Andy Davis preaches a verse by verse expository sermon on 1 Chronicles 29:10-19. The main subject of the sermon is the blessing of being able to sacrificially give to the Lord.
sermon transcript
So this is the second of three stewardship sermons that I’m preaching in support of the elders initiative, More Than a Building. Great video. A lot of that history I didn’t know, I had never seen some of those shots before, so it’s marvelous to see the heritage and the history. And my task this morning is to look at another time when another building was being built, that would itself in time, be destroyed, a temporary building, but established in the flow of redemptive history for a purpose that God would, once it was done, fill with the cloud of His glory, as a sign of His dwelling and His pleasure to use that temporary building for His eternal purposes.
David’s Context…. and Ours
To link that to what it is we’re trying to do in this building and in this community. So I wanna set it up by speaking of David’s context and then of ours, and then walk through the text. King David was the greatest of all of Israel’s kings in the Old Covenant. He had it in his heart to build a permanent structure for the dwelling of God, where people could assemble together and worship the living God. Now, up to that point, the Lord had been dwelling in that sense in a tent, a movable tabernacle that went from place to place. And the centerpiece of Jewish worship in the Old Covenant was the Ark of the Covenant and animal sacrifice, and the shedding of animal blood and the pouring out of that blood for the atonement of sins.
The Ark of the Covenant was a golden box, physical box, in which were kept the stone tablets, the actual tablets of stone that God gave to Moses on which were written the words of the Ten Commandments. Now, by David’s time, the tabernacle was about half a millennia old, about 500 years old, approximately. So now that David had conquered the Jebusite city, which became known as the city of David, Jerusalem, and David had set up his home there, his palace, he had in it his heart to build a similar palace or structure for God.
1 Chronicles 17:1-2, it says, “After David was settled in his palace, he said to Nathan the prophet, ‘Here I am living in a palace of cedar, while the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord is under a tent.’ Nathan replied to David, ‘Whatever you have in mind, do it, for God is with you.’” But then God sent Nathan the prophet back with a second message, You are not the one to build the permanent house, you are a warrior, a man of blood, and it will not be you to build it. But then he said far more than David ever thought he would say. He said, I’m gonna build a house for you. I’m gonna build an eternal dwelling where you will dwell forever.
It’s what he said in that same chapter. “I declare to you that the Lord will build a house for you, and when your days are over and you go to be with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, one of your own sons, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for me, and I will establish his throne forever. I will be his father and he will be my son. I will never take my love away from him, as I took it away from your predecessor. I will set him over my house and my kingdom forever. His throne will be established forever.”
So David’s good desire, his initiative, his desire to build a building for God, to give a gift to God, was superseded, overruled by God’s eternal plan. And it involved God building him a house, a house for David and for all of us to dwell in forever, an eternal temple, built in the heavenly realms, where the redeemed will dwell forever and worship God forever. And the one who would sit on the throne of that kingdom would not be David, but David’s eternally greater son, Jesus Christ. And that dwelling place, we call the New Jerusalem, and it’s presently under construction, and it’s doing very well, thank you very much.
As a matter of fact, I think it’s almost finished, but I don’t have a specific prophecy on that, but progress is being made every single day. And what David didn’t realize, now that he felt settled in his life, is that Israel was actually not done with its journey, and neither was God. There were still centuries to go, including the grievous rebellion of the Jewish nation against the Ten Commandments that were in that golden box, against the covenant the God had set up, that necessitated God fulfilling His promise of a curse, that He would evict them from the Promised Land if they did not keep the covenant, which He did, and that the actual beautiful temple that He was assembling materials to build, would be destroyed, completely destroyed by the Babylonians.
Yet for all of that, God still wanted it done. God knew the future. David didn’t know the future, but God wanted that building built. He wanted it to symbolize that new Jerusalem in that time and in that place in the Old Covenant, to symbolize what was going to come later, and He wanted David to take his lower position, to be willing to take a lower place in that structure, to not be the one to build it, but to assemble materials for it so that his son could build it, and David willingly, humbly took that lower place. God was greatly honored and glorified by all this, and He was moved, and He moved the people to give lavishly and generously to this building project, despite the fact that the temple that they were building was not eternal. It was temporary.
And it’s interesting how David has a sense of that, doesn’t he? We are just aliens and strangers here, we’re just shadows passing through. Now, their Spirit-led generosity to build a temporary structure for the work of God in their generation, very closely parallels our present call to give sacrificially for our temporary building here in Durham, so that brings us now to our context. David, his place… Sorry, not David. David’s up in heaven, he hadn’t done anything. Anyway, sorry.
God has placed all of us here in Durham for this moment in time, none of us are here eternally, and everything that we interact with in our lives physically is temporary, but we are here to glorify God in our physical lives by doing eternally significant work, especially the work of the Gospel. Now, as we just heard in the video, God is blessed and is blessing our region with a nationwide reputation as a place desirable to live and to work and to study and to recreate, and so people are pouring in here from all over the country, indeed all over the world, and the overwhelming majority of those that are pouring in here to live and to study and to work and to recreate are lost.
They are “without hope and without God in the world,” Ephesians 2:14. And our privilege is to use our temporary resources, our time, our energy, our money, to do an eternally significant spiritual work through the Gospel, which alone can build that invisible spiritual temple, so our physical resources, our time, our energy, our money is just a platform, a tool, but the real work is done by the Word of God, the real work is done by the Gospel. And that’s how this eternal temple gets built, seeing lost people, rescued from the dominion of darkness and brought over into the Kingdom of the Beloved Son, rescued from darkness to light, and then baptized and then taught to obey everything Christ has commanded. Built up, nurtured in the Word of God and strengthened. That’s the work.
Now, we’re beginning a financial campaign, More Than a Building, to upgrade our building, make it a better base of ministry to meet this eternal challenge. We are all well aware as we should be, that if the Lord returns in our lifetime, this building will be destroyed. 2 Peter 3 makes it very plain that everything in this present age is going to be consumed with fire, the elements are gonna melt in the heat, it’s all temporary.
However, if Christ does not return in our lifetime, and it’s maybe even another half century or more before the Lord returns, then we also know that everything that the $3.5 million buys, all the shiny new things, all the carpet, all of the walls and the furniture and all that, will themselves wear down, get old, look shabby after a while as we use them. We’re under no illusions about this. When they built the beautiful building, you heard what they said in 1962, “this beautiful building.” It would mean nothing, they said, if it wasn’t used by the Lord. They built it to be beautiful, and it’s been beautiful and it’s been functional for 56 years.
David’s Challenge to the People…. and Their Lavish Response
But time takes its toll on everything, and God has ordained that everything physical wears down, subject to decay. And so the time has come for us like earlier generations to step up and do our part for the future, just as we have inherited a building, we’ve been using it and it’s getting used, and in some ways getting used up. And so it’s our task now, it’s our time to step up for the present and for the future, so that’s our context.
So now what I’d like us to do is look at 1 Chronicles 29, so turn in your Bibles there. We’re gonna just walk through the incredible verses in this chapter as a context for us. My basic idea here is, these are some of the greatest… some of the greatest words of worship you will find in the entire Bible. And eternal generosity, generosity, the Spirit-filled and it will be rewardable, flows from worship. It flows from a sense of the greatness and the majesty of God, and this is a marvelous text to celebrate that.
All right, so it begins at verse one with David’s charge to the people. David, King David said to the whole assembly, “the task is great because this palatial structure is not for man, but for the Lord God.” And so he’s speaking to the people and he’s gonna charge them. But he wants to begin by giving them an example of his own sacrificial generosity toward this building project. Look at verses 2-5, “With all my resources I have provided for the temple of my God, gold for the gold work, silver for the silver, bronze for the bronze, iron for the iron, wood for the wood, as well as onyx for the settings, turquoise stones of various colors, and all kinds of fine stone and marble, all of these in large quantities.
Besides, and my devotion to the temple of my God, I now give my personal treasures of gold and silver for the temple of my God, over and above everything I have provided with this holy temple. 3,000 talents of gold (gold of Ophir) and 7,000 talents of refined silver for the overlaying of the walls of the buildings, for the gold work and the silver work, and for all the work to be done by the craftsman.”
So that’s his own example. That’s what he’s going to do, leading out in giving and generosity, then he charges the people. Now who is willing to consecrate himself today to the Lord? So there is an absolute necessity of leaders leading out, Matthew Henry said this, “Those who would draw others to good must lead the way themselves.” And David does that here. Now, David had been made amazingly wealthy by the grace of God. God had taken him, the youngest of Jesse’s eight sons, from following his father’s sheep out in the desert somewhere, to become king over all of Israel, and along with that had come a staggering level of wealth. We didn’t realize how wealthy David had become until he makes this commitment, incredible wealth, and he spoke out his gift plainly for all to hear. And it’s incredible, 3,000 talents of gold.
So I looked it up and I did the calculation. You knew I had to do it. Whenever there’s numbers in the Bible, I have interest. And so I’m gonna get a little geeky here, that calculates… A talent is 75 pounds, multiply by 16 ounces. Just keep on going. $1,200 an ounce, $4.3 billion. Now, all of you are looking a little concerned right now. All right, you’re thinking, “all right, we’re starting with three and a half million, where are we going with all this?” All right, we’re not raising $4.3 billion, but a staggering level of generosity… And then the silver, 7,000 talents of silver, $126 million at today’s prices. It’s incredible.
Now, you may be thinking, Why… Is it okay for him to say what he’s doing? I mean, didn’t Jesus say, “when you give, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” Well, it’s interesting about that, because Jesus did say that and he said “If you do it to be seen by others, you’re gonna lose your reward.” But in the previous chapter in Matthew 5, He said that we should let our light shine before others that they may see our good deeds and glorify our Father in Heaven. So we have to put those two together.
There seems to be a time to show and there seems to be a time to hide. A lot of it depends on your motives. What it is you’re intending by showing or by hiding. There’s some things God wants us to show brightly like the Gospel, and we tend to hide it under a bushel basket. And there are other things that we would want to publish all around for our own ego, and so people think well of us and that we’re supposed to hide.
Randy Alcorn in his book, Money, Possessions, and Eternity, said, he went to a fund raiser in New York City and people were standing up and identifying themselves and making pledges to their charitable cause, and one man, said, I’ll never forget this man, he rose, he gave his name, his wife’s name, the name of his business and its location and the kind of merchandise they sold, and then he loudly announced. “We would like to give $5,000 anonymously.” Kind of a head-scratching moment there. I think they should have just put the $5,000 in the advertising budget that… In a line item, ’cause that’s what was going on that day, advertising.
But still many Christian agencies publicize their donors’ gifts in many ways. They put them on plaques on buildings, or on the pews or the walls of the sanctuary, or they’ll even, some of the institution will publish levels of donation, you know the platinum level and the gold level and the silver level and the bronze level based on what people gave, and there are names. Studies show that people give more when their gifts are publicized. That should make you scratch your head a bit, but that’s the very thing that I think based on Matthew 6:2-4, churches should avoid, for then, we would be tempting people to lose their rewards,. Yet at the end of Money, Possessions, and Eternity, Randy Alcorn says “We should, however, find a way to do giving testimonies the way we do evangelism or mission testimonies, or parenting testimonies or other aspects of the Christian life, because we need to learn how to give. And some people are just really good at it.”
And so he advocates that there is a time, and David at that moment of redemptive history, I think did the right thing by saying, I’m leading out and this is what I’m giving, very clear. And then in verses 6-9, we see the people’s lavish response. “Then the leaders of the families, the officers of the tribes of Israel, the commanders of thousands, and commanders of hundreds, and the officials in charge of the King’s work gave willingly. They gave toward the work on the temple of God: 5,000 talents and 10,000 darics of gold, 10,000 talents of silver, 18,000 talents of bronze, and a 100,000 talents of iron, any who had precious stones gave them to the treasury of the Temple of the Lord in the custody of Jehiel the Gershonite. And the people rejoiced at the willing response of their leaders, for they had given freely and wholeheartedly to the Lord, and David the King also rejoiced greatly.”
So here are the lower level leaders and they, like David led out, they led the way, they led the way and David had blessed some of them more than others, financially. God doesn’t give to each person equal financial blessing, some people have greater resources than others, they’re able to give more. And Paul talks about this concerning… as an analogy with the manna in 2 Corinthians 8, going back to the Exodus time. He said “He who gathered much, did not have too much, and he who gathered little, did not have too little.”
Now, at that time, the amount gathered was staggering, as we already said, 5,000 talents of gold amounts to $7.2 billion worth of gold. Ten thousand talents of silver, that’s 375 tons of silver. Worth $180 million. One hundred thousand talents of iron, 7.5 million pounds of iron to build the temple. People also gave precious gems of incalculable worth and value: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires to beautify the temple, and these were all the highest quality. For it says in 2 Chronicles 2:5, Solomon says, “the temple I’m going to build will be great because our God is greater than all other gods.”
Yet, even when Solomon said that in 2 Chronicles 2, he acknowledged that no quality of earthly materials could equal what the living God who fills the universe, deserves. To honor him, he said, “But who is able to build a temple for Him? Since the heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain Him. Who then am I to build a temple for Him? Except as a place to burn sacrifices before Him.” So no matter how beautiful we make this or any building, God’s worth infinitely more than that. And we are not ever going to be able to build a box to contain God, there is no container for God, and that’s not at all what we’re trying to do, but what he said is, “except as a place to burn sacrifice and offerings.”
That was the old covenant pattern of worship. That’s all we’re trying to do with this as well. The new covenant pattern of Gospel ministry. And the attitude of the leaders was the key here. In verse 9, “the people rejoiced at the willing response of their leaders, for they had given freely and wholeheartedly to the Lord, and David the king, also rejoiced greatly.” They gave freely and wholeheartedly. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 9:7, “Each one should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, because God loves a cheerful giver.” We should not imagine that God needs us to give. We must give cheerfully, willingly, generously.
David’s Overwhelmed Praise to God for their Generosity
So then David just has overwhelming praise to God for that generosity, he’s filled with joy. Verse 9, David the king also rejoiced greatly, and then David gave credit to God, first for the actual things they had to give, and second, for their willing hearts out of which they gave it. God gets the credit for both.
Now, when we come to verses 10-13, we come to the some of the most magnificent verses of praise you’re ever gonna find in the Bible. Years ago, when I was an engineer, I was a year out of MIT, and I hadn’t yet begun memorizing whole books of the Bible, so I was writing verses on 3 x 5 cards and memorizing them. And I memorized 1 Chronicles 29:10-13, because it taught me how to praise, taught me words to say… It says in Romans 8, “We don’t know what we ought to pray for, the Spirit instructs us.” And so this is instruction on worship. I was on a mission trip in 1987 in Pakistan, and there was a sulfur bath, kind of a hot salty spring that was like 85-degree water and you would just… It was amazing. You would just float in it. You couldn’t sink. You’re just floating. And it was just an amazing feeling, ’cause we’re surrounded by the Karakoram mountains, these majestic mountains… I’m just floating in this… So I got this, I don’t know that I can get you all to float in verses 10-13, but to just have your minds and your hearts immersed in worship, and not just now, but as you’re praying about what you’re gonna do financially and frankly for the rest of your life, all of your sacrificial giving of your time, your energy, your money, should flow from worship. A sense of the greatness of God.
So let’s just walk through these. Verses 10-13, “Praise be to you, O Lord, God of our Father, Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power, and the glory, and the majesty, and the splendor. For everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom. You are exalted overall. Wealth and honor come from you. You are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all. Now our God, we give you thanks and praise your glorious name.” David begins by praising the eternal God from everlasting to everlasting. You know what that means? That means that God is every bit as much worthy of this kind of worship now as he was 3,000 years ago. He’s not changed at all. He’s an eternal God, and then David ascribes to God all the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty that there is in heaven and earth, he’s the source of it. There is nothing in all creation that is even remotely close to God in majesty and greatness. As great as the universe is, all of the physical things in the universe, God is infinitely immeasurably greater than all of it.
And then David declares that everything in heaven and earth belongs to him anyway, he made it, it’s his stuff. He owns it all. Look at Verse 11, “Everything in heaven and earth is yours.” It is such a deception that we have, that our money and our possessions are ours, they aren’t… None of them. We are stewards of them. They’re somebody else’s property. The only way any of us will give to this building campaign or to give to anything for Christ for the rest of our lives, would be out of a prior sense that God owns me and everything I have already. And in that way, we will give rightly. David then goes on to declare that the kingdom that he’s ruling, the very one who’s throne he occupies is actually God’s kingdom. “Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom you are exalted as head over all.” Mighty king David, bows the knee to the King of kings and Lord of lords. Then David speaks clearly about all the source, the source of all of his wealth. Verse 12, “Wealth and honor come from you. You are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all.”
God is the one who has given us the ability to generate wealth, so that we even have anything to give it all. God puts people in advantageous positions, and their blessed circumstances mean that their labors will not be in vain, they will produce a prophet, they’ll produce a harvest. Remember that God cursed human labor, at the Garden of Eden, under Adam. “Cursed is the ground because of you.” Your labor will produce thorns and thistles. But sometimes God mitigates the curse and opens up a land flowing with milk and honey, and that included Israel, and that includes us as well. Not in the same way, but we have been lavishly blessed. America is rich in natural resources, rich soil for crops, food is abundant, proper climate, proper rainfall for abundant harvest, so that food is inexpensive and people have freedom and time to develop other industries, and there are rich minerals in the hills and they’re easily brought out and they’re available for building projects here, and there are two massive oceans protecting us from invading armies unlike Europe, for Serbia has been invaded 145 times in its history.
And these and many other benefits have been how God has enriched America and us here, certainly we have worked. I’m not saying we didn’t work. We worked hard. I don’t deny that. However, what about the salt farmers of Ethiopia, who traveled to the Afar region, in a dry salt bed and they labor all day, in a 140° temperature to carve out blocks of salt and put them on camelback and bring them back over 50 miles, to sell for less than $10 a day for their labor? Do they work hard? They work harder than you. But they’re poor, incredibly poor. So all of the wealth that we have has been given us as a gift of God’s grace. We have to acknowledge that it’s in God’s hands to produce wealth for a people, and that we should not boast, but use it wisely. Look again at Verse 12, “Wealth and honor come from you. You are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all…” So for all of these things, David praises God. Verse 13, “Now our God, we give you thanks and praise your glorious name.” Then David humbles himself and his people in reference to this greatness. Look at verses 14-16, “But who am I? And who are my people that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have only given you what comes from your hand. We are aliens and strangers in your sight, as were all our forefathers, our days on earth are like a shadow without hope, O Lord our God, as for all of this abundance that we have provided for building you a temple for your holy name. It comes from your hand and all of it belongs to you.”Who am I? Who are my people that we should have anything to give at all?
And I praise God that we averted the storm, hurricane Florence, but you know what, the real storm is the wrath of God, and we have averted that by His grace. It is by His grace that we are not condemned for our sins, that we still live, that we have anything at all. Good comes from His grace. God has created a refuge in Christ from the storm of His wrath, and we are huddled in that refuge by faith, and God has been good to us. David feels that. We’re just aliens and strangers, you were just passing through. We’re like a shadow… We’re here today and gone tomorrow. Everything comes from you.
And then he gives God credit for the heart attitude by which they gave. Look at verses 17-19, “I know my God, that you test the heart and you are pleased with integrity. All these things have I given willingly and with honest intent, and now I have seen with joy how willingly your people who are here have given to you. O Lord, God of our fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, keep this desire in the hearts of your people forever, keep their hearts loyal to you, and give my son Solomon the whole-hearted devotion to keep your commands, requirements and decrees, and to do everything to build the palatial structure for which I have provided.” God is a God who test the heart, He puts us at certain moments in space and time, certain resources, certain opportunities, and then sees what we’ll do with them, he tests our hearts. Opportunities to give are a test, and they show our heart desires. At that time, his people praised the test, but it was only because God had worked it in them, and he asked that God would continue to work until the structure was built. He yearned for God to finish that work in them.
Our Time to Step Up and Give
Well, that’s 1 Chronicles 29. Now, it’s our time to step up and give. So what about us? Like David said so long ago, everything we own really belongs to God, and like David and his generation who died almost 3,000 years ago, we are aliens and strangers, and everything we will build with our hands will be destroyed some day. Bit we are involved by the grace of God in an eternal building project, and the work we do in that, the work of the Gospel ministry, now that’s gonna survive. Lost people that are won to faith in Christ are an eternal treasure, and they will be crowns for us as well. As Paul says, concerning the Thessalonian church, “What is the crown in which I’ll glory when I come? Is it not you?”
And so we are involved in the real building project, Ephesians 2, as we’ve said again and again, is the real temple. “We were aliens and strangers. But now we are members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus Himself as the chief cornerstone. In Him, the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in Him, you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by His spirit.”
That is the real building project, and friends, that’s gonna go on. That’s gonna go on. We are living stones, 1 Peter 2, quarried out of a dark kingdom. And the time for the tabernacle and the time for the temple is done, it’s obsolete. It’s passed away now, Hebrews 9 tells us, it was just a type and a shadow. The real sacrifice was Jesus Christ, who gave His lifeblood on the cross that our sins might be forgiven. All the animal sacrifices that were offered in the temple, they were just types and shadows of the final, once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus for sinners like you and me. That’s the true building project. Now for us, this $3.5 million that we’re raising is to refurbish our aging building, it’s just a tool… When we updated the Betsy Cheek Chapel just behind me, it went from a space that was not hardly ever used to one that’s used all the time. We wanna see that expanded, we wanna see that kind of freshness, architectural freshness and beauty to be extended.
We’re not doing the entire building. The elders felt there was a limit to what should raise now and what we should work on. Maybe future generations will wanna do more if the Lord doesn’t return. But the attractiveness of this space is really just a platform. So that as I’ve said before, the space itself recedes and you’re just with somebody, you’re there for prayer, you’re there for Bible study, you’re there for a deacon meeting, you’re there just to get together with some friends, you’re there to study the Word of God, all of these things, in a beautiful space. Now, my main message here is not about More Than a Building, it’s not about David. My main message to you is about the gospel, I don’t assume in an assembly this size that every one of you is born again. I believe that God’s gonna keep bringing lost people here every Sunday. I pray for it, and I just wanna say something to you. Maybe you really don’t believe what I said a few moments ago, the real storm is the wrath of God, but it is. And there is only one refuge, but there is a refuge, and his name is Jesus Christ.
And all you need to do, you don’t need to do anything. You need to hear this gospel message with faith, that God sent his son into the world, who lived a sinless life and died on the cross for sinners like you and me, so that if you trust in Him, all your sins will be forgiven. And I’m calling on you, I’m pleading with you, while there’s time, before the real storm comes, flee to Christ. But if you do, you will become a living stone put into an eternal temple. And now I wanna speak to the rest of you who are born again. Our real sacrifice here is not gonna be money. The real sacrifice is gonna be yourself as living sacrifices. Romans 12, “Put on the altar of God, holy and pleasing to Him.” That’s the daily sacrifice you have to make. Secondly, I’m calling on you to make the similar sacrifice Paul did for what we call the external journey for evangelism and missions. Acts 20:24, Paul said, “I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me, the task of testifying to the Gospel of God’s grace.”
Those are the real sacrifices, holiness of yourself offered to God and sharing the Gospel in evangelism and missions. Yet there is a financial sacrifice, we’re not gonna be able to refurbish the building without money. And so the elders are giving to each one, a commitment card. You have it in your bulletin. You can take it and look at it. And so it’s got a chart on it that gives you a sense of different things. This commitment card is gonna be extended over the next three years, it’s not a strict or binding number, it’s just a tool to enable the elders to make stewardship decisions as we move further along in the process. A phrase we’ve been using is, “your best guess is better than our best guess”, in terms of what you can give. I think it’d be cult-like for us to assign you our best guess. I don’t know what you make. I don’t know what your life situation is, but you do, and so does the Lord.
Another tool that we’ve been using has been something called The Gift guide, and there’s a slide that I would love to be projected here, and we’ve used this so that you can kind of find yourself and what our consultant Don Linscott told us. And this is something that people do, in terms of building campaigns all over the country is. They have different levels of gifts. So on the left-hand column, it’s the number of those giving and then the amount that that gift would be. So $350,000. Some of you are looking at that like, “Oh, wow.” But some of you are like, “Yeah, I think I could do that. God’s been that generous to me.” Like King David, you have it to give. And so, there’d be a number of gifts at a level, but just maybe only one could do that and one could do that. And then as you move down, if you look at the second column, the amount, for a three-year commitment, you’ll come to a place where you will feel maybe comfortable, you can relax. You say, “I actually think I could give that over the next three years.” Don Linscott says, that’s a great place to start. It’s not necessarily a great place to finish, but it’s a great place to start. You say, “All right, I think that that would be a level I could give without a significant amount of sacrifice.” Then you begin to look at things in your life that you’re willing to give up, so that you could be part of this.
Now, here’s the thing, God’s gonna raise this money. We’re excited about that. We’re trying to teach just an approach to life for the rest of your life. How are you gonna make sacrifices for the rest of your life? What do those sacrifices mean? To evangelize or go on a mission trip or to send to someone else on a mission trip.
These same principles are gonna work the rest of your life, so we’re asking that you find a level and then prayerfully give it to the elders by means of this card. So September 30th, we’ve got something, we call it, Commitment Sunday, and we want all of the members of the church to submit a card, no matter what the value. And the idea here is equal sacrifice, but not equal gift. So some of you may be children and you feel like you can give a dollar a week for the next three years. That’s a $156, that’s a sacrifice for you and we’re calling on you if the Lord leads you to do that. And then on up from there. If you really, you prayerfully, you just can give zero, put that on the card and put it in. And so we just have a sense of what the church, how the church is responding. But take the time to pray and just go before the Lord and say, “You know, Lord, what do you want me to do? And how do you want me to be involved?”
Closing Prayer
So close with me in prayer. Father, we thank you for the time that we’ve had to study your Word, to swim in the sea of your grace and worship. Father, I pray that you would now just be working in our hearts, be working in the church, help us to know what you’re leading us to do in terms of this giving campaign, help us to know what you’re calling on us to give, as you worked in David’s heart and the people’s heart so many years ago. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.
sermon transcript
So this is the second of three stewardship sermons that I’m preaching in support of the elders initiative, More Than a Building. Great video. A lot of that history I didn’t know, I had never seen some of those shots before, so it’s marvelous to see the heritage and the history. And my task this morning is to look at another time when another building was being built, that would itself in time, be destroyed, a temporary building, but established in the flow of redemptive history for a purpose that God would, once it was done, fill with the cloud of His glory, as a sign of His dwelling and His pleasure to use that temporary building for His eternal purposes.
David’s Context…. and Ours
To link that to what it is we’re trying to do in this building and in this community. So I wanna set it up by speaking of David’s context and then of ours, and then walk through the text. King David was the greatest of all of Israel’s kings in the Old Covenant. He had it in his heart to build a permanent structure for the dwelling of God, where people could assemble together and worship the living God. Now, up to that point, the Lord had been dwelling in that sense in a tent, a movable tabernacle that went from place to place. And the centerpiece of Jewish worship in the Old Covenant was the Ark of the Covenant and animal sacrifice, and the shedding of animal blood and the pouring out of that blood for the atonement of sins.
The Ark of the Covenant was a golden box, physical box, in which were kept the stone tablets, the actual tablets of stone that God gave to Moses on which were written the words of the Ten Commandments. Now, by David’s time, the tabernacle was about half a millennia old, about 500 years old, approximately. So now that David had conquered the Jebusite city, which became known as the city of David, Jerusalem, and David had set up his home there, his palace, he had in it his heart to build a similar palace or structure for God.
1 Chronicles 17:1-2, it says, “After David was settled in his palace, he said to Nathan the prophet, ‘Here I am living in a palace of cedar, while the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord is under a tent.’ Nathan replied to David, ‘Whatever you have in mind, do it, for God is with you.’” But then God sent Nathan the prophet back with a second message, You are not the one to build the permanent house, you are a warrior, a man of blood, and it will not be you to build it. But then he said far more than David ever thought he would say. He said, I’m gonna build a house for you. I’m gonna build an eternal dwelling where you will dwell forever.
It’s what he said in that same chapter. “I declare to you that the Lord will build a house for you, and when your days are over and you go to be with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, one of your own sons, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for me, and I will establish his throne forever. I will be his father and he will be my son. I will never take my love away from him, as I took it away from your predecessor. I will set him over my house and my kingdom forever. His throne will be established forever.”
So David’s good desire, his initiative, his desire to build a building for God, to give a gift to God, was superseded, overruled by God’s eternal plan. And it involved God building him a house, a house for David and for all of us to dwell in forever, an eternal temple, built in the heavenly realms, where the redeemed will dwell forever and worship God forever. And the one who would sit on the throne of that kingdom would not be David, but David’s eternally greater son, Jesus Christ. And that dwelling place, we call the New Jerusalem, and it’s presently under construction, and it’s doing very well, thank you very much.
As a matter of fact, I think it’s almost finished, but I don’t have a specific prophecy on that, but progress is being made every single day. And what David didn’t realize, now that he felt settled in his life, is that Israel was actually not done with its journey, and neither was God. There were still centuries to go, including the grievous rebellion of the Jewish nation against the Ten Commandments that were in that golden box, against the covenant the God had set up, that necessitated God fulfilling His promise of a curse, that He would evict them from the Promised Land if they did not keep the covenant, which He did, and that the actual beautiful temple that He was assembling materials to build, would be destroyed, completely destroyed by the Babylonians.
Yet for all of that, God still wanted it done. God knew the future. David didn’t know the future, but God wanted that building built. He wanted it to symbolize that new Jerusalem in that time and in that place in the Old Covenant, to symbolize what was going to come later, and He wanted David to take his lower position, to be willing to take a lower place in that structure, to not be the one to build it, but to assemble materials for it so that his son could build it, and David willingly, humbly took that lower place. God was greatly honored and glorified by all this, and He was moved, and He moved the people to give lavishly and generously to this building project, despite the fact that the temple that they were building was not eternal. It was temporary.
And it’s interesting how David has a sense of that, doesn’t he? We are just aliens and strangers here, we’re just shadows passing through. Now, their Spirit-led generosity to build a temporary structure for the work of God in their generation, very closely parallels our present call to give sacrificially for our temporary building here in Durham, so that brings us now to our context. David, his place… Sorry, not David. David’s up in heaven, he hadn’t done anything. Anyway, sorry.
God has placed all of us here in Durham for this moment in time, none of us are here eternally, and everything that we interact with in our lives physically is temporary, but we are here to glorify God in our physical lives by doing eternally significant work, especially the work of the Gospel. Now, as we just heard in the video, God is blessed and is blessing our region with a nationwide reputation as a place desirable to live and to work and to study and to recreate, and so people are pouring in here from all over the country, indeed all over the world, and the overwhelming majority of those that are pouring in here to live and to study and to work and to recreate are lost.
They are “without hope and without God in the world,” Ephesians 2:14. And our privilege is to use our temporary resources, our time, our energy, our money, to do an eternally significant spiritual work through the Gospel, which alone can build that invisible spiritual temple, so our physical resources, our time, our energy, our money is just a platform, a tool, but the real work is done by the Word of God, the real work is done by the Gospel. And that’s how this eternal temple gets built, seeing lost people, rescued from the dominion of darkness and brought over into the Kingdom of the Beloved Son, rescued from darkness to light, and then baptized and then taught to obey everything Christ has commanded. Built up, nurtured in the Word of God and strengthened. That’s the work.
Now, we’re beginning a financial campaign, More Than a Building, to upgrade our building, make it a better base of ministry to meet this eternal challenge. We are all well aware as we should be, that if the Lord returns in our lifetime, this building will be destroyed. 2 Peter 3 makes it very plain that everything in this present age is going to be consumed with fire, the elements are gonna melt in the heat, it’s all temporary.
However, if Christ does not return in our lifetime, and it’s maybe even another half century or more before the Lord returns, then we also know that everything that the $3.5 million buys, all the shiny new things, all the carpet, all of the walls and the furniture and all that, will themselves wear down, get old, look shabby after a while as we use them. We’re under no illusions about this. When they built the beautiful building, you heard what they said in 1962, “this beautiful building.” It would mean nothing, they said, if it wasn’t used by the Lord. They built it to be beautiful, and it’s been beautiful and it’s been functional for 56 years.
David’s Challenge to the People…. and Their Lavish Response
But time takes its toll on everything, and God has ordained that everything physical wears down, subject to decay. And so the time has come for us like earlier generations to step up and do our part for the future, just as we have inherited a building, we’ve been using it and it’s getting used, and in some ways getting used up. And so it’s our task now, it’s our time to step up for the present and for the future, so that’s our context.
So now what I’d like us to do is look at 1 Chronicles 29, so turn in your Bibles there. We’re gonna just walk through the incredible verses in this chapter as a context for us. My basic idea here is, these are some of the greatest… some of the greatest words of worship you will find in the entire Bible. And eternal generosity, generosity, the Spirit-filled and it will be rewardable, flows from worship. It flows from a sense of the greatness and the majesty of God, and this is a marvelous text to celebrate that.
All right, so it begins at verse one with David’s charge to the people. David, King David said to the whole assembly, “the task is great because this palatial structure is not for man, but for the Lord God.” And so he’s speaking to the people and he’s gonna charge them. But he wants to begin by giving them an example of his own sacrificial generosity toward this building project. Look at verses 2-5, “With all my resources I have provided for the temple of my God, gold for the gold work, silver for the silver, bronze for the bronze, iron for the iron, wood for the wood, as well as onyx for the settings, turquoise stones of various colors, and all kinds of fine stone and marble, all of these in large quantities.
Besides, and my devotion to the temple of my God, I now give my personal treasures of gold and silver for the temple of my God, over and above everything I have provided with this holy temple. 3,000 talents of gold (gold of Ophir) and 7,000 talents of refined silver for the overlaying of the walls of the buildings, for the gold work and the silver work, and for all the work to be done by the craftsman.”
So that’s his own example. That’s what he’s going to do, leading out in giving and generosity, then he charges the people. Now who is willing to consecrate himself today to the Lord? So there is an absolute necessity of leaders leading out, Matthew Henry said this, “Those who would draw others to good must lead the way themselves.” And David does that here. Now, David had been made amazingly wealthy by the grace of God. God had taken him, the youngest of Jesse’s eight sons, from following his father’s sheep out in the desert somewhere, to become king over all of Israel, and along with that had come a staggering level of wealth. We didn’t realize how wealthy David had become until he makes this commitment, incredible wealth, and he spoke out his gift plainly for all to hear. And it’s incredible, 3,000 talents of gold.
So I looked it up and I did the calculation. You knew I had to do it. Whenever there’s numbers in the Bible, I have interest. And so I’m gonna get a little geeky here, that calculates… A talent is 75 pounds, multiply by 16 ounces. Just keep on going. $1,200 an ounce, $4.3 billion. Now, all of you are looking a little concerned right now. All right, you’re thinking, “all right, we’re starting with three and a half million, where are we going with all this?” All right, we’re not raising $4.3 billion, but a staggering level of generosity… And then the silver, 7,000 talents of silver, $126 million at today’s prices. It’s incredible.
Now, you may be thinking, Why… Is it okay for him to say what he’s doing? I mean, didn’t Jesus say, “when you give, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” Well, it’s interesting about that, because Jesus did say that and he said “If you do it to be seen by others, you’re gonna lose your reward.” But in the previous chapter in Matthew 5, He said that we should let our light shine before others that they may see our good deeds and glorify our Father in Heaven. So we have to put those two together.
There seems to be a time to show and there seems to be a time to hide. A lot of it depends on your motives. What it is you’re intending by showing or by hiding. There’s some things God wants us to show brightly like the Gospel, and we tend to hide it under a bushel basket. And there are other things that we would want to publish all around for our own ego, and so people think well of us and that we’re supposed to hide.
Randy Alcorn in his book, Money, Possessions, and Eternity, said, he went to a fund raiser in New York City and people were standing up and identifying themselves and making pledges to their charitable cause, and one man, said, I’ll never forget this man, he rose, he gave his name, his wife’s name, the name of his business and its location and the kind of merchandise they sold, and then he loudly announced. “We would like to give $5,000 anonymously.” Kind of a head-scratching moment there. I think they should have just put the $5,000 in the advertising budget that… In a line item, ’cause that’s what was going on that day, advertising.
But still many Christian agencies publicize their donors’ gifts in many ways. They put them on plaques on buildings, or on the pews or the walls of the sanctuary, or they’ll even, some of the institution will publish levels of donation, you know the platinum level and the gold level and the silver level and the bronze level based on what people gave, and there are names. Studies show that people give more when their gifts are publicized. That should make you scratch your head a bit, but that’s the very thing that I think based on Matthew 6:2-4, churches should avoid, for then, we would be tempting people to lose their rewards,. Yet at the end of Money, Possessions, and Eternity, Randy Alcorn says “We should, however, find a way to do giving testimonies the way we do evangelism or mission testimonies, or parenting testimonies or other aspects of the Christian life, because we need to learn how to give. And some people are just really good at it.”
And so he advocates that there is a time, and David at that moment of redemptive history, I think did the right thing by saying, I’m leading out and this is what I’m giving, very clear. And then in verses 6-9, we see the people’s lavish response. “Then the leaders of the families, the officers of the tribes of Israel, the commanders of thousands, and commanders of hundreds, and the officials in charge of the King’s work gave willingly. They gave toward the work on the temple of God: 5,000 talents and 10,000 darics of gold, 10,000 talents of silver, 18,000 talents of bronze, and a 100,000 talents of iron, any who had precious stones gave them to the treasury of the Temple of the Lord in the custody of Jehiel the Gershonite. And the people rejoiced at the willing response of their leaders, for they had given freely and wholeheartedly to the Lord, and David the King also rejoiced greatly.”
So here are the lower level leaders and they, like David led out, they led the way, they led the way and David had blessed some of them more than others, financially. God doesn’t give to each person equal financial blessing, some people have greater resources than others, they’re able to give more. And Paul talks about this concerning… as an analogy with the manna in 2 Corinthians 8, going back to the Exodus time. He said “He who gathered much, did not have too much, and he who gathered little, did not have too little.”
Now, at that time, the amount gathered was staggering, as we already said, 5,000 talents of gold amounts to $7.2 billion worth of gold. Ten thousand talents of silver, that’s 375 tons of silver. Worth $180 million. One hundred thousand talents of iron, 7.5 million pounds of iron to build the temple. People also gave precious gems of incalculable worth and value: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires to beautify the temple, and these were all the highest quality. For it says in 2 Chronicles 2:5, Solomon says, “the temple I’m going to build will be great because our God is greater than all other gods.”
Yet, even when Solomon said that in 2 Chronicles 2, he acknowledged that no quality of earthly materials could equal what the living God who fills the universe, deserves. To honor him, he said, “But who is able to build a temple for Him? Since the heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain Him. Who then am I to build a temple for Him? Except as a place to burn sacrifices before Him.” So no matter how beautiful we make this or any building, God’s worth infinitely more than that. And we are not ever going to be able to build a box to contain God, there is no container for God, and that’s not at all what we’re trying to do, but what he said is, “except as a place to burn sacrifice and offerings.”
That was the old covenant pattern of worship. That’s all we’re trying to do with this as well. The new covenant pattern of Gospel ministry. And the attitude of the leaders was the key here. In verse 9, “the people rejoiced at the willing response of their leaders, for they had given freely and wholeheartedly to the Lord, and David the king, also rejoiced greatly.” They gave freely and wholeheartedly. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 9:7, “Each one should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, because God loves a cheerful giver.” We should not imagine that God needs us to give. We must give cheerfully, willingly, generously.
David’s Overwhelmed Praise to God for their Generosity
So then David just has overwhelming praise to God for that generosity, he’s filled with joy. Verse 9, David the king also rejoiced greatly, and then David gave credit to God, first for the actual things they had to give, and second, for their willing hearts out of which they gave it. God gets the credit for both.
Now, when we come to verses 10-13, we come to the some of the most magnificent verses of praise you’re ever gonna find in the Bible. Years ago, when I was an engineer, I was a year out of MIT, and I hadn’t yet begun memorizing whole books of the Bible, so I was writing verses on 3 x 5 cards and memorizing them. And I memorized 1 Chronicles 29:10-13, because it taught me how to praise, taught me words to say… It says in Romans 8, “We don’t know what we ought to pray for, the Spirit instructs us.” And so this is instruction on worship. I was on a mission trip in 1987 in Pakistan, and there was a sulfur bath, kind of a hot salty spring that was like 85-degree water and you would just… It was amazing. You would just float in it. You couldn’t sink. You’re just floating. And it was just an amazing feeling, ’cause we’re surrounded by the Karakoram mountains, these majestic mountains… I’m just floating in this… So I got this, I don’t know that I can get you all to float in verses 10-13, but to just have your minds and your hearts immersed in worship, and not just now, but as you’re praying about what you’re gonna do financially and frankly for the rest of your life, all of your sacrificial giving of your time, your energy, your money, should flow from worship. A sense of the greatness of God.
So let’s just walk through these. Verses 10-13, “Praise be to you, O Lord, God of our Father, Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power, and the glory, and the majesty, and the splendor. For everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom. You are exalted overall. Wealth and honor come from you. You are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all. Now our God, we give you thanks and praise your glorious name.” David begins by praising the eternal God from everlasting to everlasting. You know what that means? That means that God is every bit as much worthy of this kind of worship now as he was 3,000 years ago. He’s not changed at all. He’s an eternal God, and then David ascribes to God all the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty that there is in heaven and earth, he’s the source of it. There is nothing in all creation that is even remotely close to God in majesty and greatness. As great as the universe is, all of the physical things in the universe, God is infinitely immeasurably greater than all of it.
And then David declares that everything in heaven and earth belongs to him anyway, he made it, it’s his stuff. He owns it all. Look at Verse 11, “Everything in heaven and earth is yours.” It is such a deception that we have, that our money and our possessions are ours, they aren’t… None of them. We are stewards of them. They’re somebody else’s property. The only way any of us will give to this building campaign or to give to anything for Christ for the rest of our lives, would be out of a prior sense that God owns me and everything I have already. And in that way, we will give rightly. David then goes on to declare that the kingdom that he’s ruling, the very one who’s throne he occupies is actually God’s kingdom. “Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom you are exalted as head over all.” Mighty king David, bows the knee to the King of kings and Lord of lords. Then David speaks clearly about all the source, the source of all of his wealth. Verse 12, “Wealth and honor come from you. You are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all.”
God is the one who has given us the ability to generate wealth, so that we even have anything to give it all. God puts people in advantageous positions, and their blessed circumstances mean that their labors will not be in vain, they will produce a prophet, they’ll produce a harvest. Remember that God cursed human labor, at the Garden of Eden, under Adam. “Cursed is the ground because of you.” Your labor will produce thorns and thistles. But sometimes God mitigates the curse and opens up a land flowing with milk and honey, and that included Israel, and that includes us as well. Not in the same way, but we have been lavishly blessed. America is rich in natural resources, rich soil for crops, food is abundant, proper climate, proper rainfall for abundant harvest, so that food is inexpensive and people have freedom and time to develop other industries, and there are rich minerals in the hills and they’re easily brought out and they’re available for building projects here, and there are two massive oceans protecting us from invading armies unlike Europe, for Serbia has been invaded 145 times in its history.
And these and many other benefits have been how God has enriched America and us here, certainly we have worked. I’m not saying we didn’t work. We worked hard. I don’t deny that. However, what about the salt farmers of Ethiopia, who traveled to the Afar region, in a dry salt bed and they labor all day, in a 140° temperature to carve out blocks of salt and put them on camelback and bring them back over 50 miles, to sell for less than $10 a day for their labor? Do they work hard? They work harder than you. But they’re poor, incredibly poor. So all of the wealth that we have has been given us as a gift of God’s grace. We have to acknowledge that it’s in God’s hands to produce wealth for a people, and that we should not boast, but use it wisely. Look again at Verse 12, “Wealth and honor come from you. You are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all…” So for all of these things, David praises God. Verse 13, “Now our God, we give you thanks and praise your glorious name.” Then David humbles himself and his people in reference to this greatness. Look at verses 14-16, “But who am I? And who are my people that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have only given you what comes from your hand. We are aliens and strangers in your sight, as were all our forefathers, our days on earth are like a shadow without hope, O Lord our God, as for all of this abundance that we have provided for building you a temple for your holy name. It comes from your hand and all of it belongs to you.”Who am I? Who are my people that we should have anything to give at all?
And I praise God that we averted the storm, hurricane Florence, but you know what, the real storm is the wrath of God, and we have averted that by His grace. It is by His grace that we are not condemned for our sins, that we still live, that we have anything at all. Good comes from His grace. God has created a refuge in Christ from the storm of His wrath, and we are huddled in that refuge by faith, and God has been good to us. David feels that. We’re just aliens and strangers, you were just passing through. We’re like a shadow… We’re here today and gone tomorrow. Everything comes from you.
And then he gives God credit for the heart attitude by which they gave. Look at verses 17-19, “I know my God, that you test the heart and you are pleased with integrity. All these things have I given willingly and with honest intent, and now I have seen with joy how willingly your people who are here have given to you. O Lord, God of our fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, keep this desire in the hearts of your people forever, keep their hearts loyal to you, and give my son Solomon the whole-hearted devotion to keep your commands, requirements and decrees, and to do everything to build the palatial structure for which I have provided.” God is a God who test the heart, He puts us at certain moments in space and time, certain resources, certain opportunities, and then sees what we’ll do with them, he tests our hearts. Opportunities to give are a test, and they show our heart desires. At that time, his people praised the test, but it was only because God had worked it in them, and he asked that God would continue to work until the structure was built. He yearned for God to finish that work in them.
Our Time to Step Up and Give
Well, that’s 1 Chronicles 29. Now, it’s our time to step up and give. So what about us? Like David said so long ago, everything we own really belongs to God, and like David and his generation who died almost 3,000 years ago, we are aliens and strangers, and everything we will build with our hands will be destroyed some day. Bit we are involved by the grace of God in an eternal building project, and the work we do in that, the work of the Gospel ministry, now that’s gonna survive. Lost people that are won to faith in Christ are an eternal treasure, and they will be crowns for us as well. As Paul says, concerning the Thessalonian church, “What is the crown in which I’ll glory when I come? Is it not you?”
And so we are involved in the real building project, Ephesians 2, as we’ve said again and again, is the real temple. “We were aliens and strangers. But now we are members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus Himself as the chief cornerstone. In Him, the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in Him, you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by His spirit.”
That is the real building project, and friends, that’s gonna go on. That’s gonna go on. We are living stones, 1 Peter 2, quarried out of a dark kingdom. And the time for the tabernacle and the time for the temple is done, it’s obsolete. It’s passed away now, Hebrews 9 tells us, it was just a type and a shadow. The real sacrifice was Jesus Christ, who gave His lifeblood on the cross that our sins might be forgiven. All the animal sacrifices that were offered in the temple, they were just types and shadows of the final, once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus for sinners like you and me. That’s the true building project. Now for us, this $3.5 million that we’re raising is to refurbish our aging building, it’s just a tool… When we updated the Betsy Cheek Chapel just behind me, it went from a space that was not hardly ever used to one that’s used all the time. We wanna see that expanded, we wanna see that kind of freshness, architectural freshness and beauty to be extended.
We’re not doing the entire building. The elders felt there was a limit to what should raise now and what we should work on. Maybe future generations will wanna do more if the Lord doesn’t return. But the attractiveness of this space is really just a platform. So that as I’ve said before, the space itself recedes and you’re just with somebody, you’re there for prayer, you’re there for Bible study, you’re there for a deacon meeting, you’re there just to get together with some friends, you’re there to study the Word of God, all of these things, in a beautiful space. Now, my main message here is not about More Than a Building, it’s not about David. My main message to you is about the gospel, I don’t assume in an assembly this size that every one of you is born again. I believe that God’s gonna keep bringing lost people here every Sunday. I pray for it, and I just wanna say something to you. Maybe you really don’t believe what I said a few moments ago, the real storm is the wrath of God, but it is. And there is only one refuge, but there is a refuge, and his name is Jesus Christ.
And all you need to do, you don’t need to do anything. You need to hear this gospel message with faith, that God sent his son into the world, who lived a sinless life and died on the cross for sinners like you and me, so that if you trust in Him, all your sins will be forgiven. And I’m calling on you, I’m pleading with you, while there’s time, before the real storm comes, flee to Christ. But if you do, you will become a living stone put into an eternal temple. And now I wanna speak to the rest of you who are born again. Our real sacrifice here is not gonna be money. The real sacrifice is gonna be yourself as living sacrifices. Romans 12, “Put on the altar of God, holy and pleasing to Him.” That’s the daily sacrifice you have to make. Secondly, I’m calling on you to make the similar sacrifice Paul did for what we call the external journey for evangelism and missions. Acts 20:24, Paul said, “I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me, the task of testifying to the Gospel of God’s grace.”
Those are the real sacrifices, holiness of yourself offered to God and sharing the Gospel in evangelism and missions. Yet there is a financial sacrifice, we’re not gonna be able to refurbish the building without money. And so the elders are giving to each one, a commitment card. You have it in your bulletin. You can take it and look at it. And so it’s got a chart on it that gives you a sense of different things. This commitment card is gonna be extended over the next three years, it’s not a strict or binding number, it’s just a tool to enable the elders to make stewardship decisions as we move further along in the process. A phrase we’ve been using is, “your best guess is better than our best guess”, in terms of what you can give. I think it’d be cult-like for us to assign you our best guess. I don’t know what you make. I don’t know what your life situation is, but you do, and so does the Lord.
Another tool that we’ve been using has been something called The Gift guide, and there’s a slide that I would love to be projected here, and we’ve used this so that you can kind of find yourself and what our consultant Don Linscott told us. And this is something that people do, in terms of building campaigns all over the country is. They have different levels of gifts. So on the left-hand column, it’s the number of those giving and then the amount that that gift would be. So $350,000. Some of you are looking at that like, “Oh, wow.” But some of you are like, “Yeah, I think I could do that. God’s been that generous to me.” Like King David, you have it to give. And so, there’d be a number of gifts at a level, but just maybe only one could do that and one could do that. And then as you move down, if you look at the second column, the amount, for a three-year commitment, you’ll come to a place where you will feel maybe comfortable, you can relax. You say, “I actually think I could give that over the next three years.” Don Linscott says, that’s a great place to start. It’s not necessarily a great place to finish, but it’s a great place to start. You say, “All right, I think that that would be a level I could give without a significant amount of sacrifice.” Then you begin to look at things in your life that you’re willing to give up, so that you could be part of this.
Now, here’s the thing, God’s gonna raise this money. We’re excited about that. We’re trying to teach just an approach to life for the rest of your life. How are you gonna make sacrifices for the rest of your life? What do those sacrifices mean? To evangelize or go on a mission trip or to send to someone else on a mission trip.
These same principles are gonna work the rest of your life, so we’re asking that you find a level and then prayerfully give it to the elders by means of this card. So September 30th, we’ve got something, we call it, Commitment Sunday, and we want all of the members of the church to submit a card, no matter what the value. And the idea here is equal sacrifice, but not equal gift. So some of you may be children and you feel like you can give a dollar a week for the next three years. That’s a $156, that’s a sacrifice for you and we’re calling on you if the Lord leads you to do that. And then on up from there. If you really, you prayerfully, you just can give zero, put that on the card and put it in. And so we just have a sense of what the church, how the church is responding. But take the time to pray and just go before the Lord and say, “You know, Lord, what do you want me to do? And how do you want me to be involved?”
Closing Prayer
So close with me in prayer. Father, we thank you for the time that we’ve had to study your Word, to swim in the sea of your grace and worship. Father, I pray that you would now just be working in our hearts, be working in the church, help us to know what you’re leading us to do in terms of this giving campaign, help us to know what you’re calling on us to give, as you worked in David’s heart and the people’s heart so many years ago. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.
