A Lifestyle of Offering

I have been considering the way of offering and in particular some verses in Psalm 50. God addresses the ‘wicked’ saying,  ‘These things you have done and I kept silence; You thought that I was just like you; I will reprove you and state the case in order before your eyes. Now consider this, you who forget God, or I will tear you in pieces, and there will be none to deliver. He who offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving honors Me; And to him who orders his way aright I shall show the salvation of God.’ Psa 50:21-23.

At times, we may become overwhelmed by the proposition of offering and we may take up another model. This, of course, is the aberrant way according to the Scripture. Those who moved away from a lifestyle of offering, ended up as captives in Babylon and there was none to deliver. But God said, ‘He who offers the sacrifice of thanksgiving honours Me and to him who orders his way aright will I show the salvation of God’.

Whenever we prove God with a thanksgiving offering; examining Him and endeavouring to understand the way ahead of us, we are honouring Him. When you or I begin to move toward a mode of offering, our nerves may rattle, our intestines may turn over, and we may not know if we are doing right or wrong. We may feel all of these things but right there you and I are doing two things: we are honouring God and we are making a covenant with Him by sacrifice. Psa 50:5. If you catch this, your confidence will sky-rocket. But then fellowship becomes critical as we begin to discuss the details of our offering with others. We begin to ask, ‘Is that course of action right; is it proper; is that what we need; is that the proportion we need; is that too early or is it too late; how busy is your weekly programme; how is your health? The details of our concerted and co-operative endeavour to go forward by offering, becomes very practical.

I am no longer the fruit of what my mother and father did.  I am today the product of two decades of proving God on the proposition of offering. And I have found that when I seek to prove Him, I honour Him, and then He states the case in order before my eyes, and His covenant with me is made substantial. This is how I have come to know the ‘name’ that He has given me.

God is not like us

I have been meditating on a verse in the Psalms where God speaks to the ‘wicked’ or ungodly men and women, saying, ‘These things you have done and I kept silent. You thought I was just like you.’ Psa 50:21. This statement, of course, has a negative connotation. But we could also consider its ramifications in the positive. When we stumble and fall when we are having a go, He keeps silent.  I was very grateful for this when I was having a shot at all kinds of things in the past. When I was wrestling and struggling to find my ‘name’, He was merciful.

In the book of Malachi, the Lord says regarding our offering, ‘Prove Me now’ or ‘Examine Me now’. Mal 3:10.  He then goes on to say that He will bless us with an abundant harvest, if we will make offering. We examine Him to understand this way of offering because it is contrary to our way. We assume that He is just like us.  Isn’t that our biggest dilemma? We may not cognitively think like this but it is, nevertheless, our assumption; whatever we do must be what He does because we don’t know any other way of doing things. But He keeps silent and gives us latitude!

And here is where the matter gets a little stronger. He says, ‘You thought I was just like you. I will rebuke you and state the case in order before your eyes.’ Psa 50:21. I consider this a companion statement to the one in Malachi where it says, ‘Examine Me now in this, if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows’. Mal 3:10. As a church, we have had a go at many different enterprises but we have never tried to be entrepreneurial.  We have just tested, examined and proven the process of offering. And we have found that the Lord ‘stated the case in order before us’.  As we had a ‘shot’, He showed us from the Scriptures what we were actually doing. He said, ‘That is a burnt offering; that is a firstfruits offering; this is what it means and this is how you do it; that is a peace offering; that is a heave offering; and that is the meaning of a tithe. He stated the case in order before us.

God rebukes the devourer

In the Old Testament, there is an interesting account of a conversation that God had with His people through the prophet, Malachi.  He said, ‘“Will a man rob God? Yet you are robbing Me!” But you say, “How have we robbed You?”  “In tithes and offerings. You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing Me, the whole nation of you!  Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in My house, and test Me now in this,” says the LORD of hosts, “if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows. Then I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it will not destroy the fruits of the ground; nor will your vine in the field cast its grapes,” says the LORD of hosts.’ Mal 3:8-11.

When we offer to God, He opens the windows of heaven. The rain causes our harvest to come up out of the ground which means the grasshoppers will also come in plague proportions.  But He rebukes them back! There is no good getting a great harvest if you have a plague of grasshoppers coming, because your multiplication will only be fat grasshoppers! So God makes the provision for the increase that comes by offering but He also deals with all of the desolators, devourers, predators, and enemies that would destroy our harvest.

In the Psalms, we read another statement from God to His people. He says, ‘Gather My godly ones to Me, those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice’. Psa 50:5. When we offer, He makes a way for you and me because we are sons and daughters of the covenant which He is making with each one of us. This covenant pertains at least in part to our specific ‘name’ and predestination.

The Thanksgiving Offering

In Psalm 50, we read, ‘Gather My godly ones to Me, those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice.’ Psa 50:5. And further on in verses 14 and 15, it says, ‘Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and pay your vows to the Most High; call upon Me in the day of trouble.’ This is His inducement to us! He says, ‘Call upon Me in the day of trouble’, because we are covenant partners. We have an agreement, a relationship. When you offer, you have a testimony that is your fundamental assurance, justification, protection and provision. And He will make each of those things substantial.

What is the sacrifice of thanksgiving? It is the courageous intent to prove God by offering. It is enough courage, ticker, gumption, brainpower and commonsense to say, ‘I’m going to prove God. I’m going to go out on a limb. I’m going to take a risk and see what the Lord will do.’ That is what the offering of thanksgiving is. It is very simple.

What is a vow? Unlike the thanksgiving offering, we don’t prove God with a vow. We don’t vow to do our daily devotions, for example. We just discipline ourselves to do them or ask for help to discipline ourselves. Rather, a vow should involve those things that you have substantially proven in your life as being viable. A vow is not for you but for the work of ministry. It can be relied upon because it is already substantial. It has been proven.

We can rightly and safely say, ‘Yes; I can do that’. If you can find a day a week as a heave offering and you know you can do that, you can make a vow. A vow is not a religious observance or a holy moment. It is, ‘Look Joe, I can come into the church office and help in this way for a day a week for the next three months’. You don’t need to put the word ‘vow’ in there; you just hang your hat on a commitment because you know you can achieve and produce that outcome. That is all a vow is.

A thanksgiving offering would be, ‘Joe, I’d love to come in and help in the music administration over the next three months but I don’t know that I am available every week. I’ll let you know. I will try to be reliable. I am proving God in this to see if He will open the way for me or not.’ So Joe won’t be hanging the whole administration on you; he is working with you to see if it will become sustainably achievable. You are proving God by offering. And while you are doing that, you are making a covenant with Him and He is then testifying about you, ‘That’s My boy!’ or ‘That’s My girl!’

The principle of multiplication

We know that offering was integral to the agricultural calendar and economy of the Old Testament but are we aware that only twenty percent of those offerings had anything to do with sin? I’m referring, of course, to the trespass and sin offerings. The other eighty percent were to do with the principle of growth and multiplication. The peace offerings were offered as firstfruits at the beginning of the harvest to ensure a successful crop, and at the end of the harvest to express thanks to God and to provide seed for the next season of sowing. The heave offering represented the people’s willingness to come under the burden of the Lord’s work and to allow it to proceed. Such offerings were presented willingly by the Israelites to build Moses’ tabernacle, Solomon’s temple and to facilitate the work of the early church.

The trespass offering addresses our stumbles and sideslips. The apostle Paul said, ‘If any man is caught in a trespass, you who are spiritual restore such a one in the spirit of meekness’. Gal 6:1. We might ask, ‘Restore him to what?’ I would suggest that he or she should be restored back to the process of offering so that they can get multiplying again. We all offend in many ways, but should we allow offence to determine our right to proceed or not? I don’t think so. If we have erred relationally, we should take up a trespass offering so we can get the matter recovered and get back to offering.

I watch people sit for years in the moroseness that is consequential to their failure as an individual. They should just take up a trespass offering which will allow them to find illumination so they can become aware of the matter against themselves. We only become culpable when we become aware of something against ourselves. We can then begin to make confession, disclosure, apology, restitution, and then we will be fully recovered. Who is a spiritual person? It is the one who is able to restore someone else, in the spirit of meekness, back to their fundamental exercise of offering so that multiplication can occur in their lives.

David Falk

Bearing a good confession

I have been thinking about a verse in the Bible which says of Jesus, He testified or bore the good confession before Pontius Pilate. 1 Tim 6:13. A ‘good confession’ is clearly different to the negative aspect of confession where we acknowledge our faults, flaws and failures to one another. We do that, of course, but it does not need to be our preoccupation because the sin offering has taken care of our failures.

I have also been pondering on a verse in the Psalms which speaks about those who have made a covenant with God by sacrifice. Psa 50:5.  Obviously, God is willing to make a covenant with all people, promising the Holy Spirit and eternal life. But I think He substantiates His covenant with us as individuals when we present ourselves as a living sacrifice. Rom 12:1. When we make offering, you and I gain a confidence to carry a good confession. We read in the book of Hebrews that Abel obtained a testimony when God testified about his gifts. Heb 11:4. Abel’s gifts were the animal sacrifices that he offered to God.

I know that somebody is beginning to stand up in offering when they are no longer ashamed to make a confession about the pathway of their identity and predestination. They are not just waiting for someone to tick their boxes as if to say, ‘You can now do that’. When we offer, we don’t ask anyone’s permission, do we?  God ‘testifies’ about our gifts when He accepts our offering by blessing our efforts. Then we gain the confidence to carry the ‘good confession’.

David Falk

A Covenant by Sacrifice

There is a verse in the Psalms that says ‘Gather my Godly ones to me, those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice.’ Psa 50:5. It is a prophetic statement to the four angels on the four corners of the earth who are ready to seal the 144,000 in the book of Revelation. Rev 7:1-4. But fundamental to that event is the statement in Psalm 50 because this group of people are only  gathered because they have made a covenant with God by sacrifice.

Further on in Revelation 7, John referred to a multitude clothed in white garments. Rev 7:9. A white garment indicates that they are priests. To me, white garments represent individuals who make effective offering to God because that is what a priest did in the Old Testament. Wherever I see a reference to ‘white garments’ in the Scripture I just superimpose ‘effective offerer’. In the account in Revelation 7, they don’t have any token representatives like bulls, goats, lambs, building programmes or music programmes. They have palm branches in their hand which means they are just about ready to come to the Day of Atonement’s completion. John said, ‘Who are they?’ The Lord says that the ‘who’ are ‘My saints who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice [or offering]’. Psa 50:5. Every time you and I offer, we are making, substantiating and enhancing a covenant between us and the Lord God of heaven and earth. No wonder nothing can touch us. Of course, if we are not offering, there can be no covenant.

The New Covenant is a generic thing. We read in Jeremiah, ‘After those days I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah and I will put My law in their hearts and in their minds’. Jer 31:32-33. But that is just a statement of the generic comprehensive outcome of the offering of Christ. To make it definitely applicable to you and to me so that it is our covenant, we need to offer. That is how we make covenant with Him by sacrifice. Psa 50:5.

In reverse, if we are not offering, there is no covenant. We are just out under the sun, a ‘beat up’. And if you are a little bit stronger, a little bit smarter, a little bit more cunning, then you will last a little bit longer. But, in the end, you will be belted, crushed and destroyed because it is only the ground of covenant that will protect you and me in the day of adversity.

How do we make covenant with God? We do it by offering. How do we make sacrifice? We convert our offering into a sacrifice. In the Old Testament, an individual brought their offering to the priest who then killed it and made it a sacrifice. In the New Testament, every believer converts his offering to a sacrifice because each individual now functions as a priest. 1 Pet 2:9. And on account of that, the Lord is watching over you, He is tabernacling over you, He is bringing you into His booth. In the Old Testament, God’s people celebrated the Feast of Booths prior to the Day of Atonement. Lev23:39-43. You are being protected and hidden away from the strife of tongues. Darkness is His pavilion all around you. Psa 18:11. His ‘booth’ is all around you and you are impregnable, unassailable and untouchable because you have made a covenant with God by sacrifice.

I don’t know if that strikes a bell with you but for me that is just remarkable. I am upward and onward. I am moving forward. I am now going to keep offering because I believe the more I offer, the more I am substantiating the covenant that He is making with me and I am making with Him. And He is compounding increase upon me because He is reckoning to me the righteousness of faith that comes through offering according to my ‘name’. In this way He is testifying about my gifts. Heb 11:4. I am excited by that!

David Falk

Understand Offering

I have made it my goal to examine the proposition of offering.  As I began to examine offering in all of its aspects – its dimensions, purpose, outcome and benefit – I began to realise some interesting things. I discovered that Christ is the firstfruits and we are a certain firstfruits. 1 Cor 15:20, 23. James 1:18. I came to understand that in our day we are required to present a thanksgiving offering before the Lord. Heb 13:15. I found that He is not only our offering for sin but is also an offering for our trespasses which are our stumbles or side-slips. I began to realise that offering is a comprehensive genre with multiple components in it to make life effective. It is a comprehensive genre that describes the way God does everything!

How does God begin a matter? He brings forth firstfruits. So we can assume that if we want to begin something having already presented our bodies as a living sacrifice, we should offer toward it. If we want to multiply in a certain area of our lives, we should give a representative portion to the Lord as a firstfruits offering. Paul said, ‘If the firstfruit is holy, the lump is also holy’; that is, all of it is holy. Rom 11:6. What an amazing statement. When we offer the firstfruits of our labours back to the Lord, we guarantee the tenure and success of the harvest that is coming after it.

So, we get the benefit of His promise in the book of Malachi: ‘I will open the windows of heaven for you. I will pour in a blessing until it overflows. I will rebuke the devourer so that it cannot destroy your work. All nations will call you blessed and you will multiply.’ Mal 3:10-12. If you want to multiply, offer in the area where you want to multiply.

If we don’t understand offering then we need to be provoked by this passage in Malachi where the Lord says, ‘Examine Me now’. Mal 3:10. That statement rings my bells! I find it amazing that the Lord could ask me to examine Him immediately after He has brought a rebuke. (‘You are all robbing Me. You have a curse on you.’) He is not being punitive but rather He is saying ‘I am an open book; have a look at Me’.

Of course, this is the meaning of Psalm 50:1. ‘El, Elohim, Yahweh has summoned the earth from the rising of its sun to its setting. Out of Zion the perfection of beauty, Elohim has shone forth.’ He is there for everyone to examine; to have a look at. That is remarkable to me. We can know His way or His mode, from the rising of the sun to it’s going down.

Proving God

I have been looking at the book of Malachi from an historical perspective. Here we find an account of a grouping of people who had no idea about offering; not the foggiest clue. We could think when we read this book that Malachi was writing to people who were reasonably conversant with the will of God. But we must remember that they had spent seventy years in Babylon before returning to Jerusalem completely secularised. They had no idea why they went to Babylon and they didn’t know how long they would be there. Perhaps someone who was part of the spiritual remnant may have said, ‘I remember something about seventy years. I think it was probably the book of Jeremiah’. But most of the people might have asked, ‘Who is Jeremiah?’ If we were to think back one hundred years to the year 1900, would we remember what happened then? Sociologically, that is more than a lifetime ago.

Similarly, we could compare ourselves to the Israelites who lived as slaves in Egypt for over four hundred years. That period of time would take us back to the year 1610. Who remembers what happened in that year?  Even if we go back twenty or thirty years, it is hard to remember what transpired. I find it amazing that people who are younger than me don’t know about the Beatles! Likewise, I don’t know anything about people who were famous back in 1920. Time does strange things. It obliterates the memory of everything ultimately. I have books on my shelf which refer to people who were probably the greatest philosophers who ever lived – but I had never heard of them.

My point is this! By the time the prophet Malachi spoke to the nation of Israel, they didn’t have a clue about what it meant to make offering. So, the Lord broke in and said, ‘You are robbing Me, the whole nation of you’. And they could rightly say, ‘How are we robbing You?’ He said, ‘In tithes and heave offerings’. Mal 3:8. Our modern translations say ‘offerings’ but the literal translation is ‘heave offerings’. These are not two genres of offering but two components of one genre or regime of offering.

I think Malachi is saying that the way you begin to prove God is by paying tithes and giving heave offerings. In the Old Testament, heave offerings were part of the peace offerings which were presented at harvest time. The thigh or shoulder of a beast was lifted up to the Lord as a symbol of the person’s willingness to come under the burden of the Lord’s work.  We demonstrate a commitment to a culture of offering by becoming a burnt offering where we present our bodies as a living sacrifice and begin to prove the defining components of our predestination. But if we wish to prove God as an effective force in our lives, we do it by tithes and heave offerings.

If you are not tithing, you have no idea how to prove God. You have no idea how to find the will of God because God is not talking to you. That voice that you hear in the middle of the night is probably your I phone! It is not God. You prove God by tithes and heave offerings. But if you come under the burden of the heave offering, the Scripture says that you begin to prove God. The consequence will be that He says, ‘I will open the windows of heaven’. Mal 3:10. However, the intermediate statement is this, ‘You are robbing Me; the whole nation of you.’ And they replied ‘How are we robbing You?’ It was almost as if they wondered who this ‘You’ was; ‘who is the You that we are robbing?’ They were as thick as two short planks but probably no thicker than we are somewhere along the line.

It is constantly my goal to motivate people to give attention to the proposition of offering. I am not a fund-raiser. I am not trying to corral and coerce people to turn up for a building programme as if that constitutes offering. I would just have them turning up to a building programme. We read in Malachi, ‘Will a man rob God? They asked, “How have we robbed You?” The Lord replied ‘In tithes and heave offerings. You are cursed with a curse for you are robbing Me; the whole nation of you.’ Mal 3:8.  Wouldn’t it be interesting if the Lord turned up and said to us, ‘You are cursed with a curse’? Consider if you had chronic illness in your family or you were losing your job or your house was burning down and He turned up and said, ‘You are cursed with a curse’. I think you would say, ‘I’m glad You turned up to tell me there is something wrong here’. That is the spirit of this verse. It is not, ‘You bunch of rats; you are cursed with a curse. I’m out of here!’ It is completely the reverse. He was saying, ‘Consequential to what you are doing, there is a curse sitting on you and you don’t even know it. So, I am going to explain what you need to do. You need to bring tithes and heave offerings!’

David Falk

God testifies about our gifts

Lately, I have been considering the relationship and interplay between the biblical themes of offering, covenant and testimony. I have reflected on the verse that says, ‘By faith Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain through which he obtained the testimony that he was righteous, God testifying about his gifts’. Heb 11:4. And I have concluded that God testifies about us when we make offering according to our name, identity and gifts. I have also pondered on the verse in the Psalms, which says, ‘Gather My saints together to Me, those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice’. Psa 50:5.

 
If God approves of us, we can assume that nothing else can touch us. If we are in a covenant with Him and He is testifying about that, we are in the ultimate safe place.  This means that whatever befalls us in life, nothing can affect us adversely. We are untouchable and unassailable; but not in the sense of a lawless recalcitrant who is doing their own thing and won’t let anybody near them. Instead, the fundamental promise of the gospel is effectively working in our lives to the degree that mistakes and successes do not matter. It is all to do with the Lord’s testimony concerning our offering. Therefore, we do not need to be preoccupied with our sin. When I pray each morning, I don’t sit there doing a self-analysis. If the Holy Spirit is not convicting me of sin and my brethren are not making me aware of something against myself, I don’t give sin a moment’s thought.

 
However, I do get completely preoccupied with how I might turn my offering into a living sacrifice as we are instructed to do in Romans 12:1. And I also get completely preoccupied with being poured out on the sacrifice and priesthood of someone else’s faith. Phil 2:17. To me, this is the model of the apostle Paul. He had very little interest in his own offering. That went without saying. The exercise of Paul’s faith was mostly to do with helping make effective the offerings of others. This is what I call ‘deaconing’ the offering of another.

 
When we offer in this way, God testifies about us. We are not likely to hear his voice audibly but we will know the fruitful increase and benefit that comes when God testifies about our ‘gifts’, when He bears witness to the testimony of our lives. We could say that this is the DNA or blueprint of our predestination. We will know that this is so because we will experience multiplication in the area of our predestination.  We know when a human being’s genetic makeup is not flawed because they keep growing, multiplying and increasing. From our point of view, God also bears witness or testimony concerning us through the principle of multiplication. He does not just say, ‘Yahoo, that’s my boy or girl!’ although that is true. He bears witness and makes substantial the testimony, or ‘works’ foreknown for you and me, which is written in the Lamb’s book of life. Rev 20:12.

David Falk
Toowoomba Christian Fellowship