“Honor the Lord with your possessions and with the first produce of your entire harvest; then your barns will be completely filled, and your vats will overflow with new wine. Do not despise the Lord’s instruction, my son, and do not loathe his discipline; for the Lord disciplines the one he loves, just as a father disciplines the son in whom he delights.” (Proverbs 3:9-12 CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the uniquely American contributions to religion around the world is the Prosperity Gospel. This is an insidious, heretical movement that masquerades as a kind of Christianity. The truth, though, is that it has little to do with the Gospel, but instead uses Gospel concepts to inflame greed and envy. Mammon is the real god it worships. It is one of the more cunning deceits the devil ever created to keep people out of God’s kingdom. The challenge is that verses like these exist which seem to give credence to its central claims that God wants us to be happy, healthy, and wealthy. Let’s talk about what we should do with sayings like this in the Bible, and why taking things fully in context matters so much.

Like yesterday’s passage, our verses for today employ parallelism to make their point. At first glance, the two sets of instructions paired with promises here don’t seem to go together very well. A bit more reflection, though, reveals a connection that strengthens them both. The pair offer us contrasting approaches to the same end. Let’s start with the first one.

“Honor the Lord with your possessions and with the first produce of your entire harvest.” That’s simply an instruction for us to give to the Lord first. By itself, that’s pretty harmless. Well, it will make a mess of our natural assumptions about our stuff if we try to live by faithfully, but beyond that’s it’s pretty harmless. There are two parts to this line and the second unpacks and specifies the first.

We are to honor the Lord with our possessions. Okay, but how. With the first produce of our entire harvest. That is, when you acquire new possessions in some way, shape, or form, the first and best part of those should be committed to honor the Lord. How you do that is really up to you and Him being creative together. The pathway to an answer here goes through a reflection on God’s character and the kinds of things that honor Him generally. He is honored when we acknowledge Him as God. He is honored when we properly reflect His character. He is honored when we demonstrate His love and pursue justice. He is honored when the least, last, and lost are cared for and lifted up. So, use your possessions to pursue those ends in some way.

The easiest way to do this is obviously to give to causes and ministries that are dedicated to these things, starting with your local church, but honoring the Lord with all of our possessions should drive use to think beyond just practicing sacrificial generosity with our financial resources. How could your house or your vehicle be used to honor the Lord? Do you have other possessions you could put to use honoring Him? Be creative with this. After all, it is all God’s stuff first. Our honoring Him with our possessions is a prime way of expressing our gratitude to Him for sharing them with us in the first place.

The next part of this doublet offers a bit of an incentive. It offers what appears to be a promise. If we honor the Lord with our possessions, “then your barns will be completely filled, and your vats will overflow with new wine.” So, if we give to God, He’s going to give back to us? Awesome! I can get on board with that. And it seems like He’s going to give back to us more than we give to Him. Count me in on that investment plan. Okay, but what about all the people who have practiced sacrificial generosity for years, but who are still poor? Aren’t they a perfect example that God’s promises can’t really be trusted? Giving to God like this is a waste of time.

Not so fast. This is a proverb, not a promise. Those are two different things. We’ve talked about what that means more than once on this journey already. Yes, if you diligently and sincerely practice the spiritual discipline of sacrificial generosity to the glory of God, He is going to take care of you, and sometimes that taking care is going to take the form of making sure you are abundantly provided for so that you can continue to be sacrificially generous to the blessing of those around you to the glory of God. But not always. He may take another path that leaves you seemingly impoverished as the world reckons such things, but His care for you will be there all the same, and given that you are living for a kingdom that is eternal rather than merely temporal, you trust and know that in the end, things will work out to your favor. Anyone who tries to give you some kind of a guarantee that if you give this much to this ministry, God will make you wealthy or healthy or lavish some other kind of temporal blessing on you in return should be immediately discounted as a fraud and a false prophet.

Honoring God with your possessions is never a waste of time even if the blessings God will return for that don’t come in the time or manner you would have preferred. Sometimes the growth that God wants to accomplish in you in order to let you experience the blessings of kingdom maturity take forms that the world reckons to be curses, not the blessings they are. This is the case even when we are properly honoring Him with our possessions. This is why the second part of this passage is so important. It gives us a context for making sense out of times when our outcomes don’t match our expectations given our faithfulness.

“Do not despise the Lord’s instruction, my son [or daughter], and do not loathe his discipline; for the Lord disciplines the one he loves, just as a father disciplines the son in whom he delights.” All three of my kids have played sports at various times over the years. Two of them are running cross country right now. Cross country is a weird sport. I should know. I ran too many moons ago. In order to become a better runner, you have to discipline your body in various ways. You have to not eat foods that you would otherwise eat. You have to eat foods that you would otherwise not eat. You have to cause your body physical pain in order to keep your muscles and joints and ligaments nice and loose. You have to put your body through absolute misery by running until you can’t anymore, and then running further even though it hurts so much you want to fall over and quit. The best runners learn the difference between pain and hurt. Pain is part of the process. Hurt is something you stop to genuinely address. And you do all of this so you can experience the benefits of being in good physical shape.

When God sets about growing us in Him so that we can experience more and more of the blessings of His kingdom, He’s got to contend with all of the various manifestations of sin in us. Depending on just how thoroughly wrapped around our heart and mind sin has become (and, let’s be honest, for most of us it is very thoroughly wrapped), pruning away the bad in order to encourage the growth of the good is going to take some real labor. It’s going to take cutting out things that are going to cause us temporary pain. But this pain, as bad as it feels in a given moment, is to help us avoid real hurt later on down the road.

This pruning process is something that He does slowly and carefully. He knows just how much we can handle in a given season. Like any good coach, He pushes us beyond what we think we can handle sometimes, but He supplements us in those times with His strength which is more than sufficient to sustain us. He also knows that some of the deeper pruning that needs to be done is only going to be possible when we have started showing some actual growth. When we are running well on a line of faithfulness, He will “reward” us then by pruning away some more garbage that we may not have even realized was there. This will often take the form of hard times that seem to come out of nowhere and when we were otherwise being really faithful about doing things like honoring God with our possessions. We were expecting full vats, but instead our cisterns turn up dry, forcing us into a season of dependence we never expected to encounter.

Yet in these seasons, our job is to lean in and take the counsel of this whole proverb. We honor the Lord with our possessions, but we don’t despise His discipline, for He only disciplines the children He loves. When hard times come because we have made a series of sinful choices, that’s on us. When they come in spite of our determined and genuine faithfulness, God is giving us the kind of discipline that will result in greater growth than we can fully imagine right now. In those times, we lean in, keep riding our path of faithfulness, and wait to see how He will yet bless us. That path isn’t easy, but it does always take us somewhere good. Let’s get walking.