Brothers and sisters, there will be multiple passages of scripture that will be before us this morning, and I'll not read just one in advance, but I'll invite you to be turning in your Bibles to the Deuteronomy 12 passage that's there in your bulletin. Also, even before that, I'll be looking at 1 Chronicles 29, so you could have those both near at hand. 1 Chronicles 29, Deuteronomy 12, that'll be for starters. Many years now, we've made the first Sunday of each new year what we call Stewardship Sunday. So in addition to having an annual congregational meeting where we approve a budget, there's preaching on the subject of stewardship. You remember what Christians understand that word to mean, why we speak of stewardship. We're referring to the biblical reality that everything we have is a gift from God. and that God has called us to put to good use. all that he's given to us. That's what lies behind the principle of stewardship. Kids, a steward is someone who manages another person's property on his behalf. Because kids, there are some people that are so wealthy, they can't manage all that they own. So they have to have stewards, and we have other modern terms for that, who will, on their behalf, take care and put to good use their things. I'm sure the richest man in the world we all know him now quite well as Elon, has many such stewards. Well, God's the most wealthy person of all, but he makes use of stewards for a very different reason. It's obviously not because he just has so much stuff he doesn't know how to put it to good use. Brothers and sisters, he wants to share with us his own ownership of the world and all that it contains. And he's actually, by making us stewards, he's giving us a place at his side in putting the wonderful things of this world to good use. Now, that word stewardship has come to be a kind of code word in the church for giving money to the church. That often is what people mean when in the church they talk about stewardship. But over the years, I trust you have seen how Pastor Rosser and myself have pursued a much larger view on these stewardship Sundays than just giving money to the church. Stewardship, again, embraces everything that we have from God. And so, you've heard exhortations at the beginning of the year on things like stewardship of our time. That notion of redeeming the time, as Paul speaks of it, is a stewardship issue. Or you've heard exhortations about stewardship of our opportunities. Remember the apostle also says, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all men, especially in the household of faith. So we must make good use of our time. We must make use of our opportunities. I even had a sermon a few years ago on energies. Stewardship of our energies. We tried to face very realistically the fact that we all have creaturely limitations. We can't do everything and we have to do certain things with the best of our energies. Had a sermon for you on stewarding our relationships. You might say our relational capital. How do we, in the course of a new year, Seek to use the relationships that God has given to bless people in our lives. Last year, I had a sermon that was probably the broadest of all in terms of stewardship Sunday. It was called The Mercy of Our Mortality. And if you'll remember, I was just reflecting on the fact that all of our life, Psalm 90 reminds us as we sang this morning, fleeting as it is, is going to determine so greatly our life to come, whether you put your faith in Jesus Christ in this life, and then if you serve Him with all your hearts, has so much bearing on the life that's to come. So all that reminder to you to say that Stewardship Sunday over the years has been about a whole lot more than our money, but today it's gonna be about money. I think we're due again. There's some basic biblical teaching on Christian stewardship of our money. So the title to the sermon could actually be improved, the five points of Christian financial stewardship. That would be more accurate. Or even more specifically, the five points of faithfulness in giving. To the Lord. This is an emphasis that we have about every three to five years at resurrection, and we're due again. Christians in general, but Calvinists in particular, like five things, groups of five. So Calvinists like five points of Calvinism. Some of you will know the tulip. Others will recognize that our fathers have attempted to take the whole Protestant Reformation, put it into five points of Protestantism, also known as the solas. of the Reformation. Well, I actually think that most, if not all, of the biblical teaching on financial stewardship can be put into five points. So, we're going to be taking from all portions of Scripture. You'll have to make a decision if you will be turning to them all with me or just listening very carefully. This is a topical sermon on financial stewardship. Five points and then I'll close with a few pointers. in this new year. Number one, giving to God should be an expression of gratitude. So 1 Chronicles 29 is what should be there under your eye now. We recognize that there's varying reasons, varying motives for giving. If you're giving to someone in your life who is needy, your motive is compassion or kindness. That's the motive. But what is our motive? What is to be at the root of all our giving to God? It's certainly not compassion. It's not even kindness. It's fundamentally Gratitude. Now, that linkage between gratitude and giving, gratitude manifesting itself in giving to God, could be found all over the place. I just wanted to take you to 1 Chronicles 29, because this is David, King David, at the end of his reign, he's given a charge to the people, he's given a charge to his son, and then he is in the midst of dedicating all that he has amassed as the stuff with which his son Solomon will build a temple. So David is giving this to God, and he does so with this prayer, verse 10. Therefore, David blessed the Lord in the presence of all the assembly, and David said, blessed are you, O Lord, the God of Israel, our father forever and ever. Yours is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty. For all that is in the heavens and in the earth, it is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all of it. Both riches and honor come from you, says the king who's about to give riches to God. And you rule over all. In your hand are power and might, and in your hand it is to make great and to give strength to all. He has acknowledged thus far in his prayer that God is the one from whom all blessings flow, as we sing. In verse 13, he turns in the prayer and says, We thank you, our God, and praise your glorious name. What I'm wanting you to see is that these gifts that David is dedicating to God come with a prayer of thanksgiving. It's basic to the very nature of gratitude, to want to give. Now, there are generous people in this world that are not grateful to God, I recognize. There's philanthropists who have absolutely no relationship with God, don't even believe He exists. They're very generous. I grant that. But I also stipulate there are no truly grateful people who are not also generous. Your gratitude to God for what he's given to you manifests itself in more than one way. And one way is this thing we're talking about this morning, generosity, giving to God. Moses had made that clear long before David's time in Deuteronomy 16. He had said, every man shall give as he's able according to the blessing of the Lord your God that he has given you. So giving as a response to God's blessing. It's an acknowledgement that God has been so good. I said a moment ago when you give gifts to someone else, it's often motivated out of kindness or compassion, but there are these gifts. Women in our lives are better than the men, generally speaking. There are these gifts, they're called hostess gifts, I think is what they're called. You know, that's when your wife says, we really need to take something. Because we're going to go there and spend four days at Christmas eating their food and consuming their utility bill and so on and so on. So we're not trying to pay them back. We're not trying to even it out. We're trying to express with a gift that we are grateful to them for what they've provided. We can't begin to match. Brothers and sisters, when we come to that point every Sunday morning, or Sunday evening for that matter, though Sunday evening is a little different, especially on Sunday morning in the general offering that is taken at Matthew's Resurrection Presbyterian Church, let's remember that it's coming to us in a place in the liturgy where we've just been told, you are forgiven. of all your sins. Nothing you did this week will keep you from God and from His blessing and from His favor because of what Jesus Christ has done. And we've given thanks for that in a hymn or a psalm. And then the next thing to do, what's the next thing to do in our worship? It's to give tangible expression to our gratitude. So that's the first thing. We're to know that giving is to be motivated of gratitude. Second point. Because giving to God is an expression of our gratitude to him, it's also an act of worship. That's where Deuteronomy 12 needs to be in front of you. There has been some discussion about whether giving is just a part of the life of the church that needs to be handled in a variety of more practical ways than what we do here with the collecting of checks and cash and coins and all the rest. There's all kinds of discussions about making this more practical. Your elders continue to see this act of giving to God as explicitly a part of worship for reasons like Deuteronomy 12. Moses is there providing for worship in Jerusalem. And in the text, he's actually stipulated all the other places for worship. I want you to be violently destructive of them. In the previous part of the passages, all the high places, I want you tearing them down. They're the pagan places of worship. Don't have anything to do with them. Then in verse five he says, but you shall seek the place the Lord your God will choose out of all your tribes to put his name. make his habitation there. There you shall go, and there you shall bring your burnt offerings, and your sacrifices, your tithes, and the contribution that you present, your vow offerings, your freewill offerings, and the firstborn of your herd and of your flock. And there you shall eat before the Lord your God, and you shall rejoice, you and your households and all that you undertake, in which the Lord your God has blessed you. Now I don't know if you have thought about this feature of the worship of our fathers in the Old Testament, but that worship was not only to entail the bringing of a sacrifice. We know very well the rich significance of the sacrifice, the shedding of blood in the Old Covenant worship. But there was a lot of stuff that they brought with that. Part of worship was their money, or in many cases, its equivalent. The New Testament counterpart to this is in one place, 1 Corinthians chapter 16, where the apostle envisions some kind of offering being collected, and he says, on the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up as he may prosper, so that you know collecting when I come. I can imagine that there's many a cynical perspective outside the church on that part of the worship of traditional Christian congregations. Oh, that's the mercenary moment. In every traditional Protestant church, that mercenary moment where we hear money and see money being collected. Brothers and sisters, within the church, among biblically-minded Christians, this is the way it's always been. All the way back to our fathers in Moses' day, we recognize as biblical Christians that the giving of gifts and worship is one of God's own appointed ways to evidence our sincerity in our worship. We say a lot of things to God when we gather here Sunday by Sunday. We say to Him that not just everything we have, But our very selves, all our beings, ransom powers as the hymn puts it, they are gods and we are each Sunday coming and devoting ourselves to God. And you know how cheap talk can be. God has appointed a way for us not only to say, I'm wholly devoted to you, Jesus. He's provided a way for us to show it. So giving is not just an expression of gratitude, it's also an expression of devotion or worship. Think this way, brothers and sisters, during that portion of our worship, you're not only recognizing by what you give to the Lord that he has first given to you everything and you're full of gratitude, but also You have an opportunity in that moment to express to God, just as certainly as I have given up this for you, your glory, your kingdom, I'm going to spend a whole week giving the rest of me up to you. This is just a down payment on another week of wholehearted service. Third point of five points, of course, is this, God hasn't left us. without guidance in our giving. Sorry for the double negative. That could be put positively, but I liked the way it sounded. God has not left us without guidance in our giving. The tithe is our most basic obligation. Kids, you know that term, right? You've heard it. In your home, I trust a tithe It's a reference to a fraction. Some of you have already learned fractions. Some of that's still ahead for you. It means 1 10th. And the tithe is one of the easiest fractions that there is. A tithe of a dollar, kids, is 10 cents. 100 pennies, a tithe of it is 10 pennies. Tithe of $5, kids, is 50 cents. A tithe of $20 is $2. And once you learn decimals, kids, Tithe becomes even easier, because all it involves is taking that decimal and going, boop, once to the left. 10% of anything is just take that decimal and go, boop. That's a tithe. Now, brothers and sisters, given that God wants us to show our gratitude to Him and our devotion to Him in our giving, Well, what does that look like? You could imagine that would have tremendous diversity of expressions, and there's a degree to which that's entirely appropriate for it to do so, but has God given us any guidance of when we're being faithful in our giving? The answer is yes. He's not left us in the dark. The tithe. is our most basic obligation. This sermon is bigger than a sermon on the tithe. If I were preaching on just the tithe, I would march through the Old Testament into the New Testament and show you the various places that tithing appears. We'd go to the case of Abraham giving a tithe, first time it appears in the Bible, to Melchizedek. Jacob giving or pledging a tithe of all that he has to God in Genesis 28. We go to Numbers chapter 18 where Moses provides that the worship of God in the temple through the ministry of the Levites would be supported by the tithing of God's people. We would look in the Old Testament the book of Nehemiah or the book of Malachi in both cases where the prophets and the leaders of God's people are confronting them about their failure to give the tithe. We'd go into the New Testament where Jesus speaks of the tithe, Luke chapter 11. It's in the course of exhorting, actually doing more than exhort, rebuking the Pharisees. Woe to you Pharisees, for you tithe mint and rue and every herb and neglect justice and the love of God. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. You know the Pharisees were quite public with anything and everything they could do to show their piety. Jesus is calling them out, you are so very impressive tithing from your wife's spice rack along with everything else. You do not love justice. He says, you should tithe. That's often missed in the text. You should tithe. Attaboy. And you should even more, do the weightier things of the law. This is where a sermon on the tithe, we'd go to 1 Corinthians 9, where the apostle takes the Old Testament practice of the Levites being supported in their ministry in the temple and applies it to the support of pastors. In New Testament churches, there's broad biblical testimony to the tithe and folks, I don't know about you, I find this very helpful and very refreshing to have something concrete, rather objective from the Lord about what faithful giving looks like. It's like the Sabbath, one day in seven, tithe, 10%. our most basic obligation for stewardship. We're going to have a congregational meeting after this service, and a couple of salaries are going to be in front of you for final decision. So everybody knows what I make, especially if you come to the congregational meeting. And here's an exercise you can do. You can calculate my tithe. You can do it in your head. Remember, it's easy peasy. So you take my housing allowance plus my salary. You add those two together. You move the decimal point once. You get $11,769. Check my math. Not great in math. But this is fairly easy. I pay my tithe 12 times a year monthly. That comes down to $980.75. It's easy. Now, it's not always easy to calculate income, I know. Some of you are self-employed and some of you have bonuses and there's all kinds of ways that can be more challenging to calculate income. It's never hard to calculate the tithe. God has given us a guide for giving, that's point three. Point four, gotta add this to point three. Our God is pleased when we seek to give Him as much as we can. He doesn't legislate this like the tithe, but it's clear in the Scripture that sacrificial giving, that is to say giving even beyond that tithe, is pleasing to the Lord. The tithe is where good stewards start, in other words. It's not where they end. I quoted from Deuteronomy chapter 12, and you saw that the giving there included more than the tithe. There you shall bring your burnt offerings, your sacrifices, your tithes, and your contribution that you present, your vow offerings, your freewill offerings. Have you encountered those in the Old Testament and wondered, what is going on? The tithe is, we've already discussed, 10%. what God has given. The vow offerings, this is something that's encouraged, but never mandated. A voluntary vow, Lord, you have been especially blessed, you have especially blessed me this year, and this is what I promise to give back above and beyond the time. That's a vow offering. Not required, but once you promise it, it becomes obligatory. And then there's this thing called the free will offering. That's just that spontaneous expression of gratitude to God, devotion to Him in financial terms. There are not a few Christians who are really resistant to the idea that the tithe applies to us. I think that has to do with bad exegesis and bad hermeneutics. The bad exegesis is failing to understand how Paul and Jesus both uphold it. The bad hermeneutics is the notion that if something is not taught in the New Testament, it has to be repeated from the Old Testament to be binding, and that's bad hermeneutics. But let's just do a thought experiment. Let's take a discussion. What would be, if all we have is the New Testament, what would be the standard for giving? Well, Jesus says things like this more than once, sell your possessions and give to the needy. Gulp. Sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor and you'll have treasure in heaven. We'd like to say those are ad hoc, they're not standards for all of us. Paul holds up the Macedonian Christians, they're the gold standard of giving. I testify they gave as much as they were able, even beyond their ability. You don't want to just cut the Old Testament loose and stick only with the New Testament on this one. Put them together. Point three was the tithe is our standard. Point four, God is pleased. when we're able and willing to give even beyond that minimum amount. That's what leads R.C. Sproul, the late Sproul, to conclude that tithe is the starting point of our giving. He says, the benefits we receive as Christians far exceed the benefits that the people of the old covenant enjoyed. But it also follows that the responsibilities of the New Testament people exceed the responsibilities of the Old Testament people. The tithe, it's not some high ultimate standard for the super-Christian. It's the rock bottom. It's the starting point for a person who is in Christ, who understands something of the benefits he receives from God. I say amen to that. Brothers and sisters, good stewardship does involve stretching ourselves to give as much as we can, not being content merely with moving the decibel point. And I think there's something intuitive about that, isn't there? In light of how widely God has blessed us with material wealth as his people, what should the man making $50,000 do, he should tithe. What should a man making 500,000 do? Well, he should tithe. Isn't it intuitive? It would be a crying shame if a man who makes a half a million did nothing more than tithe. It's true in much of evangelical Christianity, we could pay the tithe all our lives and never really say we've given. Donald Whitney has written a book, I think, a teacher taught on this book recently, Spiritual Disciplines of the Christian Life. He says, as a protection against the temptation to greedily keep more as you make more, and to make sure that you remember to give according to your prosperity. That's a 1 Corinthians 16 reference. I would encourage you to have an ongoing lifetime goal of increasing the percentage of your income that you give to God. What else remains to be said of these points of Christian financial stewardship? Well, one more, number five. You'll be wanting to have 2 Corinthians 9 close at hand for this. Our ancestors giving to the Lord results in even greater gifts from the Lord. That's the rule. That's His ordinary way. Giving to the Lord results in even greater gifts from the Lord. Now, this is a principle that splattered across the pages of Old Testament to New Testament. It could take up its own sermon. before I come to 2 Corinthians 9, prove that to you by citing Moses in Deuteronomy 15, where he says, you shall give to the poor freely and your heart shall not be grudging when you give to him because for this, the Lord your God will bless you. and all your work and all that you undertake. Give to the poor and God will make it up to you, Moses is saying. The psalmist says about the man who fears the Lord, who delights in his commands, and who deals generously and gives to the poor, he says, wealth and riches are in his house. And his righteousness endures forever. In the book of Proverbs, we hear, one gives freely yet grows all the richer. Another withholds what he should give and only suffers want. Malachi, that place where God was rebuking his people for not bringing the tithe, he says, bring the full tithes in the storehouse that there may be food in my house and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need. Jesus teaches this when He says, give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap, for with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. Do you hear the theme of all these passages? I'm trying to give you a sense. This is not just an isolated text. Look at 2 Corinthians 9. Begin at verse 6. The point is this. Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly. And whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he's made up in his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. Ahead to verse 10. He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food, will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way for all your generosity, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God. That's a particularly powerful illustration because the farmer who has seed certainly has the choice. He could just eat the seed. Sowing the seed seems like throwing good seed away, but he sows the seed knowing that it will actually gain him more seed by doing so. And Paul's applying that to our giving. Paul's saying, if God provided you the resources that you're giving away, don't you think he's capable of multiplying those as in a harvest, what you've given away? Yes, I know, brothers and sisters, that as I remind you of this theme in the Bible, if you're at all aware of some of the more sordid elements of the church today, you know there's a kind of preacher, for that matter, a kind of church life, for another matter, that is only and all about that principle in the Bible. take that principle and sorely abuse it, as if there were no exceptions to the rule, that God rewards those who are generous. There are exceptions. And even more perversely, as if the motive that we're to have as we give is greed. Greed? What a perversion. Don't worry. The Resurrection Presbyterian has become a health and wealth Presbyterian church. I would be dressed in much finer suits if that were the case. I'd probably be driving a Mercedes instead of a Mazda. You would hear this theme from this pulpit a lot more than every three to five years. Don't worry. The Brown sisters don't ignore. Clear biblical principle. Long before there was the health and wealth heresy, Puritans like Owen and Baxter were endorsing books. I have one in my office, Riches Increased by Giving. It's a Puritan treatise on this theme, that this is a world that God governs. He loves generous giving. It's his ordinary way to reward that, even material ways. Just to point out in advance of our congregational meeting, you're not hearing a sermon on giving because the elders are worried about meeting the budget. The budget, as you've seen already, lines up squarely with what we've already been giving. So, just keep doing what you're doing. We'll have another good fiscal year. No one's worried about the budget. Should we be worried or concerned about you, though, in light of how much giving is not only an indicator of spiritual health and vitality, but is also a part of our own receiving blessing from the Lord? Some time ago, the elders took up this question, how healthy are we as a church? in this area? Are we as a congregation good stewards of God's gifts as reflected in our giving? Now, there's a problem with us raising that question as elders. We don't know what you give to the church by our own choice. We leave that kind of awareness entirely to the deacons. But we ask the deacons to give us a kind of high-level report on the giving of our households, and they did so in a very helpful way by percentages of households. So they took the giving of X percentage of households, and that was in the bracket of up to $3,000 a year. And another percentage in another bracket of three to $6,000 a year, and so on. That's the way we received that information. It was helpful to us. It registered to your elders in exactly two ways. We're very encouraged. Many of us are committed to tithing and then sacrificial giving. And I don't know how I'd prove this, but I dare say resurrection is more faithful as a congregation in this area than most evangelical churches. But there were some concerns that we also felt. More of you than I would have guessed don't seem to have a practice even of tithing. Put it to you this way, the deacons of course don't know what you receive by way of income, but let's assume that everyone is faithfully tithing at Resurrection Presbyterian Church. Information that elders receive and deacons suggest that 22% of our households make $30,000 a year or less. That's a head-scratcher. $30,000 a year for a family of four, that's poverty level. Another 25% of our households, if they are tithing faithfully, apparently make between $30,000 and $60,000 a year. And there may be some things that we can't measure like giving outside of this local church, we can't measure that to be sure. My brothers and sisters, it doesn't appear that we all have owned this guidance God has given of the biblical tithe and even of His pleasure in our seeking to give as much as we can. We are a wealthy people. Folks, I've told you before, this is the American way. Income and giving are inversely related in America. The biggest givers in the US, percentage of their income, are those who make less than $50,000 a year. They almost get to the tithe, 8.4. The lowest givers in America are those who make between 100,000 and 500,000. That's 2.9% average. People make between $100,000 and $500,000 a year. You can explain that. Your guess is as good as mine on that one. Does increasing wealth dull our sense of gratitude? Maybe that's a theory. and giving is an expression of gratitude, does wealth awaken a fever of materialism so we suddenly don't have enough, we always need a little bit more, or is it just that even good and godly people are unconsciously pressed into the mold of the world's list of gotta haves? Their budgets, their standard of living, have filled and even overflowed without giving to God. Folks, we didn't have a fun drive to build the buildings that we're so much enjoying, and we did spare you that. We're so thankful not to have to do that. Based our budget on historic patterns of giving. But if everyone in this congregation merely tithed, The mortgage we do have would be erased in short order, and we'd be awash in resources to devote to the kingdom. So this fifth point is not merely a health and wealth heresy point. Every heretic has his verses. They will not take them from us. We'll rightly understand them. Charles Hodge, not the slickest preacher, summarized the scripture's testimony, giving is to the natural eye, the way to lessen our store, not to increase it. The Bible says it's the way to increase it. So those I submit to you are the five points. financial stewardship, giving as an expression of gratitude, of devotion and worship, tithe as our guide, and beyond as much as we're able is pleasing to God and trusting God that faithful giving will receive, even in this life, His blessing. Those are the five points I told you I'd conclude with a few pointers, and this is the time of year. to hear these pointers. Just remind you, it takes pains, brothers and sisters, to be faithful stewards of our money. Pains as in doing without, in some cases. What are you planning to do in 2025? Can I share with you what I'm planning to do? I'm planning to take a remnant of my family, some of them are busy and otherwise indisposed, to the Pacific Northwest. I'm gonna take the camper again, and I might come back. I'd also like to do some home improvements this year. I'd also like to pay some college bills and a few other things like that. They all cost money. I think I can justify them all, but I can't if they stand in the way of my giving faithfully. God, what do you want to do this year? Home improvements, new vehicles, tourist destinations, they're all good, but they should never come at the expense of giving to God. You know what that is? When that happens, it's a form of idolatry. Second pointer, it does take faith. to be a faithful steward over money. You know that it takes faith when you're needy. You're the one who's dependent on God to give to you. It's also, have you ever thought about this? It's also something that requires faith to give sacrificially. I'm aware that some of what I've been reviewing this morning could land so heavily on some one or more of you who has absolutely no idea how do you claw back 10% your budget, you know how ends will meet. This is where there is always at the root of obedience, faith. Lord, I don't know how I can afford to tithe, but I'm going to, trusting You, take steps in that direction, maybe 5% next month. Six percent the month after that. I'm trusting You, Lord. I'm going to be faithful. It takes pains, it takes faith, it also takes planning to be a faithful steward over money. I think a lot of Christians begin to think about what they're going to give God when the plates start passing. But this is a spiritual discipline, as Donald Whitney has reminded us. So, plan. how much you will seek in the year ahead to give. What percentage will that be? 10% or even more? And as a rule, brothers and sisters, give as you receive. Give first to God. And then the fun part, this fourth pointer, is don't forget the fun of spontaneous giving. Once you've committed to paying your tithe, then giving as you feel led, that's actually really fun. I do believe your priority should be to tithe to the local church. That's what the morning offering at resurrection represents, our support being channeled primarily towards a place which most supports us spiritually, but there are so many other opportunities to give. include the deacon's offering, the thank offering, the letters from those who are going on short-term missions trips, to the many worthy parachurch ministries in our lives. Spontaneous giving is a lot of fun. The only other pointer I'll give is to say to parents, do your kids a huge favor. Raise them to be tithers. So, they never think of that 10% as anything but the Lord's. It'll save them so much financial stress later in life as they come to be awakened to these principles. I'm sure the deacons, as I've said before, get tired of counting quarters, dimes, and nickels. Keep sending them. Kids, keep tithing and do it the rest of your life, just like going to church on Sunday. So here's how I'll close, brothers and sisters. I want to draw your attention to something that could escape us all as admittedly, there's a great deal of weight to what I've said that may now be resting on your shoulders. I think I've said it faithfully in light of the word of God, but I don't want you to miss something that's absolutely wonderful. about this whole subject. Back to those nickels and dimes. Why does Jesus even care about them? Those nickels and dimes, why does he want our coins? Think about it. He has no need of us to steward what is his. You'd be tempted to say he'd do a lot better job if he didn't include us. That's never been God's way. In fact, the gospel in its biggest picture is all about restoring you and me to God's faithful stewards. God's so committed to this, to restoring stewardship to man, that He became a man. We just celebrated that at Christmas. He became a man. in order to secure atonement for our sins and reconciliation to God and the renewing of his likeness in us, so that the day would come when we'd be stewards of a new heaven and a new earth. So, brothers and sisters, as you're putting pencil to paper, planning your faithful stewardship of 2025, don't lose the wonder of it all. Behind it all is God's resolve to do His work in this world through you. That's amazing. Amen.