Few subjects cause the preacher as much anxiety as money. Last year, Leadership‘s audiotape series, Preaching Today, featured a stewardship sermon by Bob Russell that handled this controversial topic with authority, humor, and sensitivity. We asked Bob how he learned to address an uncomfortable issue with comfort and grace.
Money is controversial because you can never know how people will react to a message about it. I know guests don’t want to hear about money the first time they attend our church. Yet it never fails: the Sundays I preach on money, someone tells me, “I’ve been working on a friend for a long time, and he finally came this morning when you preached on money. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to get him back, and it’s your fault.”
Another reason money is difficult to preach about is that it can strike at the heart of influential people in our congregations. Most of us are insecure in our position, and we like to please people, so we rationalize not speaking about giving.
I remember a preacher from my childhood—my parents thought he preached too much about money. That was the one subject that could get people in that church upset. So I have childhood tapes in the back of my mind that money is a controversial issue.
Given the treacherous terrain, I decided that as long as giving was good, I’d speak to the issue only once a year. That Sunday, my whole attitude would be apologetic: “If you’re visiting with us today, understand that we do this only once a year.” The congregation could sense I didn’t like to preach on money. I’d breathe a big sigh of relief when the sermon was over.
But I’ve come to realize that some of my motives for not speaking about money were just plain wrong.
BELIEVABLE LIES
I used to say, “If we really get people’s hearts where they ought to be, the giving will come automatically.” I often used an illustration about a track coach who told the pole vaulter, “Throw your heart over the pole, and the rest of you will follow.” I thought, If we just get people’s hearts right, the money will follow. That idea will preach.
The problem is, Jesus said just the opposite: “Where a man’s treasure is, there will his heart be also.” If we don’t confront people’s “treasure,” how are we going to motivate people to acknowledge they have a heart problem?
What really convicted me was realizing that I wasn’t afraid to confront other areas where the Bible was countercultural—sexual morality, putting God first in use of time, all those areas where God’s standard is so different from this world’s. The reason I wasn’t preaching on stewardship was cowardly; I wanted to please people more than I wanted to please God.
I wrestled with this for some time. The question was easy to avoid, because as our church grew, so did our operating budget. But then our administrator began analyzing our congregation’s giving. (Of course, he was more interested in the budget than I; administrators are not nearly as spiritual as preachers!)
His research showed that our congregation was just average in giving. I said, “Well, we want to be an excellent church in all areas, and as an upper-middle-income church, we ought to be doing a whole lot better than average.” But when he reminded me of those words from time to time, I became defensive.
Then, I could see another building program coming, and I realized, If we are going to raise the kind of money we need, I am going to have to be a more courageous preacher than I have ever been.
Finally, I began to see that I needed to confront the whole area of materialism in our culture. People really do want to hear what the Bible says about money, because it’s a matter close to the heart and such a divisive issue for families.
TAKING THE PLUNGE
For the last three or four years, I’ve used the month of January to teach sermon series on money—giving, earning, spending, and saving it. By consistently speaking to the inescapable way money affects our lives, I am less likely to come across as a fund raiser.
Then, when it came time for our capital campaign, associate minister David Stone and I preached a series on our responsibility to give sacrificially and why the Lord was worthy of it. If you had told me ten years ago that I was going to preach for five straight weeks on sacrificial giving, I would have been petrified. Even after several years of the January money emphasis, I still came to that series with fear and trembling.
What we found was that when people are confronted with these truths, they are forced to identify the priorities in their lives. Sure, some get mad. But for most, to voluntarily sacrifice an unholy love for something greater is a great spiritual catalyst.
When the pledges to the capital fund campaign were announced, it effectively doubled our weekly giving. It made me wonder how much people had hoarded from God in the past, in part because a preacher was afraid to talk about it.
SETTING AN EXAMPLE
Everyone knows the leader must set the example, and stewardship is no exception. Giving was ingrained in me from earliest childhood, but more recently I’ve understood how much our lifestyles must preach stewardship.
You can be a tither, but if people think you’re not paying your bills, or they see your lifestyle as extravagant, you have no credibility. It’s amazing what people know about your lifestyle.
One guy told me, “I heard you preach on the radio and liked what you said, but I wondered if you were one of those media preachers who live like a king. So I looked up your address in the phone book and drove by your house. You live in a nice but average house, so I decided to come.” I joked later, “I’m so glad my two Jaguars were parked in the garage that day!”
In past sermons, I never talked about my giving, other than to say I tithed. But when our stewardship campaign began, the consultants told me, “One thing that would really help the campaign is for you to share publicly what your commitment is going to be.” I bristled. “I can’t do that,” I told them, “because Jesus said, ‘Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand’s going to do.'”
The consultants responded, “What about that passage in First Chronicles 29 where David told the exact amount he was giving for the temple? You know about that verse, don’t you, Bob?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. As soon as they left, I looked it up, and sure enough, David told everyone exactly how much gold and silver he was giving from his personal treasury. Then it says that the leaders followed David, and the people followed the example of the leaders.
So I studied what Jesus meant when he said, “Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” I became convinced it was the motive that mattered—whether you told in order to boast, or whether you did it to set an example that brings honor to God.
Yet, on the Thursday evening before I was scheduled to speak about this, I still wasn’t sure I could do it. It was so contrary to my nature. I went to bed convinced that I would simply say, “I’m going to do the best I can, and that’s what we ask of you.” That would have been easy to say. But I woke up early the next day with an acceptable way I could talk about my gift.
Ten years ago we went through a similar campaign. I went to the bank and borrowed $10,000 over three years to give to a one-time offering, because we just didn’t have the cash on hand that we wanted to give. I told that story early in the sermon.
Later in the message, I said, “I never dreamed our church would be in a building program again, but here we are. I’ve concluded that since this program is five times as big as the other program, I’ve got to give five times what I gave then.”
Everyone began mentally doing the math, and that sermon served notice that we were asking for genuine sacrifice. The mood turned serious in a hurry.
My wife runs our church’s tape ministry, and during that series she got a letter from a preacher who wrote, “You’d better tell Brother Russell to stop preaching so much about money or he’s not going to have anybody left to go with him to that new building.”
She wrote him and said, “You might be interested in knowing that in the five weeks that Bob has preached on money, there have been 165 responses to the invitation to receive Christ.”
It was remarkable; in those services, there was nothing overtly evangelistic in my message. Yet the atmosphere of sacrifice for a worthy God somehow moved people to give their lives to him.
GIVING AS A CHURCH
A church must be generous before it can expect its people to be generous.
In my preaching, I tell people, “If you give to him first, God will see to it that your needs are met and bless your life.” It really sends a mixed signal, then, when a congregation decides, “Our needs at home are so great we’re going to cut giving to outside needs.”
Our policy had been that 10 percent of our gross receipts went to missions giving. When we moved into this building, we hedged on that. I’d like to say we didn’t, but you can call some things “missions” that aren’t really missions.
During a staff retreat, we realized we might have to relocate again, and the more I thought and prayed about it, the more I realized that the first thing we needed to do was revisit our commitment to missions giving. I recommended to the elders that we immediately give a full 10 percent to missions, then every year increase it by at least 1 percent. “Only then,” I said, “will we investigate the possibility of relocating.” They agreed, and currently, missions giving is around 15 percent. That gave a clear message to people that we weren’t asking them to do anything the church as a whole wasn’t willing to do.
AVOIDING EXTREMES
When we preach on stewardship, it’s important to remember there are two extremes sitting out there—people who are really struggling as well as those who have incredible resources.
If we focus our message on either, I don’t think we’re approaching it from the Lord’s perspective. Both can learn from each other.
The people with big bucks are more likely to be convicted by somebody who is really making a sacrifice than they are by a peer. Sometimes the widow with two mites can inspire you to give a whole lot more than the Pharisee who gives $10,000.
One of our church’s receptionists, a single mother, gave a testimony one Sunday morning. She said, “When this capital campaign was introduced, I didn’t think we had a dime to give. My husband and I are divorced. He doesn’t help us. I have three teenage children, and we don’t have much to live on. So as our gift, we decided we would pray every day for the success of this program.
“But then we realized, We do have cable television. So for the next three years we’re going to give up cable TV, and the money we save is what we’ll give to this capital campaign—$25 a month.”
That story made us all examine our definition of sacrifice.
I watch the illustrations I use, making sure they are balanced. A close examination of the text will usually keep us from focusing on either extreme. For instance, the Parable of the Talents says as much to the one-talent person as to the ten-talent person.
There are always people with resources who haven’t given significantly yet. I feel a real sense of failure when I think about a person who has a huge salary yet is content giving $25 a week. Why can’t I persuade that person that his hoarded money isn’t doing anyone a bit of good? His kids are well-off and don’t need his money. I think about ways I can encourage him to invest in something that pays eternal dividends.
On the other end are people struggling with real financial insecurity. The last thing I want to do is create guilt about finances. I’ve got to be sensitive when preaching a sermon like “How to Invest Your Resources.” They are thinking, Invest? I can barely put food on my table for my kids. I’ve got creditors knocking down my door, and you’re talking about investing.
TEACHING ON TITHING
I know that not all preachers accept this, but I teach a 10 percent tithe as the standard by which generosity is determined. To help people understand this, I might use an illustration like this:
“When our first child came, we used a baby sitter who lived next door. The first time we used her, I asked, ‘Patti, how much do you charge for baby sitting?’ She said, ‘Fifty cents an hour.’ (That was a long time ago!) Patti was so good. She’d fold our laundry and do the dishes, always going far beyond the call of duty. We loved her.
“Four years later, our second child came. I said, ‘Patti, how much do you charge for two children?’
“She said, ‘Mr. Russell, you just give me whatever you want to give me.’
“Do you think I gave her less than she requested before? No, she had always done far more than we expected. So I gave her a lot more than fifty cents an hour.”
I then explain that in the Old Testament, God set a tithe to teach people what was expected. Now we have Jesus Christ. We have the Holy Spirit. We have the New Testament. We have the church. We live in affluent America. Does God deserve any less than a tithe?
SHARING THE STORIES
Since money is woven into people’s lives, sometimes the most unexpected things turn into great illustrations if we learn to recognize them.
We had an elders’ meeting to discuss the capital funds campaign. One elder, Mount Davis, said, “The best thing about this whole program is that everyone is involved. If someone donated the whole amount we needed, that would be the worst thing that could happen to us.”
Everyone said “Amen.” But then Jack Webster said, “I move if somebody donates the whole amount, we accept it, but don’t tell Mount Davis about it.” It was so moved.
A story like that is destined to make its way into a sermon.
Another time, after our elders and staff made their advance commitment, our board chairman came to me with tears in his eyes and said, “I just gave money I don’t have, to reach people I’ve never met, because of a God I love very much.”
What a succinct and powerful statement! I asked his permission to share that in a sermon.
BEING REALISTIC
Sometimes when we preach on stewardship, we leave the impression that when God says, “I will pour out a blessing so great that you will not be able to receive it,” we are speaking just about financial blessings.
God does supply our needs. But the real blessings are a changed perspective, deepening spiritual attitudes, a closer walk with Christ, and understanding the value of family and friends.
The woman who gave up cable TV spoke again about two years later. She said, “I want to tell you what’s happened to me. Shortly after I made that commitment, my car broke down. We had just managed to have it repaired when my teenage daughter totalled it.” She then described several other things that went wrong over a short period of time.
Following this season of testing, though, someone gave her a car. She concluded her testimony with great news: “I’ve met a wonderful man. We’re about to get married.” It was a powerful testimony because it was realistic yet showed how in the long run, God was faithful.
Advertisers know that nothing is as powerful as the personal testimony. We use them as often as possible.
When I hear about someone growing in this area, I ask the person to share about what’s happened. Usually the person will say, “I could never do that.” Then I’ll say, ” Would you write it down so I can use it in the church paper?” or “Would you write it down so I can use it as an illustration?”
Once the person starts writing it down, he or she gets excited all over again. I’ll read it and say, “This is really good. But you know, it would be even better if people heard it from you.” More times than not, the person will agree and share his or her story publicly.
MEASURING SUCCESS
It’s not always easy to measure progress when we preach about giving. I had a guy who was worth millions tell me after a sermon, “I have never been in church before when I felt like I was the only one there.” I started to squirm, but he went on, “I really don’t like those passages where Jesus talks about rich men and camels and needles. I don’t like them at all.”
Then he laughed, slapped me on the shoulder, and walked off. I thought, God is really getting hold of him.
When I read what Jesus told the Rich Young Ruler, I wonder why I’ve been so timid about this subject. If a person came to our church with all those resources, we’d be tempted to say, “Let’s elect him a deacon and finesse him into stewardship.”
But Jesus went straight to the heart of the matter: “Go sell everything you have and give it to the poor.”
The disciples were probably shaking their heads, saying, “Boy, he’s not very seeker sensitive.”
Jesus’ example teaches us that we need to shoot straight with people, because we don’t have forever. Deep down, they know something’s wrong. They know these resources aren’t providing happiness. They feel guilty about it, and they want somebody to tell them the truth.
One thing that has come over years of ministry is that I want to be respected more than I want to be liked. I want people to know I’m going to tell them the truth. And the truth is, if they don’t learn to put the Lord ahead of their resources, they’re a thousand miles from the kingdom of God.
The August edition of Preaching Today will feature a workshop by Bob Russell entitled, “Confronting a Materialistic Culture.” To subscribe to this monthly series, call 1-800-866-6464.
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Robert Russell is minister of Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky.
1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal
