Transcript

2 Samuel, will you turn there? 2 Samuel 24. We will suspend our look at Amos until after the conference as we now turn our minds and our hearts on the Missions Conference, the True Church Conference, supporting missions, praying for missions, being involved in missions, not for missions but for God’s glory. I’m going to talk about just some simple straightforward things this morning about why we do what we do and particularly why we give the way we give and why we give a faith commitment offering.

And my heart was just moved toward this passage that is familiar to us but it’s been a long long time since we looked at it, 2 Samuel 24:18. A terrible pestilence, a plague, has been sent by the Lord upon Israel and it is due to David’s sin of numbering his men, numbering his people. We are not told exactly why that’s wrong. We know Moses was instructed to do that very thing but we do surmise, and I think accurately, that the problem was David began to glory in his 1.3 million man army and began to lose his glory and confidence in God. David began in vainglory to look at his numbers and find security there instead of in the Lord so God sends the plague.

Then we pick up in verse 18, a repentant David making things right before God. 2 Samuel 24, beginning in 18.

18 So Gad came to David that day and said to him, “Go up, erect an altar to the LORD on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.” 19 David went up according to the word of Gad, just as the LORD had commanded. 20 Araunah looked down and saw the king and his servants crossing over toward him; and Araunah went out and bowed his face to the ground before the king. 21 Then Araunah said, “Why has my lord the king come to his servant?” And David said, “To buy the threshing floor from you, in order to build an altar to the LORD, that the plague may be held back from the people.” 22 Araunah said to David, “Let my lord the king take and offer up what is good in his sight. Look, the oxen for the burnt offering, the threshing sledges and the yokes of the oxen for the wood. 23 “Everything, O king, Araunah gives to the king.” And Araunah said to the king, “May the LORD your God accept you.” 24 However, the king said to Araunah, “No, but I will surely buy it from you for a price, for I will not offer burnt offerings to the LORD my God which cost me nothing.” So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. 25 David built there an altar to the LORD and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings. Thus the LORD was moved by prayer for the land, and the plague was held back from Israel.

We entitled this, “I Will Not Offer to the Lord My God That Which Costs Me Nothing.” What a powerful phrase. David in his humiliation, David in his contrition over letting his heart drift from putting his hope and confidence in God’s strength and began to think, “I’m okay and we’re going to be good and the victory is going to be sustained because I have 1.3 million soldiers,” and God strikes him with a plague and 70,000 valiant men are killed and David is broken and realizes he sinned in his heart before the Lord.

Then he comes to build this altar as the prophet has instructed him, and make this offering to the Lord to express the contrition, the brokenness, the repentance that is in his heart. And he is told to go to a certain man in a certain place, Araunah, and go to the threshing floor Araunah has built to thresh out his grain, and he is to buy that very spot and build an altar and sacrifice to the Lord. When Dave arrives, Araunah who is of a king’s lineage but has since turned from his pagan ways and has embraced Jehovah, the God of Israel as his God and as his Lord and Savior, Araunah is grateful in any way to serve God’s king and Araunah bows before him and says, “Look, use the threshing floor for the wood and the yoke for the oxen for more of the wood and build the altar and then sacrifice the oxen. I’ll give it all to you. I want to be a part of this.” And David said, “No, you don’t understand. In this season of brokenness and humiliation, I realize just who God is, how wonderful he is, and I must do something that costs me something. I can’t just go through the motions. I can’t just check off the box. I can’t just do a little bit. I’ve got to do something tangible that expresses how large God is to me in my heart. I will not offer, Araunah, wonderful that you’ve offered it. Your spirit is wonderful and good but, Araunah, I will not offer to the Lord my God that which costs me nothing.”

That has challenged me as I have meditated on it this week. I wanted to challenge you today as we meditate on it this morning: how do you bring your offerings to the Lord? You say, “Well, I bring them to the local church. It pays the salary of the pastor and the staff and pays the bills around here.” No, you bring it to the Lord. That’s just the way God wants you to bring it. Do you offer to the Lord your God that which doesn’t affect you very much?

First of all, I think one of the things David did as he brought this offering to the Lord his God was that he reflected that God was his Creator. Now, wait a minute, wait a minute, very simple foundational truth but we need to think on that a moment. We have a Creator. We can look at David’s writings in the Psalms, in Psalm 33:6, “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host.” God brought these things into being. Then further in Psalm 139, beginning in verse 13, he speaks to the Lord, “For You,” You, God, “formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, And my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth; Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them.” God made us. We have a Creator.

Now, Satan loves to attack the doctrine of creation. You see, if we are creatures, if we are created beings, then we are obligated to that Creator and we are to come to him with submission and gratitude. That’s why we need to deeply and readily and repeatedly teach that to our children and our babies, “You have a God who made you.” And we should be ever diligent to push back against the attack that somehow we made ourselves. You see, Satan wants God’s place and therefore he is constantly undermining, putting a twist on this whole thing of theistic evolution, that’s taking God’s creation and twisting it a little bit, anything to take the emphasis out of God’s almighty and full responsibility. Satan wants to discount it, thwart it, undermine it, because Satan wants to spread insubordination to God and ingratitude to God. But God is our source. I am because he created me and if he had created me and did nothing else – now listen, pause for a moment, ponder that – he made you. For that alone we should say, “I will not give an offering to the Lord my God which costs me nothing. He is my Creator.”

Possibly the greatest hoax Satan has played on man is the parading before our schoolchildren the unscientific faith of evolution because if they can just get that out there with all the great chasms of holes where the scientific theory just doesn’t hold up, but if they can get that out there that you are just the result of chance, by chance some protein, some life form in its smallest single celled form began to evolve in the primordial slime and you were the result of this multiplication and mutation until now we have today what we have and we are basically us, we look to ourselves. Today we have what I call self-creation idolatry. Self-creation, we made ourselves. But the Psalmist reminds us in Psalm 100:3, listen to this, we ought to think on this, “Know that the LORD Himself is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves.” Know it. It’s an admonition. He’s saying you slip from the foundational concept of that, you just kind of let that go by like, “Oh, we all know that,” no, but do you know it? Know it is he who made us and not we ourselves.

Most of you remember and know something about the pop icon, Michael Jackson. Perhaps there was some form of mental illness there. I don’t know but the way he excessively sought these surgeries and radically changed his appearance, is that not anything other than, “I am my own creator”? It is. All of this nonsense about what your gender is and now the city of New York recognizes like 40 different genders. What do you say? “I will create myself.” The Psalmist said, the word of God says, “No, no, no. Know ye that the Lord is God. It is he who made you, not you yourself.” And when we grasp that and we settle on that, there is a humiliation, there is a humbling, there is an insubordination and there is a gratitude that ought to resound in us. And I’m bringing these truths basically from the writings of David, the one who said, “I will not render to the Lord my God an offering which costs me nothing.” II. Not only does David come knowing God is his Creator but I believe based on the additional writings of David, he comes knowing God is his Sustainer. God is the one who sustains him. As a matter of fact, looking over at David’s writings in the Psalms, Psalm 116, notice how David words this as we begin in verse 1. Psalm 116, beginning in verse 1, “I love the LORD, because He hears My voice and my supplications. Because He has inclined His ear to me, Therefore I shall call upon Him as long as I live. The cords of death encompassed me And the terrors of Sheol,” that’s the realm of the dead, “came upon me; I found distress and sorrow.” David is hurting here. Verse 4, “Then I called upon the name of the LORD: ‘O LORD, I beseech You, save my life!’ Gracious is the LORD, and righteous; Yes, our God is compassionate. The LORD preserves the simple; I was brought low, and He saved me. Return to your rest, O my soul, For the LORD has dealt bountifully with you. For You have rescued my soul from death, My eyes from tears, My feet from stumbling. I shall walk before the LORD In the land of the living. I believed when I said, ‘I am greatly afflicted.’ I said in my alarm, ‘All men are liars.'” Now look at verse 12, “What shall I render to the LORD For all His benefits toward me?” This sustaining preserving power of God, David said, it has been so real. Listen to me, nothing in your life happens by chance. If you could see your life the way the angels and the way God sees your life, you could not list all night long in prayer all the ways God stepped in and sustained you.

David remembers the day he was keeping sheep out there on the hills and the prophet came to his father’s household and he was summoned in and the prophet anointed him king of Israel. He wasn’t installed as king right away but he knew God is the one who chose me and God is the one who has kept me and sustained me. David reflected back on those days keeping the sheep when a lion attacked the sheepfold and with supernatural power God sustained him and he killed the lion. And a bear on another occasion attacks the sheepfold and with supernatural enablement, David kills the bear. He goes up against the mighty one of the Philistines, Goliath, takes a sling with a stone and slays the giant. He sees God did this. God stepped in for me. God was there. He has always been there. All those days, months when David was running from jealous Saul. Saul was a carnal king and to some degree a wicked king but he saw a righteousness and a holiness in David and he hated that; he resented that David was gaining so much respect from the people and Saul wanted David destroyed and David is running for his life and hiding in caves, but God sustained him and God kept him. God gave him great victories over all of his enemies. He was able as king to reclaim Jerusalem and return the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem. He was enabled by God to make all the provisions for his son, Solomon, to rebuild the temple. As David reflects back and surely a part of what David’s heart and 2 Samuel 24 is saying is, “God has been my Sustainer. I will not offer to the Lord my God that which costs me nothing.”

How many of you right now, either you or someone quite close to you, got the verdict from the doctors that it was very bad but God is seeing you through or them through? I will not offer to the Lord my God that which costs me nothing. I believe that’s where David’s heart is coming from.

Most of you know that I did not grow up in a Christian home, I didn’t grow up going to church or serving the Lord, and I sometimes look back and think about those days. I was in a car wreck when I was like a sophomore in high school. There were four of us in the car and we were going down a narrow rural country highway and a lady backed across the road and we just came over a rise going way too fast and we came over a rise and a lady had taken a carload of children to the movies and she was across the road and the guy driving the car, a friend of mine, had a choice: either T-bone that car, no doubt killing a lot of people, or turning off into an embankment. He swerves off the road. We go up in the air. We hit a tree in the air. The car spins around and falls down in a field several feet below. One of my friends spent a week in the hospital. One of my friends spent three months in the hospital. And I walked away. The state trooper said, “If you had hit that tree just a few inches more forward, you would not have hit the axle and the car would have just collapsed around the tree, surely killing all of you.” But hitting directly on the back axle going sideways, it sort of bounced us off and kept that from happening.

How many times has God stepped in and sustained us? You see, these are simple things. You just throw this around. Don’t do that. How many times? Not to mention, just to be honest and transparent and you be honest and transparent in your heart, how many times have you done something really stupid? It could have resulted in shame, embarrassment, loss, a thousand things, and God protected you. Just in goodness and in grace. If I could put up on this screen 1% of what has been in your hearts and minds this week, none of you would ever show your face in this building again. God’s protecting sustaining grace.

David said, “I will not, I will not offer to the Lord my God that which costs me nothing.” It was over 20 years ago, I was at the gas station at the corner of 43 and 72 Woodward Avenue, 72 that runs east and west down here. Phil Baggett used to have a store there. And I was at that store getting gas and Pam was coming down Highway 72 and she had our little babies in the car and she saw me getting gas and she said to some effect to the little girls, “Wave at daddy! Wave at daddy!” And they waved and I’m pumping the gas. She had glanced up and a turning signal was green but the straight line was red. She saw the green and she went through one of the busiest intersections of the Shoals in the middle of the day going about 45 or 50 miles an hour and I can still see my babies waving as she goes straight through that intersection. When we both realized, I’m not in her car but when we talked later, we were both almost couldn’t breathe of what could have been. That’s the truth. That’s 100% true. The only way I can describe it is as if everything just stopped and she went through that intersection and everything started back up again. The odds of you getting through there when the light is red and not getting hit are 1 in 1,000 at best. Now, in total honesty, my wife is a very cautious driver and a better driver than me. It was just one of those things. She wanted the babies to be excited about seeing their daddy and that’s why she just didn’t look at the light as long. Here’s my point: God’s sustaining of his children. How many times? How many times?

Old time Grace Life Church members, how many times should we not have made it as a people? It shouldn’t have happened, humanly, it just shouldn’t have happened. It just shouldn’t have happened. David said, “When I think back on him, he is my Creator. I didn’t make myself. He has been my Sustainer over and over and over again.” Surely in David’s heart based on his own words from the Psalms, surely God did these things and, “I will not offer an offering to the Lord my God which costs me nothing.”

3. Not only God is our Creator and God is our Sustainer but the preeminent event and the one that really in the context jumps out the most from 2 Samuel 24: he is our Redeemer. He is our Redeemer. He saves us. From David’s own writings in the Psalms, Psalm 19:14, he calls God his Rock and his Redeemer. His Rock and his Redeemer. Now, the word “redemption,” Old and New Testament, has the connotation of being bought off the slave market. “I belong to another. I was in captivity. I was doomed and gone. I was the victim under the enslavement of a cruel taskmaster. I was lost and gone and doomed and hopeless and God, my God, came to me when I could not come to where he was. He came to me and he came to me in the filth and in the muck and in the mire and took on my sin and he has purchased me back, brought me out of that hole and out of that pit and out of that enslavement and out of that doom and darkness in condemnation.” Listen to me, child of God, listen to me: if you know Christ, the condemnation is over. The future despair is over. You are his. You have been redeemed.

David knew his Redeemer. He knew his Redeemer and I believe David knew in his heart as he’s going to buy the threshing floor of Araunah, David knew in his heart, “My God is faithful to forgive and give us a new start because he is our Redeemer.” As a matter of fact, in the Psalms, Psalm 22, David wrote about knowing this Redeemer and about how wonderful it was to serve this Redeemer.

Look at it with me, Psalm 22. Notice how David speaks of the coming crucifixion of his promised Savior and Redeemer. He didn’t live on this side of Calvary like you and I do, he is looking forward by inspiration of the Spirit. Notice, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” Psalm 22:1, “Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning. O my God, I cry by day, but You do not answer; And by night, but I have no rest.” He’s reflecting on how Christ will look to the Father but when Jesus hangs on the cross, God the holy Father has rejected and cast away his Son because he became our sins and our sin bearer.

Verse 3, “Yet You are holy, O You who are enthroned upon the praises of Israel. In You our fathers trusted; They trusted and You delivered them. To You they cried out and were delivered; In You they trusted and were not disappointed.” Again a picture of Christ.

Verse 6, “But I am a worm and not a man.” You say, “How can you call Jesus a worm? How could that be about Jesus?” Because when he took your sin and became your sin, the Father saw him as the worm you are. “I am a worm and not a man, A reproach of men and despised by the people. All who see me sneer at me.” This is those who surrounded Jesus as he’s dying. “They separate with the lip, they wag the head, saying, ‘Commit yourself to the LORD; let Him deliver him; Let Him rescue him, because He delights in him.'” Remember how they mocked him? “Save yourself,” they said. That’s what this is saying. This is the prophecy of Christ.

Verse 9, “Yet You are He who brought me forth from the womb; You made me trust when upon my mother’s breasts. Upon You I was cast from birth; You have been my God from my mother’s womb.” Verse 11, “Be not far from me, for trouble is near; For there is none to help.” Can you see the Lord Jesus hanging there on the cross and no one will help him.

Verse 12, “Many bulls have surrounded me; Strong bulls of Bashan have encircled me.” That’s the Romans, the bulls of Bashan is one of the pagan idolatries the Romans were known to worship. “They open wide their mouth at me, As a ravening and a roaring lion.” Verse 14, “I am poured out like water, And all my bones are out of joint; My heart is like wax; It is melted within me. My strength is dried up like a potsherd, And my tongue cleaves to my jaws; And You lay me in the dust of death.” As he pictures God the Father putting this crushing blow on God the Son.

Verse 16, again referring to the Romans and the Gentiles involved in the crucifixion, “For dogs have surrounded me.” Jews generally viewed Gentiles as dogs. “A band of evildoers has encompassed me; They pierced my hands and my feet.” Verse 17, “I can count all my bones. They look, they stare at me; They divide my garments among them, And for my clothing they cast lots.”

David understood he had a Redeemer. God had apprehended him and saved him through the merits of the coming promised Messiah and so David would say, “Araunah, your oxen, the yoke of oxen, the wood from the threshing floor, perfect for building the altar, perfect for offering an offering but, Araunah, I can’t take them because knowing him as Creator, Sustainer and now Redeemer, Araunah, I cannot offer to the Lord my God that which costs me nothing.”

Now, you don’t become justified or accepted by your work, by your offering, by your gifts. That’s why I can say to you with an utter clear conscience and complete confidence: you do what you want to do. Amen? When it comes to your offering, you do what you want to do but may the Spirit of God stir our hearts so that we are in a place where we say, “I cannot possibly offer to the Lord my God that which costs me nothing. I’ve got to do something even materially, financially, which represents the greatness of how I view my God.”

It’s very interesting that 2 Samuel 24 is the second great public sin of David’s life, counting his army. The first great public sin was Bathsheba and God in that occasion also brought David to repentance over his adultery with Bathsheba and killing her husband Uriah. And David repented and God forgave and here again, David loses some of his confidence in God and kind of maybe has been at ease in Zion, maybe things have been going too well, and began to put his confidence in the great mighty army he has built up there in Israel, and God disciplines him again and brings him to humility. But you know, even through these things, there is a redemption because through Bathsheba, he has his son, Solomon, and Solomon became a great king and built the temple. And here we have David coming to this threshing floor to build an altar and sacrifice to God because of his sin. Do you know what happened on that very altar when his son, Solomon, became king? On that very place, God ordained the temple be built. Had it not been for David’s sin, he would never have bought the land. Listen, are you listening to your pastor? We serve the God who brings beauty out of our ashes. He’s the God who brings beauty out of our ashes. We mess up and mess up and mess up, now he corrects us, he brings us back to where we ought to be, then he takes the rotten filthy thing we did and somehow in perfect righteousness, never participating in the wickedness, but in perfect righteousness brings a Solomon or a temple out of our failure. No wonder David said, “Araunah, that’s a gracious offer. I cannot offer to the Lord my God that which costs me nothing.”

Now, we’re coming to that time of the year when we are making our commitment to world missions. We call it our faith commitment offering. Now, we have built this faith commitment offering out of 2 Corinthians 9:1-5. I want to read that real quick and we will be done. Paul writes to this church and he says, “For it is superfluous,” it’s not even necessary, he says, “for me to write to you about this ministry to the saints; for I know your readiness, of which I boast about you to the Macedonians, namely, that Achaia has been prepared since last year, and your zeal has stirred up most of them.” Now stop for just a moment. Paul writes to the Corinthians and says, “We’re going to take up a big offering from you guys and give it to the suffering saints in Jerusalem, and already people are hearing about how much you’re planning to give.” I don’t know all that Paul is doing here but he is sure milking it, in a good way. Your reputation of giving generously to missions has impacted others, that’s what he’s saying to the Corinthians.

Verse 3, “But I have sent the brethren,” this is a team to get the giving campaign organized and ready, “I have sent the brethren in order that our boasting about you may not be made empty in this case, so that, as I was saying, you may be prepared; otherwise if any Macedonians come with me and find you unprepared, we – not to speak of you – will be put to shame by this confidence. So I thought it necessary to urge the brethren that they would go on ahead to you and arrange beforehand your previously promised bountiful gift.” He didn’t just say arrange the gift you promised to give. He said, “You have promised a bountiful gift, so that the same would be ready as a bountiful gift and not affected by covetousness,” not affected by your natural, carnal, greedy stinginess. You got it in your heart to do something great for the people who are needful in Jerusalem but, he said, I know how people are but I’m going to send, we’re going to have a campaign, as such. As a matter of fact, this is the only giving campaign I know of in the New Testament where it kind of spells out how Paul did it. He sends this team of brothers ahead of time to work with the Corinthian church to get them ready to get the offering.

Now, three simple thoughts here. 1. The ministry team Paul is sending to them is to get them ready to give the offering and that’s what we’re doing today. That’s what you studied in small groups this morning. That’s what we’ll be doing in the True Church Conference, is God getting a hold of our hearts again, shake our hearts and minds off of stuff that is temporal and doesn’t really matter, and help us get focused on what really matters. So right now we are seeking the Lord to get us ready to give to missions.

So the offering was prepared beforehand, secondly, the offering was committed beforehand. So there was a time when the brethren got there and they started working with the church and I don’t know exactly how but they got them committed, “Okay, Paul is coming later to get the money but I want to get you ready to give the gift.” That’s what we will be doing Sunday morning, February 19, when we fill out this faith commitment card, put a one time offering inside the envelope for the conference expense, but indicate on that card what we’re going to give to missions. We will be making a commitment ahead of time of what we in faith want to give to God’s work, his work in missions around the world.

And then Paul comes later to Corinth and actually receives what was prepared and already committed. So on April 1 of this year, we are preparing ourselves now, you’ll make the commitment on February 19, then on April 1, the first Sunday of April, it’s not the first, I think it’s the fourth, you will actually begin giving your gift to missions in installments, weekly, twice a month, monthly, whatever you do, a few people give annually, so that we might support missions through our church for the rest of the year. And then that giving will go through March 2018.

It has been quite a phenomenal story and testimony of what God has done through Grace Life Church since we embraced what I have taught you and call a personalized strategic approach to missions which means we are not just going to throw missions at a missions agency, we personally want to be involved and we want to biblically strategically want to be involved. And being biblically strategic, we are focused like a laser beam on sending out pastors to preach the Gospel, win souls and start churches because that’s the central theme of God’s missions work. As a matter of fact, there is no other missions work mentioned in the Bible. I’m not against any other but if I’m going to give my life to something, I want to make sure it’s thoroughly biblical.

So that’s what we are committed to do and since we began to passionately and annually recommit ourselves to a personalized strategic approach to missions and using this principle from 2 Corinthians 9, God has greatly multiplied our effectiveness. In the 13 years before we did this, our cumulative offerings over those 13 years was less than $400,000. The next 13 years after we instituted the faith commitment offering and the personalized strategic approach to missions it’s right at $4 million. $400,000 the first 13 years, $4 million over the next 13. I just believe when you follow the old book, God blesses.

You may remember that because God had blessed our missions involvement, that many years ago the president of the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention flew 65 mission leaders and mission experts to be here for a week to watch how we do our conference so they could learn how to do it better and teach it to others and it has been taught to others many many many times and it has had a huge impact in many many ways. But by God’s grace it started here. Not because we are special or we are unique, we just decided what does the Bible say, let’s try that. Let’s do it that way and see what God might do.

Now, as you prepare for your faith commitment offering this year and here are three things, these aren’t original with me, by the way, but you might think about some people call it moonlighting for missions. I remember we had a man who restored automobiles and he said, “I’m going to take one of the automobiles I restore this year and whatever I make off of that, I’m going to give it to missions.” We’ve had retired people who said, “I’m going to get a part-time job and whatever comes in there or a big portion of that is going to go to missions.” We’ve had ladies in our church, many on a fixed income but who could make things and sell things and they would say, “Whatever I make in sale of this particular item, I’m going to give it all to missions.” A lot of different things like that. Years ago back when I would go preach for places that gave me large love offerings and large honorariums, I committed that to missions one year and they doubled that year. They literally doubled that year. Now, I quit doing that because as we began to plant churches and help these church plants, often we would go and preach and minister and it would cost money. I didn’t get money so I didn’t want to commit those years to the Lord. In recent years for me and Pam and I, we have just taken an amount and committed it. But you’re looking in the future, “Lord, if this comes in, I will give it to you,” and for some of you that might be less than God wants you to do. I have no idea but moonlighting for missions.

Another thought is a lifestyle adjustment. Just, “I’m going to do something that costs me something,” is what you’re saying. For example, if a family of two gave up eating out once a week and probably most of us eat out at least once or more a week, but if you gave up a meal, an eat out meal once a week, that’s approaching $2000 over a year. If a student gives up a soft drink a day and says, “I’m just going to give up that soft drink a day and give that to missions,” that’s approaching $600 over a year. It’s just amazing what can be done. Maybe you can put off a car payment. I’m not telling you what God might but maybe you say, “You know, I can put off that car payment another year and I’m going to commit that to missions.” You ask God what he would have you to do. And then this would be very very rare but it has happened and I don’t necessarily encourage it, sometimes there is just money out of nowhere. Somebody just puts down an amount and says, “I’m going to trust God might bring it in.” Now again, I don’t want you to put down $500,000 and you make $30,000 a year. Now, don’t do that, but sometimes money comes out of nowhere. We had a man in our church many years ago, he made a large commitment to I think then was one of our building projects ,and lo and behold he got an insurance settlement check in the mail he had completely forgotten about. You just don’t know how God may take care of things.

Well, here’s what I’m going to say to you and here’s how I’m going to close: whatever you do, make sure it’s from your heart. It’s not under coercion. It’s not under obligation. It’s where it came from from David’s heart. And let’s all commit that we will not offer unto the Lord our God that which costs us nothing. Maybe it’s your year to do something big, maybe it’s not. I don’t know but don’t calculate it out necessarily. Go by revelation more than calculation and see what God might do.

Let’s pray together.