Honour the Lord with your wealth, with the first-fruits 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
My aunt, who was unmarried, started a shoe shop in Stevenston in 1952 - seventy years ago. She was a very generous lady giving to missionaries and local people in need. Her business started with nothing but it is still going today many years after her death. If you are visiting the seaside town of Largs you will see a shoe-shop called C.Y. Neilly (the original shop is in Stevenston). Aunt Cathy never married and after her death her older brother took over the business. Again, he followed the same principle. He was visited by the Inland Revenue and they queried the amount of stock he had given away for nothing. They had not been used to a business being run on the principles of Proverbs chapter 3 and verse 9.
My uncle always said that our possessions were given to us in trust. God expects us to use our wealth for His glory. "The Lord loves a cheerful giver." "God is no man's debtor." I remember these statements being made regularly in my boyhood days. Two brothers lived in council houses a few streets away from each other - one in Misk Knowes and the other in Sommerville Drive, Stevenston. My father worked in Ardeer Factory in the cash department but he regularly talked about money as 'filthy lucre,' referring to the fact that his hands got so dirty from handling cash all day. My uncle worked in Ardeer Foundry at that time, before he started working in C.Y. Neilly's shoe shop. My mother did not go out to work and neither did my Aunt Lizzie so there was only one wage earner. I never thought we were poor but we lived fairly plain lives - few luxuries and few holidays. But both brothers were kind and generous. That has left a lasting impression on me. I have watched our society become more affluent and more materialistic but less contented and more stressful and more materialistic.
The verses in Proverbs are so relevant to us today even though we live in a very different society. The book of Proverbs was written for an agricultural society where most people would be subsistence farmers. In other words, they did not expect to make huge profits from their land. Most people just hoped to have enough to live on. And yet the writer was instructing them to make a priority of giving to God. He was to receive the first-fruits of their harvest before they had taken the harvest for themselves. The promise is that God would reward their generosity. Their barns would be overflowing and their vats would be filled with new wine. Jesus told a parable about a man whose barns were overflowing but he forgot all about God and he is called a 'fool.'
I want to repeat earlier warnings about the danger of preaching a prosperity Gospel. It is easy to persuade some poor people in the developing world to give generously to the pastor in the hope that they would be rewarded with prosperity. This has made some pastors obscenely wealthy and it opens the Christian church to criticism and condemnation. They are abusing their position of trust and they are bringing the Word of God into disrepute. Our giving all starts with the condition of our heart. If we give out of a sense of duty, we have missed the point and we are failing to grasp what God wants from us. If we give to the Lord because we know that others will be watching us and we want to impress others with our generosity, we are also wide of the mark. God wants us to love Him and to respond to His love by our kindness to others who need our help. Generosity is a sign of spirituality - a response to our appreciation of what Christ has done for us.
We may be rewarded financially and materially. I am aware that many Christians have been generous and the Lord has blessed them financially. But even if we are still struggling materially, there is a huge spiritual gain from giving to the Lord. I am not just suggesting that we will be rich when we get to heaven. This may sound 'cheesy' but my perception has been that Godly people are also rewarded in this life with an abundant supply of spiritual blessings. When he was writing to Timothy, Paul highlighted the blessings which came from a right perspective with regard to material things. Paul referred to false teachers who think that godliness is a means to financial gain (in other words, they practise a sham form of 'godliness with a view to making a financial profit - so they were around in the first century).
'But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. 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. ' [1 Timothy 6:6-10 NIV]
I would still recommend this formula for life
Godliness + contentment = Great gain (spiritually)
Photo by Karren McPherson, photographer for Day Share.
Prosperity heresy a big problem in Uganda