Honor the Lord with your wealth, with the firstfruits of all your crops; then your barns will be filled to overflowing, and your vats will brim over with new wine. – Proverbs 3:9-10 (NIV)
Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase: So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine.– Proverbs 3:9-10 (KJV)
52 Proverbs in 52 Weeks – Weeks 16 & 17
This week’s theme: Stewardship
This is the first week on our next theme, Stewardship, and Proverbs 3:9 starts us off with two foundational principles for being good stewards of the blessings God has provided…
First, we should Honor God with everything we have. I really like the word “substance” in the King James translation for this part of the verse. “Honour the LORD with thy substance” implies honoring Him with everything that makes us who we are–our very substance. This certainly includes our material blessings, but also our skills, talents, family, time…everything. Our first priority for using our “substance” should be serving and honoring God, and all other things we’d like to do with those blessings should be secondary.
Second, God expects us to give Him the first and best of what we have–our “firstfruits.” In Old Testament times this meant offering God the first of the harvest and the best of the herd…not just bringing Him the leftovers and sick or injured animals. Although we no longer bring sacrifices to the Temple, the same principle applies in our day. Our tithes, our offerings and our service to our Lord should come first, before other priorities, and should come from the best we have to offer. After all, everything we have is a gift from our God. He deserves nothing less than our first and our best.
Proverbs 3:10 then closes this passage with encouragement that putting God first is the recipe for success. When we’re extremely busy with other aspects of life or going through challenging financial times, it may seem counterintuitive to be spending time serving others, giving tithes to the church or helping others in need…isn’t that just making busy times busier and hard financial times harder? In short, the Creator of the universe can easily overcome any earthly challenges we may face. Malachi 3:9 speaks to this:
“Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.” (NIV)
Pastor Paul Chappell, from a church we used to attend in California, used to answer that question this way:
“God shovels it in. We shovel it out. But God has a bigger shovel.”
Our God expects us to be good stewards of the resources He’s entrusted to us, and Proverbs 3:9-10 shows us the way.
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