Bulls, Bears, and the Bible II, Opening the Windows of Heaven

Adjust yourself there. Let's take your Bibles this morning and turn to the book of Malachi. Just turn to the New Testament and back a couple of pages or look up here on the overhead. Definitely want to get your teaching outline out of your notes this morning. If you were not here, and just out of curiosity, this is just a little moment of insight for us all. Last week it snowed or there was just some obstacles. How many of you were not here last week? Just put your hand up real quick. Hold them up real high. Look, Gary, just look around and see that. There are invariably, friends, on a Sunday morning between 30 and 40% of our church was not able to be here. Now, what's interesting, next week I'll put my hand, I'll do the same thing, it'll be a different set of hands. So we just have to trust that communication gets passed through. That makes our challenge that much more difficult. But last week the Lord had me change the message. This was to be a three-part series on opening the windows of heaven and how we can lay hold of God's resources. And I want to say as I begin this morning that for some of you, this will be old information. Some of you will say, yes, it's about time you said that. But for the majority of us here today, there's going to be some new information that I feel very passionate about, that I believe is what many of us need to hear and lay hold of in our spirit, not just for the sake of our own personal wellbeing, but for the sake of what God wants to do in this church. And I share this today with an awareness that I need the Lord in a special way to help me communicate. Would you pray with me about that, please? Father, this is not just a sermon or a message that I want to get done so I can get beyond it. Lord, it's a message that I believe you want to fashion in the hearts of everyone that you've brought here. I thank you for these wonderful people. I thank you for their commitment to growing in faith. And I pray that you would instruct us now from your word. Lord, remove obstacles, take away whatever veil would be over our eyes. Lord, give me the words that you want me to speak to this service particularly today, for I ask it in Jesus' name, amen. All right, Karen's going to help me on the overhead today, and there's a lot of things to be shared here. So let's begin. We're going to read Malachi chapter three, and I'm going to try to find all the different scriptures I have. This should be up here on the overhead. I'll just, when all else fails, I'll turn in my Bible and read it. How's that? Malachi three, and we're going to be reading verses six through 12. Why not read it out loud with me? Let's declare God's word, all right? I, the Lord, do not change. Can't hear you. I, the Lord, do not change. Good. So you, O descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed. Ever since the time of your forefathers, you have turned away from my decrees and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord Almighty. But you ask, how are we to return? Will a man rob God? Yet you rob me. But you ask, how do we rob you? In tithes and offerings. You're under a curse to the whole nation of you because you're robbing me. Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in my house. Test me in this, says the Lord Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it. I will prevent pests from devouring your crops, and the vines in your fields will not cast their fruit, says the Lord Almighty. Then all the nations will call you blessed, for yours will be a delightful land, says the Lord Almighty. Doubtless, there's some today that brought a friend. I had someone say in the first service, I've been praying for six months to bring someone to church with me, and you came today, and they didn't ever want to come because all the church talks about is money, and you brought him today. But as I said two weeks ago, we really only talk about finances here directly about every, on average, 18 months or so in terms of what the Bible says to us as part of our stewardship. This is a very important message because how many of you have dealt with money this week? Well, I think it makes sense to know what God's Word says about it. USA Today recently wrote this in a survey that they conducted of young people. The Baby Busters, they're called 18 to 29 or 30 years old, said this, over 38% of that age group would be willing to exchange some happiness for a higher income. The perception being that having money puts you in a place where you'd rather be wielding some influence and power. And lest you think that's just a youth thing, friends, 25% of people in the Baby Boomer generation said the same thing. We said two weeks ago that money has this incredible allurement, this power that it promises things to us of influence and control and security and happiness that it flat can't deliver. And we all sort of admitted two weeks ago that left to ourself, we did not have the internal reserves, the power, the willpower, the strength to deal with money the way God had ordained it and that we needed something else. We needed grace to help us. And so we made our theme verse, this is the next scripture, the theme verse, 2 Corinthians 8, verse 7, that we would excel in this grace of giving. And I underlined the word grace because friends, when it comes down to handling money, it has to be grace, God's power at work, because we will not win the battle of dealing with money God's way. Now I've noticed over the years that people deal with money all different kinds of ways. See if you fit yourself into one of these categories. As I've watched people handle money, they're cash people, people when they go to the restaurant, they just open this wad and peel out the money for lunch. And then they're credit card people. Everything's a credit card. They're big tippers and they're pastors. They're mall shoppers and then they're catalog shoppers or outlet shoppers. They're balance the checkbook carefully every month people and they're shut the checkbook down every two years and start over again people. They're stockbrokers and then they're people who are capable of going broke without them. They're Wall Street Journal people and they're penny saver people. They're blue sky people. Oh, it's just gonna get better. Keep going. And then there's the sky's falling people when it comes to money. It's always gonna, the crash is coming. There are lots of debt risk taker type of people and there are no debt, healthy stomach kind of people. You know what I'm talking about. All of us are wired differently. Some of us, it comes from the way we were brought up. Maybe in our home things were very strict and so we've gotten very loose. Some of us it was the other way around. Some of us grew up during the depression years and I've heard many folks say, I know the value of a dollar, that kind of thing. But one thing we all have in common is this urgent need to tame this allurement of money. And in the words of Jesus, friends listen, you cannot, he didn't say it would be tough, but he said you cannot serve God and man. And in that phrase, listen, Jesus began to very clearly link what he reinforced many times throughout the Gospels and throughout the New Testament, the link between redemption and resources. Now listen carefully. You would never hear me preach from this pulpit anything about your money having anything to do with your salvation. You cannot begin to pony up the bucks necessary to redeem your eternal soul. You know that. One drop of the blood of Jesus was all that was sufficient. And that's why we talk about the cross of Christ. But make no mistake, there is a clear association in scripture between the power of redemption at work in your life and the release of resources in your life. There's a link in scripture about the physical nature of money and the spiritual nature of that which we hold as being real. Friends, nothing reveals more about what you really believe about the biblical teaching of the unseen realm than what you do with the scene that's in your hand. Nothing tells me more about what's going on in your heart, what you value, what's important to you, what you really believe than what you do with your money. As someone has said, the two most revealing documents about you are your day planner, your calendar, and your checkbook. When I was a seminary student in Pasadena, California, I'm one of those people that shuts down the checkbook every two years. And I carried mine around in the car and leave it different places. And one day I left it in the front seat of the car. Someone broke into the car and stole the checkbook. I wasn't real worried about it. Not a whole lot in there. But interestingly, make it kind of a long story rather short and to the point, we reported it to police. It turns out that this same individual who stole the checkbook had committed a number of other crimes in that area and they were hot on his trail. And when he was fleeing one of the crime scenes, he dropped the checkbook. Had my name, Jay Pasadena, 729 Locust Drive. So who do you think the police came to visit? This is a true story. But when they peeled through the checkbook, they said, what's all this stuff about church this, church that, this mission, this, that, that. I said, there's no way this guy's in there robbing some kind of convenience store. They looked at my checkbook and they said, hmm, doesn't match with the profile of the kind of person we're looking for. Here's your checkbook back. You see, we need to understand one thing. God knows us, friends. He knows even now how some of us are at this glaze. I mean, you're fighting to want to tune me out right now because you don't want to hear about this. But I want to convince you that what I'm going to share with you in the next 25 minutes or so is life changing. It will free some of you from a lifelong bondage to things and stuff, whether you think you might have a lot of it or you might not have any of it. I want to say particularly, there's a lot of young people, a lot of college students here in this service, a lot of TNTers. If you get a hold of this that I'm going to share today at an early age and start to follow it, I'm going to show you on the overhead in a minute how your life can quickly begin to fall into God's plan and come under great blessing. And you'll avoid the trap that I see so often in young couples who get to be in their 30s and want to start doing some things for God and want to start stepping up, but have dug themselves into a deep hole of debt and find themselves having to withdraw rather than to move forward in the will of God. And in some cases, even withdraw from God because they feel under such burden and such guilt and such a need to invest even their, quote, days off to make money, including the Lord's Day, because they're so far in debt. I feel passionate about it. I don't want to apologize about it, but I do know that it's sensitive. And you know why it's sensitive, friends? You know why sometimes it gets difficult? Because there's this raw nerve in us related to all this, because in the end, what money has to do with is character. Really what it has to do with, and you know that you wish you could point to some pitfalls that you've had and say, you know, it was this person's fault or I got tricked this way. But in the end, all of us basically made the choices that land us where we are. We made the choices to spend the money or not to work and not to do this or not to do that. And we know that in the end to change things, we have to raise up our will and ask God for the grace to enable us to grow in character so that we can conform with his plan for giving. So how do we proceed? Well, friends, it takes a plan. The next scripture says in Proverbs 21, verse 20, that a wise man plans, he saves for the future, but the foolish man, he spends whatever he gets. The wise man, the man who thinks God's way, who thinks about a plan, the man of character and commitment endurance, he earns and then saves and spends and gives it his God direction. Listen, God is honored, anxiety is reduced, bills get paid, savings grow, children learn, and the work of God advances, and best of all, his life is blessed. That's the wise man of scripture. It's win, win, win, win. Everybody wins when you do it God's way. The foolish person is the one with no plan, little forethought, no strategy. The one who kind of spends it as he comes kind of feels like, well, you know, down the road, I'll do better and I'll have more. And as I said two weeks ago, if you don't do it with little, you won't do with a lot. It's a principle. And then when the opportunity comes to give or an emergency comes or a friend comes and said, man, I am really, really needy right now, can you help me? You have to hang your head and say, you know what? I really can't because you've made no provision. And the late notices pile up and the pressure and the shame and the stress and the guilt and the hassle and friends, it just isn't worth it. So listen to this, a very brief plan I want to outline for you. And if you're not following a plan, then there's a good chance that you're not in the realm of spiritual blessing that God's intended for you as well. First part of the plan, the letter P, praise God at all times. This is critical. Someone asked me in the first service, they said, well, you know, Pastor Joe, I used to understand this and then it didn't seem to work, they said. And I asked them about this part of their life. You see, praise God, did we put that up? Yeah, praise God, praise God at all times. Verse six of Malachi 3 says, before you do anything with your money, get your attitude right. I, the Lord, do not change. The basis of your ability to be able to do God's plan is to realize he's not changed, he's not moved away. He's, as Dede said, he's not short of cash. Okay, he can handle what you need. Friends, you've got to know that. And to begin to praise him is the beginning point of being in a posture then to receive what he wants to pour out. God loves a cheerful giver. I haven't heard that verse before. When we take the offering here in about 20 minutes, look down the row and see how many are really participating in that. Is there a smile? I mean, are people enjoying that? One of my pastoral friends in the area is Joseph Garlinkin. I know at his church, when they take the offering, they have this applause and they carry on and they shout and they're, I mean, that's an outward expression. The important thing is, what's going on in your heart? Are you joyfully giving? Because the Lord says, if you're just saying, all right, God, you know, all right, peel it out of me and take it and just get off. There's no blessing in that. You might as well just put it back in there. Or if you're thinking, you know, all right, you know, get Jay to get onto another subject here. That's not gonna work. God wants us to be a generous, cheerful giver. Why? Because we understand that we're planting seeds in the kingdom and friends, those seeds will produce a fruitful harvest. 2 Corinthians 9 says that that harvest is gonna just abound over and over again in every realm of our lives. Praise is the language of faith. Faith is what releases grace. I'm gonna say that again. Praise is the language, praise is faith speaking and faith releases grace, all right? That grace is what we need to release God's blessing in our lives. About two years ago now, I'll never forget, New Year's Eve, 1995. I stood up here at this podium and had to say to the congregation that was gathered on that day, we'd been in the building one year. It was a very difficult year. We had stretched enormously to get into this facility and we needed $200,000 in that one day or we would have been delinquent on our mortgage payment and in some other repercussions. And I remember saying to the congregation, I didn't know what to do. And I went to the Lord and I had a restless kind of night on Saturday and the Lord said, you gotta pray. And so I told the church, I was gonna go up to the prayer chapel and pray and if anyone was led to pray to join me and as God would lead us that he would meet the need. And I remember thinking, what would the tenor of that night be like? I mean, what kind of atmosphere was gonna take place up there? And people would come up to visit and I could see them sort of tentatively coming in wondering, was Jay gonna be on the carpet saying, oh, why did we do this? And God, where are you and what's wrong with us? And was I gonna be weeping and pounding my chest and oh, please God, you've gotta come through. And you know what? From six o'clock in the evening when I started, all we did that night was to praise God. We had praise tapes and CDs going. We sang praise choruses. Occasionally we'd stop and say, Lord, thank you that we know that you're the God who sovereignly rules over all things. And as the night went on, people were calling in. I had a cell phone in there and they're saying, how's it going? I said, hey, we're having a praise time. And they could hear people clapping back in the background. I gotta admit, by four a.m. the praise was dying down a bit. But it wasn't because my spirit was just, I was getting tired. But then we cranked up again around 6.30 or seven, praised God all the way through till noon and by 12 o'clock noon, January 1st, 1996, $218,000 had been walked in the door to this congregation. Hallelujah. You see, you praise God not just when you have it, friends. You praise him when you need it because he's the God of all supply. Don't miss this part of the plan. Praise God. Thanksgiving is praising God for what he's done. We're gonna do that Wednesday night. Hope is praising God for what he's going to do. But faith is praising God for what he is doing even though you don't see it. Number one, praise him at all times. Number two, lay before God your tithes and your offerings. Lay before God your tithes and offerings. The very first check you should write every week of every month or whenever you're paid on a regular basis, the first check you should write is your tithe. And what is a tithe? People say, well, what is a tithe? Is a tithe $20, $50, 2%, a tithe by definition, the Hebrew word for tithe means a tenth of. It's one tenth of your income. And friends, this was established long before the law. And I'm gonna talk about this for a couple of moments because many people told me in the first service they hadn't understood this before. You see, one of the big hangups about tithing is it Old Testament or New Testament? Is it the law? I mean, if it's law, then I don't wanna go back under law. Listen, the first reference in the Bible is called the principle of first appearance. It tells more about how a word is used than any other time in scripture. The first appearance of the word tithe is in Genesis 14, and I think we do have that scripture, Karen. In Genesis 14, Abram, who's being called to be the father of the Jews, is coming back from this encounter with his enemies and he meets this mysterious mystical figure called Melchizedek. Melchizedek is referred to several times in scripture. In the New Testament, book of Hebrews 6, 7, and 8, he is talked about quite a bit. Melchizedek was likely a Christophane, or in other words, a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus Christ. Here's what happens. Melchizedek, king of Salem, and what is Salem a reference to? Jerusalem. That's right, it's the first reference to the city of Jerusalem. Brought out bread and wine. Well, that's interesting. What is bread and wine? A symbol of communion. He was priest of God Most High, and he blessed Abram, saying, Blessed be Abram by God Most High, creator of heaven and earth, and blessed be God Most High who delivered you, your enemies, into your hand. Then Abram gave him a tenth of the net. He gave him a tenth of everything. And that is the reference. What I want you to see is that's Genesis 14. Friends, this is six or 700 years before Moses brought the law down off of Mount Sinai. The tithe was established long before the law. It is a principle of created order. It is the tangible way that we say to God on a regular basis, my life is yours. Listen now, listen carefully to this. We stand and sing our praise. We'll stand and tell somebody, I'm a Christian. Jesus is my Lord, we would say. Our tithe is our tangible way of saying, God, you are Lord of my life. You really own everything in my life, but here's 10% just to remind me that you own it all. That's what the tithe is. And by the way, the Bible says that we're to honor God with the firstfruits. In other words, the tithe isn't written as the last leftover check you have. It should be the first expression that you have. And this is important. I was really convicted of this when I was preparing a couple weeks ago for this series about honoring God. How do you honor somebody? These septuplets that were just born, how many got that with someone else that received that blessing? Seven of them. But the family received all these gifts and all, and they were honored for, I guess it was an achievement of sorts, I don't know, but for this great blessing. And I remember one of the scenes, the owner of the dealership where this gentleman sells automobiles presented him with the keys to a 15-passenger van. They said, we wanted to honor you for this incredible blessing in your life and bringing notoriety to this little town in Iowa and all the rest. They honored him by giving him the biggest van you can buy. I don't think it would have honored them. He said, you know, we had this used GeoMetro coupe over here with 120,000 miles. Could you get a couple kids in the back? Wouldn't have happened. Wouldn't have honored them. They wouldn't have gone on national TV and said, oh, well, here's this kind of rust bucket with two seats in it. But listen, how many times do we bring to God what's left over? You know, well, here's a little something, God. It's better than nothing. Now the Bible says, honor the Lord with the first fruits. And that's why in my household, we write the first sect every month. It goes to the Lord. It honors God. And friends, the Bible says, you think God doesn't notice this? In this scripture, the Lord says, I am angered because you've robbed me in this. Make no mistake. I don't wanna be on the side of any people that are robbing God. Because we put ourselves under a curse. What kind of curse? Not a plague or not some kind of physical thing, but a curse of the word of the Lord being stopped up. Now, how many of you know enough about Bible history to know that for 400 years after Malachi, nothing was said? Are you listening? Things were quiet on the heaven side of things because the people were robbing God. And I wanna stop, and I didn't even have this unction in the first service, but I wanna stop right now and say, I am convinced that if we will own this principle on a spiritual level of giving our tithes, that God will begin to bring the breakthrough on the heaven side of things in the spiritual realm that we long to see. But as long as we all just kind of sort of play it cautiously and close to the cup and all, we're gonna hold back the blessing that God has for us individually and as a church family. There's some questions people often ask me, just real quickly, you know. They say, well, what am I supposed to do if I don't have any money? Well, everyone has some money, access to some money. But I would say this, if you need some money, just tithe what you need. If you need $1,000, say, you know, God, I'm gonna trust you, I'm gonna plant a seed. We as a church have done that from time to time. We've planted 10% of what we've needed in order to see God release blessing upon us. And I wanna say, this thing of tithing could be the biggest act of faith that we as a church, the greatest statement that we could make to the powers and principalities of the air would be an act of faith that would lead us to tithe together. Why? Because much of what controls this whole community in which we live is mammon. It's the spirit of money. It's the pursuit of more, isn't it? Having more, accumulating more, living a little better. By God's grace, we make a statement to those powers when we tithe and honor God. But the best part is this, as we do so, number three, we can anticipate God's blessing. What does that mean? Well, that means that God gets ready. He says, if you do this, watch out. The windows of heaven are gonna open up. Now, the NIV helps us by translating it accurately as floodgates or sluice gates. The Bible says that as we tithe, God is then free to open those gates of blessing. How many of you have ever been to the Grand Coulee or the Hoover Dam or one of those huge dams? How about Pima Tuning? There's engineers building a way to control the back of the reservoir so they can let the water flow and create the flow of water that'll turn the turbines and so on. And the Bible clearly tells us there are three times that the word windows or floodgates were used in scripture. I don't have these down here. I just jotted them down. The first is in Genesis 7-11 where Noah's flood took place. Bible says there that when God brought judgment, he opened the windows of heaven and let water come down and flood the earth. And then second, it's referred to in 2 Kings 7 when Elisha told the people, hey, there's gonna be a change. And grain and all that's been so scarce, people were starving from lack of food. He said, it's gonna be so abundant that there's gonna be a tremendous harvest. And someone turned to Elisha and said, even if the windows of heaven open, something like that couldn't happen. And in fact, it did. The next day, the people were delivered and food was abundant. So that was talking about natural things. And here, windows of heaven is used the third time talking about the spiritual resource that God releases upon us when we do it his way. The word for windows or floodgates, the word is aruba in the Greek and the Hebrew rather. And that word talks about a channel by which water that's in a reservoir is dispersed and released. And I couldn't think of a way of doing this. I couldn't build a dam here and show you how it works, but we have something. How many of you have a hose at home? Garden hose, right? And if you plug that hose into the nozzle back there and turn the spigot on, that water will just come pouring out until you put one of these on it, right? Then you can turn the water on and the water will fill the hose. And if you wanna spray your garden or wash your car, all you gotta do is what? Just open up the old nozzle. An amazing thing happens. That power that's all backed up there in the system starts to flow through. Friends, this is your tide. God is ready to release, but you control the nozzles. And if you say, you know what, I just don't wanna do it your way, God, then here's what you're doing. You're just laying the old hose down. It doesn't mean, you know, how many of you have little hoses that drip? You'll get some. God may, you know, there may just be some blessing anyhow, but you wanna open it up. You got to employ that tide. My heart says today that many of us here know that we need to do this, but we're afraid. I wanna assure you of one thing. I've never met a person who stepped out in trust of God and found him to be unfaithful. God wants to bless you. And I wanna underscore how much he wants to bless this church if we'll move together in that. Friends, the plan is simple. 10% to God. The second 10% goes to you. This is called the 10-10-80 plan. I've referred to it before. Let me just touch on this and then I'll close. Just think again, if you could give God the first 10% and then you, instead of just spending the other 90, you save 10%. And Karen is gonna help me with this on an overhead. We have a little chart. Let's get that chart up. I want you to see, again, if you're a young person, maybe you're wondering, well, this doesn't apply to me very much, but if you're a young person and you're wondering, well, how can this plan really work for me? The other part of it is learning to save in a way that directly affects you. And I'm gonna have to have Karen help me up here. All right, let's just say that you're age 25 and you're making $15,000 a year, flat salary. And for 20 years, you have no increase. You have no raises, whatever. Age 45, 20 years flat income, $15,000. Don't put it down yet. Number one, you will have been able to give to God's work $30,000 over those 20 years, $30,000. And you, second, go ahead, slide down, would save for yourself $85,900. How many 45-year-olds here today wish they had that kind of money saved up? Well, let's just bump it up a little bit. Let's say you do a little bit better than that and you're making $30,000 a year. And you start at age 35, and for 20 years, you just gave faithfully. Well, in the next 20 years, with no increases, no bonuses, you could have given the work of God $60,000 and you would have saved for yourself $171,000. Not a bad little start, would you say? Remember that the statistics will tell us that the great majority, 80% of Americans, will have nothing upon which to retire except Social Security. Just before we, yeah, let's put up the age. 60,000 a year, and I hear say in our community some people make that much money. From age 40 to age 60, you would have given to God $120,000. Think of that, $120,000 in 20 years, and you would have saved for yourself $343,000. That is, that's amazing. That's the power of compound interest. That's what can be available to you. And again, it's 20 years. That's not a lifetime, it's just 20 years. That's about just a little bit longer than we've been together as a church. You say, well, with that kind of a plan, why doesn't everyone do it? And here's the reason. Because the urgency of everything presses in and money starts to speak to us and it tells us its story and we go crazy. And we all hear the lines, you know, the biggest sale of the season, whether we need it or not, we're going down to check it out. No payments till 1999 or 2001 or whatever. What do we do? Money becomes this sort of, it's this sort of medication. When you're bored, what do you do? Spend money, hey, gotta have some activity, creativity. When you're celebrating a victory, what do you do? Hey, let's go out and spend some money. When you're depressed, what do you do? You're gonna spend something, aren't you? When you're happy, what do you do? Hey, this, I feel great. When you're angry, what do you do? Oh, I can't have this, I'm gonna buy that. And it's called revenge spending. And see, we just keep piling on the ways to spend money and all these things happen. And then someone comes along and offers us, do you get these things in the mail like I do? Where is it here? Is this it? All these letters that say, dear John E. Passivan, you are a special person. Do you get these? You can borrow, no. You can get a substantial amount of money anytime for any reason. And all you need is the strength of your signature because you're our preferred customer. You're not, but I am, I just want you to know that. And there's no collateral, just your good name. So you read the fine print, my good name and a promise to pay 21% on that money. And if you knew what that worked out to be, friends, it doesn't take long to get into a big pile of trouble. And so instead of falling prey to this, this is where character comes in, hold off and number four, never stop. Just faithfully continue on the plan of God. And you'll find that the blessing of God will begin to increase in your life. Kingdom finances are not a magic formula. Please hear me say this. If you begin to tithe today, don't walk out tomorrow and play the lotto. Oh yeah, you know, now it's all the windows, the windows must mean the Harrisburg windows. No, it's the windows of heaven. And you'll be tempted to give up when you have a difficult time. People say, well, what should I do if I, you know, I don't have enough to pay my bills, should I keep tithing? Friends, that's when you can't afford to be cut off. You know, when we were buying our first home, we applied for the mortgage and I remember the banker, we sat down with him and he said, well, what's this? And I put on there a liability of 10% of my income. He said, what's this? And I said, that's my tithe. He said, well, he said, well, looking at the numbers here, t