?What if we talked to God first, and asked Him His advice, His wisdom and counsel before all others, putting the counsel of our friends, neighbors, and paid advisors last?
We declare God as reigning supreme in our lives, and we may even quote Revelation 1:8, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,” says the Lord, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” But yet it seems our personal agendas, somehow, more often than not, manage to edge God into last place. ?Are we brave to be honest with ourselves to admit to being personally responsible for not putting God first, giving Him our first and last everything?
So go with me a moment: Let’s suppose we’re going to play the 10% tithe game. ?We’ll give Him 10% of our money maybe, and that’s a BIG maybe, but will we be as careful about giving Him 10% of our time, 10% of our words, 10% of our food, 10% of the mileage on our car, 10% of our thinking, 10% of whatever else our lives are made of? Do we r-e-a-l-l-y want to do the 10% thing? How will we accurately measure out 10% of those? By what standard will we make that measurement? Sounds VERY tedious to me. Funny how selective we get over which part of our lives we give 10%. We are so … very … careful to count out, to the penny, 10% (or less) of our money, and then our underlying attitude is one of “now that i’ve paid God off this week, the rest of everything is mine … mine, mine, mine.” Me, me, me. i think maybe this 10% business is really a very disturbing cover for something much deeper.
Here’s a better way. The following are three points to approach the idea of how to mark a portion as belonging to God. And can you believe it? It starts with our thinking, seeing the Lord as our, here’s the three points: focus, context, and destiny.
First point, God. He is the subject of life, the foundation for living, the beginning of the beginning. If we don’t have a sense of the Lord being primary and first, chances are good we’ll have a hard time keeping our priorities straight. Let us put Him first, giving Him the first fruits of all we do and say. When we do that it puts us in the position for the Lord to give us a vocabulary for speaking accurately and comprehensively about our lives, where we come from and where we are going. We are positioning ourselves to be able to express what we think and do. When we orient our heading towards God it enables us to possess wisdom about the people we live with and how to get along with them. Suddenly we have longitude and latitude knowledge about the troubles we find ourselves in, and understanding for the amazing blessings that keep arriving. Not God in the margins, not God as an option, not God only on weekends, not God as an afterthought, but God at the center and circumference every day.
Second point, God. He is the context in which we live our lives, the connective tissue between our heart, head, and body, with Jesus and the Holy Spirit as our life line to the Father. If we don’t have a sense of Him as our substance, we will be like a zero on a number line, just place holders with no increasing value. Not God as just the rule maker, not God as just a plumb line of law, not God as just some obscure protoplasm hanging between molecules, but God in the middle, edge to edge, as the medium and context of all our breathing. And that is the word “medium” in the context of the intervening substance and person through which and who impressions, ideas, and our very essence are conveyed. Acts 17:28, “‘In him we live and move and have our being”.
And third point, God. He is the end of the end. All things end at His feet. He reserves the right to designate the beginning of our days, and sets aside for Himself the exclusive right for all things to end at His throne. Our goal is to be restored, walking with Him in the end of the day, in the cool of the garden. If we don’t have a sense of the Lord as our end point, we will never successfully define our destiny. Not God as a vanishing point, not God in obscurity, not God as only one of many possible endings, but God as support and covering, breath and vision, first and last.
What if we gave God all our breathing, all our thinking, all our feeling, and all our strength? How would that look to you? ?What if we trusted Him to tell us how much to give of our everything, believing He was not going to ask us to give till we were destroyed? What if God really, really, actually, actually does love us and cares for us so much that if we trusted Him with our breathing, thinking, and feeling, He would bless us beyond our wildest dreams, so much so we can’t imagine and have never seen the likeness of His outpouring of goodness on us? What if we gave to others because Jesus first gave to us, and we gave as the Lord told us rather than just doing a rule or law of a percentage?
This week, give God your first and last words. Try it for 3 days. Make Him the first person you greet, and the last person you say goodnight to. He is worthy. “And it will be said in that day: “Behold, this is our God; We have waited for Him, and He will save us. This is the LORD; We have waited for Him; We will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.”
Oh, and we’ve really got to get rid of our merit/demerit system which says, “If you don’t tithe, God will squeeze it out of you somehow!” Really? i actually heard more than one pastor say that. Do we really believe God is that vindictive and hard? Is that r-e-a-l-l-y His character? If you think so, where did you get that idea ‘cause it’s not true.
Give God your first fruits, give Him your first and last of every day, and the entirety of your thoughts and words in all the in between.