Make your stewardship commitment.
As we think about stewardship and giving, the crucial question we each must ask ourselves is not “how much should I give?” but “why should I give?” There are plenty of disincentives to give: we worry we can’t afford to give generously; we think our small gifts won’t make much impact on a large church budget; we have no plan to give regularly and so we’re always unprepared to make a gift when the opportunity comes around.
In our Stewardship verse this year, the Apostle Paul offers a gospel motive for generous giving which, when stacked against every disincentive, outweighs them all. In 2 Corinthians 8, Paul commends the Macedonian churches for their sacrificial giving, as a way to encourage the Corinthian believers to follow suit. Actually, he says that the Corinthians had already begun the financial support of gospel ministry a year before. What’s more, they “desired to do it” (2 Cor. 8:10). And to help fuel their desire to continue on in their financial partnership he offers this great incentive: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you by His poverty might become rich.”
Why give to the local church? Not because we have made a calculated assessment of the comparative impact our gift will have on the total budget of the church and determined that it’s worth it. Not because we have some cash left over that we might as well give to the church. We give to the work of the gospel in the local church because Jesus Christ has lavished the riches of His grace upon us at the incalculable cost of His own impoverishment—robbed of all outward emblems of glory, despised and rejected of men, crucified, dead, and buried.
“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you by His poverty might become rich.”
2 Corinthians 8:9
Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour, All for love’s sake becamest poor; Thrones for a manger didst surrender, Sapphire-paved courts for stable floor. Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour, All for love’s sake becamest poor. (Frank Houghton, 1894-1972)
All this He bore, this great price He paid, Paul says, that in Him and by His impoverishment, we might become rich. Like the returning prodigal, our sin has left us in the rags of spiritual destitution, stained by the filth of our rebellion against God. But Christ has taken our rags upon Himself, and robed us beneath the pristine garments of His own perfect righteousness. We receive the “riches of His glorious inheritance among the saints” (Eph. 1:18). Forgiven, justified, adopted, changed—all at the cost of the Cross of Jesus Christ. We are rich indeed. Is there any sum you would not give in token of your gratitude for such extravagant generosity from Him?
All this He bore, that in Him and by His impoverishment, we might become rich.
Why should you give to gospel work? Because Jesus gave all for you. You became the recipient of His rich grace through the work of the gospel. And now you want to give back to Him in gratitude that the riches of Christ’s grace in the gospel might reach others also.
May the Lord help us to weigh the riches of His grace carefully against all our reasons not to give, and move us, as He moved the Macedonians and the Corinthians to give generously for His sake.
Your Pastor,
David Strain
Our churchwide teaching theme this year is A Lamp to Our Feet: Knowing & Loving the Word of God. Certainly, the Word has a lot to say about stewardship, and you will find some devotionals in this book that expound on various parts of scripture that teach us about stewardship. I hope these devotionals will be useful to you as we consider stewardship together.
As you consider stewardship, I’d like to ask you to especially give prayerful consideration to our stewardship verse this year, 2 Corinthians 8:9: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you by His poverty might become rich.” Notice the focus of this verse – Jesus Christ. While any discussion of stewardship will necessarily entail discussing how we use our money, our time, and our talents, let’s not lose sight of where our focus should always be: Jesus Christ.
As we seek to know and love God’s Word more this year, and consequently understand Him more, let us focus our thoughts around stewardship on the person and character of Jesus Christ. He is always our example to follow, and certainly there can be no better example of being a good steward than Christ. As Paul tells us, though He was rich, though everything was His, He humbled himself for our sake. He sought to do the will of His Father, and, in obedience, He served and He sacrificed.
I don’t know about you, but when I think of how Christ gave of Himself for others, I know my poor efforts pale in comparison. And yet, I am encouraged that by His grace He gives us the ability to do so much more than we believe we are capable of. It’s so easy to want to guard our time or our treasure because we think we have so little that we can afford to give. And yet where would we be if our Savior had not been so generous?
Please join me in praying this stewardship season that God will show us the idols of our hearts that prevent us from being bold in our giving. Pray that God will work in our hearts to make us all cheerful givers. Pray that we will seek to follow the example of Christ, who for our sakes became poor so that in Him, we might become rich.
In Christ,
Matthew Turnage,
Stewardship Chair
In this devotional book, you will find a 2024 Pledge Card which gives you the opportunity to commit to give financially toward the work of First Presbyterian Church in the coming year. During this season, the Stewardship Campaign Committee encourages every member of the congregation to prayerfully consider making a giving commitment in 2024 and to make use of this pledge card for the following:
For Prayerful Planning
Our prayer is that in filling out and submitting this pledge card, you will worshipfully seek God’s will to develop a rhythm of prayerful planning for your stewardship as individuals and as families. Before filling out this card, take time to prayerfully reflect on the year that is coming to a close, consider the year ahead, contemplate God’s faithfulness in giving abundantly to us, and plan for the ways we can faithfully give back to him from that with which He has entrusted us.
For Accountability
Oftentimes, good intentions for faithful giving fall away once real life starts to happen. One member of the Stewardship Campaign committee writes, “Until I started using a pledge card to make a giving commitment, I never put thought ahead of time into what I planned to give in the coming year. The first year I pledged, I wrote down an amount I thought was reasonable, but as the year was coming to an end, I realized I wasn’t anywhere close to giving what I said I would give. I still look at that year in which I didn’t meet my commitment as a reminder of how easily I let myself off the hook and at how regularly I need to hold myself accountable in order to give to God what I know I should.”
After you submit your pledge, you will receive regular updates from the church business office throughout the year, showing your progress towards meeting the amount you pledged, and the same progress is updated weekly on your ShelbyNext profile. Regularly checking your progress towards your giving goal is a great way to keep yourself accountable.
For Worship
Giving our offerings to God is an act of worship and, as such, is a regular and consistent part of the order of worship in our services. Whether you are an online giver who has set up a regularly scheduled amount or someone who prefers to put paper in the plate, the offertory should be a reverent time of reflection on what God has done for us. Expressing our worship to our Almighty God includes returning a portion of His provision for the furthering of His kingdom.
For Developing Generous Hearts
The mission statement of FPC is to glorify God by making disciples in our neighborhood, in our communities, and around the world. FPC’s history of making good on that mission has been accomplished, in part, through faithful and self-sacrificial giving from its congregation. Our prayer is that by regularly making use of tools like this pledge card, the FPC church family will continue to cultivate that faithful generosity of its members and raise up believers who “do not lay up treasures on earth… but lay up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” – Matthew 6:19-21
Daily Devotionals
The 2023-2024 Stewardship Committee has put together a series of daily devotionals for us to use for the week of November 6-10 as we prayerfully consider how we will steward the gifts we have been given. We encourage you to use these devotions in the week leading up to One Sunday to prepare your hearts to worship God through giving.
We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia, for in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of their own accord, begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints—and this, not as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord and then by the will of God to us.
2 Corinthians 8:1-5
There’s a lot we can learn from the churches in Macedonia. One of the Macedonian churches was in Berea, and Acts 17:11-12 tells us that when Paul preached at Berea, the Bereans searched the scriptures to determine the truth, and many became believers as a result. Their faithfulness to the scriptures as their guide led them to belief in Christ. From this passage, we can see how that belief bore fruit in their faithfulness. Although the churches of Macedonia were poor, their poverty increased their reliance on the Lord. Their faithfulness was made manifest in their obedience to God so that they gave even beyond their means for the relief of the brothers and sisters in Jerusalem.
Just as the Bereans faithfully studied and searched out the scriptures, so, too, must we devote ourselves to the Word to learn and grow in faithfulness. And just as the Bereans gave abundantly to support ministry, so, too, should we seek to live out what we profess to believe in obedient self-sacrifice.
Being a good steward means recognizing that whatever we have, small or great, is from God and being obedient to Him means returning a portion of what wehave to Him. That may mean taking a closer look at our household budgets and asking ourselves if we are faithfully stewarding our financial resources. It may mean asking hard questions about how we spend our time and stewarding that time by devoting ourselves to volunteer in church ministries. It may mean taking inventory of our talents, and finding the best ways to use them to further the work of God’s kingdom.
Being a good steward isn’t easy. It means we have to be honest with ourselves about how we are using the gifts we have been given. It means putting obedience to God and service to others above ourselves. But let us remember the example of the Bereans and how God blessed the work of that church. If we are faithful stewards, just think how He can bless FPC Jackson as we minister in our neighborhood, our city, and beyond.
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.
So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.
Luke 14:26-27,33
In this passage from Luke, Christ calls us to be disciples, to bear our own cross, and to follow Him using some strong and, potentially, confusing language. This passage has a direct and meaningful implication on stewardship. We must recognize and acknowledge that we must be prepared to renounce all we have and all we are in order to make Christ the Lord of our lives. The phrasing Jesus uses in this passage can be shocking. Are we actually being told that we must hate our families in order to be a disciple of Christ? In fact, Jesus is using hyperbole, employing the word “hate” to make His point clear that, in coming to Him, we must put our priorities in order. That means Christ must be on the throne in our lives, and for that to be true, we must love everything that God had blessed us with less than we love Jesus.
That must have been hard to hear for the crowd that was following Jesus that day.I imagine it might be even harder for us today, living in a society of which the constant message is “take care of yourself” and “go out and get what you deserve.” The world’s message to us seems to pervade our culture with a constant drumbeat: “put yourself on the throne.” That’s not Christ’s message, and it’s not what it means to follow Him and to be His disciple.
I’ve found that when I think about or pray about stewardship, more often than not I am thinking about money. But in reading this passage, it is evident that I need to “zoom out” and take a broader view. Of course, we are called to tithe; we are called to give sacrificially, to give to missions and to be responsible stewards of our time, talent, and treasure. These are all part of worship and are pleasing to God.But, always at the core of our stewardship should be the prayerful and humble recognition that Christ is King, and His call upon our lives and our resources must be priority number one.
For too many of us, the word stewardship immediately evokes an image of the annual church stewardship campaign—filling out a pledge card and maybe an accompanying commitment of our time and talents so as not to put too much emphasis on the money aspect. But, before we blindly adopt that reflexive response, perhaps we should first ask what the scriptures have to say about stewardship.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
Next, we could turn to the Psalms, where David states…
The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.
Psalm 24:1
C. S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity (one of the most popular Christian books of the last century), phrased it this way: “Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to God’s service, you could not give God anything that was not in a sense God’s own already.”
When God created everything, he did not hand ownership off to us. God still owns all of creation and all that is in it. A steward is not the owner but the manager of that which belongs to another. As God’s stewards, we are responsible to care for all that God has entrusted to us. Once we acknowledge that what we have is God’s, the question becomes what does God want us to do with it? Even more sobering is the fact that one day each of us will be called to give an account of how we have managed what God has entrusted to us.
Biblical stewardship is a way of life and a primary means by which we live out our identity in Christ. It is the way that we employ the abundance that God has placed in our care to show our love for God and each other. Yes, stewardship is much more than money, pledging, tithes, and plate offerings. It is a spiritual practice that allows us to live out our belief that all we have and all that we are belong to God.
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.
Philippians 2:6-7
“…but emptied himself…” What a reminder to us are these verses of the love of our Savior and how much He gave for us. It causes us to reflect on what Jesus’ life was all about. He came; He left His place in Heaven seated beside the Father to come to Earth. There was no fanfare announcing His birth; it was lowly and humble. He gave up everything; He became poor so that we would gain everything, eternal life and our inheritance in Heaven. Throughout His life here on Earth, He continuously emptied Himself up until His final breath. He gave all.
I reflect on my own life and the things that I continue to cling to and grasp so tightly with my own hands like a child saying “mine” instead of saying “all of me for all of you.” We live in a world focused inward, not outward. We would never think to empty ourselves and give all that we have for someone else, even for the sake ofthe gospel. If I am being honest, it is a daily battle to let go and trust Him knowing that He will never leave me nor forsake me, that He will provide for all of my needs minute by minute. It is a daily choice to lay everything down at His feet, the things to which we hold most tightly: our possessions, our time, and even our loved ones.
During this Stewardship season, may we each ask God to help us daily to loosen our grip on the things of this world, open our hands and hearts to Him, accept each gift He gives, and face each trial with grace, resting in the knowledge that“my God will supply every need of yours according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).
And they came, everyone whose heart stirred him, and everyone whose spirit moved him, and brought the Lord’s contribution…
Exodus 35:21
In a quick reading, Chapters 35 and 36 of Exodus can be mistaken for dry description, the sort of thing my eyes might skim by quickly in a daily devotional — but scattered throughout that description is a beautiful story. Through Moses, God has imparted to the congregation of Israel His vision for the tabernacle. Upon hearing God’s plan to build this place where He will dwell among them, the people are so moved that they cannot stop giving towards that vision.
Exodus 35:21 tells us that the people’s hearts were stirred and spirits were moved after hearing God’s word through Moses, and they brought for the construction of the tabernacle all their treasure (gold, precious stones, fine wood) that they had accumulated while leaving Egypt. Exodus 36:2-7 goes on to tell that the people were so generous with bringing their treasure, that the builders had more than enough to build the tabernacle and had to ask the people to stop giving.
A vision shared through God’s Word.
Hearts moved, spirits stirred.
The people gave.
This stewardship month, take a moment to consider what great ministry is accomplished at First Pres by our Father through the generosity of His people as we give our treasure towards a shared vision: the regular preaching and teaching of God’s Word, the baptism of our children, hearing God’s sweet scripture coming from those same children’s mouths as they grow, the fellowship of our church family in Miller Hall on Wednesday nights, ministries of mercy throughout our community, the making of disciples inside our church and through our people going out into our city and around the world, and so much more. All of that built, brick by brick, from the treasure we return to God.
The scope of what God has accomplished here can take your breath away; even more so—what more ministry might be accomplished!
Please join me in my stewardship prayer for myself and for my family as 2023 draws to a close and 2024 begins: that God’s Word and our mission move my heart and stir my spirit and that, with joy and for His glory, I bring back to God what He has invested in me.
