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Never With an Empty Hand
Rev. Ty Hofman
The Scriptures tell us that in the matter of giving to the Lord we ought
not let our left hand know what our right hand is doing. I’ve never
preached on that text and I confess that I really don’t know what it
means except that we ought not to brag about our giving.
Zero! Zip!
Whether it has some implications for whether or not I
should be watching the right hand of my neighbor I don’t know either.
But there are times when you just can’t avoid seeing that your neighbor
in the pew had nothing in his right hand, or left one either. When the
collection plate is being passed and “he-she” takes it by the rim and
passes it on without even a slight pause you know the score. Zero! Zip!
I’m sure the deacons could fill us in big-time on the percentage of
people who think that “passing the plate” means passing it by. Having
been a pew-sitter for the better part of my 13 retirement years I know a
bit whereof I speak.
The plate-passers I’ve noted belong to no one age group or particular
status in the congregation. It includes younger and older, immature
sorts of hangers-on in the church and elders wives. But it gets worse as
the “givers” recede on the age scale. I recall attending a
college-church worship service and sitting on the end of a long pew of
about 15 participants and finding that my dollar bill had no company as
I passed the basket on the attending deacon. Now one’s first conclusion
might be that college students are hard up and a dollar isn’t easy to
come by. But I was also aware that at that same time a famous rock band
was on the local scene and the college crowd had swelled the attendance.
I heard that admittance was $16. Maybe a reason for the low response to
the offering plate – no money left over.
Now I would say nothing about this if the deacons were taking a
collection. Collections are totally open ended. You give if you wish, as
much as you wish, as little as you wish. No one should call us to
account for what we give in a collection.
An offering of joy
But in a Reformed Christian worship service the
church in the name of Christ asks for an offering. It is to be an
offering of thanksgiving to express to the Lord in a tangible way that
we are aware of his blessing of salvation freely given us. The offering
ought reflect our joy in being saved by grace. The offering, our singing
and our prayers are the three fruits of a grateful heart, given as the
sweet incense of worship which glorifies the Lord.
If then we would worship the Lord we will come with an offering, whether
large or small, everyone of us who worships, young or old. While your
left hand may not know what your right hand is doing, let no one come to
the Lord with an empty hand!
However, in a few “with-it” congregations, we have the anomaly of modern
youthful wisdom that announces in the bulletin that if you are a visitor
you are not expected to give any money when the offering is taken. It is
assumed that being a visitor you are a seeker, and being
seeker-sensitive, we will do nothing to put a seeker on the spot, or
anything that would give the message that the church is after your
money, or that it might be offensive to ask a possible unregenerate to
support a Christian cause. So – no offering please!
Now we’ve learned that at Willow Creek, but that has a seeker service in
which there is no worship (American style wisdom). It is the regular
congregational worship service to which I’m referring. Methinks this
another gimmick picked up to impress the membership of the congregation
just how serious we are about bring in the lost. It will not help an
honest seeker to understand what worship is.
What is surprising about all this is that we would expect our young
leaders to be right on the forefront of what is required of us in
worship. For this is the age in which worship is being discovered in
Reformed circles. We hold worship conferences in Grand Rapids which now
draw up to 800 participants from all over the continent, including many
from Canada. While I’m not aware of the particulars on the menu of these
conferences I can say I’ve not heard of any discussion of or sermons on
the subject, or noted any in the sermon listings on Saturday in the
Grand Rapids Press high-lighting the offering. I fear that the offering
is a well-kept secret in our times.
Always something to give
It was not so in older times. No family ever went “to
church” but that every member had an offering as soon as they were old
enough to respond to the passing of the sack on the end of a long thin
pole or a basket or a plate. In hard times it was often a penny tightly
held in a tiny fist. There was always something to give. I recall that
during the Depression my Dad always made sure that he had “church
money.” That likely totaled only 25 cents but we always each had a
nickel. That was likely as significant as giving Junior $5 for the
offering today. And we all knew the story of the widow’s mite, where
Jesus commended her sacrificial gift and counted it of greater
significance than the lavish offerings of the Pharisees.
I suggest that it is high time we get back to basics, get our theology
of worship and offering in order and begin to seriously create a worship
service that involves a new emphasis on our giving of self and of
service. That will mean nurturing an understanding that the worship
service is not a matter of what we will get but of what we will give!
Now lest I be accused of extremism, let me also tell you that I am
greatly edified by the reality of families in the worship service where
each child eagerly drops in a dollar bill. I can’t help but noting such
a family with four children where Dad teaches school and doesn’t have it
plush, but which puts first things first. These are the families that
are the pillars of the church and the ground for hope that tomorrow
there will be those who help carry on the good worship tradition of
always coming to the Lord with a gift in our hand!
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