Albert Einstein said, “Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.” Last week we started a series of messages for November that ask a simple question: what are you worth? Another way of asking that is to borrow from Einstein: what is your value? Last week we talked about worth, or value, in terms of people and of time. People are of great value to God and God invites us to create value for him and for others and even for ourselves as we use the very valuable commodity of time. As we spend the next few minutes of our time with each other we are going to move the conversation to another aspect and we are going to talk about something near and dear to our hearts: money. So hold on to your wallets, the preacher is talking about your money today.

What are you worth? Most often when we think about that we think in terms of money. In fact, there is a magazine with that title: Worth. The magazine’s website proclaims that its mission is, “to better enlighten, inspire and serve a select group…with an avid interest in the intelligent stewardship of their personal wealth.” There is a piece of that I particularly like: “intelligent stewardship.” That is what we are after when it comes to talking about money from the perspective of our faith: intelligent stewardship. And we are talking about a particular kind of intelligence: spiritual intelligence. Money is precious, is it not? Everyone should be interested in the wise, intelligent, effective stewardship of money.

If you browse through bookstores you’ll most likely discover that there are two basic approaches to the business of money: how to make money and how to spend money. God certainly has no qualms with the business of making money. Making money is about making a living, and God put us on this good earth with the means and ability to earn our living while we are here. But what I want to talk about today is how you spend money. It is in the spending of your money that you actually create value with it. Stockpiled money, saved money, money in the bank, is of no good to anyone unless it is being spent some way or the other. Loaned money, invested money, spent money has the potential for great good. Just making money is not enough. To go back to the wisdom of Mr. Einstein, we might say that success in creating wealth is one thing, but that success means little unless we learn how to create value with our wealth, which is a question of spending. Money is meaningless until it is spent and so the wise, intelligent spending of money is a deeply spiritual issue. And so we must turn to God’s wisdom in scripture to learn not just about how to be successful in making money, but how to create value in spending money.

Two of the Bible’s pivotal passages on the important question of spending money are the ones we’ve just read from Deuteronomy and II Corinthians. Let’s linger a few moments with each of them and learn the crucial lessons they have for us. The Deuteronomy passage is a portion of a larger section in which God, through the voice of Moses, is teaching the people of Israel about how they will conduct themselves as God’s people once they have crossed over the Jordan River and entered the Holy Land. God has rescued the people from bondage in Egypt and led them through the wilderness and they are on the threshold of their new home that God has prepared for them. And that is actually the first lesson the passage teaches us. The land of Israel and the promise of becoming a nation is a pure gift from God, literally “an inheritance to possess,” Deuteronomy says. The primary question we have to ask and answer when it comes to the business of making and spending money is this: to whom does your money belong? If it belongs to you, then you have the right and responsibility to determine what you will do with it. But if it belongs to someone else, then just maybe that someone has some say in the matter. People of faith have always understood these twin truths: what we have is what has been given to us. Though we have worked to earn our money, still it is a gift, because life and land and the ability to work are from God. All Christian stewardship is grounded in this essential belief, that the possessions we have are not ours alone, but we hold them as gifts from God.

Everything else that happens in this Deuteronomy passage flows from the people’s recognition that they owe their existence and life and identity as a nation to God. And so, they are commanded to take some of the first fruit and present it before the priests with the acknowledgment that it is a gift from God. Notice: what they give is not the leftovers, not the last fruit once they have seen if there is enough for everything else, not that which is already used and worn out, but the first. The order of giving is important. When you give at the front end from the first fruit you establish a spiritual order of things that is in fact consistent with the very nature of creation itself. The reason to give the first fruit is so that we will never forget from where our wealth originates and what our possessions are all about. Only when we have that priority established can we hope to spend everything we have with wisdom and the ultimate impact that God wants it to have.

Right about now I suspect that some of you are thinking, “Oh great. God wants us to pay him off before I get my share.” But notice what happens next. The people are commanded to celebrate with what they give! The people have to be reminded that their ability to give something back to God is cause for joy. God does not ask the people to take from something that they do not have, but from what they do have! Why is it that in the church when we talk about stewardship and giving we instantly become defensive and angry and sad and focus on how much we are giving away, when the real focus should be on how much we get to have and to keep and to spend for ourselves? “Celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you,” the scripture says. We are to use the small portion we give to remind us to be thankful for the large portion God has given and be happy about it!

Notice this as well. The celebration includes some folks and those folks represent an important spiritual principle. The Levites, the aliens, the orphans, and the widows are to be involved in the celebration because they are the recipients of the gift of the first fruits. The Levites were the men of the tribe of Levi, the one tribe of the original twelve that was set aside as the priests of God. Having a relationship with God, their very source of life, was so important to the people of Israel that they made sure they provided for special people and special places to remind them of their faith and to teach their faith to succeeding generations. Also included were the aliens, orphans, and widows, those groups of people who could not provide for themselves. Part of the giving of the people was about insuring the life of religion, and part of the giving was about insuring the lives of those who had to depend on the others for their very existence. In Christian terms, we would see this as giving to the needs of the church and giving to the needs of others.

Finally, from Deuteronomy, we read that when the sacred portion is given to God, the giver is to say that he has given, “in accordance with your entire commandment that you commanded me; I have neither transgressed nor forgotten any of your commandments.” What is that about? It is about simply this: when we spend our money in the way that God commands we also align ourselves with all the rest of God’s commands. When we trust God with something so precious as our money we are more likely to trust God in other areas of our lives. When we turn over control of that part of our lives which has to do with our possessions then we are learning how to turn control over in other areas of our lives. Giving is therefore a sacred act of spiritual discipline that strengthens us in every aspect of our faithfulness to God.

When we turn to the New Testament and Paul’s second letter to The Village Community Church of Corinth, what we see there on the topic of spending and giving money is directly tied to what we learned from ancient Israel. From the various churches he founded, Paul has been collecting an offering to take back to the church in Jerusalem, because the Christians there are suffering from extreme poverty. He wants the Christians in Corinth to participate, both for the good of those in Jerusalem and for the spiritual growth of the Corinthian Christians themselves. And so he starts essentially where Moses starts in the Deuteronomy passage-with the grace of God. God’s grace has so filled the hearts of the Christians in Macedonia that they have given generously to help those in Jerusalem, even in their own poverty, from their first fruits, so to speak. The Macedonians gave in order to share in the ministry, another way of saying that they were doing God’s work, supporting the message of the gospel and taking care of the less fortunate. Paul told the Corinthians that they were excellent in many spiritual aspects, and so they needed to learn the discipline of being excellent in giving. And Paul reminded the Corinthians that their abundance would supply the need of the people in Jerusalem, and one day the tables might be turned, in other words, God wants everyone’s need to be filled.

Paul had one advantage over Moses when it came to talking about giving. Paul had Christ. “For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor….” Of course Paul wasn’t talking about Jesus’ money. Paul was talking about Jesus himself. But the spiritual principle is there: giving yourself away is what God does for us, and therefore what God invites us to do for others. If Jesus could give his life for you, can you not give some of your precious money for the things that were precious to him? Pretty simple, isn’t it?

It is all pretty simple, or should be. But you and I so often become confused and distracted and pulled in a different direction when it comes to how we spend the precious resource that is our money. That is why I wanted to take us through a simple review of some of the key things that we know from God about the wise use of our money. We are more likely to spend well when we realize that what we have is a gift from God. We are more likely to spend well when we remember to thank God for the abundance we do have. We are more likely to spend well when we insure that others are being taken care of. We are more likely to spend well when we are working for something larger than ourselves, something that is actually part of what God is doing in the world. We are more likely to spend well when we measure all of our financial decisions against the decisions that Jesus made that led him ultimately to the cross.

You may think that I have been talking about spending well only in terms of what you give to the church or what you give to other worthy causes that take care of people. But actually, I have been talking about all of your spending. God wants all of his children, including you, to have enough of what they need. In the reality of the world, however, some will have too much, and some, too little. In the reality of the world, however, all will need constantly to learn how to be wise in their use of money. And so, God gives us the gift of requiring us to give, so that others may have, and so that all may learn, through the life of the church, about how to share. What you spend on the things of God, therefore, changes the purpose and character of what you spend on yourself. When we do not learn to spend for God, we don’t really learn to spend for ourselves. And so we need to learn to become wise, spiritually wise, in all of our spending.

There once was a thrifty farmer from Vermont who went to the bank and requested a one dollar loan. The bank manager told him that could be arranged, but that the farmer would have to put up some collateral. The farmer produced a $10,000.00 government bond and asked if that would be enough. The banker readily agreed of course, took the bond, and sent the farmer off with his loaned dollar. Every year, the farmer would go to the bank and renew his one dollar loan. Every year, he would pay the required interest on the loan, 7 percent, which he paid with one nickel and two pennies. After many years of receiving their 7 cents interest on a loan of one dollar secured with a $10,000.00 bond, the bank manager became very curious. One year, when the farmer came in to renew the loan and pay his interest, the manager asked him, “Why do you need this one dollar loan?” And the farmer said, “Well, you’ve been holding my government bond all this time and keeping it safe. Do you know how much you would have charged me for a safe-deposit box?”

How much value are you getting when you spend? Are you helping others? Are you supporting the spread of the Kingdom of God? Are you enjoying the huge portion that you get to spend on yourself and your own needs? When you learn to spend well for God then you learn to spend well for yourself.

Amen.