Why ‘Begin Again’?, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Hey, welcome back to Summit Life with pastor, author and apologist J.D. Greer.

I'm your host Molly Bidevich. You know, the world seems darker and more confusing by the day, whether it's politics, morality, education or justice. It all just seems to be heading downhill, doesn't it? But now is not a time to shrink back in fear. It's actually a moment for us to renew our commitment to righteousness, to step forward in faith. If we've stopped to begin again. Today, Pastor J.D. continues teaching from Exodus chapter 13, showing us why we need a new beginning and how to actually do it. So let's rejoin Pastor J.D.

right now in Exodus chapter 13 as he continues the teaching we began yesterday called Why Begin Again? First principle of beginning again, number one, number one, he says they were to bring their firstborn, not their 10th born. Bring your firstborn, not your 10th born. God said to bring the first one out of the womb, not the second one or the fourth one or the 20th one. Why?

Well, you probably know why. First, when you give God the firstborn, what you're declaring is that God deserves your first and your best. Even before you get anything, he deserves it. And second, what you're saying is that you trust God to provide for you in the future. Because when that first one comes, that's all you got, right? And you're not sure what's gonna come after it.

It could be a lot, could be a little, could be none at all. So giving that first one to God declares that you trust God to provide for you. Principle number two, they brought their first and best, not donated it.

They brought their first and their best, not donated it. The language in Exodus 13 is a bringing, not donating. You see verse 12, verse 12, you are to bring to the Lord every firstborn male of the womb or present to the Lord. All firstborn offering of the livestock that you own that are males, they belong to the Lord. Again, bring, not donate. You say, well, what's the difference?

Well, you donate something that belongs to you that you want somebody else to have, but you cannot donate what already belongs to somebody. Look at the positive side of the verse though, okay? Test me, he goes on to say, test me in this way though, says the Lord of armies, bring the tithe to me first and watch, see if I will not open the floodgates of heaven and pour out a blessing for you without measure.

Test me. I love that you cannot out give God. And God says, you honor me and I will honor you. Verse 11, then God gives the negative side of the promise, right? If you give me the first fruits, I will rebuke the devourer for you so that it will not ruin the produce of your land. The implication being that if you don't give him the first fruits, he won't stop the devourer.

He may frustrate your efforts so you don't experience the abundance of God and the fullness of joy on this part of your life. That's principle number two. Principle number two is you give, you bring it, not donate it. Number three, third principle, what they had as precedent, what they had as precedent, we now have as pattern.

A lot of times people object here and they're like, oh, but JD, I kind of got you on this one. This is all Old Testament. We're not under the law anymore. Christ has freed us from the law, which means he freed us from this. We are under grace now.

And I agree. In fact, it makes me a little proud that you say that because I feel like I had a part in teaching you that. But here's the question in the New Testament, what does Jesus do with the Old Testament laws? Did you just throw them away or does he raise the stakes on them or lower them?

He always raised it. The law is like the minimum. If you understand love, it will always compel you to go farther than the law. The same would be true with generosity. We would expect that Jesus's love would not take us backwards into less generosity. We would think that his gospel, his love, his cross would propel us forward into greater sacrifice. And sure enough, if you want to be technical about it, the smallest percentage for a gift that we find in the New Testament is 50%. People like Zacchaeus or the woman with the alabaster flask of perfume, they get so overwhelmed by Christ's grace, they don't even keep count anymore. They just can't help but give extravagantly. A lot of people think that Jesus never talked about the tithe in the New Testament, but he did.

Let me show it. Matthew 23, 23, Jesus says this, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, elders and deacons and seminary grads, you tithe mint and dill and cuban. These guys tithed from their spice rack.

That's varsity. When you're pulling off spices of stuff like 10% of the ground pepper, 10% of the time, that's amazing. But you neglect mercy and faithfulness. These, the first things you ought to have done. See that phrase, the tithing, you should have done that, but you shouldn't do that without neglecting the others. In other words, you were right to tithe, but that was only the beginning of generosity. You see, for the Christian, tithing is not the ceiling of generosity, it's the floor.

It's the starting point. So don't hate on the tithe. Jesus did not hate on the tithe.

Think about it, right? Jesus in a way is God's tithe to us. He gave his first and his best so that we could be saved. So far from seeing the tithe as an Old Testament law to be discarded, should not we joyfully offer our first and our best back to him.

So see, that's what we learned from Exodus 13. Now, because I love you people, and I've been with you for a long time, let me deal with some common questions that I get regarding this, or dare I say even objections. We'll call this the yeah but section of the message. Yeah but, okay, here we go. Yeah but, here's the first one, I can't afford it.

Well, let me ask you this. Based on what I've shared with you today, can you afford not to? I mean, listen, I understand some of you are in financial situations that are pretty difficult. And the last thing I want to do is put some kind of burdensome God tax on you. In fact, if you were in that category, if you were in a financial emergency, what I'd love for you to hear is I'd love for us to be a help to you if we can. But God's commands to give the first fruits are not directed only to people with excess money.

They're given to everybody. No matter what your financial situation is, you can still give your first and best to God. Jesus once very famously looked at a poor widow who was putting in two half pennies into an offering plate in the temple. It was an incredibly small offering, like totally insignificant.

The counters probably wouldn't even register it on the balance sheet. Jesus says to his disciples that her giving of those two pennies was more meaningful to God than all the money given by all the rich people that day because they were giving out of their excess, money they would not really miss, money that they could afford while hers represented her first and best, given in faith, given in trust that God would provide what she needed. So even if you have very little, you can still give your first fruits, your first born in faith to God, trusting that if you do so, he'll take care of you just like you promised.

One of the best applications of this I've ever heard comes from David Jeremiah, pastor out in California, who tells a story about a young couple in his church who heard him teach on some of these things. And they came to him, they like, pastor, we really want to obey this, but we're really struggling because man, we're on a shoestring budget. We're just married and we're trying to make all this work.

And how do we do it? And David Jeremiah says, tell you what, why don't you write a check for what the tithe is, write down and once you give it to me, I'm going to put it in an envelope and I'm going to put it in the top door of my desk. And at the end of the month, I'll check on you.

And if you can't pay your bills, I will tear this up and give it back to you. He said, how does that sound? And they kind of looked at each other and said, well, that sounds reasonable. That's all we can do that.

He sort of got a smile, a little twinkle in his eye. And he said, well, shame on you because you just said that you trust me more than you trust God because that's what God says he will do. So if you trust and obey God, then this is the way that you show him. All right, that's your first yeah but.

Second yeah but. Yeah but, I feel like this is all a manipulation ploy by you to get my money. So we're all thinking that, so I'll just go ahead and verbalize it for you, okay? Let me address this in a couple of ways. First, I want you to know sincerely that my wife and I see serving here as one of the greatest privileges of our lives. And we see ourselves as first and foremost givers to this church, not receivers from this church. Every year we are praying about how we can lead in giving and in sacrifice for years. Our giving goal here for our family has been to double tithe. And I don't say that to brag, I'm just trying to say that I got skin in this gate.

And sometimes we've been able to go beyond even that. So please understand that my primary goal is not to get money from you, it's to lead you in giving like Jesus, a giving that I want to model for you. In fact, I always love to say it this way, you don't give to the church as much as you give through the church. You're giving to Jesus at his mission through the church, not to. You're not giving to me or the other pastors, we're all giving to the mission of God through this church. Second, I want you to know that we have a very open and accountable process at this church.

We would invite you to take a look at. I am under the authority of a group of congregationally appointed elders. They are not staff members who work for me and whose salaries I control, they're lay members who are appointed by the congregation. They oversee all that we do with money.

They don't work for me, they don't report to me, I work for them and report to them. But finally on this, let me say what I always try to say here. If obeying this command of God is hard for you because you just can't shake the idea that I'm trying to manipulate you or get rich off of you, maybe you had some previous experience in a church and it was really misused and you saw that, or maybe just turn on the news and watch some pastor somewhere that's just totally abusing this. I understand, I really do.

I really genuinely do. I'm going to ask that you obey God's command to be generous. If this is you I'm describing, please obey God's command to be generous, but give it somewhere else.

If you cannot get over some bad experience, you've seen this used manipulatively and you're associating that with me, I want to take away that obstacle for you. So I'm going to ask you to obey Jesus in this, but give it somewhere else. It is much more important to me that you learn to be obedient to Jesus than it is for you to give here. Because you can't be an actual disciple of Jesus if you don't give generously. And it's more important to me that you learn to give than that you give your money here. We'll be fine. Genuinely, we will.

Right? God will take care of us, but for you, for the sake of your soul and for your walk with God, give somewhere else. Now, I do sincerely hope that if this is the church that God has brought you to, that one day you will learn to trust us and you'll be able to give here with a joyful, happy heart.

But for the time being, if that's an obstacle, I'm just asking you, getting my permission, even my request, give somewhere else. All right, here's a question that I get a lot. Okay, here's another one. Should I tithe off of the gross or the net? In other words, pre-tithe or post-tax? I do get this question a fair amount. And sometimes I struggle to answer this because I don't want to imply there's a bunch of technical rules out there about giving. That's just not the New Testament way. And usually this question is asked with the right spirit, but just know it kind of puts me in a weird position, but I get it so much, I'm going to answer it. So don't hear this as some kind of divine rule.

I'm just going to tell you how my wife and I think about it. Veronica and I have always tithed off of the gross, our income pre-tax, because A, we know that it's God's before it's the government's. Plus, I kind of want God to bless the whole, not just the net. So I want to give to him first. I want to honor him with the first fruits, not the post-tax second fruits.

So that's how we think about it. Then there's this question, where should I give the tithe? Let us pick out my favorite charity.

Can I be my own charity? Again, I don't want to get too legalistic, but like I showed you a moment ago from Malachi or Malachi, the only Italian prophet, if that's how you read that. In every age, God has always established a central institution to be the hub of his work in the world. For the Jews in Malachi's day, it was the temple, the storehouse and the temple. The temple oversaw the teaching and worship ministry and oversaw the distribution to the poor. In the New Testament, that institution is clearly the local church.

We do all the same things that the temple did. We lead in worship, teaching, doing missions, helping support the poor in our city and around the world. That is not to say you should not give outside the church, just that the biblical pattern is that the tithe itself goes to the institution God appointed, which in our case would be the local church. Beyond the tithe, I think there's a lot more flexibility in following the Spirit's guidance in your life.

For what it's worth, my wife and I give a minimum 10% off the gross here to our local church, and then we support a number of extra mission things with another 10%. You are listening to Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer, and we'll get right back to today's teaching in just a moment. But first, did you know that Pastor J.D. has a brand new book releasing soon? It's called Twelve Truths and a Lie, answers to life's biggest questions. Okay, let's be honest. There are hard questions that we all have to answer in life, like, can I know that I'm going to heaven? And what's my purpose in life? Pastor J.D.

answers these questions with biblical truth, and he also answers one of the most prevalent lies in Christianity today. Now, the book releases December 5th, but I'm going to let you in on a little secret, okay? If you preorder the book, we will not only send you a physical copy when it releases, but we'll also send you the audiobook version read by Pastor J.D.

right now. All you have to do is head over to jdgreer.com to preorder. But don't wait because this special offer will end when the book releases.

So preorder Twelve Truths and a Lie today. Now let's get back to today's teaching. Once again, here's Pastor J.D. All right, how about this one? Tithe. Check.

Am I done? A lot of Christians are like, all right, 10% check. God tax is paid. Duty's done. Now I can go on and enjoy my money guilt-free. I know a lot of people wouldn't say that bluntly, but my job is to basically verbalize bluntly what you're thinking.

And that's basically how they think. But remember Matthew 23, 23. Jesus said that in giving the tithe, you hadn't even gotten to the weightier realities of Christ's likeness. And that's giving motivated by worship and mercy and compassion. Experiencing the extravagance of God's generosity in the gospel should lead you to an extravagant generosity toward others. I mean, after all, y'all, Jesus did not save you by tithing his blood, did he? No, to save you, he gave all of it. So somebody that's been truly impacted by the gospel is not asking how much do I have to give so I can go back to my self-centered life of material pursuits without guilt. They say, how can I leverage more of my life for others the way that Jesus leveraged his for me?

So I will say it again. For somebody impacted by the gospel, tithing is never the ceiling of their giving. Tithing is the floor.

How about this one? I tithed once, no big payoff ever came through. You're like, well, I tithed one time and it didn't have a cool random check in the mail for the exact amount of money as my mission trip plus a stamp story like you do. Sometimes people hear these stories and they assume that bringing the tithe works like some kind of a spiritual rebate program where God's like, mail this in, I guarantee you'll get a check in the mail back for more. But you get, don't you, that God's blessing in your life doesn't always come in financial forms, right? In fact, I would say that many of God's greatest blessings are not financial by a long shot. For example, 1 Timothy 6, Paul says, godliness with contentment is great gain. So what's a greater gift?

Think about it. What is a greater gift? More money or the ability to be happy and secure and content with what you have? And you're like, well, why don't you give me more money and I'll think about it. But just hang with me, okay? You guys know that some of the unhappiest, greediest, most miserable people in the world are wealthy, right?

Starts with K, rhymes with Ardashian. More money does not always mean more happiness. So God might say, hey, instead of more money, that won't make you happy anyway. What if in response to your generosity I give you something greater than money?

That is the ability to be happy and content. In fact, in the rest of the verse, Paul says it's people of a corrupt mind who think that godliness, tithing, is a means to financial gain. But godliness with contentment itself is great gain. You all have the belief that if you give to God that he'll make you richer, that's what we call the prosperity gospel. And it is a false, dangerous gospel, even though a lot of people in America believe it and a lot of pastors in America get rich off of teaching it.

Paul says to reject it. Maybe through your generosity he will wean you off of dependence on things of the world. Maybe through your generosity he will enlarge your heart of love for others and teach you the joy of Christ's likeness. I mean, after all, Jesus said it's more blessed to give than to receive. You know, the Greek word for blessed is the word materios, and it literally means happy or blissful.

It's happier. It's more blissful to give than to receive. God may teach you that through your generosity. Now listen, in every study ever done on this, secular or Christian, it all showed that the happiest people in the world are generous people. I love how in the great philosophical treatise Dr. Seuss's Grinch movie, you got the Grinch as somebody whose heart is what? Small and shriveled, which makes him not just selfish but also deeply unhappy. Remember that great little quote about why the Grinch was so grumpy?

Remember this? It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right. It could be perhaps his shoes were too tight.

I think, though, that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was too size is too small. You think the reason you're unhappy is because you need new shoes or a new job, but what you really need is an enlarged heart, a God-like heart, and God uses generosity to produce that in you. So in whatever way God enriches you, and he will, I promise, it will be his best for you. It will lead to your joy. That's why we often say here generosity is not something God wants from you.

It's something he wants for you. So that's my attempt to deal with the biggest objections I hear to this teaching on giving to the first fruits. Again, I'll say it again. If hearing me talk about this and talk about money in church in general is an obstacle, please give somewhere else. Just give, because you cannot be an actual disciple of Jesus and not give radically and generously. Jesus talked more about money than he did any other subject, because he knew. Not because he needed money.

He'd take five letters of doofish and feed it himself for 10 lifetimes. He just knew that money gets to the heart of what we really love and trust. To circle back to Exodus 13, here's my favorite part of giving. In the future, when your son asks you, what does this mean? Remember, say to him, by the strength of the hand of the Lord, he brought us up out of Egypt, out of the place of slavery. When my son sees me give, and I do want to do it in front of him, and my son says, Daddy, why? I should give in a way, by the way, that makes him ask why.

Dad, why do you do that? I get to tell him, Son, I give like this in an extravagant way, because I was a slave to sin, and God saved your Daddy. Jesus paid it all. All to him I owe, Son. Sin had left a crimson stain.

He washed it white as so. Son, I was nothing without him. I was hopeless.

I was lost. So, of course, he deserves my first and my best. I owe him everything. I owe him everything.

In fact, we're the whole realm of nature, mind. That would be a present far too small, love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all. Son, see, if that's how much he loved me, if he loved me enough to come to earth to pursue and save me, well, that means I can trust him with my future. He'll always take care of me and provide for me. If he rescued me when I was his enemy, now he's going to take care of me now that I'm his son. So I give to him first, and I'll get to tell my son, Son, I owe him this from my dad. My dad was always super generous. He always explained to me what he was doing also. He and my mom. I've told you before that whenever my dad would get a yearly bonus, we'd sit around the dinner table and talk about what kingdom thing our family was supposed to give it to.

You know, when I was a kid, I thought that was so cool. But then I got in my teenage years, and I was like, hey, we're giving away what we could be spending on a nicer car for me. My dad and mom gave me something far greater than a nicer car.

They gave me a deep and abiding trust in Jesus, and that's worth all the cars in the universe. Watching my dad and my mom give taught me that I could trust them in a way that their words never could convince me. When we give in front of our kids, we're saying with our actions, you can trust them.

Talk is cheap. You parents know that. But when I give in front of my kids, I'm saying, Son, I am literally putting my money where my mouth is. Watch what I give to and learn to trust the God that I trust. Parents, let me ask you, if your kid's future trust in God is based solely on what they observe in your giving, what kind of trust in God are they going to develop?

Because you know this, don't you? Regardless of what you say, what you do with your money, it says far more to them about what you really treasure and trust than all your words do. And your kid, I guarantee you, can see it. I know that was certainly true for my parents, of my parents.

Singles you also. How you give demonstrates trust in God for the future for other people to see. Some of it's time to begin again. God has brought us through a difficult season. Time to renew our commitment to mission. You know, this is a great time of year for all of us to take stock of what we're truly prioritizing in our lives, especially with our finances.

If you missed part one of this teaching yesterday, you can always catch up free of charge thanks to the generosity of our incredible gospel partners. Pastor JD, okay, Thanksgiving may be tomorrow, but Christmas is right around the corner. And one of my very favorite things about the holiday season is getting Christmas cards in the mail from close friends and family and even a few I wasn't expecting from someone that I may have lost touch with. Yeah, you know, Miley, I could not agree more. There's something undeniably special about receiving a handwritten note, particularly during the festive season like Christmas is that it's that personal touch that tangible connection that speaks volumes to us in this increasingly depersonalized digital age.

So at jdgrier.com, we have made an incredibly simple way for you to do that. We've got a set of Christmas cards that we we want to offer you. And you know, Miley, what I love about these is this is not a stock set that we've just kind of put our name on.

These are unique, exclusive designs you won't find anywhere else. So listen, I know you got a billion things to do at Christmas. And I know some of us are kind of by nature procrastinators.

I get it. But this is not something to wait on. Let's make Christmas at 2023 unforgettable, one heartfelt message at a time. We're in a teaching series called Begin Again, which is all about taking stock of where our priorities lie. And what better investment of our time than to encourage someone that God has placed in our lives with a thoughtful note or even an invitation to spend some time together. Get a hold of your set now when you give a gift of $35 or more to this ministry. To give, just call 866-335-5220.

Or you can always give online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch. Tomorrow may be Thanksgiving, but we'll be right here with you on Summit Life with brand new teaching titled Whoever is of a Generous Heart. Happy early Thanksgiving, and we'll see you tomorrow here on Summit Life.