How are the finances in your church? (2 Chronicles 31:10)

Today’s Readings: 2 Chronicles 30-31; Luke 10

Azariah: The Eternal One has favored His people, and they have shown their thankfulness with immense generosity. Since the Israelites began bringing their gifts to the Eternal’s temple, there has been more than enough to eat and have plenty left over to sacrifice.

Because of growing up in a parsonage and my military travels, I’ve attended a lot of churches over the years. I don’t ever remember attending one that had an overabundance of money. Some pastors or board members talked about money a lot, most didn’t talk much about money, but you knew the church could use more to keep repairs up, pay for new programs, contribute to the community, and a lot of other things. There never seems to be too much money around a church.

The funny thing about the lack of money around a church, though, is there shouldn’t be. When we look at the temple in this story of Hezekiah asking for offerings for the temple, people brought in so much he had to build extra storage rooms on the temple grounds to hold it all. I won’t ask when was the last time your church had to build storage rooms to hold its offerings. None of the churches I attended had to.

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Malachi talks about giving our tithes to God and the blessings He will pour out on us if we do. He talks about robbing God if we withhold what belongs to God. Yet church members continue to do it. No church across the nation would find themselves in financial trouble if its members gave their tithe to the church. But most of the people who sit in the pews every week don’t. Many give some offering, but quite frankly, most don’t tithe.

I’ve never wanted to know what people give and made it a point not to when I was in pastoral positions. But it seems you can always tell those who give and those who don’t. Those who are generous with what God entrusts to them and those who are not. Those who recognize the material things we have are temporary and not really ours in the first place, and those who think they must hoard what little they have.

God says to test Him and see if He won’t bless you. I’m not a prosperity preacher, but I also know that I’ve never gone hungry giving my tithes and offerings freely to God. The bills get paid. The math doesn’t work, but I always live better on 90% of my income than I do on 100%. I think it’s about trusting God with our finances. If we can trust Him with our eternity, surely we can trust Him with our finances!

You can do what you want with your material goods just like you can do what you want with your soul. If you’re smart, though, you’ll let God, who is significantly wiser than any of us, take charge.

Join me next time, won’t you?

Richard

An altar and a house (2 Chronicles 4:1)

Today’s Readings: 2 Chronicles 4-6

The temple altar was bronze and incredibly large—30 feet long, 30 feet wide, and 15 feet high.

We probably don’t think much about the size of the temple Solomon built to honor God, particularly with the scale of some of the buildings we construct today. Warehouses that cover city blocks and skyscrapers of several dozen floors, but think back to Solomon’s day or even to most of the world and think about the task of building an edifice like he built.

One of the things that I always looked for in my military travels across 42 different countries and countless cities and villages were the number of public buildings above three stories tall. The reason for looking for those structures in a quick view of the city as we approached was to gauge the effectiveness of the electrical grid. People will routinely walk up three flights of stairs, but not more. Public buildings with more than three stories without elevators or with elevators with sporadic power outages become monuments to the incompetence of the party in power so they don’t exist.

So in your international travels, you can tell pretty quickly whether you can expect frequent power outages just by the average height of the public buildings. If few public buildings exceed the three-story mark, you can expect routine power outages during your stay. Be prepared. Don’t trust your life on anything that requires electricity, clocks, hair dryers, television, telephones, lights, anything that must use power from the grid will fail while you’re there unless the place you stay has its own generator off the grid.

So consider just the bronze altar in Solomon’s temple. The chronicler tells us it was incredibly large, 30 feet by 30 feet and 15 feet high. That might not sound incredible large at first, but think about it for just a minute. Homes have gotten considerably larger over the last several years, but a 900 square foot apartment in Manhattan will cost you $1 million dollars! 900 square feet is half the size of the average house. 15 feet hight is almost twice the height of the average 8-foot ceiling.

By the way, that’s just the altar for the temple. How big is the altar in your church? Many no longer have altars, but those that do are usually less than a foot wide and 10-15 feet long. For the convenience of kneeling, they usually stand about 2 feet tall. Now compare that to the sacrificial altar of Solomon’s temple. Maybe you want to compare it to the central piece of furniture that holds our communion sets. They average about 2 feet by 5 feet. No comparison. We’re talking about a small house…in the temple…just for the purpose of sacrificing burnt offerings to God!

The basin Solomon built will fill about 500 bathtubs. That’s a lot of water! Now stop and think about the work of the priests in Solomon’s day. Making enough sacrifices that they overflowed the altar. Refilling and cleaning the basin each day for the daily sacrifices. Ensuring the temple remained clean, pure, and ready for each day’s work. These guys put in some serious time and effort in God’s house every day to keep up the rituals he called for. Can you begin to understand how some of them could get caught up in the ceremony instead of the relationship?

It’s a warning to us, though, who work diligently in the church to remember why we do what we do. It’s always about relationship with Him, not about the tasks we do. Never forget why Solomon built the temple and why the priests performed their duties.

Join me next time, won’t you?

Richard

The Levites Worked!! (1 Chronicles 9:33)

Today’s Readings: 1 Chronicles 7-9

These are the singers, the chiefs of the Levites during their own generations, who lived in the chambers of the temple in Jerusalem free from other service because they worked day and night.

I remember of few of those assignments in days past when it days turned into nights turned into days. Never ending tasks blended together until the days ran together and I didn’t know what day it was anymore, especially during some of those long planning sessions during some of the combat operations that comprised my military career. Cloistered in vaults with other planners, with no windows, locked doors, time pressures, attempting to crank out the best plans we could create to win battles and campaigns, we truly forgot time as hours and days passed by in preparation for imminent deployments.

Those days weren’t my most fun moments in the military, but I must say they constituted some of my most focused moments. Knowing the lives of thousands of soldiers and civilians might stand in the balance of what we accomplished in those rooms made us pay attention to the minutest detail. We questioned facts. Played out potential consequences of decisions and actions. Rolled back time and changed variables to try other actions to see if outcomes changed with other tactics.

The units from which each of us came as we gathered to plan operations knew we had important work and every other task assigned suddenly disappeared from our list of tasks. Nothing held the importance of the work we did in those rooms planning the operations for the conduct of the upcoming combat. Everything else stopped.

So it was with the Levites and their duties in the temple. Each tribe fulfilled their responsibilities and plenty of work needed done to keep all of them occupied. Today, most don’t understand the work that goes into preparation for a worship service. The typical pastor across the country spends 20 hours preparing each sermon. The worship leader spends about the half again as much time preparing the music program for each service.

We no longer use animal sacrifices in our worship services, but imagine a religion in which each supplicant must sacrifice birds, sheep, goats, rams, and cattle for various transgressions of the law. The priests must prepare and offer each sacrifice. Offer every prayer. Clear and clean every altar. Shine every utensil. And start again the next day. Notice I said next day. Religion meant every day life, not come to the temple on the Sabbath and forget it the rest of the week. If you knew of a transgression, you made it right…then! Not later!

The Levites worked day and night. There were enough of them that they worked for two weeks at a time and then went back to their farms to grow food for the rest of their tribe and to help take care of the home front. But for those two weeks, they WORKED non-stop, day and night, living in the temple.

Know any church members so dedicated? Hmmmm!

Join me next time, won’t you?

Richard

There’s something about the way they worshiped! (Ezekiel 46:9-10)

Today’s Readings: Ezekiel 45-46; John 19

When the people of the land come together to worship the Eternal at the regularly scheduled feasts, all those who come in through the north gate are to go out through the south gate, and all those who come in through the south gate are to go out through the north gate. They will exit the temple through the opposite gate so they continue to move straight ahead. During these feasts, the prince will walk with everyone else, entering and exiting at the same time and in the same way as the commoners.

I ran across these two verses I just never remembered reading before. I know I have, but I just don’t remember them. Ezekiel is one of those books I don’t spend enormous amounts of time in, but you’d think after reading it more than 35 times, I’d remember it. But I don’t. When I them for the first time today, they really struck me for a couple of reasons.

I’ll start with the last part of verse ten first. The prince will walk with everyone else, entering and exiting at the same time and in the same way as the commoners. A remarkable verse to remind us that He made us all. No one is more important than another in His eyes. Our station in life, more often than not, comes as a result of our birth. We had no choice into which home we were born. God put us with the parent He chose, not us. We came to life in the country He decided, not us. So God directed the prince remember he serves the people he governs. He walks in the temple with everyone else.

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Second, I noticed in the ninth verse people who enter by the north gate leave by the south gate and those who enter by the south gate leave by the north gate. The verse says “so they continue to move straight ahead.” Jesus talks about walking a straight path rather than a crooked one. He talked about the difference between the straight and narrow path that few walk and the broad, crooked path that so many take to their destruction. The pattern of entering and exiting the temple served as a constant reminder to God’s people they were to walk a straight path.

The third thing I saw in the verse is that people enter from both the north and south gates. As they moved to the opposite gate, they necessarily met people coming in from the other direction. You see, God expects us to mingle with each other. He expects us to care about each other. He expects us to spend time with each other. His plan meant you met about half the people in the temple while you there. Coming in and going out of different gates you passed by a large crowd of worshipers. God gave every opportunity for His people to interact and share each others joys and burdens.

Do you do the same when you enter and exit your place of worship? It’s a good habit to start!

Join me next time, won’t you?

Richard

 

Zion is more than a city! (Psalm 134:3)

Today’s Readings: Psalms 132-134; 2 Corinthians 10

May the Eternal grant you His blessing from Zion,
God, the weaver of heaven and earth.

Zion: 1) a : the Jewish people : Israel. b : the Jewish homeland that is symbolic of Judaism or of Jewish national aspiration. c : the ideal nation or society envisaged by Judaism. 2) Heaven. 3) Utopia. And so Webster’s dictionary defines Zion.

Now we have an interesting prayer from the sojourners that travel from their homes on pilgrimage to the city of Jerusalem for their festivals. Psalm 134 from which this verse comes would ring out from the hills as they walked up the steep trails that led to the fortress atop the hill on which the city sat.

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From the time of David, Zion began to take on more than the name of the hill just outside the city. It became a symbol of everything good God has in store for us. Zion became the seat of God Himself. It expanded from the hilltop to the Holy of Holies to the Temple to the city of God to Heaven including God Himself.

The pilgrims sang out on their journey, “May the Eternal grant you His blessings from Zion.” So where did the blessings come from? Perhaps the psalmist meant from heaven, from God. That’s nice to get blessings from God. We enjoy blessings coming from God. He is good all the time as we often say. We pray for God’s blessings often. We ask them for others and we ask them for ourselves.

As I read these words, though, I remembered the covenant between God and Abraham. God told Abraham He would make him a blessing to all nations. Since Christ’s coming and the gospel spread throughout the earth by the apostles and the early church, the Gentiles (us) have been adopted into God’s family. We are part of the new covenant Jesus brought to all people through His death on the cross.

What if God wants us to act as the instrument of blessing to others? Maybe instead of asking for God’s blessings to pour out on those around us we should begin to pray, “God how can You use me as an instrument of blessing to those on my prayer list?” Perhaps instead of asking for God to do the work, we should start rolling up our sleeves and grab a hoe and shovel and get ready to plow some ground ourselves.

How are you woven into the fabric God laid out for all time? What plan does He have for you as the creator of heaven and earth? God blesses, but sometimes He wants to use us for the blessing. Be prepared for Him to use you as an instrument.

Join me next time, won’t you?

Richard