In his sermon, 'Economic Hotspots Church Leaders Need to Address,' Scott Brown discusses the critical role of church leaders in guiding their congregations through economic challenges. He emphasizes the sovereignty of God as the ultimate provider and the importance of trusting God's provision, even in times of financial strain. Brown addresses the fear that often drives people to work excessively, disregarding the Sabbath and family responsibilities, and highlights that work should glorify God, not be a source of self-actualization. He discusses the biblical perspective on work, inheritance, and debt, emphasizing contentment and stewardship of resources. The sermon also touches on the significance of sacrificial giving, even during hard times, as an expression of trust in God. Additionally, Brown advocates for the importance of church and family collaboration in work, the proper management of church funds, and the celebration of God's provision. Ultimately, the sermon underscores that all resources and work should be dedicated to glorifying God.

So we're here at another Elder podcast and we want to talk about hot spots for paths for leadership in the area of economics. Here we live in a time when foreclosures are up, joblessness is up, saving rates are up because people are afraid of the future. That's probably a good thing. The health care package looks like it's a bomb wrapped up with pretty wrapping paper. But what do the people of God do in times like this?

How do the people of God respond to the pressures of joblessness and financial collapse? Well, we want to talk about that here in the next hour or so. Everything we say, though, we pray, would fall into line with what David said. The Earth is the Lord's and all its fullness. That all that we have, all that we are, would be dedicated for the glory of God.

And I pray that this discussion will help us glorify God in these economic times, that the connection between heart and wallet would be a godly one, and that we would be found faithful in handling the things that God has put in our hands. On the one hand, it's filthy lucre. On the other hand, it's a gift of God for good purposes. So, Let's launch out on the discussion. So let's start with the whole matter of the sovereignty of God, because it is God who gives the ability to make money, so says the scripture.

And so Let's just begin our whole discussion with this critical principle of the sovereignty of God. And we need to start with the idea that we are to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all other things shall be added unto us from Matthew 6. In the context of this in Matthew 6 is exactly, where do you get food? Where do you get clothes? Where do you get shelter?

This is the context. So to pull this from the context of work, this is what Jesus Christ is talking about here. And so whatever we do, we're to do to the Lord, and our work has to be to the Lord. And what that doesn't mean is that, okay, I can go be lazy and not work because God's going to provide everything. No, part of seeking the kingdom of God is to do the work God's commanded you to do.

Part of righteousness is not to be like an infidel in refusing to labor for your family. So that provision is part of seeking the kingdom of God. It is part of seeking the righteousness of God. But we shouldn't think that somehow it's our work that provides the increase. It is always God who provides the increase.

We do the work that we're to do, and God provides whatever increase he chooses to provide. Jesus' words in this category are so comforting. Consider the sparrows. I feed them, consider the lilies of the field, I clothe them. And so these things come from God.

So yes, do we have a part to play? Absolutely. But ultimately, are the results ours? No, duty is ours, and the results are God, as in every other category. So I would just say, the first thing that needs to be taught in a church is that God is sovereign and that men ought to work without worry, that God is their provider.

Their corporation is not their provider. God has always been their provider. You know, I look out over a congregation and am considering the sovereignty of God in financial matters and the pressures of the current day. It always amazes me that here we're sitting with all these people and for all these years, God has fed and clothed all these people. They're okay.

They may be in stressful economic times, but they have a lot of proof over hundreds and hundreds of months that God will take care of them. And in the context that Jesus is talking about this, in Matthew 6, 8, for your father knows the things that you have need of before you ask him. In the context of this is not that there's this God who just wants to show wrath to his people. This is as a father, if your desire is to feed your children, This is the context that God is talking about. This is we come before Him as a father.

But as a father, there are times that I have had my children skip meals. Hey, you want to eat your green beans? That's fine, but you're not eating anything else until you eat those four green beans. I remember that very distinctly with my son that it was four. And so it was three meals before he ate.

Does that mean that I didn't want to feed him? No. But that meant that because he was acting unrighteously, he had to learn. And this is the relationship we have with our Father in Heaven. This is not a Father who's trying to withhold good things from us.

That's not true. But this is a Father that will chastise when we're disobedient. Not just individually, but as a Church and as a nation. Yeah, and so when we consider the sovereignty of God, we have to understand that there are times of strain and also times of abundance. That's normal in life.

In this world, you will have tribulation. That's part of God's work in our lives. Now, one of the realities that you face in a church is the reality of fear in men's hearts. Men are often driven by fear. I like to say that, you know, Men have two great enemies, fear and lust.

And fear is one of the ones that dogs them in the whole area of work. And so you have men running in fear in churches from time to time. And it's expressed in different ways. It can be expressed in workaholism, where men have no time to execute their duties as shepherds of their families, as being church members. You find men who act like they despise the Sabbath.

The root cause is fear. They're constantly working. They never lay their tools down because they're afraid that God won't provide for them. So they find themselves as Sabbath breakers and also family neglecters as a result of their fear. And we've been memorizing in the Church Deuteronomy 28, and Deuteronomy 28 is exactly saying the opposite, right?

When you do the things I have commanded you, there will be abundance. And we have to recognize that it's not a problem that the world cannot provide for the people. God created a world that can easily provide. It's sin that is causing problems. When we have economic disruption, it's because of sin.

Not necessarily personal sin, right? The guy that gets laid off because he works for a company and he's worked there for 20 years and he gets laid off. But there's sin that caused that and it's not all personal. But we have to understand that God restricts, right, famines. All these things as you read the Old Testament, these are chastisements for the people because they disobeyed God, They've ignored God instead of trusting in God.

And one of the chastisements that God does is he removes the Sabbath. When we look and we look and see Sabbath breaking, what God actually says is that he stops giving his people, not his people, but he stops giving people rest as a punishment for not trusting Him. And so when we look in our society and we see that all these people, the Sabbath is this interesting thing. It's both a sign that the people don't trust God and it's also a punishment for not trusting God. God gives them over to the lust of their own hearts.

And so essentially when we look at our nation having completely disregarded the Sabbath, even most churchgoers completely disregarded the Sabbath, it is also a punishment on the people for our failure to trust God that working six days is enough. Right. Then you have harsh task masters that enforce Sabbath breaking, like in Egypt. When the children of Israel were in Egypt, Pharaoh would not let them rest. And, you know, perhaps, you know, God did that to just derive home how good He was in contrast to Pharaoh.

God desires His children to rest. God desires His children to cease from economic activity, to cease from striving for food, to trust God, to understand that He gives manna, He gives bread, He will take care of His people. So if you have a man who is driven by fear, who constantly is breaking the Sabbath, what you have is a man who has lost a sense of divine sovereignty. It's really that serious. He's lost a sense of the character and the nature of God.

And the result is that joy just flows right out of his soul, and it's replaced by fear. So let's talk about the purposes of work, because in the culture that we live in, there are a number of disfigurements that lead us astray. One of those disfigurements is the whole matter of the way that we understand our work. We live in a world where people think of work as applying their passion. It's the way to be self-actualized.

It's a way to find yourself. It's a way to connect with who you really are. And so you have this desire, which is, I think it's a good desire, but it goes bonkers in men and it masses them up in their understanding of work. Let's talk about that. Sometimes men find themselves to be governed by this, the thought that all their pleasures and their satisfaction in life should come from their work.

So is it good to enjoy your work? Absolutely it is. Should you desire to have a job that you feel good about and that is satisfying to you? Yes, those are all good things. But we have seen men chase that to a degree that compromises some of the other reasons for work that would be higher on the totem pole.

Provision, obviously, is one of those. And It's not hard to find men who have jumped from job to job because they weren't receiving the right amount of satisfaction in their own minds. And they've really compromised their ability to provide for their families. And we have to think of work in the right way. There are a number of purposes for work and satisfaction and self-actualization, which is just a terrible term in itself because it's not biblical language.

But we've been taught to think this way, right? Nazlo was a chief educational theorist out there, and at the very top of his triangle this is what he has, right? Feeling good about yourself and you get this from work. I think it's worth reading Genesis 3, 17. Then to Adam he said, ìBecause you have heeded the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, You shall not eat of it.

Cursed is the ground for your sake. In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. But thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you shall return." Now, work was there before the fall and work will be there after glorification, but That does not mean that on this earth we should be looking for our satisfaction from work, as you said, Jason, because God says he's promising thorns, thistles, and sweat.

He's not saying he's promising joy. Thorns, thistles, and sweat don't sound that joyful. Joyful. And a lot of it is a matter of priority. When we look at what should have priorities in our lives, our functions as men, as family shepherds, absolutely comes above having satisfaction in our work.

Being faithful providers of our families, as God intends us to be, absolutely comes above that. So is there a place for satisfaction in work? Of course there is, but it's been given the wrong place, and sometimes it causes men to chase that vision of what they think they should be experiencing in their work life to the detriment of a lot of other categories. And a lot of those satisfactions should come from taking dominion because that's the other purpose of work or another purpose of work is to take dominion. And when we think of taking dominion, we should seek, again, going back to God's sovereignty, we seek the Kingdom of God, we seek His righteousness, so we do the things.

And then we accomplish things for Him, and He gives us satisfaction, He gives us joy. But if we're seeking joy in the work rather than seeking joy and satisfaction by having accomplished the things that God would have us to accomplish. We won't find joy there. We won't find satisfaction there. You know, the other thing is there's a replacement factor here.

You know, if you find yourself exclusively focused on self-actualization, you will find what Jason was alluding to a couple of minutes ago, and that is that self-actualization actually swallows up other more important functions in a man's life. It swallows up his time to lead family worship and to bring his children up in the training, the admonition of the Lord to walk beside them. It might swallow up his role as a brother in the church. You know, he's been gifted by God yet the church is deprived of his energy and his gifts. It's just a fancy way to think of idolatry, really.

It's really just putting yourself at the top of the triangle, and this is not where we belong. As with almost everything else, you find that if you start chasing after the fruit, you end up without the fruit. The fruit is that. It's not the root. It's the fruit of something.

It comes as a result of something. And if you make the fruit the objective, you, by definition, deprive yourself of the chance of having the fruit. Let's talk for a little bit about how to be a good worker, because often we find that men's problems in the marketplace can be traced to spiritual matters. For example, if there is a lack of spiritual fruit, specifically the fruits of the Spirit, work life will be impacted. Let's talk about that.

So, Just let me start with the positive side of that. I would think as a man who's had a 20-year career now in a marketplace where I have not been an entrepreneur, I've worked for companies all of that time, I can say with great clarity what an advantage Christian men have in that work environment. Particularly as our culture drifts further and further away from our biblical moorings, it becomes more and more difficult for employers to find people who have the fruits of the Spirit and that's the type of employees that they need. So Christians have distinct advantages in that kind of workplace environment because the fruits of the spirit are just the type of things that make for a good employee. I think it's worth actually reading some of the fruit of the spirit because it is, you know, Do you want an employee that's grumbling and complaining, or do you want one with joy?

Which one's going to be more beneficial to the employer in the workplace? Do you want one that's causing strife all the time, or do you want one that's at peace? Do you want one that anything goes wrong, they blow up, and they can't deal with it, and they're causing problems, or do you want somebody that can suffer through, you know, especially in customer service? Don't you want somebody that's long suffering when the customer's screaming at them? Kindness.

Do you really want somebody that's mean in the workplace? Does that really help or is kindness a great benefit in the workplace? Goodness. I mean, you don't want your employee to steal from you. This is a real basic thing that's very useful.

Faithfulness. Faithfulness to God, but also faithfulness to God ends up being that there's a faithfulness to the people that God has put in authority over you, including your boss. Gentleness. Gentleness versus harshness. There's, you know, obviously gentleness has a lot of benefit.

And self-control. Who doesn't want an employee that has self-control? That's one of the biggest problems now. You look at businesses, and businesses have television because people sit there and watch television and the Internet, how much time do employees spend looking at the Internet and self-control constrains all that. So all the fruits of the spirit, while they may not come into the top level jobs, have a real advantage in terms of advancing within corporate organizations.

The second thing is no Christian family should underestimate the power of a keeper at home to allow a man to actually focus on his work when he's at work. You're just watching this in my workplace environment and watching how that impacts both the men and the women who work for that company, two income families. All of those employees have significant distractions that a Christian man who has a wife who's a keeper at home, those distractions are eliminated and it's a real advantage. And Franklin said a penny saved is a penny earned. That's no longer true, right?

A penny saved now is two pennies earned. With a 50 percent tax rate, you have to go out there and earn two pennies for a penny saved. A keeper at home can save a lot of money. And you do stuff yourself and even though you might look at it and say, well, to pay somebody to do that would only be $50, but you have to earn $100 to pay that person $50. In a keeper at home that's doing those things instead of hiring them out, I mean, economically, it just makes sense.

So church members need to understand the importance of their spiritual life. The control of their lives. The apostle Paul said, be not drunk with wine, but be filled with the Holy Spirit. The issue is control. What is the control factor in your life?

Is it wine that's controlling you? Or is it the Spirit that is governing your attitudes, your speech, everything about your life? So this really is an issue of the government of God through the work of the Holy spirit. And the control of God, the government of God has a lot to do with laziness, self-control, things we've talked about, grumbling, complaining, lack of joy. So the fruits of the spirit, the spiritual life is really, really important for workers to understand because God blesses these qualities in the marketplace.

And to consider also in that realm is that how are you supposed to treat your boss because as an employee that's a significant thing. In 2 Peter 2, 18 it says, servants be submissive to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle but also to the harsh. For this is commendable if because of conscience towards God one enters grief suffering longfully. We just have to understand that again, first of all, the purpose of work is not joy, but one of the purposes of work is God has put you in that place, and in that place you are supposed to give a Christian witness where God has placed you. In that Christian witness, especially as an employee, sometimes it can be very difficult, but the truth is that we're supposed to witness to who God is wherever we are.

Another issue is when you go to work, whose servant are you? Are you a bond servant of Christ? Are you a bond servant of that person where all you're trying to do is put the surface look so that they like what you're doing as opposed to actually producing what you should be producing. And we're specifically, you know, Ephesians 6, 5 says, bond servants be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling and sincerity of heart, as to Christ. Not with eye services, men pleasers, but as bond servants of Christ doing the will of God from the heart.

We have to understand that when we go into that office place, we're supposed to look at our boss and actually treat him as he has real authority, as he, you know, it even says as to Christ because God has put that authority in place over us and we need to do it with an actual desire to be a blessing to the business that we're in, not just to be there to get a paycheck. Everybody else there that doesn't believe in Christ, they're there for one purpose and that's to get a paycheck. We actually have a greater purpose and that's to testify that authorities are real, that God's sovereign, that God put that boss into place and we need to treat him that way and so we need to do it to try to be a blessing to the business that we're in. Amen. Let's shift and now talk about work in the family.

We believe that families should work together and work together a lot and they should walk together in their work and that shepherds have a responsibility to both encourage families to work together and also to help them get through that. Everybody who's ever worked together with their family knows that the devil is there. I'll never forget this time several years ago, many years ago when my children were little. And my children just were not working the way I wanted them to work. And I was angry.

And we were out in the yard working and my wife Deborah would walk by me and she would be humming, there is a flag flown high in the castle of my heart because she knew that I was walking in the flesh, I was mad at everybody, I was biting and devouring everyone, I was snapping. So often, you know, the devil is there when you're working to make it a grief rather than a joy. So let's talk about families working together and how shepherds can encourage beautiful work in family life. One thing that just to kind of make sure that we expand the definition of work properly, because that work is not always just to get money, right? And one of the things that we have to do is there's an aspect of work is just redeeming the time.

And when you go and do work for the church, you should not expect to get paid, but you should expect to be a laborer for God. And not to get into all the elders and stuff, and yeah, there's appropriate times to pay. But The point here is that working is seeking the kingdom of God. When we bring our families together, we need to teach them a work ethic, especially both for the young men and the young women. It is hard work to be a mother.

It is hard work to be a wife. It is hard work to be a keeper at home, it is hard work to maintain a home. And so we need to teach them from an early age that work should be a central part of their life. We've created an entertainment culture that says that the highest standard is entertainment. Now the thing that God calls us to is to work six days and to rest one.

The church actually ends up being a fantastic venue to provide opportunities for families to work together. And what a blessing it would be for all the local churches if we would all rise up and begin to look at it that way as our local church is an opportunity for us to serve together and grab on the same rope and pull on the same direction together as a family. One of the things that really caused me to desire the work of the deacon was the ability to bring my family along into that. As an elder, there are some particular limitations about how you can bring your family into that work. Because the primary functions of elders is prayer, ministry of the word, and the shepherding functions.

So you're somewhat limited as to how you can bring along your family. Deacons have a much wider scope of ability to bring their families into those labors and service to the church. And we should look at our local churches in that way as the perfect venue to labor together. Churches can be a fantastic place to help people learn how to work and also for shepherds to learn how people are equipped to work. Often when you work together, the truth is you find out who the slackers are.

And that's helpful because you can speak to them. You can help them understand what they're doing. And working together reveals flaws in a church. It reveals where the works of the devil might be. It reveals where character problems might be, anger.

All kinds of things end up coming out in work situations. It's good for churches to have projects where they work together. And all those same things are true for the family as well. The father needs to be actively working to get everybody to work together. It could be redundant, but in one of those things is that he can see the character flaws in his family when he does that and understand what areas he needs to be focusing on.

And as shepherds, we need to be very deliberate about getting the church to be working, getting the church to be doing things. We're not supposed to be just looking at the four walls, staring at each other. We're supposed to be the body of Christ that's shining light to the world, and we're supposed to be out there loving our neighbor, and the church can teach people how to do this through working, through helping other people, through helping the unbelievers around us, both as a testimony to be Christ and to be a blessing inside to the people of the church. I'll never forget a moment I had with one of the men in our church. We had just put on a large Memorial Day celebration, which we do every year.

It's a big project. It takes 100 people to pull it off. It's exhausting. And you know, you get to the end of it and you know, you're ready for some rest. So anyway, we had several guys sitting together at the end of this.

And we were all dog tired at the end of the day, sun was going down. And I said, I said, this is so much work, do we want to keep doing this? And one of the men said, we absolutely have to keep doing this. We're teaching our children how to work. We're teaching our children how to love the church and how to love our community.

So yeah, we absolutely, we need to do this. We need to wear ourselves out and wear our children out serving the community. So I thought that was wisdom. And so we've kept on doing it since that conversation. But it's helpful for churches to labor.

Church life requires labor, hard labor. Paul said, I am spending and being spent for your sakes. That's what it ought to be like. Church life shouldn't be a breeze. There should be labor and difficulty making the things happen that ought to happen.

Paul also says that he's being poured out as a drink offering. The thing about the drink offering, most of the other offerings, at the end there was something left. With the drink offering, it hits the altar, the altar is hot, it all evaporates. There is nothing left. So when Paul says, I'm being poured out as a drink offering, what he's saying is he is working himself and there is nothing left.

And we just want to make all these other secondary things, entertainment, pleasures, all these secondary things. This just isn't what Paul teaches us. So churches should work together and shepherds have responsibility to help flock know how to work together. Well, one other thing to talk about in teaching our children to work, we just have to understand how important this is. Over the last 20 years, we've gone from what it takes five years to get a four-year degree to taking five and a half years to get a four-year degree.

Our society is teaching people how not to work, how to drag it out, how to do it as slowly as possible. And if our country is going to survive in the next generation, somebody needs to know how to work. And the only people that are going to are Christians. And so if we're not teaching our children, we have to understand the whole nation will be put into poverty. The people that have to be leading in the next generation have to be Christians because the other society is simply not sustainable.

And that comes to how well do we teach our children to work? It is a very serious subject. So let's now talk about inheritance. We live in a world where the two most prominent issues of inheritance are these. One, you can see it on a bumper sticker.

We're spending our children's inheritance, and that's sort of the ethic of the age. The other one is fighting over inheritance. And so the Bible has a number of things to say about inheritance, and Christian families need to not follow the culture in their understanding of inheritance. Let's talk about some of the texts of Scripture that would lead us to understand God's will in the matter of inheritance. I guess the 2 Corinthians 12, 14 says, for the children ought not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children.

And one of the things that we're also seeing, if we look at our society around us, what we do is we save up money for the end of life care. We keep the big pile of money that the government inflates and takes away. So you don't end up with the big pile of money that you thought that you had because the government ends up taking most of it. But instead what we do is instead of using that in a wise way for the children where then the children could take care of the parents when they're older. Instead, what we do is we drive the children into debt so that they go out and buy a house and they borrow a huge amount of money and they become slaves to the lender.

And we've created this system that just propagates, and again, it's a rejection of the sovereignty of God. What we don't trust is that our children will take care of us, that this is God's plan. Instead what we say is we need to make sure that we're protected, that we have security in our own resources, that we have security in ourselves, instead of saying, You know, what the proper thing to do is to put our children on a solid footing so that they can be better off than we are. And that part of being better off is that when we're old and unable to provide for ourselves, we come live with them. Right.

That's a hard road to walk on for the older generation because they're not used to thinking that way. And it's also, it's just hard because our pride wants to say that our eyes do not grow weak and our limbs do not grow weak and all the things that happen with age. And the reality is this is a good thing, this is what God does. Our bodies do age, they do get weak, they do get unable to provide for themselves and that plan is so that the children can then show honor to their parents by providing for them. So in providing inheritance for children we are mirroring the work and the will of God.

In Psalm 47, verse 4, we read, He will choose our inheritance for us. Psalm 16, 5, O Lord, You are the portion of my inheritance and my cup. You maintain my lot. So in the same way that God provides inheritance for His people, He also calls fathers to provide the same for their own children in love. When we think of inheritance, a lot of times people say, well, we'll keep everything that we can't spend on our RV and everything else going to Florida that whatever's left we'll give to our children when we die, instead of saying the inheritance should be to further the next generation.

How do we have our children be more successful than we are in the work of the kingdom because of the resources that we can give them? And one of the things that's driving that in our culture today is how we view end of life. This World War II generation, they don't want to be a burden to their children. And so they have saved. They were savers by and large.

And they have saved, in many cases, a large, large quantity of money, but they're saving it to pay for their end-of-life care so that they're not a burden to their children, not understanding that their children have an obligation and actually can be a blessing to their children to have to serve their parents in their older days. And so this is what drives a lot of our behavior and thinking about inheritance. Let's talk about envy. This is a pretty critical issue of economics and church life. Because we live in a world that is full of socialistic thinking, that I should have what you have.

I think it was last year, one of the major news magazines ran a cover story entitled We're All Socialists Now. So when you have a church full of recovering socialists, you have a church full of people struggling with envy. So let's talk about the whole subject of envy and how it impinges on church life. And one comment that I'll make before we go there, which is to understand Marxism is to understand that the basic principle of Marxism is that the tenth commandment is not a commandment that actually says this is sin, that what we need to do is flip this and say that this is a good thing. And so this is what our society teaches, that where God says covetousness is evil, Marxism says covetousness is good.

So, Hey, there's people that have more money you should force them to pay for your healthcare. And this is where our society is constantly teaching. And what we need to, first of all, is come back and to say, no, if you look at another man and you say, well, why didn't God give me what he has? What we're doing is we are saying that we're smarter than God. We're saying that we have a better plan than God.

We're saying that all things do not work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. What we're doing is we are rejecting the sovereignty of God when we look and covet. That is why it's such a horrible sin. So what we need to understand that the people walking into our church is they have been taught that the tenth commandment does not apply anymore. That not only that, but they should be actively working to increase covetousness of the people around them because that's how society will now be equal, that's how everybody will be better off.

And so one of the things is that we need to have focused teaching on covetousness. Covetousness is evil because it's rejecting God. I'm actually aware of a couple of churches that split over this issue where one man became incensed at another because of what he had. Perhaps he bought a house that was larger than the other one thought was appropriate. And upon inspection, it was discovered there was a certain number of square feet that was a godly number.

Anything over that was excess, and anything under that was godly. So, misunderstanding of the sovereignty of God, that he does give more to some and less to others. This is part of his plan, and he does it by his own sovereignty. Of course, we can misuse our resources. All of us are aware of that.

All of us have probably participated in the misuse of resources. But the spirit of entitlement is running through the people of this age. And so that will come out in church life. What is the heart of the matter? Contentment.

1 Timothy 6, 6, Now godliness with contentment is great gain. That's the heart of the matter of this. Godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into this world and as certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and clothing with these we shall be content. God has provided what we need and for the man who has less and the man that has more, we need to be willing to go to the man that has less and say, God has you have less because this is the best thing for you.

The reason that we know that is because God has you have less. And we have to trust that it might be because God is using it to point out sin in your life. It might be because God is using it because he knows that if you had more that you would be tempted and that you would wander, who knows? We can't understand the reason, but what we have to start with is to trust the sovereignty of God. Right.

So I think in this way, God wants a happy church, a contented church where people understand that God is the giver of all good things. So church members need to understand that. So let's move on and let's talk about the use and the ownership of resources. God gives different amounts of resources, different kinds of resources to different people in the church. What should be the instruction on this matter?

Well, the central point is that God owns it all and so that has to be the foundation for how we view any resource that we have is that the ultimate owner of it is God and so that our having it implies a stewardship for it. And all of our resources should be in play. There shouldn't be anything that we regard as off limits for God's use. And When you look at the example that Paul uses in 2 Corinthians 8, which is the gathering of the manna out in the desert. God put the manna out there.

Some people gather more, some people gather less. But in the end, Hugh gathered much and nothing left over, and Hugh gathered little had no lack because those who have abundance, they're supposed to give it to those who have lack. We have to understand that that has not changed, that God is still the one that has put those things out there that we gather. We gather them with our work, but we don't gather them because of how great we are. And those who gather more have a responsibility to those who have gathered less, in the church especially.

You know, everybody has time. Everyone has a place that they live. Everyone has vehicles. It's important that we understand that everything that God has given us has a purpose. And it isn't exclusively for ourselves.

And so we ought to be willing to put the resources He's given to us in play. That means that They'll get worn out sooner. That means they'll get used up. And that's a good thing. Because they end up being used for godly purposes rather than exclusively your own.

Not that it's wrong to use them for your own purposes. That's why God gave them to you as well. But whatever resources, whatever skill sets are resident within a family, you know, ought to be somehow in play for godly purposes. Right. In Matthew 6, Jesus Christ talks a lot about how they've received their reward in full, and we have to understand if we think that when we've got these possessions and we're just going to use them for our own pleasure, we're just going to use them for ourselves, then we've received all the treasure that we have from that.

And so the treasure in heaven is much better. When we use them for the Kingdom of God, we're storing up treasures in heaven. And our reward on earth is not full, we will be rewarded in heaven. And that will be much better than the reward we receive here. So let's shift now and talk about giving.

Sacrificial giving, the subject of tithing, to use a biblical word. Let's open up this discussion and talk about giving, particularly in hard times. You find that people end up in a place where they just absolutely have nothing left and nothing to give. How do we deal with the matter of tithing and giving in a local church in hard economic times? I think the key point is to understand that there is a direct connection between heart and wallet.

And where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. And so giving is one of the ways that we can break the curse of the tendency the desired hoard and keep all these things for ourselves and spend these things in our own lusts. And the best way to break that is to part with it and to part with it generously so that you're proving to yourself that you're not owned by these things but that you own them. And Jesus Christ in Luke 21 points out the widow putting in her two mites even though that was probably all that she had. And so It's also a testimony of our trust in God when we look and we say, well, we're going to tithe.

We're also saying that we trust that it is not us that have provided for ourselves when we pray, give us this day our daily bread, and then refuse to tithe. We're saying, that's a lie. We don't believe that God gave us our daily bread. We believe we gave us our daily bread instead of trusting that God truly is the one that gives the daily bread. And so tithing ties straight back to trust.

Do you trust God or not? You know, it's interesting statistics are gathered on local church giving, and from what I understand, about 6% of Christians tithe, 94% of those who claim to be Christians do not tithe, 32% report that they tithe, but 6% actually do. So the Barna Group has ended up concluding that church budgets anticipate congregation members to donate about 2 or 3 percent of their income to the church. So there seems to be what most people would call a low level of giving in local churches. What does the Scripture say?

How should we be counseling people in our churches regarding sacrificial giving? Well, even before we get to sacrificial giving, one of the other things that we have to understand is God is not a Marxist. Marx says those who receive more, they have an obligation to give a greater percent. God actually says everybody has a responsibility to give the same percent. Now those who have more are supposed to help those who have a lack.

But the requirement that God gives is that everybody is supposed to tithe. And so when we look at it in sacrificial giving, that means that, yes, sometimes you give money to the work of God even though you don't think you have enough money. And the reality is what you're saying is you trust God, that God will provide what you need. It's very difficult for pastors to talk about this subject because they're always so worried that it comes off as self-serving and that what they really want to do is swell the church's budget. But Pastors have to talk about this because of the connection between the heart and the wallet.

And the hearts of the people that have been entrusted to them, a lot of the spiritual health of the people who sit in the church week after week depends on their ability to break free from coveting and from the love of money. So pastors have to talk about this and they have to encourage their people to give sacrificially. David, when he's making the sacrifice to stop the plague in Israel after he did the census. He goes to the threshing room floor and the man says, hey, you can take the ox. I want the plague to stop too.

And David says, no, I must pay for this because otherwise it's not an offering. Otherwise there's no sacrifice. And the reality is we have to understand that we are supposed to come to God and it's a statement of trust to say, I'm going to give up something that I have that I want to have because I trust that God will give me something better. You know, we're not here to try to solve forever the issue of tithing, whether tithing is for today, very hot issue. But here's what we do know.

Paul says to the Corinthians, in 1 Corinthians 9, 6 and 7, sowing sparingly and bountifully and cheerfully, all are important things to consider. If you sow sparingly, you reap sparingly. And while God says that he gives money to enjoy in Ecclesiastes chapter 5, we also know that a man can rob God in Malachi 3. There are ways that we rob God by refusing to give sacrificially. So We could speak about the tithe being present before the law.

We could speak of the various tithes of the Old Testament. They give us principles to understand the heart of God regarding giving. There is the Levitical tithe, there is the festival tithe, there is the tithe for the poor. There are a number of passages in the Mosaic law that relate to it. Leviticus 27, 30-33, Numbers 18, 21, and Deuteronomy 14, 22-29.

God communicates clearly in both the New and the Old Testament that God's people are meant to give sacrificially. Scott, you mentioned the text in Malachi that talks about giving. That's really an astounding text because it's not only a rebuke for the people not giving, but it's an invitation for the people to test God in His faithfulness. And there may be other instances of that, but I certainly can't think of one. It's not a practice that's generally commended testing God, but God invites his people to test him in the matter of giving to see whether he'll be a faithful God and provide.

As part of it is just that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And so because of that, again, it comes back to a testimony that do you truly trust that God is the sovereign God and that the reason that you have the resources that you do is because God decided to give them because it was a... Sometimes it's because it's a curse to you because God's punishing you and chastising you, but other times He's given them to you because you're going to be in efficient use of them. Amen. Okay, so let's talk about the dispersal of funds in a church and specifically the role of the deaconate.

Let's deal with the financial issues that deacons are supposed to be focused upon. And Jason, why don't you kick off this whole discussion about the role of a deacon. The biggest surprise for me in being a deacon is how difficult benevolence is. Deacons have two primary roles. One is to relieve workload of things that don't relate to prayer and ministry of the word from the elder so that the elders can be focused like a laser beam on those two areas, prayer and the ministry of the word.

The other thing is that there would be spiritually qualified, spiritually robust men in the church who can be entrusted with sensitive financial matters and particularly benevolence. And the pattern for that is given to us in Acts 6 where the church was having problems with distribution, uneven distribution to widows. And the disciples knew that they would be unduly diverted from their primary function in the church if they took this on to solve the problem themselves and so that was that was given to them. What we find as deacons is that there are two things that have to be managed towards and they seem contradictory but they're not. The first is that God desires the New Testament church to be like what is pictured in Acts 2 with people selling their possessions and sharing as anyone would have need.

The other thing that has to be also balanced though is what we see in 2 Timothy 3 where Paul talks about his orderly life among the Thessalonians. And part of that orderly life was he worked with his own hands and he provided for his own needs. And so there are certain categories which are easy, which are widows and orphans. James talks so beautifully about that pure and undefiled religion is this, and it's ministry to widows and orphans. And so that's a clear-cut category.

But where a man has the primary responsibility to provide for a family, when is the right time to step in to provide resources for a family that is together and that has a provider in the home can be a very difficult subject. And especially in a time of recession where it's going to be hard to find a job. And you know, part of the Second Thessalonians 311 right after, if anyone will not work, neither shall I eat. It says, for we hear that there are some who walk among you and disorderly men are not working at all but are busybodies. So we have to understand when we, It's not even that we're just hurting them.

What we end up doing when we provide to people who are not willing to work, who are not trying to work, what we end up doing is create a real damage to the church and a harm to the church because they're going to go around and they're going to be busybodies. And by the way, that same theme is picked up by Paul in 1 Timothy 5 when it talks about cares of widows and why widows who are younger than the ages of 60 should not be provided for. And it's that they would become busybodies as well. So if you read that In isolation, it seemed like Paul was beaten up on women who tend towards gossip. But then you turn to second Thessalonians and the same admonition is there for men with the result being the same, that if you provide for a man who could provide for himself and should be working, you essentially turn him into a busybody.

And this is what our society has become, right? We teach that when you graduate from high school that you're going to be an adolescent. What do adolescents do? They sit around and talk, right? They hang out.

They spend hours learning how to be busybodies. So to tie back to what we talked about before about learning to work, if we do not teach our children to work, understand the other thing that you leave them as busy bodies. Those are the two choices. One of the big problems that we have in our world today is a total lack of understanding about jurisdictions and about what jurisdictions should be handling which category. And nowhere is this any worse than in the area of caring for people in need.

Right now we have a government which has never been given that responsibility crossing over into the church's jurisdiction. So you have a whole group of people in society who are being provided for without any of the accountability or restrictions that you see in the New Testament, whereas the church has stepped back and not done that. So we have much, much learning to do in how to take that ground back so that benevolence is done in a proper way and within the right jurisdiction. And when God does bring economic hard to a family and to a believer, He's using it to teach him and to turn from sin. And when we step in at the wrong time, and the government, right, blanket steps in, and so It removes the chastisement of the Lord that the Lord has planned, or not against God's sovereignty, but the way that the normal process is supposed to work is that's a chastisement for sin, and instead the government steps in and serves to send them a check.

We run into the same problem with the church, is that we need to make sure on the one hand that we're helping and that we're loving people who are diligent and working, but on the other hand we have to make sure that we're not getting in the way of God's work in that person's life where his intention is to chastise that person for their sin, to get them to turn from their sand. So the hierarchy that we see in the New Testament is first that a person should work with their own hands, they should eat their own bread, they should provide for themselves. That first line of defense is family, and we clearly see that in 1 Timothy 5, that when a widow or a family falls on hard financial times, that immediate family really should kick in and provide the necessary resources so that the church is not burdened with that. And then the second line of defense is the church itself. And so this is God's plan.

First, that we provide for ourselves when there's hardship that the family is the first line of defense and then when that fails or isn't an option that the church provides. That the church provide. Not doing things in that order can actually harm people when you intend to hurt. I read an interesting book recently that was titled, How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor. And it talked a lot about that, the tendency for us to reinforce the problems of poverty through the way we try to address poverty.

Jason, could you give us just a few more guiding principles that guide the deacons at Hope Baptist? So one of the things that we found right off the bat was how difficult it is to set up guidelines and procedures for this because there's a thousand different factors in every situation. Where we've ended up is that these have to be carefully, these situations have to be carefully inspected one by one and that we have the guiding principles that I just talked about which are a help. But it's not as easy as it thinks. You say, if a man won't work, well, determining that can be very difficult, particularly when there's 10% unemployment.

And it really is true that it's a very difficult time to find a job. And so parsing out whether a man has a reluctance in his soul to work or whether it's just a hard time to find a job can be difficult. And so, and so this, this underscores the wisdom of what the disciples did in Acts 6 when they call, when they call for the congregation to come forward with men who are full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom. This is why deacons aren't the janitor's team or the grounds crew, but they're spiritually qualified men who are full of the Holy Spirit and they have wisdom because these are very difficult things to try to parse. And we do need to understand that when we do benevolence that we need to do it out of love.

And we want to simplify love and just make it. We deal with their needs. But to actually love the person is to care enough, as you said, to know them, to know the situation and be able to respond to the situation that they're really in. And the government never does that. That's one of the reasons that you could see why God would have the family be the first line, because the family should know the person best and the church would be the second line.

And the government's not even in it because the government in the end is just going to make regulations. And that's not how you actually love the people. Right. Right. So let's move to another hot spot, debt.

Let's talk about debt in the church. People have strong views on this whole matter of debt. What are some passages of scripture that need to be considered? Proverbs 22, 7, the rich rules over the poor and the borrower is the servant to the lender. We just need to understand that when we borrow money that what we're doing is constraining our options.

It doesn't mean that it's always wrong to borrow money. You can't support that. But we also have to understand why we have such a high debt burden in the United States, And that's because we're dissatisfied with what God has given us. Instead of living in a 500 square foot house, we need a 3, 000 square foot house, so we're willing to sell the next generation for that. And God says, hey, if you were saved as a slave, be a slave.

That's fine. Be satisfied with where God has you. But one of the things that we should desire and that we're commanded to desire is to be free. And so one of the things that is the leading fruit of the spirit that gives freedom is self-control. And the problem is we're not willing to be dissatisfied with what we have.

We're not willing to say, hey, this is where God has us. We need to be content with where God has us. Instead, we'd rather sell our children into Egypt. So while everyone who listens to the podcast will probably be in financial circumstances, likely that includes debt. And we should be content with where God has us today.

God is definitely wants us to point in a direction and the direction is to be free, is to be free from that. Yes, so there are, you know, Scripture makes it very clear there are dangers in debt. And so it's important that those are clear to everyone. At the same time, Scripture governs lending and borrowing. And so I think you have to hold both of those in tension, like you said, Jason, to encourage people to move in the direction of freedom as much as they can.

And when we think in terms of the amount of worry that happens over financial matters, part of that is not our trust in the sovereignty of God. Part of that is the financial condition that we have allowed to constrain us. When we take on all this debt, it lends itself to worry because the loss of the job then becomes a much bigger deal than it would have been had we not had that debt around our necks. In looking through passages, I stumbled across 1 Samuel 22, 2, right? And this is when David's gathering the troops with him for his army.

And it says, everyone who was in debt went to him, right? These are the losers of society. And everyone who was in debt went to him, were gathered to him. So he had about 400 men with him out of all of Israel. Consider now if somebody said, everyone who's in debt come to me.

In The United States would be what, 300 million. He only had 400. We've become slaves. We have to understand as a society, we have become slaves. This is not normal.

This is not typical. This is very, I mean this is really, as a nation we've been completely pillaged. We just have to understand how impoverished we really are. When we think that we're in this nation that's wealthy, we are not wealthy. We are an extremely impoverished nation because everybody's in debt.

You know the housing market, the easy availability of credit is driven that. We need to understand that in the 30s when the FHA began their program, which massively increased the indebtedness of the American people, most people owned their house free and clear. Most people pay cash for their house. And the loan restrictions, you know, required that you couldn't have more than 50 percent debt and you had to pay it off in 10 years. That was the more common kind of a mortgage today.

You know, it's all bets are off. It's whatever, you know. And of course, we're seeing a tightening in the credit markets right now. But the kind of credit situation that we have today is very dangerous to families. And it does make them slaves.

And so to be really pointed, we need to be teaching our children to be content with a lot less than what their neighbors have. But freedom is better than slavery. 500 square feet is better than 3, 000 square feet as a slave. That's what God says. That's what God's Word is about.

You look at the number of times that Jesus Christ says, He came to set the captives free. Let's stop being captives. Let's stop teaching our children to be captive. And in the end, the main driver of their captivity is their own lusts. And we need to be teaching people to be satisfied with what God has for them.

There's nothing more shocking than to come to a home closing and signing off on the truth and lending statement, which shows what you'll actually pay over the life of the loan. So when you say be content with $500 rather than have $3, 000 square feet and be a slave, really in purely financial mathematical terms, the fastest way to get to the 3, 000 is to start at 500 and do it as you go. And the amount that you pay is so much less than you would have on a 30-year mortgage. Financial intelligence of the average church member is not much above, you know, the average pagan out there. We still have people who go to buy a car, which we advocate buying cars for cash, buy clunkers for cash.

But you know, most people still go into a car dealer and they're duped into the idea of what's my payment. And what's my payment really doesn't have anything to do with the cost of that car. If a car dealer can get you focused on your payment, you are going to pay thousands of dollars more than you would have if you had focused on other issues. That has to do with financial intelligence, understanding interest rates and amortization schedules and the dangers of debt and how ripped off you are when you buy things on credit like that. And you can always tell a shady used car salesman when they will not tell you the price of the car, all they keep going back to is payments.

I mean, that is the sign that they're shady, as shady as it could be, right, because you go into car dealers that won't tell you the price, that means because they're thieves. And you just have to understand who you're selling yourself to. Yeah. So the big message is get out of debt, you know, don't buy cars or things like that on credit and get free of encumbrances as quick as you can. That's the message.

But there's the other big message about that is that the people, after the people learned all to go into debt, now they've sold the Church of Jesus Christ into debt. Right. And that now you have churches that are borrowing huge amounts of money, and the church is becoming a slave to banks. That is evil. It is one thing for a man to sell himself into slavery because he needs to.

The Church of Jesus Christ can pay its own way. God provides. Well, and it has implications all the way to the pulpit. There are texts of Scripture that cannot be preached on in pulpits today because of financial considerations, and nobody wants to concede that point, but it's hard to argue it. It's hard to send the rich men down the road because of the exclusiveness of the gospel or other particular commands or principles that are in Scripture.

You know, the gospel offends. The Word of God is often very difficult to swallow and it sends people down the road and it ought to. It separates the sheep from the goats. And often our indebtedness makes us reluctant to preach the word in season and out of season. So with that happy thought, Let's move to our final consideration in this discussion.

And let's talk about celebration. Our understanding of scripture is that church leaders need to encourage families in the church to celebrate with the funds that God has given them and that the church itself also celebrates. What's the biblical basis of that? One thing is if you look at the ceremonial law for Israel, they had the Sabbath one day a week. They had the New Moon Feast one day a month.

They had three weeks where they were supposed to gather as a people and have feasts. A lot of times when we think of sacrifice, our immediate thought of sacrifice is the blood being shed and all these other things. And that's all true and we need to remember those things. But these were also, this is when you killed the fatted calf, this is when you gathered for a party. And we just need to understand that God's plan for Israel had a great deal of feasting in it, a great deal of celebration in it.

It's very easy for us to look at economics times and start to become dour and start to say, oh no, everything's terrible. I just need to hoard, hoard, hoard, hoard, hoard. That's not God's plan. God's plan is that there are times of celebration where we say, God will provide for tomorrow, so today I'm going to feast. I'll just have to say at a personal level, I've been working under a more utilitarian viewpoint of how the church should be using its finances than what we actually see in Scripture.

You know, the thought that it would be a legitimate expenditure for a church to have a celebration where you just, you pay for all the stuff and people just come and celebrate and enjoy each other's company. And is there spiritual content to it and a spiritual component to it? Of course there is. But it is a big shift in mindset, how liberating it is to know that one of the things God has provided for us is resources so that we can celebrate together. And it's a celebration of His goodness.

Moses instructed the children of Israel to set aside 10 percent of their income for celebration. Think about that for a minute. And now they would have a lot of days that they were supposed to be using that income. But yeah, it's a significant portion that they were supposed to set aside for that celebration. And one of the things that we have to understand is that part of Thanksgiving is celebration.

And we are supposed to be a very thankful people, right? The unrighteous do not glorify God as God, nor are they thankful. Now Thanksgiving starts in the home, it starts in the church, and now we're at the point where we think Thanksgiving is something that's only for the jurisdiction of the state. And the truth is, is yeah, the state does have, you know, Solomon, he had a day of celebration, he had a time of celebration when they open the temple. And it is legitimate for the state to do it, but we also have to understand as fathers, we should have days of thanksgivings in our home.

As elders, we should have days of thanksgiving where we, as the church gathers, like you were saying, and just celebrates. And that's the purpose of it, is to celebrate. And that goes across all jurisdictions. All jurisdictions have the right to declare a fast. All jurisdictions have the right to declare days of celebration.

And we should celebrate how good God has been to us. Amen. So let's be a people who celebrate and who understand the will of the Lord in all these things. We've covered lots of ground here, lots of hot spots. We've talked about the sovereignty of God.

We've talked about the purposes of work, about how to be a good worker and the implications of the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We've talked about teaching your family how to work. We've dealt with matters of inheritance and envy and the use and ownership of resources, of sacrificial giving, of benevolence, and the role of the deaconate, of debt, and finally of celebration. So what does all this mean? God really cares about the resources that He gives us and what we do with them.

God desires to glorify himself with everything he's put in our hands. What is the purpose of this financial season? It's to glorify God. What's the purpose of everything that God has put into your hands? It's to glorify Him.

Everything for the glory of God. All work, all resources for the glory of God. We pray that God will help us to make continuous progress in this whole matter in our own church. And I pray that all of you who are listening will be blessed of the Lord, that your hearts will be full of celebration at the kindness of God in giving resources for one single purpose. We'll see you next time.