As December approaches you will begin to hear more and more from me about our upcoming Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions. Over the past couple of weeks I have used the phrase “Lay Away for Lottie”. This is a takeoff on all the Christmas spending commercials we are seeing that encourage “lay-away” to buy your gifts early and “pain-free”. My point in “Lay Away for Lottie” is to encourage you to begin now praying, planning and setting aside weekly (or each pay period) a sacrificial financial gift to go towards this annual missions offering.
(More info in Lottie Moon and this offering can be found at http://www.imb.org/main/give/pagelm.asp?q=Lottie+moon )
I read an interesting article by John Piper in which he outlines several benefits of faithful Christian giving. Biblical stewardship “puts the governor on our natural impulse toward luxury”. Piper writes:
There is an almost infallible human rule: spending expands to fill the income. If you make more, you buy more, and the things you buy have to be stored and repaired and insured. Spending begets spending. If you have less at your disposal, you spend less. And most of the time you don't even think about it. I spend absolutely no time thinking about world cruises and $30,000 cars. But if I made two or three hundred thousand dollars a year, pretty soon things like that wouldn't seem any more strange to me than all the stuff I buy now—because I could afford it.
If this is true—if expenses almost inevitably expand to fill the income—how shall we restrain ourselves from accumulating more and more stuff and more and more expensive stuff, and looking to the world like we have all the same values they do in our little earthly prelude to eternity? The answer is that as our income grows, we move beyond the tithe. We resolve to give a greater and greater percentage of our income to advance the kingdom. This puts the brakes on our natural impulse toward luxury.
Illustration: John Wesley
Take John Wesley for example. He was one of the great evangelists of the 18th Century, born in 1703. In 1731 he began to limit his expenses so that he would have more money to give to the poor. In the first year his income was 30 pounds and he found he could live on 28 and so gave away two. In the second year his income doubled but he held his expenses even, and so he had 32 pounds to give away (a comfortable year's income). In the third year his income jumped to 90 pounds and he gave away 62 pounds. In his long life Wesley's income advanced to as high as 1,400 pounds in a year. But he rarely let his expenses rise above 30 pounds. He said that he seldom had more than 100 pounds in his possession at a time.
This so baffled the English Tax Commissioners that they investigated him in 1776 insisting that for a man of his income he must have silver dishes that he was not paying excise tax on. He wrote them, "I have two silver spoons at London and two at Bristol. This is all the plate I have at present, and I shall not buy any more while so many round me want bread."
When he died in 1791 at the age of 87, the only money mentioned in his will was the coins to be found in his pockets and dresser. Most of the 30,000 pounds he had earned in his life had been given away. He wrote,
"I cannot help leaving my books behind me whenever God calls me hence; but in every other respect, my own hands will be my executors."
In other words, I will put a control on my spending myself, and I will go beyond the tithe for the sake of Christ and his kingdom. (Quotes from Mission Frontiers, Sept./Oct. 1994, nos. 9–10, pp. 23–24.)
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