Respond & Reflect – September 27, 2026

Hello.

My name is Jack.

The Old Testament reading is found in Deuteronomy 12, 5 through 7.

Instead, you must search for the location the Lord your God will select from all your tribes to put his name there as his residence, and you must go there.

You must bring your entirely burned offerings, your sacrifices, your tenth part gifts, your contributions, your payments, for solemn promises, your spontaneous gifts, and the oldest offspring of your herds and flocks to that place.

You will have a feast there, each of you and your families, in the Lord your God's presence, and you will celebrate all you have done because the Lord your God has blessed you.

The word of the Lord.

What I mean is this the one who sows a small number of seeds will also reap a small crop.

And the one who sows a generous amount of seeds will also reap a generous crop.

Everyone should give whatever they have decided in their heart.

They shouldn't give with hesitation or because of pressure.

God loves a cheerful giver.

God has the power to provide you with more than enough of every kind of grace.

That way you will have everything you need always, and in everything to provide more than enough for every kind of good work.

The word of the Lord.

If you're able, would you stand for this morning's gospel reading found in Matthew 6, verses 19 through 27?

Matthew 6:19–27

Stop collecting treasures for your own benefit on earth, where moth and rust eat them, and where thieves break in and steal them.

Instead, collect treasures for yourself in heaven, where moth and rust don't eat them, and where thieves don't break in and steal them.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

The eye is the lamp of the body.

Therefore, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.

But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.

If then the light in you is darkness, how terrible that darkness will be.

No one can serve two masters.

Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be loyal to the one and have contempt for the other.

You cannot serve God and wealth.

Therefore, I say to you, don't worry about your life, what you'll eat or what you'll drink, or about your body, or what you'll wear.

Isn't life more than food and the body more than clothes?

Look at the birds in the sky.

They don't sow seed or harvest grain or gather crops into barns.

Yet your heavenly father feeds them.

And aren't you worth much more than they are?

Who among you, by worrying, can add a single moment to your life?

The gospel of the Lord.

Please remain standing with me as we pray this morning.

As we have been doing throughout this series, we're going to pray the Lord's Prayer together.

We'll put the words on the screen because we all learned various versions.

And if you are comfortable and you want to join hands with somebody next to you, that's great.

If you're not comfortable, there is no pressure.

But this is our family prayer that our Lord gave to us.

Let's pray it together.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread, and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours now and forever.

Amen.

Amen.

You may be seated.

Good morning, saints.

It's great to see you this morning.

Uh, if you're new or newer or visiting, my name is Jason.

I'm one of the pastors here.

Um I want to say a special hello to everybody that is watching online or watching later, especially those who are serving uh with our kids this morning.

Our students, our middle schoolers are serving kind of around uh this morning.

So you might see some of them.

If you see a teenager serving, uh, please make sure you encourage them.

One quick announcement before we dive into the message today.

Uh, you may have seen it on our website or on an email that we're getting ready kind of throughout the month of October to host a number of vision meetings of just talking about what we sense that Jesus is doing among us.

And this is really a chance to share kind of what's on our hearts and what's on your hearts and to be able to discern together, okay, where are we going?

What are the next things for us?

We're gonna host those at the Commons.

So we're gonna host as many of them as we need for as many of you to be able to attend.

The hope would be that everybody in the congregation would come to one of them.

Um, so there'll be kind of groups of 49 at each one of those sessions.

They'll be highly interactive.

So, not like I'm like choking on my like saliva this morning already.

I'm like, what is wrong with me?

This is not gonna go well if it's like this uh all morning.

Give me just one second.

Is it allergies?

I don't know.

Like everybody says allergies, uh, look at this.

Hold on.

Hi, my name's Jason.

We're just gonna start all of that all over.

Um, but these will be highly interactive, so not like our congregation meetings, we're just kind of one-directional conversation.

Um, so it's uh we really want everybody to be able to come.

We want to hear your voice, uh, we want to hear your thoughts in the middle of that.

So um please uh sign up.

You can sign up here on the QR code or go to our website um from there.

But one of the things that we're discerning is how do we continue to live out this call that we have as a congregation to be a community of disciples formed in a common faith through a common life and for the common good.

Those three elements, common faith, common life, common good, are a core part of our identity as a church.

And so we've said a couple of times already this fall that a few times, like usually once a year, we'll do a deep dive into one of those ideas.

And so we've been focusing the last several weeks on what do we mean by the common good?

It really is the exploration of how we devote our lives to the prayer that we just prayed.

That the very prayer that Jesus taught us to pray is to set our hearts on seeing God's kingdom come and his will be done on earth, in this place, in our life, in our cities, as it is in heaven.

And so we're thinking, how do we do that?

How do we give ourselves first to the common good of one another, knowing that that's a witness to the world, and then together give our collective life to the common good of our city and beyond.

So we've spent the first three weeks looking at uh vocational stewardship, how our paid and unpaid work becomes a means of contributing to the common good of our city.

And then last week we shifted the conversation to talking about financial stewardship and particularly the Christian practice of giving and how our giving, our generosity, contributes to the common good as well.

And we want to say at the beginning of all of these talks on this topic that this can be really difficult to discuss.

Anytime that money comes up in any context, in any conversation with anyone, it can for many bring up some painful memories or some uncomfortable emotions.

It can be attached to regret or shame or fear, any of those kinds of things.

And that can be particularly so if you're experiencing any kind of financial insecurity right now, going through job loss or job uncertainty or finding it difficult to make ends meet or trying to buy a house in Colorado Springs or any of those things that can cause just some extra anxiety.

And then maybe even especially true that those emotions can be there when we talk about finances within the church.

Because sometimes these conversations can be the source of some of those painful uh memories or experiences or emotions because of the way that it can be handled sometimes in the community of God's people.

So it's a difficult topic, but it's also a really important topic.

That we want our life together as a church to be marked by holistic discipleship.

That we say that discipleship is about our whole lives for our whole lives.

So the words and the way of Jesus are meant to shape every aspect of our lives.

There's no area that's like, oh, Jesus just doesn't really care about this.

So this includes our use of money.

And so throughout this series, we're laying out kind of the five reasons why Christians give.

And we covered the first one last week, which was this for those uh that weren't here, we give because we first received.

That all stewardship, whether it's vocational stewardship or financial stewardship, begins with the awareness that everything, everything comes from God and still belongs to him.

So even if we study hard and work hard and make wise decisions and live simply and follow a budget and start a 401k and bundle and save a Liberty Biberty, like if we do all of those things, everything that we want to do, like all of our abilities and all of our opportunities and all of our possibilities, they all come from him.

And the very breath in our lungs and the strength in our bodies and the ideas of our minds come from him.

And so when we're giving, we're really giving back what he has given to us.

We're gonna explore the next two ideas today and then the final two next week.

So the second reason that Christians gives Christians give is this is that we give as an act of worship.

We typically think of worship as singing together on Sundays or a genre of music that you listen to on K-Love or Spotify or whatever.

But worship is so much more than just the things that we connect to with song.

In the Old Testament, there are two primary words that are typically translated worship in our English Bibles.

One of them means to bow down, to submit, to surrender.

So anything that we do in our life that is a surrender to God in some way is a form of worship.

The other word is the word that gets translated as work or serve.

That worship is an act of work or service to God and his kingdom.

And then we have this whole constellation of other words: honor, bless, praise, give thanks, sing, make music, dance, even that like charismatic little shuffle thing, like that counts as dancing, I think, as an act of worship.

But really, at some level, every single one of those things is a responsive act.

These are the things that we do in response to God's beauty, to God's power, to God's goodness, to God's grace, to God's love, to God's worth.

That when we behold him or experience him or get a glimpse of him, then we look for ways to respond to who he is.

Even our English word worship comes from the old English word that indicates a kind of worthiness, that we see or experience something, and then we respond with particular acts.

And so worship really is in the scriptures an all-encompassing term to talk about the ways that we respond to who God is and what God has done.

The ways that we respond to Him.

So singing is one of the acts of worship, but so is giving.

It gets placed in that same category.

So throughout the history of God's people, what we have done is that God's people have given our first and our best of what God has given to us back to Him as worship.

That the primary framework has been what are the first and best things that God has given to me, and how do I give them back to him?

This has often been referred to in various Christian uh communities, depending upon your background, as a tithe, which is another one of those weird words you never hear outside of church context, spelled T-I-T-H-E, or Tithes plural.

So a tithe has often been referred to as the first 10% of our earnings.

Typically, the most communities use it as the first 10% before taxes and deductions and contributions, the first and the best.

But if you spend enough time in Christian circles, you'll start to understand that there's really significant differences between the way people really understand those things.

For some, you may have grown up in a community or heard that that's kind of the standard that all Christians should give.

And that's really all that the Bible has to say about financial discipleship.

That if we just do that, then nothing else really matters.

And so we kind of check it off that box and we move forward, and that's the end all be all of financial discipleship in our lives.

Others you might hear them say, well, that's a starting point, like the minimum amount that people of God should give at least 10%.

And then you'll have others that will say, well, no, no, no, no.

No, like the New Testament doesn't clearly teach that.

So that's not really applicable to Christians today.

And so they'll look in at Old Testament and New Testament ways in really sort of different perspectives and doesn't prescribe a percentage.

And so it becomes more of a means of uh discernment and opportunity and all of those things.

Uh, when we look at the Old Testament, what we really see is a really dynamic way in which these words are used.

Throughout the Old Testament, we find that the people of God brought many gifts, that tithe or ties was really a part of the world.

I don't think I can scream, oh, look at that.

Are we good?

We'll see.

All right, should I take another drink of water and we just go?

Um, but we see in the Old Testament is uh that a tithe or tithes is just a part of Israel's worship.

It's part of one of their many gifts.

We heard this in Deuteronomy 12, and they're talking about the place that God sets his name, the place of worship, saying you must bring your entirely burned offerings and your sacrifices, your tenth part gifts or your tithes, your contributions, your payments for solemn promises, your spontaneous gifts, and the oldest offspring of your herds and flocks to that place.

So tithes were just a part of Israel's giving.

They were not the height of it or the extent of it.

There were animal sacrifices and there were grain offerings, and then there were the practices of things like lending without interest, not harvesting to the edge of their fields to the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the immigrant might be able to access grain.

There's the ideas that came up with Jubilee of forgiving economic debts and returning land to the original owners.

This is a much broader conversation in the Old Testament.

And what we also find is that it wasn't mandatory for all Israelites.

That Israel was a primarily an agrarian economy, and so people were to give 10% of their produce and then the firstborn male of its flocks and herds.

But if you did not own land and you did not own animals, in other words, if you're among the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the immigrant, you could not tithe crops you did not have, and you could not offer animals that you did not have.

You could bring other offerings, but there was a much more dynamic system at play here.

And the instructions actually move with deep compassion into taking into account everyone's financial situation.

Something that sometimes, when we just talk about a blanket percentage, doesn't recognize the unique dynamics that any one of us might be facing in a certain point in time in our lives.

And so in any given year, what e what economists sort of look at and say, okay, if you take any Israelite in any given year, that Israelite gave somewhere between 0% and 33%.

That would have been more of the dynamic that was at play, depending upon what it was that they were stewarding.

How did their flocks do that week or that year?

Was there one um uh one animal born to the herd?

Was there five animals born to the herd?

Those percentages change based on all of that.

And then when we get to the New Testament, and what we find is that the New Testament doesn't uh reduce or restrict giving.

What the New Testament does is it actually radicalizes it.

John the Baptist says things like if anyone has two of something, we should give one of them away.

Jesus says to one person to sell everything and to give it to the poor.

And that person's heart was so sort of caught up in their possessions that they walked away sad.

The book of Acts shows Christians who were selling land and houses and then giving the proceeds to the poor.

And yet then we also have these moments where there's a widow who comes and offers just a couple of coins, and she's held up as an exemplar for all of us to be able to follow.

And we see this much broader perspective.

So what we see is the most consistent thing is that in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, this was all seen as an act of worship.

That whatever people could give, they gave as an act of worship.

They would bring their offering to the place of worship, to the temple, to the synagogue, or to the church, and they would offer it in that way.

Deuteronomy 14 says it this way it says, You must reserve a tenth part of whatever your fields produce each year, and then eat that tenth part of grain and wine and the oldest offspring of your herds and the flocks in the presence of the Lord your God, in the location, this is going to eventually be Jerusalem, that he selects for his name to reside.

And then interestingly, it says this why would you do all of this?

So that you may learn to fear the Lord your God at all times.

The giving is explicitly connected to worship and to what the scriptures call the fear of the Lord.

Now, this is not fear as in like abject terror, like, oh my gosh, I feel about God like it did about Chucky as a kid.

You know, it's like not that kind of like horror story, but a sense of awe, of reverence, of respect, that out of response to who God is and what God is doing, we look for ways to respond to him.

And one of the ways to respond is through giving.

So the psalmists say things like this give to the Lord the glory due to his name.

How?

Bring gifts.

Proverbs says, honor the Lord with your wealth and with the first of all of your crops.

Elsewhere, we're encouraged to give in gratitude and in trust and enjoy.

Again, all expressions of worship.

Paul commends us with these words everyone should give whatever they've decided in their heart.

And they shouldn't give with Hesitation or because of pressure, because instead, God loves that when we get to this place where we can cheerfully or delightfully or joyfully give, out of this sense that God has the power to provide us with more than enough of every kind of grace.

That way you will have everything you need always and in everything to provide more than enough for every kind of good work.

So the way that Paul talks about is when we get to this place where we recognize that everything we have comes from him, and then something starts to birth enough.

It's called gratitude.

Oh my goodness, look at all that God has given me.

And that gratitude gives birth to trust.

Oh, the God who's provided this for me will continue to provide for all of my needs.

And then giving moves from duty to delights, to that place of, oh, I have been entrusted, I find gratitude, I find more trust, then I can give in joy, which is where we see the more spiritual formation aspect of this.

And so here, Paul, in this chapter ago, really goes to the core of the matter.

And the core of the matter always in these things is the core of us.

The core is our heart.

Paul starts to say that everyone should give what they've decided in their heart.

In that place, it's the center of our affections, that place, the source of what we love and what we trust, the desire to obtain significance or security, that in that place, giving is connected to that for us.

Jesus says it this way: He says, wherever your treasure is, that's where your heart will be also.

Some interpret this as our hearts will follow what we value.

That as we give to something, then our hearts will be drawn to that.

The reverse is oftentimes seen by others, that what we value is an indication of where our hearts already is and tells us something about what's going on inside of us.

So that who we are or who we are becoming is deeply caught up in this practice as well.

And that's the third reason we give.

It's this is that we give in order to be formed into God's image, or to be formed again, to be restored into his image.

Every single one of us was made in the image of God.

We were created with that a vocational impact to, or a vocational connection to that, to continue God's work.

But there's also a deep sense that our the image of God is not solely about the work that we do, but about the character we embody in the world.

That his divine image is in us, that we might reflect it to the world.

And though that divine image in us was certainly defaced by our rebellion against God, what we believe as followers of Jesus is that it's being restored.

That as we follow Jesus, we are being transformed back into the full likeness of God.

Paul puts it this way in 2 Corinthians, we are being transformed into that same image, the image of Jesus, the firstborn, from one degree of glory to the next degree of glory.

And this doesn't come from us.

Even this is a gift.

It's something that God does, and we get to join him in.

This comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

So one of the things we deeply believe about who God is is that God is generous.

That God is a God who gives.

And he doesn't just give out of duty or obligation, but he delights in it.

He's a God who loves to give good gifts to his kids.

And so when we give, we are participating in the Spirit's work of making us more like Jesus, more generous as people, that we can reflect his likeness then to others.

Our generosity can become a glimpse for others of the divine.

That it's in our life, in us, that we hope they get a glimpse of Jesus.

You've probably already experienced this at some point in life.

Can you think of a time where maybe you were out shopping for a birthday or a Christmas present or a boyfriend or girlfriend, and you were just looking for the perfect gift.

You know, it was like, if I could just find this thing.

It was something that because you knew them, and they had maybe like hinted at one point in June that they wanted this for Christmas, and you filed it away, and you're like, I am going to find that.

And then you wrapped it up and you gave it to them and they opened it.

Do you remember the look on their face?

That moment of just like pure joy, a sense of feeling seen and known and loved and cared for.

They're like, oh my gosh, how did you remember?

You're like, oh, in that moment, what are they glimpsing?

They're glimpsing that this is what our God is like, or maybe you've been the person on the other side.

Where you have a moment where you can remember just a profound experience where somebody gave something to you.

And it was in some way this transformational kind of moment, either in your relationship with that person or in your life.

Do you remember, like in that moment, just how you felt or what you did, or maybe what your face might have looked like in those moments?

Last week I shared with you all uh my baseball card story.

Uh, for those of you who missed it, here's a quick recap.

I was eight years old and a fanatical baseball fan.

And so I began at eight years old when I started making my own money through lawn mowing and snow shoveling to collect baseball cards.

Terrible investment, but you know, that's a different thing at that point in time.

By the time I was in fifth or sixth grade, I had saved up enough money to buy my favorite player's most expensive rookie card.

And at one point I found it at a baseball card show, and I was just overjoyed that I had saved up, you know, my dollars to be able to buy this thing, which is the most money I had ever spent on anything up to that point in my life.

And I got the card and I ran to find my dad and I showed it to him, and immediately his response was to start to point out all the flaws in the card and all the faults in my purchase, and how I went through and made the decision, and I should have done this and should have done the other thing, and all of a sudden, all of that joy was replaced by shame and regret.

And I unconsciously carried that experience with me into nearly every conversation about money.

That shame and regrets have become the most common emotions that I experience around financial conversations.

And not only that, but that memory traveled with my prized childhood possession.

The one thing that I'd bought and carried with me through all of these years, it was still there, and I rarely, if ever, looked at the card because it just had this kind of tarnished experience with it.

Five years ago, uh, in a message at the Entlers when we were meeting there during the pandemic.

And it was probably somewhere between a month and two months later, several weeks had gone by, and I received a letter in the mail from a man named Brian in Georgia.

Brian and his family had started watching our services online during the pandemic, and I was like, oh, I didn't expect to get anything in the mail from Brian.

And so I grabbed the letter and I opened it, and inside the envelope was a near-perfect version of that exact same card that I had bought all those decades before.

And in a moment, that painful memory, that painful story, was given an entirely different ending.

And I was given a much clearer picture of the father than I was in that earlier memory.

And all of that happened because of the generosity of another.

See, when we give, Brian might be watching later on, so Brian, I love you, man.

Thank you.

Um, we give as an act of worship, we give in response to who he is, and we give to be formed in his image that we might reflect what our God is like to others.

This is the stuff that gets caught up in the middle of all of this.

But oftentimes we're like, well, like, but how do we actually practice this?

What does this look like?

I think sometimes when we think about financial discipleship, we have this tendency to sort of separate it from everything else and we want to treat it really differently.

And I think in some ways that's appropriately so, because then we can have all of these like hard memories and emotions associated with it.

But sometimes we can then forget that um giving is just like every other spiritual practice, that this is something that we learn to do, and that as we do it over time, it's that practice that begins to change us.

That we start just by giving and then we learn how to practice giving.

And eventually what happens over the course of time is that by the work of the Spirit, we become generous people.

And that's the hope is that we become generous like our God.

And so if you're new to following Jesus or new to church, or maybe new to the idea of financial discipleship or financial stewardship, and you're hearing these messages and go, well, like, where do I start?

You st we start in the same place we all start with any spiritual practice, it's just by giving something.

It's the same place we start by with prayer, we pray something.

It's the same time we start with worship, we sing something.

Um, we just start somewhere.

And so if you've never practiced this before, that's the place to start.

It's just making the choice to give for the first time, or maybe the first time in a long while.

But maybe you've been in a place where you're like, you've done that sort of periodically, give occasionally, kind of throughout the year, and um, maybe in moments where you hear a story like, oh, I want to give um toward that.

But really, the invitation to Jesus is to move from doing something once or doing it occasionally to making it a regular practice.

That we read the Bible and then we start learning to read the Bible regularly, or we pray and then we pray regularly.

And eventually the hope in prayer is that our life becomes a prayer, that we start praying at all times without ceasing.

And same thing, that we give something and then we learn to give regularly, to make it a habit, to start to practice it again in hopes that we would be transformed into more generous people, that others would see the generosity of God then in us and through us.

And so maybe you've been in that place of like, oh, I do that on occasion.

Maybe the invitation is to set up recurring giving, to say, okay, I want to move to a place where this becomes a regular practice for me when I receive my paycheck or out of your IRA or designated or donor advice fund, whatever those things happen to be.

But what happens oftentimes for those of us who set up regular recurring giving is that we kind of set it up and then forget about it.

Like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's there.

Um and the work sometimes is just reattaching it to making it an act of worship by remembering why we give.

Um, not just simply doing it, but remembering why.

And so, just as we did last week, I want to invite us to pray this simple prayer over the gifts that we've already given.

Uh, maybe you have given throughout the year, you've set up recurring giving in some way.

What we want to do is just stop and say, remember why we give by praying this prayer.

Part of the prayer comes from a Matt Redmond song, so inspired by Matt, for those of you who are Matt fans.

Uh, but let's pray this prayer together, thinking, maybe even holding out your hands over the gifts that have already been given.

Let's pray this together.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we have nothing to give that didn't first come from your hand.

And we have nothing to offer you that you did not provide.

Every good and perfect gift comes from your kind and gracious heart, and all we do is give back to you what always has been yours.

So receive them as an act of worship, and through them transform us into your image.

May they provide for others as you have provided for us.

Amen.

Now, as we prepare to come to the table, we remember again back to that very first point that everything that we do, whether it's giving or singing or living or working or anything else, always begins with God, the source, from whom all things are from.

And so we come to the table to behold the generosity of our God.

That our God is a God who gives and not just gives stuff.

The greatest gift that our God gives is the gift of himself.

He gives himself to us, he holds nothing of who he is back from us, and so we come to the table to respond to his gracious gift with our worship.

And we come to the table empty-handed, we bring nothing to receive from him the very gift of himself, so that we might be transformed into his likeness and reflect his character to others all around us.

Glory be to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be a world without end.

Amen.