Gifts to the Poor – How To Start Working With God Financially Part 5

As we have seen, God wants to bless you financially.   To integrate your financial life with God’s economic system, God wants you to give Him some of your money.  God is then going to give you “harvests” on those “seeds”.

Today we will briefly discuss giving to the poor.  As with tithing, giving to the poor is not a legal requirement.  You will not be cursed or go to hell if you never give to the poor.  However, God wants us to be ever mindful of the poor as we consider our finances. 

I find Leviticus 23:22 (and other similar passages) very interesting as I consider giving to the poor.  Whenever your receive financial increase in your life, you should be ready to share with the less fortunate. 

God is going to attach you to specific ministries and works for your regular giving (for me its Grace Family Church, Schools for Haiti, Inc., Andrew Wommack Ministries and Bill Winston Ministries).  Some of those may help the poor (like Schools for Haiti).  But God also wants you to have spare monies around and available for the less fortunate. 

Personally, this is the smallest area of my giving after my tithe and general offerings to God’s Kingdom, and I actually think that is appropriate.  But again, we are just talking about establishing a framework for your finances.  You see someone collecting money for a needy family, or an orphanage, or something like that.  Give them a few bucks.  You see an opportunity that sounds good and you feel your heart moved with compassion, send a few bucks there way.  Quickly check with the Holy Spirit, what’s the right number?

Look at this amazing promise for when you are generous with the poor.  “Give generously to them and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to.”  (Deuteronomy 15:10 NIV)

(Proverbs 19:17 NLT) – “If you help the poor, you are lending to the Lord-and He will repay you!”

As with tithing, gifts to the poor invite God’s blessings into your financial life.  Yes, I understand we don’t only give to get, we’ll talk about that later.  For now we are focusing on understanding God’s economic system.  As we use our money according to God’s ways, we will see His financial blessings show up.

(In case you missed any installments in this series or want more information otherwise, you can always see all of my messages, posts, podcasts, etc. at byronhowell.com.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Love Revolution

Image
Recently I read a new book by Joyce Meyer, the Love Revolution.  I must say that it is fantastic.  It discusses the Christian duty to love and gives inspiration and education on the subject.  Joyce wisely teaches us more about love and how to love.  But really, Joyce doesn't just want us to read a book, she wants a revolution, one that I can proudly say I've joined. I don't think we can overstate the importance of love to Christians.  Jesus said that by our love for each other people would recognize us as Christians.  Jesus said that the two most important commandments are for us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and for us to love our neighbor as ourselves.  Then Jesus gave us a new commandment, enhancing the second one above, that we should love people as Christ loved us.  Christ sacrificed Himself so that we could be saved and have better lives, only because He loved us.  Therefore we must also learn to sacrificially love others.  Furthermore, the
Read more

Looking At What Can't Be Seen

Everyone understands that a huge portion of physical reality can’t be seen with the human eye.  Perhaps most importantly, we can’t see the air we breathe.  Isn’t that amazing, we can’t even see something that our bodies depend on constantly.  This natural realm, all that consists of what we might perceive with our physical senses, contains many other important substances we can’t see.  But there is another entire realm that we can’t see or perceive with our natural senses, the spiritual realm.  I know even the phrase “the spiritual realm” sounds weird and you’re thinking about skipping this teaching, but the importance of spiritual reality cannot be overstated.  The spiritual realm is actually the higher realm, the more important realm, with authority and power over the natural realm.  Even a basic understanding of the spiritual realm will dramatically improve your life and faith journey. I’ve heard people discuss the spiritual realm before, but I’ve never seen a teaching from any
Read more

You Must Defeat Doubt

Today we will talk about faith and doubt, and we are going to see that doubt is one of the greatest enemies we will ever have.  We will also talk about defeating doubt. If you are anything like me, you have several areas of your life that you are currently praying about.   You have several areas of your life where you would like God’s help or to see God’s best.   So you pray about those areas and you try to make positive changes.   I hope you listened to my last episode because I talked about what to do in any difficult situation.   To briefly sum it up, for any difficult situation you need to pray about it, study God’s Word about it, do anything God says, and stay in faith that God’s Word is working in your life.   We also talked about praying instead of worrying and what it means to stand in faith despite contrary natural circumstances. If you have listened to me talk about faith, and I have a lot of episodes about faith, you know that true Biblical faith involves believing God
Read more