,.
Alex Huggett: Evidently, things weren't going so well for them economically either, and they were faced with the same kind of choices as us have to cut back.
Alex Huggett: And, as it turns out, they were cutting back on their tithe.
Alex Huggett: And this is what the Lord says.
Alex Huggett: So this is from Malachi, chapter 3, verse 7.
Alex Huggett: So this is the last book in the Old Testament in our English Bibles, and it says since the days and this is God speaking through the prophet Malachi since the days of your ancestors, you have turned from my statutes.
Alex Huggett: You have not kept them.
Alex Huggett: Return to me and I will return to you, says the Lord of armies.
Alex Huggett: Yet you ask how can we return?
Alex Huggett: Will a man rob God?
Alex Huggett: Yet you are robbing me.
Alex Huggett: How do we rob you, you ask, by not making the payments of the tenth and the contributions.
Alex Huggett: You are suffering under a curse, yet you, the whole nation, are still robbing me.
Alex Huggett: Bring the full tenth into the storehouse so that there may be food in my house.
Alex Huggett: Test me in this waste, says the Lord of armies.
Alex Huggett: See, if I will not open up the floodgates of heaven and pour out a blessing for you without measure, I will rebuke the devourer for you so that it will not ruin the produce of your land and your vine in your field will not fail to produce fruit, says the Lord of armies.
Alex Huggett: Then all the nations will consider you fortunate, for you will be a delightful land, says the Lord of armies.
Alex Huggett: So the prophet Malachi probably wrote these words around 450 to 500 years before Christ.
Alex Huggett: After the exiles had returned from Babylon where they had been in captivity, they rebuilt the temple roughly around the time of Ezra and Nehemiah.
Alex Huggett: By now, israel was a province of the Persian Empire and they were free to practice their religion.
Alex Huggett: But needless to say, they weren't doing very well, and God brings a number of accusations to them through Malachi, but the one we are concerned with today is this charge of robbing God.
Alex Huggett: So it seems that the people were facing an economic hardship through failing crops perhaps, maybe drought or locust plague or something similar to that, and, as so happens when things aren't going our way, they were throwing up their hands and saying what's the point of following God if everything keeps going wrong?
Alex Huggett: So they were having to make some choices about their discretionary spending and decided that one of the expenditures they could do without was giving to the temple, giving the tithes and contribution, or the tenths, as my translation puts it, to the temple.
Alex Huggett: So what's that about?
Alex Huggett: Well, in the Bible, Torah, the first five books of the Bible, there are actually many instructions on giving tithes and contributions.
Alex Huggett: So I just want to highlight a few.
Alex Huggett: So Leviticus 27, verses 30 to 32.
Alex Huggett: I'm not going to read them because we don't have time, but in those verses the Lord said that a tenth of everything the land produced once they got into Israel was to be his.
Alex Huggett: It was to be given to the temple.
Alex Huggett: That was their crops, their orchards, their flocks, everything.
Alex Huggett: And if they wanted to redeem it, they could do that.
Alex Huggett: They had to pay a little bit of extra.
Alex Huggett: They had to add a fifth to the value and give it to the temple.
Alex Huggett: Part of the temple offerings were burnt as a sacrifice to God very often, but in Numbers 18, verse 8, god says the part that wasn't burnt, which was actually most of the animal, usually was given to Aaron and his sons, so that's the priests as a portion and permanent statue.
Alex Huggett: So essentially, those offerings were how the priests got paid.
Alex Huggett: And this was because when the Israelites entered the Promised Land, there were 12 tribes, if you remember, and one of those tribes was Levite, which the priests were a part of the tribe of Levite.
Alex Huggett: So all the other 11 tribes were given an allotment of land.
Alex Huggett: Everyone went in and essentially every family in Israel at this stage was meant to have a family allotment.
Alex Huggett: The Levites and the priests didn't get one of those.
Alex Huggett: They had a few towns and some of the lands around it, but they basically didn't have those ancestral lands.
Alex Huggett: They relied on the temple for their income.
Alex Huggett: Deuteronomy 26, verse 12, says that, in addition to the regular tithes every three years, the people were to bring a tithe and make it available to the Levites, as we've just mentioned, the resident aliens, so foreigners in the country, fatherless children and widows, so that they may eat in your towns and be satisfied, and so that tithe every three years was essentially a way of caring for the poor.
Alex Huggett: It was welfare for the people of Israel.
Alex Huggett: So there's a lot more but to summarize, the tithes and contributions were an act of worship and an acknowledgement of God's ownership over Israel.
Alex Huggett: They were a wage to the priests and Levites who were devoted to the ministry and kept the temple going, and they formed a part of the welfare for the poor.
Alex Huggett: And so in that light can you see what it meant for a covenant people who were in relationship with God.
Alex Huggett: When they were slack in bringing their tithes and contributions to the temple, they really were robbing God of what was rightfully His.
Alex Huggett: There was literally no food in the storehouse for the priests, so they couldn't do their job properly and the poor had no relief from the grinding poverty and injustice.
Alex Huggett: And that, says God, is why the people were suffering economic hardship.
Alex Huggett: In terms of the covenant, god had said if you live by the terms of the covenant, then I will look after you, your crops won't fail, you'll have no poor among you, because just the way the covenant was set up was they would look after each other.
Alex Huggett: If they lived by the covenant.
Alex Huggett: It's almost like God didn't need to do anything, but he would protect them.
Alex Huggett: But the people had broken the covenant and so what had happened is God says if you walk in the covenant, I will bless you, I will protect you.
Alex Huggett: But they had placed themselves outside of that covenant blessing and so they no longer covered it by the blessing but by a curse, and I'll talk about that a little more in a moment.
Alex Huggett: The people were withholding their tithes and offerings and contributions because things were getting hard.
Alex Huggett: But what they didn't realize was things were getting hard because they weren't honoring God, and part of that there's other things in Malachi but part of that was because they weren't honoring God and being faithful with their offerings, and so things were getting hard.
Alex Huggett: And so God says to them test me.
Alex Huggett: Essentially, he's saying, hey, try out covenant faithfulness.
Alex Huggett: Let's just try this agreement we made together and see what it's like to live under those terms.
Alex Huggett: Now you might be saying this morning yeah, but we're no longer under that old covenant.
Alex Huggett: That's an Old Testament thing.
Alex Huggett: We're in the New Testament.
Alex Huggett: It doesn't apply.
Alex Huggett: Well, that's kind of true.
Alex Huggett: But the New Testament actually has quite a bit more to say about this subject than you might realize.
Alex Huggett: In 1 Corinthians, chapter 10, verse 6, paul said that the things that happened to Israel, all the bad things that happened to Israel, took place as an example to us, and so we're to learn from it rather than writing off the Old Testament as something that's outdated.
Alex Huggett: And in fact it's interesting that in 2 Corinthians, chapter 9, verses 6 to 10, paul makes almost the exact same point that Malachi is talking about in these verses.
Alex Huggett: So in this, what I'm about to read, he's talking about poverty relief that all the Gentile churches were sending to Jerusalem, which was in the midst of a famine.
Alex Huggett: But he writes this general principle that applies beyond that specific context.
Alex Huggett: He says the person who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the person who sows generously will also reap generously.
Alex Huggett: Each person should do as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or out of compulsion, since God loves a cheerful giver and God is able to make every grace overflow to you so that in every way, always having everything you need, you may excel in every good work.
Alex Huggett: And now the one who provides seed for the sower and bread for food, that's God will also provide and multiply your seed and increase the harvest of your righteousness.
Alex Huggett: The person who sows sparingly will reap sparingly.
Alex Huggett: The person who sows generously will reap generously.
Alex Huggett: Do you know what goes beyond this?
Alex Huggett: Do you know that Paul appeals to the principle of the Levitical Tithe out of the Old Testament to argue that Christian workers are entitled to an income as ministers of the gospel?
Alex Huggett: Listen to this.
Alex Huggett: This is 1 Corinthians, chapter 9, verses 13 to 14.
Alex Huggett: Don't you know that those who perform the temple services eat the food from the temple and those who serve at the altar share in the offerings of the altar.
Alex Huggett: So that's what I was just talking about.
Alex Huggett: In the same way he says the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should earn their living by the gospel.
Alex Huggett: And then in 1 Timothy 5, verses 17 to 18, he says the elders who are good leaders are to be considered worthy of double honour, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching.
Alex Huggett: For the Scripture says Do not muzzle an ox while it's treading out the grain and the worker is worthy of his wages.
Alex Huggett: And that do not muzzle an ox comes from Leviticus.
Alex Huggett: So honour here means payment.
Alex Huggett: I think that's pretty obvious from the context.
Alex Huggett: It's what we used to call an honourarium, and Paul is saying the elders now what we call pastors were meant to be paid by the church in the same way priests and Levites were.
Alex Huggett: Isn't that interesting?
Alex Huggett: So the Old Testament perhaps has something more to say to us than we realise.
Alex Huggett: And I just want to point out if it says it about money, it probably says other things as well we need to pay attention to.
Alex Huggett: But that will be getting us off topic.
Alex Huggett: So what does this mean for us today?
Alex Huggett: Tithing, and actually more than a tithe when you read the Old Testament, and certainly in the New, where generosity of giving is commanded.
Alex Huggett: Tithing was commanded in the Torah, the Old Testament law, and the Gospel teaches us the same principles for today in the church.
Alex Huggett: And so what does that mean for you and for me?
Alex Huggett: Are we under a curse if we don't give?
Alex Huggett: Is some kind of prosperity gospel at work when I give?
Alex Huggett: Well, no and no For one.
Alex Huggett: Jesus has taken every curse upon himself on the cross, so we don't have to fear a curse, and I don't know if I need to say the prosperity gospel is basically a heresy.
Alex Huggett: But there is this principle of sowing and reaping at work, and the Scriptures clearly, old and new, point out and it's just an axiom of life, isn't it?
Alex Huggett: What you invest in is what you get a return from, whether that's with your money or whether that's with your time, whether that's with your emotions.
Alex Huggett: What we put into is what we get a return from.
Alex Huggett: Consider this when pastors and Christian workers, when money is coming into the church, then we can do gospel ministry, we can pursue the gospel which brings growth and blessing to God's kingdom, and when they're not paid, their attention is divided at best.
Alex Huggett: There's this other principle at work too, that has to do with the nature of blessing and cursing which I mentioned earlier.
Alex Huggett: When we see the curses in the Old Testament, they're usually worded as God bringing a curse onto people, god inflicting punishment on the people, and that's true.
Alex Huggett: But very often the way the curses work isn't so much that God is wielding a big stick and bashing the people until they come into submission, it's more that he is removing His blessing from them.
Alex Huggett: As I said, they're sort of stepping out of that realm of blessing into this realm outside of God's blessing, which is in a world of sin, is a place of curse.
Alex Huggett: It is a place where the shalom, the peace of God does not reside because essentially not because God doesn't want it there and he's not offering it, but because it's rejected it.
Alex Huggett: He doesn't accept Jesus as Lord, and so the curse is as much ourselves removing ourselves from God's blessing as anything else.
Alex Huggett: So it's like a child who you know, you get a young toddler and you say "don't wander off.
Alex Huggett: Why?
Alex Huggett: Because when a child stays close to you, they're safe, you can protect them from harm.
Alex Huggett: You've probably got all the goodies in your bag that they can eat and the toys they can play with.
Alex Huggett: But if they wander off what happens?
Alex Huggett: They're wandering into a realm of danger and perhaps hardship.
Alex Huggett: It's not that mum and dad don't want to protect them, it's that suddenly they can't not as easily.
Alex Huggett: It's like Adam and Eve in the garden they're given the choice between which tree to eat.
Alex Huggett: Are you going to eat from the tree of life or from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?
Alex Huggett: And what do they choose?
Alex Huggett: Every time it's good and evil.
Alex Huggett: We want to, we want to be able to figure this out for ourselves, we want to be our own moral authority, but as long as we're walking close to God, his arm around us, by His side, him, us keeping in step with Him, and we're under the shelter of His blessing and protection.
Alex Huggett: But if we wander off, god's like saying well, okay, then, if that's what you want, but I can't really help you from, if you're over there, you'll have to wear the consequences, and that's what we call the curse.
Alex Huggett: Could he intervene?
Alex Huggett: Well, yes, he could, but he honours our choices, and so, when times are tough, it's easy to start to get afraid and, rather than trust, to seek our own safety through our own resources.
Alex Huggett: We, rather than the tree of life, of dependence on God and dwelling in His Word, we seek the tree, the knowledge of good and evil, working it out for ourselves, friends, but when times are tough, this is where faith begins.
Alex Huggett: Will we stay close to God?
Alex Huggett: Will we stay close to His ways?
Alex Huggett: Of course, this goes way beyond finances, but it includes finances, and finances have such a hold on us that they're a powerful sign of our faith.
Alex Huggett: Will we stay close to God in His ways, looking to Him and His tree of life, or do we panic and close in on ourselves and follow the world's knowledge and wisdom?
Alex Huggett: If we do that, we start to move away from the place of blessing into danger.
Alex Huggett: We withhold the tithe.
Alex Huggett: The giving may not be a literal tithe, but that giving, that generous spirit towards God, that is an act of worship, because our money represents our time and our dreams and our investment, and when we give it to God, we are expressing His worth to us.
Alex Huggett: If we withhold that, we're withholding our worship, we're losing our connection with God, who sacrificially gives Himself to us, and so that's why, when that financial planner said to Andrea and me that we should review our giving, we ignored him.
Alex Huggett: We're like no, our giving is the first budget item.
Alex Huggett: Everything else has to work around that.
Alex Huggett: And, friends, god has been faithful.
Alex Huggett: Now it does get tricky.
Alex Huggett: Sometimes we do have to tighten our belts.
Alex Huggett: Those commands to tithing and giving in Israel were particularly for, in the first place, for people who had land, who had means, and when you really don't have to have means and you really need to start crying out to God.
Alex Huggett: I wouldn't want anyone to go into debt so they can tithe.
Alex Huggett: So, okay, there's an element of common sense in what I'm going to say, but there is also a real challenge here to faith, because to grow in our faith and give God space to work, that only starts to happen when we're at the end of our resources.
Alex Huggett: Right, when I have nothing and all I've got is God, it's like, okay, I've got to see what you're going to do now.
Alex Huggett: When we pray for healing because the doctors are at their end and there's nothing, god, are you going to do something here?
Alex Huggett: When we have a broken relationship and we've done everything we can, god, we need a miracle.
Alex Huggett: And when our finances, the wallet's empty, the bank account's looking pretty poor, god, are you going to do something here?
Alex Huggett: I need a miracle.
Alex Huggett: Miracles happen when we reach the end of our resources and rely on God.
Alex Huggett: So I want to ask you today is there a step of faith you need to take in order to seek God's blessing?
Alex Huggett: Now I know for some of you you already live in a place of generosity and praise God.
Alex Huggett: But I'm guessing there are some here who are perhaps held back by fear or doubt.
Alex Huggett: There may be even some here, because we're all subject to this temptation, and who may be held back by greed and materialism.
Alex Huggett: But you know, maybe the question will God really provide?
Alex Huggett: What if I don't have enough?
Alex Huggett: What's going to happen then?
Alex Huggett: But God says in Malachi you're having hardship because you're not giving.
Alex Huggett: So here's an experiment I want to challenge you with for the next month, let's say for the month of November.
Alex Huggett: Why don't you try giving just a little bit more?
Alex Huggett: If you don't give regularly, particularly to the church, try it for just one month.
Alex Huggett: Try tithing and see what happens.
Alex Huggett: Now maybe you just can't count.
Alex Huggett: Count, countenance giving 10% For one month.
Alex Huggett: I'd really challenge you to try that.
Alex Huggett: But if you really can't just give something 5%, if you're already giving why not try giving a little bit more?
Alex Huggett: If you're not giving 10%, bump it up, see what happens 15%, maybe More.
Alex Huggett: And as you do, though, remember this is an act of worship first and foremost.
Alex Huggett: It's a, first and foremost, giving our hearts to God, because money so often has our heart, and in giving it to God, we're releasing Pray, pray as you go, seek God, dedicate yourself to Him, as well as your finances, and look if, after a month or maybe two, god hasn't blessed you in some way.
Alex Huggett: If you're really struggling to get food on the table and pay the bills and you have no joy in it and you're not feeling closer to God, okay, stop, you don't have to do it, it's not work.
Alex Huggett: Paul says God loves a cheerful giver, and if it ain't bringing cheer into your life, ask God why.
Alex Huggett: What's going on?
Alex Huggett: Do some self-examination, but if it is, what might happen, it's not when things are easy that we need faith or we need miracles.
Alex Huggett: It's when times are tough that our faith is tested, and what does God say in this regard?
Alex Huggett: Test me in this way.
Alex Huggett: See if I will not open up the floodgates of heaven and pour out a blessing for you without measure.
Alex Huggett: Let's pray, oh, father, as I'm preaching this, I'm just aware of how much a whole money can have on me sometimes, and, father, I'm sure that's common to many of us.
Alex Huggett: Lord, give us the faith, the courage, the conviction to honor you Father, the understanding to know what's happening when we relinquish our finances to you.
Alex Huggett: And, father, I pray that, as we do, that you will multiply your ministry here in this church, that your kingdom will come into our city and into our world.
Alex Huggett: Father, I thank you for the abundant generosity of this church.
Alex Huggett: We see Lord through our faith offering and through our offerings.
Alex Huggett: Lord, there's so much more to do and, father, there's so much more for you to do within our hearts, in our homes, in our families.
Alex Huggett: Please make us more like Jesus, amen.