April 6, 2004--Sowing and reaping

We were discussing the laws of sowing and reaping in Sunday School, and the discussion turned to tithing. We hear a lot about sowing into God's Kingdom and reaping a spiritual blessing, and I've heard numerous testimonies of people giving when they didn't have enough to pay the bills and God bringing money out of nowhere to make up the difference. I've even had a few of those stories myself. Yet, we've been faithful in tithing for a few years now, and while we're being blessed, it's not been to the extent that pastors like to preach that we should be. I've wondered a bit, but I'm generally pretty content with where we are, and also I remember that we are living in the richest country in the world, so I don't complain that we don't have so much our barns can't contain it. We're still below poverty level, still barely making ends meet most of the time. Until recently, those ends often didn't meet. We might tithe, pay our bills, go out for ice cream, buy a few things we need, and then put gas on the credit card because we ran out of money before the next paycheck.

In the past few months we've been involved in Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University. This has been life-changing for us. We've learned to live on a budget and we know where our dollars go. Before we'd put our tithe in trusting God to make up the difference. (Often we'd end up using a credit card to make up the difference.) Now it's all on paper--this much to the church, this much for gas, this much for bills, this much for eating out with, etc. Nothing goes on credit anymore. And guess what? We are finding that before we were using tithing as sort of a magic charm to make up for all the rest of our bad decisions! It was like we were saying, "We are really doing good over in this area, so God should bless us enough to make up for these other areas where we aren't doing so good."
I know the principle of sowing and reaping works. When we sow into God's kingdom, we do reap blessings. It's not a lie from televangelists to get our money. But that isn't the extent of it--when we sow money into credit cards, we reap interest payments. When we sow money into unnecessary things, we reap the results of wastefulness. Those things eat up the harvest we reaped from tithing.
I thought about the parable of the sower and the seed. The Bible doesn't say how much seed went on the ground or in the weeds or the rocks or the good soil. We can assume most of it went in the good soil, since that is where he was aiming, and some of it missed it's mark.

But what if the sower had purposely sowed only 25% of his seed into the good soil, and had sowed the other 75% in the rocks, the weeds, and on the ground? He reaped a great harvest off of that 25%, but what if he had sown it all in the good soil? He would have reaped much more!
Since this Dave Ramsey course we are sowing good financial decisions. We are going to sow into investments when we get our debts paid off. We are sowing into savings instead of debt. We will still sow into God's Kingdom, but our harvest from that seed won't be eaten up by the harvest from our seed sown into debt.