Spiritual Disciplines: The Discipline of Giving
Key Points
- 01Money itself is amoral — it is the love of money, not money, that Paul calls the root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:10)
- 02Every dollar already belongs to God; we are stewards, not owners, of what passes through our hands (Haggai 2:8, Deuteronomy 8:17-18)
- 03Tithing as a strict 10% requirement was Mosaic law for national Israel (and was actually closer to 23%); the New Testament never binds it to the church
- 04Giving is to be sacrificial — the widow's two coins counted more than the abundance of the wealthy (Mark 12:41-44)
- 05The amount is decided personally between you and the Lord, not under compulsion; God loves a cheerful giver (2 Corinthians 9:7)
- 06Giving is purposeful, proportional, and an act of worship — the question is not how much to give God, but how much of God's money to keep for yourself
Watch the Full Sermon
Sermon Summary
On a Mother's Day morning that began with a child dedication and the bright energy of a congregation singing 'All I Have Is Yours,' Pastor Lance steps into one of the most uncomfortable sermons a preacher can give — the discipline of giving — and tells the church up front that he is not there to crowbar open anyone's wallet. He sets the topic on its proper footing: this is not a strategy to earn favor with God, because no one can earn what Christ has already finished on the cross. It is, instead, a practice that flows out of salvation already received. Lance frames the morning around a single, disarming question that will sit underneath everything else: how should a person who has been bought by the blood of Christ actually think about money?
He begins by tearing down the popular slogan that money is the root of all evil. Quoting 1 Timothy 6:10, he insists Paul is precise — it is the love of money, the avarice that exalts wealth above God, that grows the root of every kind of evil. Money itself is amoral; it becomes good or evil through the attitude we bring to it. From there Lance moves to a second jolt: the money is not yours. Through Haggai 2:6-8, Psalm 50:9-12, and Deuteronomy 8:17-18 he hammers a single point — every dollar, every paycheck, every cattle on every hill belongs to the Lord. Job's response when stripped of everything ('the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away') becomes the posture of the steward, not the owner. Drawing on 1 Peter 4:9-10 and 1 Timothy 6:17, Lance reminds the congregation that God 'richly provides us with everything to enjoy,' and that contentment, not deprivation, is the goal.
Lance then takes the congregation on a quick survey of tithing across redemptive history. Before Moses, only Abraham (Genesis 14) and Jacob (Genesis 28) tithed — both voluntarily, out of gratitude, with no requirement. Under the Mosaic Law, Israel actually gave closer to twenty-three percent, between the Levitical tithe, the tithe of feasts (Deuteronomy 12), and the every-third-year tithe for the poor. Jesus and the disciples tithed because they were still under that law. But in the entire post-resurrection New Testament, tithing is never tied to the church — and that is not an oversight, because every New Testament writer except Luke was Jewish and would have invoked it if God meant it to continue. Tithing is a good benchmark, not a binding command. The New Testament principles are higher and harder.
Lance closes by walking through what those principles look like: giving is investing with God (Luke 6:38, Matthew 6:19-21), sacrificial (the widow's two coins in Mark 12, the impoverished Macedonians of 2 Corinthians 8), a matter of the heart and not the amount (Luke 16:10), decided personally between you and the Lord (2 Corinthians 9:7), responsive to real need (Acts 2-11), purposeful and proportional (1 Corinthians 16:1-2), and a true act of worship (Philippians 4:15-17). He ends with a question from his friend Larry Rosenthal that reframes the whole conversation: 'Most people ask how much of my money should I give to God. The question should be how much of God's money should I keep for myself?' The closing song — 'All I have is yours' — is the prayer the congregation is being invited into.
Scripture References
Going Deeper
The discipline of giving has a longer history than most modern believers realize, and tracing that history clarifies why the New Testament treats it the way it does. Under the Mosaic covenant, Israel was a theocracy with no separation between civic and religious life, so the tithes functioned as something closer to a national tax system than a freewill offering. The Levitical tithe supported the priestly tribe that had no land inheritance (Numbers 18:21-24). The tithe of feasts funded the great national pilgrimages of Israel's calendar (Deuteronomy 14:22-27). The third-year tithe was a welfare provision for the Levite, the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow (Deuteronomy 14:28-29). Together they came to roughly 23%, and they sat on top of freewill offerings, firstfruits, and the gleanings laws of Leviticus 19. To read tithing well, you have to see it as one strand in a much larger fabric of generosity that the law wove into the rhythms of Israel's economy.
The New Testament shift is striking. After the resurrection there is no Levitical priesthood to support, no central temple in Jerusalem to maintain, and no theocratic nation collecting tithes. The apostles take generosity even more seriously, but the framework changes entirely. Acts 2 and Acts 4 describe believers in Jerusalem selling property and laying the proceeds at the apostles' feet, not because a 10% line had been crossed but because need was visible and the gospel reorders priorities. In 2 Corinthians 8 Paul holds up the Macedonian churches — themselves in severe affliction and 'extreme poverty' — as the model of New Testament giving, because their generosity 'overflowed in a wealth of liberality.' The pattern is freewill, sacrificial, and proportional, given out of love for Christ and an awareness that what is held has been entrusted, not earned.
Church history shows the same pattern. The Didache, written before AD 100, instructs Christians to give freely and warns that giving must come from the heart. Augustine pressed his congregation in Hippo to remember that God gave the world the gift of his Son, and so generosity is not a tax we pay back but a participation in the kind of love that has already saved us. Martin Luther observed that there are three conversions necessary for any Christian — the conversion of the heart, the mind, and the purse — and he was honest that the last is often the slowest. John Wesley famously preached 'earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can,' and lived it: his personal income rose substantially over his lifetime, but his giving rose so much faster that he died with almost nothing in his estate. The cloud of witnesses around the discipline of giving is enormous, and it consistently treats money as a tool for kingdom work, not as a measure of personal worth.
For today, the most practical step is the one Paul gave the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 16:2 — set something aside on the first day of each week, in proportion to how you have prospered. Practically, that means deciding ahead of time, ideally with a spouse if you are married, what you will give before the bills and the wants of the week start competing for the same dollars. Automated giving, given prayerfully and reviewed annually, is one expression of that principle. So is asking whether the local church you sit under is in fact stewarding generosity outward — to discipleship, to missions, to the poor in the community — because Paul also assumed in 1 Corinthians 16 that the gift would be held and deployed by the gathered body for kingdom ends. Giving is finally less a financial decision than a heart posture: God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and the question is how willingly you will let him use the small herd entrusted to you.
