Honor The Lord With Your Wealth

Proverbs 3:9-10 Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.

We are called to honor the Lord in our body, our spirit (1 Corinthians 6:20), in our actions (1 Corinthians 10:31), and Proverbs 3 teaches us we also are to honor him with our wealth. Wealth here does not simply mean our cash flow. We can have a tendency to think that if we give the first ten percent (our tithe) off the gross margin of our pay check, we then have ninety percent that is ours. What’s Gods is Gods, and what’s mine is mine. Everything I purchase with my money is mine, and the church is responsible to use my tithe as the Lord’s money. I don’t see Proverbs is teaching us that. Rather we are called to honor the Lord with all of our wealth; one-hundred percent of it. Yes we tithe our percentage to the Lord, but he wants us to honor him with all that is part of our wealth. I think this includes everything in your possession that has value.

My house and yours is filled with possessions that have presumably been purchased by the ninety percent. Those possessions are yours and part of your wealth. Yet we are called to honor the Lord with all of it. What that looks like is going to look different for each family. If you have a spare couple of rooms and your children are all grown and moved out; maybe that means you are called to use your house for missionaries to stay in while they are on furlough. Maybe you are called to use your groceries to make meals for a single mom. Or maybe you are called to use your cell phone to send encouraging notes to those who are suffering and downcast. Whatever that looks like for you; we are all called to honor the Lord with our wealth. Matter of fact, we can never have the Lord’s smile upon our lives if we don’t honor him. Honoring him is what we are called to do.

The promise of the text is that if we honor the Lord with our wealth, he will ensure that our barns and our vats will be over-flowing. This does not mean our bank accounts will be over-flowing. But rather we will have an increase of things to share and bless others with. If we use our wealth to honor the Lord, he will give us more to honor him with.