Welcome to this year's big money sermon.  Well…that’s what it’s called isn’t it?   We might call this a stewardship campaign, and a stewardship sermon, but the preacher is going to talk about money, so hold onto your wallets!   Yep.   Today’s the day.   You have your envelopes, you packets, and the preacher’s going to talk about giving.   Giving money.   Or worse yet….the “T” word.   Tithing.    But before I say anything more, we should hear from someone with a little more, well.. oomph.   How about a prophet?   A prophet who speaks God’s words to the people.   Malachi 3:6-12.

MALACHI 10-24-10

6 For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, have not perished. ⁷Ever since the days of your ancestors you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts. But you say, ‘How shall we return?’

8 Will anyone rob God? Yet you are robbing me! But you say, ‘How are we robbing you?’ In your tithes and offerings! ⁹You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me—the whole nation of you! ¹⁰Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts; see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing. ¹¹I will rebuke the locust^* for you, so that it will not destroy the produce of your soil; and your vine in the field shall not be barren, says the Lord of hosts. ¹²Then all nations will count you happy, for you will be a land of delight, says the Lord of hosts.

So says the Lord of Hosts.  

Remember in August, we gathered for our Tailgate party out on the front lawn?  We were getting PLUGGED INTO the Power of God through the ministries of the church.  And we were getting POWERED UP and energized!  PLUG IN and POWER UP!  Remember?   Gabriel and I, preaching at the top of our lungs…PLUG IN…POWER UP?

Well...once you’re plugged in and powered up…once you got your full charge….what then? I have a cordless drill. Sometimes I charge it up just before putting it back into the case.   Then it goes back out into the garage.  And then several weeks or even months go by and then I need to drill a hole, or drive a screw and I go out and get the drill out of the case and guess what?   You got it.   It’s run down!   I didn’t put it to use when I charged it up!  I put it away!  What good is it to be plugged in and powered up if you’re not put to use?  So today, we’ve added a third component to our charge. PLUG IN!  POWER UP!  And now... PASS IT ON!

Just as any powered tool or instrument is plugged in and powered up for a purpose, so too are we!   We’re not simply plugged in and powered up to feel the buzz!  To be lit up for our benefit only.  No, we plug in and power up for the purpose of being put to use, passing on what we have received for the transformation of the world into the Kingdom of God!

So if you’ve plugged in.   (And I hope you have or at least thought about how you will by now) and if you’ve powered up (a personal experience and encounter with Jesus that makes you new!) then it’s time to pass it on!   I know three good ways to do that.  

The first is your witness.  Take advantage of opportunities to tell others about the joy and the life that you have found in Christ, and live your life in such a way that others see that power at work.   A man in our church just this week told me that he has a sticky note in his pocket calendar with our church’s mission statement on it: “to create opportunities for people to encounter Jesus in ways that they will believe and be made new.”   He took his calendar out of his pocket to set a date with another man who saw the sticky note and asked “what’s that.”   The church member showed him the mission statement, telling him that this is what our church aims to accomplish, to which the other man responded, “that’s pretty good.”  You see how simple it is to be a witness?  Now, if you can follow your witness up with an invitation, that’s even better.  Better still, follow your invitation with an offer to bring or accompany someone to church or Sunday school.   Do that…and you are powering up others with the energy and power of God!

Beyond our witness is our service--putting the power of God to work to bring healing and wholeness to others. How many of you here were at the Numana food packaging a few weeks ago?   Didn’t you feel plugged in? Wasn’t it powerful?  Better yet, didn’t you feel as if you were being put to use?   It was the most organized, efficient and exciting project I’ve ever been a part of!    Now, think for just a moment about all that food that was packaged here being loaded onto a ship, setting sail for Haiti.   See in your mind the big cranes offloading giant cargo boxes from that ship to the dock in Port Au Prince.  Imagine those boxes of food being transported to outlying areas where people are starving where they are opened, those same boxes we sealed. Can you see in your mind, those bags we sealed being handed out, and people smiling, excited to see food---real food perhaps for the first time in days or weeks.   Imagine those bags, those very  bags we filled and weighed and sealed and flattened and boxed up, those same bags being opened again…the contents being poured out into a pan filled with hot water…imagine bowls being filled and starving people eating food instead of dirt.   That’s the power of God!   Passed on!   Making a difference!    Anytime you put yourself into service, you become a transmission line of God’s love and care to others!  

We pass on the power of God in our witness and our service and also, our giving.  (Yes…this is the money part!)   But hear me out.   Almost anything we can do, anything we can offer, anything we can provide for someone else, has first been done for us, offered to us, provided for us.   Anything we have to give…has first been given to us.

You might be thinking. “Not me! I EARN anything I get.”   Ah…but how much would you earn without the God given gifts of health, strength, wisdom, and talent or skill?   How much would you earn without the opportunity to be employed?   How much of all that you receive isn’t reliant somehow on what you have first received from God? 

So, anything we have to pass on has first been passed to us.  An electricity transmitter can only pass on what has been received.   It can transform that energy, change it into a useable voltage…but it can only pass on what it has received.  The same is true of us.   The power we pass on…whether it is our witness, our service, or our gifts, we can only pass on what we first have received.

That’s the principle of tithing.   God’s people are asked to give only a tenth, a ten percent portion, of all that we have received.   The other 90 percent… can be used for our own needs.   It’s okay to enjoy the fruit of your labor, that’s biblical too!   But of every dollar received…because God has been generous with you…God asks that you consider returning a dime.   A single solitary dime.   And if God isn’t worth a dime, well….

 Our reading from the prophet Malachi today is one that it takes some courage to read and preach in the church today…mainly because the church is largely made up of people who think tithing is old school….really old school, I mean old TESTAMENT school!   No one tithes today right?   Wrong!

We have people who tithe.   I tithe.  My wife tithes.   Many on our staff tithe.   We have a number in this congregation who tithe, because they have found that if you really believe, and I mean REALLY believe that all we have comes from God, then gratitude motivates one to return a portion, a percentage, a tithe to God for God’s work.

Tithing still is the biblical expectation (no that’s too soft) …tithing is GOD’S expectation for his people.   In Malachi, God speaks through the prophet.  “¹⁰Bring the full tithe into the storehouse,” God says.   The full tithe.   The whole tithe.  The whole enchilada.  The whole ball of wax.   The whole nine yards.   The whole shootin’ match.  The whole kit and caboodle.   Bring the whole tithe—the full tithe into my house,” God says.

Not half an enchilada but the whole thing.   Not just the kit, and not just the caboodle, but the whole kit and caboodle.  Not 3 yards, not 6 but the whole nine yards!  Amen?  

For if you do not, what is it God says to His people?   “You have robbed me.”

“You have robbed me, in your tithes and offerings.”   Who here wants to dare tempt fate by robbing God?  

Not me.  But more than that…I understand something else.   I understand how little a tithe is…it’s just a dime after all—just a dime!   But I also understand how much the tithe is…how much the church can accomplish if its people tithe.

Our church has about 505 households locally—in our zip code or within driving distance.  What if those households all tithed?   Could we double our budget?  That we could we go from $650,000 dollars to say, 1.3 million?   Well…the census tells us that the median household income…not individual income but income for an entire household in Ford County was $47, 590 back in 2008.  The median—meaning half of the incomes were higher than that, and half of the incomes were lower than that.  Now then, if you took our 505 households all making the middle income—and they tithed…you’d have a budget of not $650,000, not 1.3 million dollars either.   If all our local households tithed…we’d have 2.4 MILLION  dollars to do Christ’s work!   We’d pay our M & M’s in the first week of the year and go on to pay the M & M’s for our entire Dodge City District.   We’d pay our Bridges to the Future pledge all the way through 2012…and put shoes not just on the first 200 children who show up but on the whole district.   Can you imagine?   A 2.4 million dollar budget…we could build the dining hall at Youthville ourselves!   A 2.4 million dollar budget…the DIMES ADD UP!   That’s if we all tithed.

“But preacher,”  you might be thinking, “not everyone gives, let alone tithes.”   True. We know there are some “inactives.”   Hmmm?   In fact, we know that of our 505 local households, only 302 households give. We have a record of at least one gift this year from 302 households.  But if those 302 giving households tithed, we’d still increase our budget from $650,000 to about 1.4 million dollar budget!  The dimes add up.

In fact, look at it this way.   If all of our church members, about 950 of us…if all our members worked at say…McDonald’s for minimum wage…7.25 an hour.  That’s not much.  It’s only about $15,000 dollars a year—below the poverty line.  But if we all made only that, and…we all tithed…gave just a dime for every dollar, we’d have roughly one and a half million dollars for the work of Christ.   1.5 million dollars.   The tithe of our members if we all made minimum wage.

But we all don’t.   We don’t all work for McDonald’s do we?    And we all don’t tithe either, do we?  No, a dime is too much.  We don’t all bring the full tithe into the storehouse for God’s work.   Nope.  We don’t.  And when we don’t…we’re holding up God, instead of passing on God’s love and God’s power.   Plug in.  Power up.   Pass it on.   Amen.