August 18, 2014
Meeting All Your Needs
It’s interesting how churches
handle reporting weekly income in their bulletins. Some report no data, others
record what is received. Still others report two sets of figures — what they
received and what their budget calls for. I’ve seen listings for “budget needed/budget
received,” “giving/giving shortfall,” “gifts given/gifts needed,” and the one
that just screams entitlement, “tithes needed/tithes actual.” I cringe at the
implication that God is not fulfilling the needs of these churches. Paul wrote
to the church in Philippi, “And my God will meet all your needs according to
his glorious riches in Christ Jesus” (Phil 4:19 NIV).
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Gail;
-----God knows every thought and feeling there’s been, as well as all those that will be. Have you ever noticed how many thoughts are about what to think? He knows those, too. So He not only knows all thoughts, He knows all proposed thoughts and possible thoughts that have been or will be. And since He sees all things, He knows all the stuff there is, too, from every single quark in the universe to all of them together and all the things they form and how everything interrelates with everything else. Yah, He also knows all of the possible arrangements and interrelationships of stuff. And we think we know our needs.
-----God knows how everything should fit together to be good and do good. But He also knows that since man turned down His offer of a blissful existence in perfect accord always struck with His desires and will, everything goes off in its own direction towards chaos at best, and man thinks the best he can but never gets a thought totally right. Each little human mind knowing only a smidgeon of anything has little chance of striking upon the idea about something that is just the way the Lord would have it. His grace and mercy is His taking part at all in our bent up and twisted efforts to get things right in His eyes. So it’s not the rightness of how we get things which really pleases Him, its our desire to get them right expressed through the efforts we make.
-----Many of our siblings in the Lord make a great deal about being Spirit led. In actuality, I think they make less of it than it truly is. If we had the ability to more completely control more things at a finer level of detail than we do, we would really have the world screwed up. Oh, yah, we have it messed up anyway, but I mean a whole lot more than that. Thank God our guesses at what He likes about our situations can be made no more than in generality, the choice of paths. So budgets show general paths choosen, while the Spirit directs exactly where and how each foot falls upon that path. And again, it is by His grace and mercy that He participates in our footsteps, for if He would have had more say in the choice of paths even our general directions would be different.
-----So, humbly knowing that we all do for Him things not of perfect fit with how or what He would have done them, because there’s just no way we can, the variety of budget presentations and the many different responses their designers desire them to evoke are both criticizable by some who know better and acceptable to Him as they are. But given the surety every church and denomination has in it’s doing things “God’s way”, there’s little wonder as to why there are so many of them and how little they work together. If it were otherwise, budgeting would be less a hassle in paths that would be more overlapping and intersecting. God could then direct far more footsteps to advantage one another. And fewer budget presentations would wind up looking more like beg-fests.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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