When a rich, young ruler comes to Jesus to ask how to inherit eternal life, Jesus tells him that he must sell all he has and give the money to the poor (Luke 18:18-23). Despite how this passage is sometimes used in sermons and books as an attempt to get the rich to give more money to the church, the point of this passage actually lies elsewhere.

In Jewish ways of thinking, much like today, money and wealth was a sign of God’s grace and blessing. The Mosaic Law promised that if a person obeyed God and followed the Covenant, then God would bless them with land, crops, cattle, peace, prosperity, and health (Deut 28:1-14). If, however, someone did not have all these things, then it was a sign that they (or their ancestors) were sinful and had rebelled against God, and so God was punishing them (Deut 28:15-68).

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Churches often debate how to budget their money.

Jesus might have something to say to us about this.

Jesus: “Here is How to Budget Your Money”

If Jesus were to show up at the annual meeting of the typical church when the church budget is analyzed and discussed, He would probably sit in the back and wait for the pastor or one of the elders to ask His opinion on the church budget. If they did, He might say, “You should organize your budget so that people do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not bear false witness, and honor their father and mother.”

And the church elders would glance smugly at each other and answer Jesus, saying, “Good Teacher. This is what we have been doing for many years! People have been trained. Disciples have been made. Hatred is being replaced with love. Marriages have been helped. Men are loving their wives, and wives are respecting their husbands. Youth and teens are being taught to honor and obey their parents. And as a result of all this, God has blessed our church! Membership is up thirty percent, we paid off our mortgage last year, and we are looking at purchasing some prime real estate across town to launch a satellite campus.”

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There are many things a church could be doing with the money it receives.

One of these is that the church could become a church that gives.

The Church that Gives

Rather than spending the majority of our income on buildings, salaries, and church programs, so that only what is left over goes to help the poor and needy, maybe churches could reverse this practice, so that a majority of the money that a church receives goes toward feeding the hungry, helping the poor, and serving those who are outcast and rejected in society.

Though there is no hard and fast rule, it seems that if loving and serving others really is a priority for our church, our church budget should reflect this by setting aside a majority (51% or more) of the church income for such service-oriented ministry. Such a move would be impossible for most established churches, but they could begin to move in that direction by portioning off an ever-increasing percentage of their annual budget for serving the community in this way.

Majority to Missions?

I am aware of several churches that actually do this, but most of them are in the mega-church category, and have annual operating budgets of $5 million or more. These churches often pride themselves in giving 51% of their budget to “missions.” This is wonderful, and is to be encouraged and praised. And yet I sometimes think that for churches like these, 51% is not nearly enough. They still spend thousands of dollars a month to air-condition their empty building. They spent tens of thousands of dollars a year on new choir robes, colorful bulletins, professional cleaning for the padded pews, and on and on it goes.

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The central chapters in the New Testament about giving are 2 Corinthians 8–9. In these chapters, Paul provides his suggestions on who should give, how much they should give, where they should give to, why they should give, and how the church should use what they give.

Giving is not about Tithing

Note first of all that not once in these chapters do we read about tithing. Paul is not writing about the Christian tithe. He is no interest in resurrecting or reworking the instructions about tithing from the Mosaic Law. He recognized, as we have seen above, that the laws about tithing were for Jewish people living in a covenant relationship with the God of Israel, and with the Temple and the priestly Levitical system as one of the central symbols of that covenant. There was no command from Paul for the Corinthian believers to give. He explicitly states that what he writes is “not by commandment” (2 Cor 8:9). Instead, he was urging them to finish what they had already started.

Giving is to Help the Poor

What was it they had started? There were several Macedonian churches in deep poverty, and the Corinthian church offered to help these other churches out financially (2 Cor 8:2). Being in deep poverty does not mean that these churches were unable to pay their pastor, or were falling behind on their mortgage. No, remember that such things did not exist at that time. When Paul says that these churches were facing affliction and were in deep poverty, he means that the people themselves could not afford food and clothing. Many of them had probably lost their jobs as a result of becoming Christians. Some of the men had probably been imprisoned, or even killed, leaving their wives and children without income and support.

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When we read about the early church and how they handled money, one of the first examples we come to, and also the most famous, is the account in Acts 4:32-5:11. The text begins by stating that nobody in the community was in need because those who had more shared with those who had less.One example is given where a man named Barnabas sells some of his property and gives the money to the apostles who then distribute it to those within the church who had need (Acts 4:32-37).

Following this, in Acts 5, we read about a husband and wife in the church named Ananias and Sapphira, who decide to do something similar. They also sell some of their possessions, with the intention of giving the proceeds to the church. But when they receive the money, rather than give everything, they only gave part of the proceeds. However, they tell the apostles and the rest of the church that they had given everything. As a result, both of them are struck dead by the Holy Spirit (Acts 5:1-11).

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