11/8/20 Mark 12:38-44 “Giving-Trusting Jesus!”

06 Nov 11/8/20 Mark 12:38-44 “Giving-Trusting Jesus!”

11/8/20    Mark 12:38-44        “Giving-Trusting Jesus!”

Our society has really changed in nearly 70 years that I have been around.  I was raised so that I would always answer the phone.  I get nervous when it rings and rings.  I would say that isn’t always the case anymore.  I was also raised so that I would open all mail that came to me.  I really can’t do that all the time either.  We have new media now called email and texting where some of the same principles apply.  The reason that we don’t always look at things addressed to us is that we have no faith in what is being said.  Just the other day, I received an email that said the end of the world is coming soon.  We have heard this type of thing so much that we don’t pay attention to it.  I think that the same idea applies to most of our advertisements we get in the mail.  We have gotten to a point in our world where we don’t trust anyone or anything.  And there are probably very good reasons why we have such a hard time trusting.  Today’s passage from Mark talks about trusting and giving.  Let’s see how these two concepts go together.

Here is a modern parable as told by Tim Zingale about an IRS agent who found a rather odd return.  Someone with an income of under $10,000 claimed that he gave $1,248 to some church.  Now this was inside the 20% limit but it looked suspicious.  So, this agent decided to pay the man a surprise visit.  He thought the man would become very nervous like all other people do when an IRS agent calls but not this guy.  He was calm.

So, the agent asked him for a receipt.  The man said ‘sure’ and went to his drawer and found his receipt from the church.  The agent was getting nervous himself as he knew he had made a mistake.  The deduction was on the level.  So, the agent was forced to apologize and he added that he had to check on deductions that seemed unusually high.  As he was leaving the man invited the agent to church.

The agent said, “Thank you but I belong to a church myself.”

“Please excuse me,” the man replied, “That possibility never occurred to me.”

The agent didn’t understand what the man had meant by this statement and it bothered him.  Finally, the meaning occurred to him the following Sunday morning as he was putting his usual $1 into the collection plate.   On one of the levels today, these verses are addressing stewardship.  How much are we to give?  This poor widow woman gave all she had.  You may think that this is a little radical.  You are right.  This is radical but I think that we have become so complacent in our world of comforts that we need to be a little more radical.  It is time to shake up our thinking.

Some of you know my story but here is part of it again.  I came to the Lord around 1991.  This was and still is the greatest event of my life.  It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I felt this process was complete.  We were at a time when we had no money.  We had to wait until I got paid to be able to afford groceries.  It was during this hard time, during my prayer time, Jesus told me to give to Him.  I didn’t know what to do.  I usually gave $1 a week so I looked up what a tithe was.  It is 10% of our income, by the way.  Due to the influence of Jesus Christ in my prayer time, I wrote a check out for 10% of our income for that week.  We couldn’t afford to do this but I did anyway.  I have been doing this ever since.  For some people this may seem like a lot of money.

But I would rather look at the other side of the equation.  I would rather look at all the blessings that have come our way.  I am doing work today that I had never dreamed possible.  I absolutely love being a pastor and retired pastor.  We have more things than I ever thought possible.  I cannot even count the wondrous blessings that have come into our lives because of this act of obedience.  This is why I will tell you that if you don’t already tithe your income, then you should start today.  As far as I can tell, you cannot afford not to do this.

I have never known how much any person gives to the church.  It is none of my business.  I will not and cannot check up on you.  It is between you and God.  Your promises are made to God and not to me.  All I know is that we are supposed to give 10% of what we have.  We are to give it through time, talent and money.  One area isn’t supposed to replace another when it comes to giving.  A church can’t run on just time or just talent or just money.  It needs 10% of each one.

Now I hope that you remember that many of the writings in the Bible are written on two or more levels.  Being generous and giving is one level.  Now let’s look at another level.  Last week we talked of the teachers or scribes.  This week we have a warning from Jesus to beware of teachers/scribes.  In ancient times these guys had a lot going for and against them.  All the Jews looked up to them because of their knowledge.  They wore long robes and tried to look the part of the learned.  When they prayed, they would pray in public and usually they prayed long drawn out prayers.  They did this because people would pay them for their prayers and the longer they prayed the more they got paid.  The ones who wanted or needed the most prayer or the longest prayers were the poor and the widows.  So, the teachers would abuse their post by taking advantage of these lowly people.  They were not nice or trustworthy!

There were also huge brass pots located in the Temple area where people would come and throw their tithes and offerings.  They had no paper money and these pots made a lot of noise when the coins were deposited.  These teachers would also make sure that they made as much noise as possible so that all could hear how much they had put into the offering.  Not only that but they were also in on the plot to have Jesus killed.  Again we can see that they were not very trustworthy people.

So, we have all of these people putting money into these huge brass pots and there is a lot of noise as Jesus watches.  I hope that you have noticed in your life how Jesus is all powerful, all knowing and all everything.  There is nothing that we can do or say or think that Jesus doesn’t know.  This may be a little unsettling to some but it is a fact.  I want you to notice that in this passage Jesus can see and hear pretty well also.  He noticed this widow coming along who was probably trying to be unnoticed.  Remember now that unless a widow was married to a brother or relative, she would probably have no money, no means to make a living and no social status.  In India we have similar people today and they are called the untouchables.  Anyway, this poor woman puts in two small coins into the collection pot.  These coins were worth a fraction of a penny each.  In today’s economy, they would be worthless.

We hear Jesus telling us that this is all the money that she had.  Why in the world would she do this?  She did this because she was down and out and she trusted the Lord because He is trustworthy.  You see, even in those days, faith was what mattered, not how much you knew or how much you gave.  She gave because of her love of God.  I once knew a local man who was quite a drinker and he was always in trouble.  To make a long story short, he found himself in church one evening with only $.09 in his pocket.  As a matter of fact, this is all he had period.  The collection plate came around and he put it all in the plate.  The Holy Spirit was working on him at the same time and he came to know Jesus.  He liked to call himself the $.09 miracle.  This is what Jesus does.  He changes lives.

There are a lot of people who have trust issues today.  As I noted in my opening, I have trust issues.  This is really a very sad commentary on our country.  No one trusts anyone anymore.  We have to make sure we triple our locks on our doors.  We feel unsafe in strange places.  We don’t really trust too many institutions with our money.  We are even seeing ourselves not trusting our government in this COVID-19 crisis.  And you know what?  There are very good reasons for this.  There are too many swindlers, too many cheats and too many people willing to hurt us.  Strangely enough, there are not enough ways to overcome these things because we like to coddle our criminals.

We can point fingers all over the place and find reasons for all of this.  We could get into a heated argument and start ourselves a TV news commentary program.  If you ever want to get sick of arguments, just watch one of these so-called news network shows.  And none of these programs has it right.  They only point to the symptoms and not the cause.  Did you know, and many people don’t want us to know this, that this country was founded on the principles of God and Jesus Christ?  That’s right!!  This country was built upon loving God and loving our neighbor.  For over a century and a half, we loved God and we were blessed as a country.  Sometime around 1950, Christians fell asleep and we let Satan take over.

Notice what Jesus does in our reading.  He calls his disciples together and says to them beginning with, “I tell you the truth.”  When you read this in the Bible, pay close attention because what follows in very important.  He is giving the disciples and us a teaching moment.  We never do find out what actually happened to the nameless widow.  But we can infer that good things happened by what Jesus is telling the disciples.

He tells them that she has given more than all the rest of the people.  Some Bibles will call these coins she put in mites because they were worth so little.  All the other people in the area gave out of their wealth.  They had money of some kind and they gave what they thought was right.  Some would even have given 10% of their income.  But this poor widow gave all that she had.  She did not hold back anything.

In the churches I have served, we have had the same principle working.  I would guess that if we had 3 or 4 or 5 people from these churches that tithe their income, we would be lucky.  I know this because if everyone did this simple act of faith, we would have all kinds of money to use for God’s work.  And it’s not like the money is ours.  It’s not.  It belongs to God.  So do our cars and our houses and everything we have.  It all belongs to God.

Anyway, if we have 3 or 4 or 5 people who tithe, they are giving from their wealth and this is ok.  We have this money and we set it aside to give to God.  Does God expect all of us to give all the money we have to Him?  Of course He doesn’t because that is not what Jesus is talking about here.

What Jesus is really talking about here is that we are to give ourselves to God.  He is not talking about money at all.  Jesus wants each and every one of us to give ourselves to Him.  We are to give ourselves at the rate of 100%, not 10%.  God wants every bit of us and not just bits and pieces.  We have talked of this many times.  We always want to hold back things from God.  We want to hang onto our anger.  Or we want to hang onto to our pride because we are sooo good.  We like to hang onto things that God doesn’t want us to have.

We cannot help but want to hang on to things that we do or have done in our past.  We are broken human beings living in a very broken world.  If this is where I left this message, then I would have to suggest that you never listen to me again.  But this is not the end of the message.  We are to come to God to confess our sins.  We are to give up these things that we like to keep and give them to God.  We need to do this on a daily basis because of the brokenness around us.  And if you haven’t yet asked Jesus to take control of your life then do so today.  It starts with confessing all of your sins to Him and then asking Him to live in your life.  When I first confessed everything to Jesus, it was like a huge weight had been taken from my shoulders.  It was like I could stand up straight for the first time in my life.  Do this as a favor to yourself.  This is what this Scripture is all about.  This is what the whole Bible is all about.

Peter Ghalayini tells the story of a self-made millionaire who was telling his story of success in front of a crowd of people.  He told the people how poor he had been when he was young and how he had started with absolutely nothing.  He had to leave school early and work just to make ends meet.   He had to take some risks along the way and the reason he was so successful today was because of these risks that he took.  He started with nothing and he told the people that they could do the same thing that he had done.  He challenged his listeners to go out and make their fortune.

We have all heard this story before as it is the same story that many rich people tell.  However, this rich man opened the meeting up for questions and one young man said, “I dare you to do it again!”  This young man was thinking that if this was such a wonderful formula for success, then this rich man should be able to get rid of all of his money and start again.

The rich man was speechless.  He couldn’t do it.  It was easy when he was poor but it is now hard when he is rich.  Jesus isn’t asking us for money today.  He is asking you to start over with your life.  Many people think that they have nice rich lives and things are going great.  But if they don’t have Jesus, then they don’t have life.  Their lives are worthless.  Come to Jesus today as only He can give you the things that you are missing.  Maybe if everyone did this, we could start trusting people again.  Trust Jesus today.  And thank you Jesus for first loving us.  Let’s pray.