Ever had a question you wanted to ask, but didn’t think it would be appropriate? “When is your baby due?” “Are you ill, because you don’t look so good?” These questions could be politically incorrect in certain circumstances and could backfire on you.
From time to time, I’ve had questions about God that could have been deemed “religiously incorrect” if I had asked them out loud.
Here’s one such question: “Why do we need to give to God? He doesn’t need anything. And if He did, He could make it out of nothing whenever He wanted!”
There. I said it! But now that it’s out there, what’s the answer? Since God doesn’t need our stuff, what’s the purpose of giving it?
Leviticus chapter 27 is all about giving to God, but it can also teach us a lot about ourselves.
We’re a very tangible people, living in a very tangible world. Gathering our tangibles around us and keeping them close makes us feel secure. But the more we give our tangible things to God, the more we must find our security in the great intangible…God!
A person can’t surrender the ownership of their stuff to God without first surrendering ownership of themselves to God. We’re very connected to our stuff, so the more God has our stuff, the more God has us.
Another way to look at it is that our level of giving things to God is an indication of our level of keeping things from God. The less of our stuff we give to Him, the more of our self we keep from Him.
How much of yourself are you giving to God? All you need to do is look at how much of your stuff you’re keeping for yourself.
Bret Legg is the Teaching and Counseling Pastor at Warren Baptist Church in Augusta, GA.