Good morning. The reading today is from Malachi chapter 3 8 through 12 Should people cheat God yet? You have cheated me, but you ask what do you mean? When did we ever cheat you you have cheated me of the tithes and offerings due to me?
You are under a curse for your whole nation has been cheating me Bring all of the tithes into the storehouse so that there will be enough food for in my temple If you do says the Lord of heavens armies, I will open the window of heaven for you I will pour out a blessing so great. You won't have enough room to take it in try it put me to the test Your crops will be abundant for I will guard them from the insects and disease your grapes will not fall from the vine before they are right Says the Lord of heavens armies then all nations will call you blessed for your land will be such a delight says the Lord of heavens armies This word is true and can be trusted Thanks Jessica. I'm surprised that Jessica did not get mad at me for making her read such a weird Bible passage Okay So have you ever been in that space of in between you know I think about um it's all the school teachers The room we may echo this that time between Thanksgiving break and Christmas break or between testing in the end of the year Like Maggie shaking her head no right now like it's worthless time right? I those like those fun times of in between we're in anticipation wait You know there's also sometimes there can be some awkward some frustrating times of in between you know You might be in the doctor's waiting room We're waiting on a phone call that can change things or be you know waiting for your Lord to call you like one of those like those awkward times Of in between you all this also might be sitting here saying Chad, you know We're talking about generosity now What on earth does generosity and and seeing what it means to unlock our potential and our power that God gives us to see the Holy Spirit Move around us You know what does that have to do with in between space and absolutely what does it have to do with that weird piece of scripture Jessica?
Now our passage this week it sounds it sounded a little harsh It's okay, but it's about and in between moment It's about what happens when people are living in the space of in between and trying to just really figure out who they are and all of us You know we're in some in between spaces right now culturally I mean I noticed the governor listed the mat with the mask mandate last week You know that's a big thing we're talking about I saw something about um memes about food shortages while sitting in the deer stand this weekend So I kind of a little hang junior chuckle country boy cancer I have a little bit But you know we've we're wanting to know like what's going to happen here You know as a church we're living in in between we're a year off of a merger We're almost a year into being in this new building You know we've got two years of you know cayd red that six core value earlier But we've had two years of learning what does it mean to be this covenant community called into our neighborhoods? We've had to make a lot of like different physical decisions this year You know when we're in in between moments that are just a part of life And this passage earlier and actually the whole book of Malachi It's about a really big in between moment And it's about how the relief that God offers people in those in between moments is actually part of the story of generosity I promise y'all right now. I'm not trying to disguise a money talk You know if you're trying to fit where is this going like this is about realizing? What does it mean to grow out of things and Malachi he takes this story and we're not really familiar with of what this space of Malachi?
We don't talk about this. There's no fun vacation Bible school stories. We can talk about this part of scripture We don't know what to do with it But we're really we're doing with the timeline here Can we even fill that that slide up there you know the destruction Jerusalem it happened um And Nebuchadnezzar came in and just obliterated the city and for a generation these people moved and they were they were sent off into exile And um and there's a point in time when they were allowed to come back and what so funny is the Babylonian Empire They didn't just like they weren't nice and let's just send the Jewish people back They actually kind of got tired of having to take care of all of these people they brought over So think back we are familiar with the book of Daniel like that is one of those pretty familiar vacation Bible school kind of stories But the book of Jeremiah the book of Ezekiel we can read about this destruction of Jerusalem this time of captivity This is hauling off the Bible doesn't talk about the fact that the Babylonian Empire just got tired of having a bunch of random strangers living in their Country and they push them all back home. This is when Malachi happens.
These are the Jewish people This is the first time they're actually ever called Jews. They're sent back To be here, but the problem that Malachi relation to deal with is fact that they don't know who they are They've lost their identity. They need to recover it desperately. Who are we?
So I think back that question of identity who are you what it makes me go back to more than anything else is the biggest insult when I was in high school The thing about like when you were in high school that that massive awkward That space of like social relationships and all this kind of stuff But when I was in high school mid 90s rapids parish and all the kids I hung out with were all in a rock and roll bands Or they were skaters or they were the ones who were trying to go to knackish to losing on school for arts and math and science like it was All of those weird kids and I remember the biggest insult you could call somebody is to call them a poser I remember if somebody calls you a poser, you're gonna end up in the parking lot of the magic modal Jackson Street extension and somebody was getting Croped I mean it was gonna get gnarly was always like the kid in the alish and change t-shirt and that whatever band wrote that song Reficit Tiffany's but like if you called somebody a poser there was going to be a fight because it was a mark of identity It was telling them you really don't belong with the people that you're seeking belonging for Malachi in this passage was read earlier in all throughout Malachi what he's essentially doing is he's screaming out We are a bunch of posers. We've lost our identity We don't know how to be formed in the image of God and no one is really listening to him That's the context of this passage. So maybe it doesn't sound a little as brutal as it is early. It's all about curses It's kind of stuff.
I came to church to hear happy fun stuff and I'll let curses This puts this just in a little bit of the story becomes clear to us and some of our favorite Bible passages are like this because they Sam they seem complicated they seem outrageous they seem weird they seem scary all of these things but they're good because what's going on is That the outrageousness that we find in them is really just about waking us up to understand something So think about why Malachi might be accusing Israel of being a bunch of posers No, the first thing is this they are living in a pale shadow of who they once were I found this painting earlier this week I'm like this really kind of brings the thing in you know This this mighty and this amazing city and Jerusalem sits on top of a mountain and like you're not gonna go to Jerusalem Unless you're meaning to go to Jerusalem. Okay It's not a quick off-ramp exit from the Egyptian interstate system Now you're coming through the wilderness of the desert the gnarly parts of the of the terrain and you see this massive city Sitting on top of a hill with the temple at the peak of this mountain and what which one is amazing and beautiful and gorgeous And you can see just the opulence of Jerusalem from miles away now is destroyed And it's this pile of rubble that can be seen from miles away. Now Israel you can see the weight of their sin from miles away Walls of stone that were once burned so bad that they became brittle enough that you could pull down with ropes The temple where they believe God's physical presence lived on earth was scraped clean to bedrock We think the book of Daniel The thing that threw me for a loop is when you you read in the Bible about this time you find out the old people So the little kids we see in this painting right now they get to come back and their 50s and 60s being in tears Because of the way things are and they know it will never be like what it was once again And the Jewish people are there and they're they're living in a destroyed city You know Ezra and Nehemiah talk about when the walls were rebuilt when the temple was rebuilt This is happening before that I mean they're living amidst their own destruction You think of the cynicism that's there where they felt that faithfulness was just too costly for this time And the greatest thing that we have to offer God our faithfulness was something that they just could not muster up And so what Malachi's talking it's not some sort of a punishment for their lack of generosity We're not gonna go there But the issue was it was really their lack of a posture of repentance and thankfulness. That's what was so just repugnant to God You know they it wasn't a resources thing.
It's about belonging and it's about worship It's about the Jewish people had completely forgotten their identity They've forgotten who they were made to be they were forgotten what they were called to do And they just were so exhausted from it all that they just didn't want to touch it Deuteronomy 25 1500 of years before this begins kind of laying the ground work for what was really going on in the heart It says this now look down from your holy dwelling place in heaven and bless your people Israel and the land you sword our ancestors to give us a Land flowing with milk and honey They had a relationship with the space with the physical land that was supposed to be all about Generosity and abundance and having so much of nice things those nice things turn into normal things That is the vision of life They had moved into that space that they had and they were just lamenting it wasn't there anymore the tithes They talk about in the Old Testament. It's just 10% biblically It's about the abundance that God has given you about bringing that abundance back Not to have not to store not just to be there But to bring a portion of that abundance back is a celebration of you belonging to God and you belonging to his people That identity and generosity and scripture are woven together so tightly And to lose your generosity was to lose your identity The Old Testament tied that what it does is it sets the stage for abundance it sets the stage for blessing It sets the stage for belonging Malachi also talks about robbing God and we can't divert around that we read that and we we think this might be the first Hellfire and brimstone that sermon you ever hear me preach right we hear robbing and curses But this robbing remember Malachi is in the middle of this hypothetical argument. It's about having a weak and a boring faith This whole book is told in the context of restoring relationships and and part of the restoration of generosity was a restoration of identity They're robbing isn't about their action, but about the content of their heart It's about holding things back that belong to God anyway And that their destiny and then our destiny anyone's destiny who follows Jesus is it wrapped up in the character of God's faithfulness This robbery isn't about resources, but it's about relationships that God's people saying we don't even see value and following you anymore Have you ever said I don't feel like myself You know we say those things a lot of times our family or our friends they come around like okay Let's let's go do some of their favorite things for a moment to kind of snap them back into shape These things are absolutely part of who they are remember for a long time I told my wife that every time I saw something scary on TV or watched a movie that maybe not feel right or maybe kind of Feel weird. I would immediately watch Ernest goes to camp They're like equalize it back out.
I remember one time we saw some kind of shaken up and Mary's like what do we need to do is like? I need to watch Ernest goes to camp kind of puts me back into equally I mean God's people and my own customers said hey Listen you've tried this your own way You've come back to the space you've said once we get back to Jerusalem everything will be perfect and you're back here now And you've lost yourself even more It didn't work they still feel like they're living in between space and what Malachi's doing is he's talking about several different things one of them Generosity included to try to remind them of their core identity is simply repeating what God has already done and being his people They're saying we don't feel like ourselves and mounts of yeah, you don't because you're opposed or you're not doing who you're supposed to be You're not doing your thing and that generosity was part of it So we look at Malachi in the way he just kind of howward to get people's attention So how we listen to these words where Malachi urges us to just rethink about our identity in the space of generosity inside that the first Thing is morning's we realize this we practice generosity so that through our generosity other people might be blessed You know we don't just do this because it's a nice thing to do a preacher I worked with for years and Kentucky would say the church of Satan can have a coat drive You know we don't just do nice people nice things for supposed to be nice people We realize our generosity is really at the basics of who we are made to be Genesis 1 26 and 27 says this and God said Let us make human beings in our image to be like us They will reign over the fish and the sea the birds in the sky the livestock all the wild animals on the earth the small animals That scurry along the ground so God created human beings in his own image in the image of God He created them male and female he created them and this isn't just a physical thing But because of Jesus Christ and his life and resurrection we are called to embody the character of God We're called to be his images his representation That's our birthright that's our greatest fulfillment and God is gracious and God is generous and so then we need to be gracious and generous It's not a requirement, but it's the thing that it's the way that we participate in being like him if we claim to follow Jesus and we struggle with generosity We're going to struggle with our own core identity. There's no way that we can say we are trying to be like Jesus But to say we are choosing to not be a generous person And also we do this through our local church This is why the local church matters Kate talked about earlier because we believe in the power of covenant spiritual community We believe that God gives churches specific things to accomplish that only they can do there's a lot of fantastic churches And one of the things I love so much about this community is and all the pastors were all good close friends We all know each other really really well But all of our churches are very different because God needs different churches in this community And so we give to our local church because we realize there are things that God is asking us to do that only we can accomplish the second thing I love about this passage is this it's about testing God, which is kind of a weird scary thing But it shows back up in verse 10 and 12 we read this earlier when we read again Try it put me to the test your crops will be abundant for I will guard them from insects and disease your great So not fall for the vine to for their rights as the Lord of heavens armies that all the nations will call you blessed for your land Will be such a delight says the Lord of heavens armies This is the only time in scripture that God tells people to test him He's saying these are the things that you're nervous about these are things that you feel like you need to take care of yourself To make sure that you're safe to make sure you have your own identity They say give them to me and let me do what I do best But go to say test me out on this one The only time in scripture God invites people to do that is to say I want you to see what happens when you trust me with your Abundance and with your generosity God invites us to come over to that true way So what I want to do for a moment is I want to share with you some really big wins that we have to celebrate is we finish up This life is a church as we reflect on the abundance that God has given us so right now currently this year We have a hundred and fifty three active adults in our church. You can ask the staff around the board We define that number pretty aggressively.
There's probably 40 people who are part of this community We don't call active adults, but what's wild is that is more active adults than we had quarter one of twenty twenty pre-pandemic now There our church is larger and our church is stronger than it was before the coronavirus We've had 50 students overall attend a student ministry function of the church two years ago We didn't have a student ministry we struggled for years to have that No, Jack and Madeleine worked really really hard to make that happen We've had over 50 students this year come apart that what's wild is What a lot of people that talk about church health look at is they say if 10% of your Sunday morning attendance is students Then you have a healthy ministry going this is pre-pandemic statistics right now in the last six weeks our student ministry prizes 20% We've got a stronger and a larger student ministry than we should have for a church I just because you have invested and gave and people have worked really hard to make this happen There's 70 people in our church have attended and been part of one of our discipleship groups or a discipleship event this year Our prayer room ministry which Jack Lockby has led has gone over fantastic We have an advent prayer room this coming up the first week in December I really want to encourage you to do that but over half of our church this year has been involved and active in discipleship stuff 67 people have served through Foundry kids through our welcome ministry or through worship ministry issue and this number actually it skews low Because there's things and there's activities and events where people serve that we've not been able to track just yet But over 50% of our church is actively serving right now We've also had 81 different kids attend Foundry kids this year. Okay brought this up earlier We're not met in the middle of a heavy revamp of that ministry But we still have on a low Sunday at least 10% of our average attendance is back with Foundry kids that is a pre-pandemic number We're full folks say this is important to celebrate We've had multiple things happen over the last couple years of living in this in between space And what we have seen is that we have thrived and we have grown through it This last year we had 67 different households giving towards our vision and mission as the church and this is kind of wild I had a feeling this was coming and it finally happened. So as of last week our General Fund which is what we which is what how we pay for 95% of our ministry the church covers payroll it covers our bills its facility maintenance It's a mortgage payment on this building I said it's 95% of the money that we have at this church goes to our general fund as of last weekend We have taken in every bit of money in the general fund is we did an all 12 months of 2020 So our giving increased essentially two months this year We've got some giving things that it's not challenges We've got some giving hurdles to jump over the next few months But every single one of them is related to growth not a single one of them is related to any sort of a deficit It's all related to as we grow We need to make sure every level of our church is keeping up with our growth because what you've seen is in the middle of this in between Our core identity as a church has grown has become stronger and has been really well-defined And what I want to do is I want to share with you the only deficit that I think we need to be aware of and watch out for And it's a deficit really of the cultural moment we are in right now But I told you earlier that we have a hundred and fifty three active adults in the church That's number matters for a lot of reason but before the pandemic on On any given Sunday our attendance in this room during big church was typically 80% of our active adults now I went to rapids parish Maggie she teaches mass in high school She would hated me in high school my math skills are horrible So I'm gonna change these numbers to make them easier for people to understand even like me So what that means is prepandemic if we had a hundred active adults we would have 80 adults in worship That statistics sat with foundry for years But over the last nine months since we've come back from our second shutdown since we've been in this building that statistic has almost always stuck at around 50% so what that means is on any given Sunday at Foundry we see about half of our folks here What's a little bit more troubling is me and the staff sat down about a month ago and we kind of lined out Okay, these are the folks that we feel like we see in church every single Sunday We had about 50 people I'm about told you we have a hundred and fifty three active adults in the church and about another thirty or forty that are here But are not considered active our average worship attendance right now in this room is about 80 people And so it takes over a hundred almost a hundred and twenty five people to make up 20 to 30 people here on Sunday morning Friends our biggest deficit that we have in the church right now is we need people to be here serving on Sunday mornings Because it takes 25 folks to do what we need to do well We feel we've been called to do well We need people to do that we cannot be the church We thought God has called us to be and a lot of it's just a fact that because of the coronavirus our worship attendance frequency has changed a lot If there's one thing that we need to be attentive of right now as a church as we talk about our generosity Not just the finances but of our of our time of the things that we're good at that's the thing that I feel like we have to put right in front of It's right now, but I'm not worried about it I'm gonna tell you a really cool story I've been sitting on for a year almost about why I'm not worried about it what this is This is the story of faithfulness inside of this community No, it's all right to have things were worried But it's even better than that to realize where God has always been faithful and why we shouldn't be worried about such things So the land that we're sitting on right now here right now this land was paid for with cash The parking lot that's out there the asphalt lot the first version of the old gravel lot that was paid for it with cash The building slab the concrete of this building was paid for with cash the red iron that framed up this whole building This was paid for it with cash The outside of this building the metal for the metal siding and stuff you see it was paid for in cash If you can't catch this by the road we were able to cash flow as a church a tremendous part of where we are right now And we built this bill We also had a loan from Mary and state bank that was gonna cover what we couldn't cash flow But overall this whole project probably cost us about a nine hundred thousand dollars And we were able to cash flow over half of that so last year is the building process is going on We get the point we need to start having bank money and so we're paying for things with bank money Brian West he built this building sitting right there Brian would submit a bill to be paid and we'd email the bank and say hey Pay this out of our loan money And that's how I went back and forth back and forth and and Brian had to spread sheet It was super valuable that let us know how much we paid and how much was estimated to be left of work and last summer Around July I started getting nervous Because we've never had money problems at the church We've always had we need no hand but I'm looking at this spreadsheet and stuff's not doing what it needs to be doing So I said something to Brian about it. Hey, don't worry about it.
It's not gonna be a big deal. I was like, okay, okay I'm all right We get to we get to September and we look at things and we got the end of our bank money We had no more loan They would loan us X amount of money and we had spent all that money and I'm looking at this cost estimate Still coming up and it's about a hundred and ten thousand dollars and we had sixty five thousand dollars in the bank of our cash And so I'm starting to get nervous get what worried here the boards aware of this mother a leader's aware of it And we know Dwight Moody says that you suppose to work like there's no such thing as prayer and pray like there's no such thing as work And starting in mid-September with sixty five thousand dollars of cash left what we needed a hundred and ten thousand dollars We started praying we started working and we were making phone calls We were sending out emails to make sure folks knew that the capital campaign was ending that if they had a pledge that hadn't been fulfilled Jet that this was the time to send it in we started reaching out to folks who weren't part of this process and we were doing every single Thing we could to try to get that money together. We would need to be able to step into this space Clear news is going on going on going on and I got a phone call from Brian early November And we had had the bank had done something kind of funny at the end of the spring beginning of the summer that had gotten sorted out And Brian called and said hey, I need you to send me From your records every single cent you've paid me and so I send him that list and he calls back So I got to do some more number crunching But I think that that weird thing that happened in the bank something really nice might work out in y'all's favor So at this point in time we had sixty five thousand dollars of money in the bank and we had begun raising and cash flowing about We had about forty forty five. We weren't there yet.
We were getting close So a couple weeks later, Brian calls me says hey I've got the last bill this will be the last bit of money that y'all owe me that we were done the bank had a mistake This is gonna be a little bit better than you thought. So remember sixty five thousand dollars in the bank We'd raised about forty thousand Brian's last bill came in actually and pulled it up this morning to make sure Brian's last bill for this building was sixty four thousand eight hundred dollars It was the money we had in September When we were nervous and started praying actually in my journal every morning one of the things I do is if I wake up With a song in my head I write it down and I'll pull out my old journal from back Then this is the day that Brian gave me the phone call that morning I woke up with old him too, so sweet to trust in Jesus in my head I see what I wrote that morning. It was about faithfulness and thankfulness and I had a line drawn It says p.m And here I am writing down all the stuff that happened on phone calls and emails that day and what I love about that story y'all is When you say we need things there's a couple ways that can happen What that way showed us was every single thing we needed we already had inside of us To me that is stronger. That's what you say.
You're praying from if you're praying for money You're thinking it's gonna be like a Walmart sack with hundred dollar bills on your front door And the thing we were praying for and thing we were working for was already inside of us It was part of our identity and it was us exercising spiritual faithfulness Unlocked what we need and what that also unlocked was though another level of generosity his friends part of our plan That how to do this in a healthy way was gonna be moving into this building where it looked a lot a lot skimpier than it does right now It was like let's just move all the portable equipment here. Let's not have a stage It was gonna we're gonna get in here But we're gonna get in here barely and technically and then all of that the working side of that parade gave us was a large amount of money Rick I told you the stage could be a lot nicer. We thought the stage was gonna have to be that's why We did God does what he needs to do with what's already inside of us It's about us taking in that posture and openness of generosity and that's what it takes to unlock these things God's generosity does not show up in bags on your front porch at night God's generosity shows up by unlocking the potential that we already have inside of us I think that story right there friends is a lot stronger than any other story that we can have so as we are here You know starting off on this journey this week of this month of talking about faithfulness and stewardship and finances That's what I want us to lead with it's like every single thing we need and we have needs But every single thing we need we already have inside of