I Declare Today

The speaker welcomes listeners to the CCI Fellowship podcast and explains that they aim to reach God, each other, and their community. The message for this week is about the declaration made over tithes and offerings. The speaker encourages listeners to be part of fellowship groups and emphasizes the importance of community. They discuss the instructions given in Deuteronomy 26 regarding tithing and highlight the principles behind it. The speaker emphasizes that the increase comes from God's goodness and that the declaration is a way to acknowledge His faithfulness. They also mention the importance of treating the tithe as holy and not giving it to other gods. The speaker encourages listeners to read and meditate on the chapter and seek the Holy Spirit's guidance. They conclude by reminding listeners that the declarations are God's instructions and that they should be spoken with a heart of gratitude and honor. Welcome to CCI Fellowships podcast. Thank you for joining us. At CCI Fellowship, we are reaching God, reaching each other, and reaching our community. We pray that this week's message challenges you in your walk with the Lord, causes you to grow in your faith, and encourages you in your love for the Word of God. Open your Bibles to Deuteronomy 26. This is going to be fun. Hold on to your seatbelts. Deuteronomy 26 verse 3 says, And you shall go to the one who was priest in those days and say to him, I declare today to the Lord your God that I have come to the country which the Lord swore to our fathers to give us. As we have just done our declaration, and something that I have been wanting to do for a couple months now, is to address the declaration that we make over our tithes and offerings at the end of each service. And so today's sermon title is, I Declare Today. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for what you are already doing in this service. We thank you, Lord God, that we have come to meet your presence. We have come to your throne. You have received us, Lord God. You have welcomed us in. You have stretched out your arms, Lord, with what you want to bestow upon us. You have not just welcomed us in as a sovereign, you have welcomed us in ready to give gifts to us, Lord God. Gifts of healing, gifts of deliverance, gifts of open doors, gifts of provision, Lord God. Father, we come because we love you. And you give because you love us. So Lord, as we look into this portion of Scripture, may you teach us the principles behind it. And may, Lord God, we not just each week make a declaration because it's what we do, but may the conviction of it grab a hold of us, Lord God, as we thank you and as we glorify you for everything that you have given us. In Jesus' name, Amen. So, we make this declaration each week before the tithes and offerings. It goes, Father, I thank you for the opportunity to come into your house, to come to your altar, to worship you with the holy tithe and my gifts and offerings. I declare them blessed with a heart of faith, a heart of honor, a heart of gratitude in Jesus' name. Why do we do this? Is it scriptural? Is it a command? Is it necessary? What are we doing more than just an exercise? I do not have time to read through this whole chapter. And again, fellowship groups is a wonderful opportunity to discuss this more in deeper ways to hear what other people think and to really meditate on what God is speaking to us in the Sunday sermon. So, if you are not in a fellowship group, please get into one. If you are part of a fellowship group, you're in the chat. Please go. Just go. Don't just be in the chat that you ignore every week when they say, are you going to come and put the pole out there? Go. Be a part of it. You will benefit from it. Oh, yeah, I love my schedule and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do you make room in your schedule to eat? Do you make room in your schedule to sleep? Do you make room in your schedule to survive? It is important for your spiritual survival to be part of groups and part of community. Within this chapter, Moses is giving the Israelites instructions on how to handle their firstfruits offering and their tithes. It's what to do and what to say. And there are a couple of things I want us to focus on as we look at this chapter. So, during this week, whether you go to fellowship group or not, which you need to, read through this chapter, pray about it, meditate on it, go back and listen to the sermon again later, and ask the Holy Spirit what he wants to say to you in this. This chapter talks about two separate tithes. The first one is in verse two, and it has to do with the first tithe given whenever they have received the first harvest after moving into the promised land, and it is called a firstfruits tithe. It is the first of the first of what is harvested. It also talks about a tithe later on. It's in verse 12. It talks about a tithe that has been gathered for three years, and then it is given at that point in time to the priests, to the widows, to the poor, to the alien, and it lists different people. Now, as we look through Leviticus, as we look through Deuteronomy, we find different things about tithing, and I'm not going to go into all the different types and the different offerings that are there and all of those different details. We're going to pull out in the next seven minutes the concepts that we need to learn from this that establish the precedent for us and establish the principle for us of why we can, week after week, make such a declaration regarding our tithes and our offerings. Amen? Are you with me? If you are new to CCI and you want to learn more about what we believe about tithing or what we believe about offering, you can come and talk to us. I encourage you to do so. We are more than willing to have open dialogue with you and to answer whatever questions that you may have. So, the first thing to pull out of this chapter is that it does talk about two separate tithes. The second thing to pull out, the tithe was given from the increase or the harvest or the income that they received as a result of God's goodness. Now, where does this abundance come from? It comes, yes, from their labor. They had to go and they had to plant and they had to go and they had to weed and they had to water and they had to take care of the crop. They had to harvest it. They had to put it together. They had to set aside the tithe that was going to be given. There's a lot of personal involvement when it comes to tithing. However, the increase did not come from their efforts. The increase came from God's goodness. If we look in 1 Corinthians chapter 3, Paul is trying to set them straight because they were all divided about who they were following. One said, I'm a disciple of Peter. One said, I'm of Paul. One said, I'm of Apollos. And Paul said, we are nothing. One plants, one waters, God gives the increase. So even in our obedience and even in our following after God, it is God and His goodness, and like we talked about last week, God and His promises that bring the abundance to us, that bring the multiplication, that bring about the things that we are believing for and the things that we receive because He loves us. Verse 11 says, So you shall rejoice in every good thing which the Lord your God has given to you in your house, you and the Levite and the stranger who is among you. The third thing, which is very key here, it's God Himself who tells them to make these declarations. It's not Moses who just came up with a good idea. It's not Moses who is instructing the people. I think maybe God will look upon this favorably. It's not Moses' idea. It's Moses communicating, and throughout the book of Deuteronomy you find the same thing. Throughout the book of Leviticus you find the same thing, where it is God communicating through Moses the instructions that He wants to give to His people and the instructions that He wants them to follow. So verse 3 says, And you shall go to the one who is the priest in those days and say to him, I declare today to the Lord your God that I have come to the country which the Lord swore to our fathers to give us. Verse 5, the beginning says, And you shall answer and say before the Lord your God. And verse 13 starts out with, Then you shall say before the Lord your God, I have removed the holy tithe from my house. So there are three separate instructions within this section of Scripture that God is reiterating over and over to His people that when you come and bring the tithe, when you come and bring what is holy and what belongs to Him, that you're not just supposed to come and, there you go, and forget about it. But you are supposed to come with a certain attitude and with a willingness to declare and speak over your tithe the things that God has instructed. I know you, questions are going off in your mind. It's alright, we'll get there. Why, what is it that they are to declare? Verse 3, I'm here because God kept His promise. It says you're supposed to go to the priest and say, I have come to the land that the Lord your God has brought me to. I was a slave. I was in Egypt. I was the son of a slave. I had no land of my own. I had no harvest of my own. But the Lord in His faithfulness has brought me to this land. I am here because God has kept His promise. If you read through verse 4 through 10, they're recounting God's goodness in their history as a people. In verse 10, which you, O Lord, have given me. They went from hardship to deliverance to wandering to a land flowing with milk and honey. They moved into abundance. Verse 13 and 14 says, I have treated the tithe as holy and have not contaminated it. These are the three things that they're to declare. I'm here, God, because you kept your promise. And this is the promise that you kept, God, and they go through and declare that. And as a token and in proof of your promises and proof of your blessing, I have taken what belongs to you and I have treated it as holy and I have set it aside. And this is what God is telling them. It says, I set it apart. I didn't give in the temptation to use it. How many times have you looked at the amount of your tithe and looked at the bills that are piling up and thought, you know, if I just didn't give my tithe this month, I could pay that bill. The temptation is real. It says, also, I did not offer it to other gods. In other words, I didn't give my tithe to other things before I've given it to you. And the fourth thing is, I didn't treat it as common. In verse 15. Verse 15, it says, if I can find it. Look down from your holy habitation. Now, keep in mind, God is instructing them to say these things. This is God's command to them. It's God's permission to them to say these things. Look down from your holy habitation, from heaven, and bless your people, Israel, and the land which you have given us, just as you swore to our fathers, a land flowing with milk and honey. God calls upon the people to remind him and remind themselves of his obligation to complete his own word. Will God ever fail in his word? Absolutely not. He's not worried about completing his word. He's not worried about how he's going to come up with the answer of things that he's promised to do. Oh, I don't know what I'm going to do. I promise to do this in these people's lives, and I don't know where I'm going to get that from. I don't know how I'm going to make this come to pass. I don't know if I can keep my word. That's not God. He never says that. He never has to. He always keeps his word. But his instruction to the people is, go ahead and remind me. Go ahead and pray that prayer. God bless your people. God, bring your blessing on me. So many people now, because of such the perverted teaching regarding tithes and offerings and the prosperity gospel, people have so come to either they embrace it way too far or they're absolutely against it. And so anytime we talk about praying for blessing, people are like, no, I don't want anything of that prosperity gospel. Huh. God said, don't miss out on what God said because some other idiot taught something falsely. Don't reproduce their ignorance by refusing to accept that what God has told you belongs to you. In Malachi 3.10, bring all the tithes into the storehouse that there may be food in my house and try me now in this. Scripture in other places says, don't test the Lord your God. In this scripture, God says, go ahead and test me in this. Go ahead and try me in this. Try it out. Go ahead. Try it out. You don't believe me. Try me out. Try me in this, God says, if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you such a blessing that there will not be room enough to receive it. Oh, well, we shouldn't focus too much on blessing. You know, we, we, we're, we're sinners and whatever God will give us, you know, that's, that's great. If He just gives us a morsel, then we'll be fine because we don't deserve anything from Him. No, we don't. We don't deserve anything from Him. We came to Him as sinners, but He gave us a new identity and made us sons. And sons don't have to beg for morsels. Sons don't have to come to their parents and say, oh, could you please just spare a little bit? And, you know, Mom and Dad, whatever you can give me, that's fine. I, I know that I don't deserve it. No, kids come in. Anybody have kids? Anybody know how filiguenos they are? Always asking. You go to the store with a kid. I want that. I want that. I want that. I want that. I want that. Or they just put it in the cart. And you as the parent got to weed it out. They're immature. We have to grow in our maturity. But we're never supposed to grow to a place, because it's not growth, it's actually going backwards, to where we think God is stingy and won't bless us. Because He's the one that said, try me in this, if I will not pour out a blessing. And His command to the Israelites was, go ahead and say it. Go ahead and say it now. Father, God, pour out Your blessing that You promised. Living in the promises of God that we talked about last week is not just, not just accepting His promises, but claiming His promises. It's declaring His promises. It's reminding yourself of those promises. As we move into verse 16 to 19, it talks about the result of all of this is a new identity and blessings. This day, the Lord your God commands you to observe these statutes and judgments. He commands you. What statutes and judgments? That when you bring your tithes and offerings, you are to declare these things over them. You shall be careful to observe them with all your heart and with all your soul. Today, you have proclaimed the Lord to be your God and that you will walk in His ways and keep His statutes, His commandments, and His judgments, that you will obey His voice. You have declared it. You have said you will do it. You have accepted God as your Lord and as your Savior. And verse 18 then says, also today, the Lord has proclaimed you to be His special people. Do you see the exchange that's happening here? It's not just come and declare me as Lord and I'm just going to sit here and do nothing because I deserve it. I command you to give to me. I command you to do this. I command you to do that. And I have nothing to do with you afterwards. Today, you have declared that I'm your Lord. And today, me as your Lord has declared that you are my people. What a powerful thing. The Lord has proclaimed you to be His special people just as He promised you that you should keep all His commandments and that He will set you high above all nations which He has made in praise, in name, and in honor and that you may be a holy people to the Lord your God just as He has spoken. Well, while He said this to the Israelites, well, Peter also says, you are a chosen people. A royal nation. A chosen people set forth to declare His praises. He has called you out of darkness and into His marvelous light. Nothing has changed. He declares His people and His people declare Him. So, is our declaration scriptural? Yes. Is it word for word? No. Does it have to be word for word? No. We have a precedence set in scripture. We have a precedent set by God that we can come and say, how do we adapt this to us, Lord God? And how do we interact with You based upon this precedent that You have set? Well, our declaration is certainly more simplified. It contains the same components of gratitude, of testimony, of recalling God's promises to bless and most importantly, of worship. Is it commanded of us? It was commanded of them. But we take from them this example and we adapt it in our lives as a precedent, not because of a legalistic thing, but because of an act of worship. Is it necessary? Absolutely, it's necessary. Why is it necessary? Why is it declaring these things? Why is it necessary? Because it reminds us. Not that it reminds God. God doesn't forget anything. But it reminds us of what we are doing. And the longer you tithe, the longer you live a life of tithing, the easier it can grow to become something that you just do out of habit. And if it's just done out of habit, you are paying a tax. That's all it is. The tithe is not a tax. It is an act of worship. And this declaration helps us. Now you can get to the place where like, yeah, we're saying the same thing every week and there's always the opportunity for mundane, repetitive approach. But that depends on our hearts. When we stand and we hold up our tithe before God, what we're saying is, you have brought me into the place of plenty. You have brought me into the place of provision. I was in a place where I didn't have. I was in a place of lack. And you have provided for me, God. I declare You are my Lord. I honor You with this holy tithe because You are my Lord. I have kept it safe. I've put it aside. I've made sure it hasn't been spent. I have treated it as holy. Now, God, I have praised You. I have worshipped You. I have treated what belongs to You as something holy. Now, Lord, look upon this gift and bless it because Your Word says that You will. That's why we make a declaration. Amen. We hope to see you or hear from you soon. Blessings.