Some of you are traveling light today. You left your billfold home. You know this is the time of the year pickpockets come to church and try to get your money. And the worst of them is the preacher, some say. It’s stewardship season. Shall we pause for a collective YIPPEE? But I may surprise some of you today. You generally hear me telling you about how you ought to give more. And you should, most of you. But today you are also going to hear me tell you that you ought to save more.

There are two sides to stewardship: taking care of what you have been given, and giving with care of what you have. Both sides are critical. If you don’t take care of what is in your care, you fail the test of stewardship, and you have little to give away anyway. If you don’t take care of the poor and give away to the mission of the gospel in the world, you fail the test of stewardship and have little to receive in spiritual blessings.

Farming is a key image for stewardship in the Bible. And even though most of us city folk have little exposure to the farming life nowadays, the principles are the same no matter what business you are in. The one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, St. Paul says. And the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.

Farming involves both sowing and reaping, both seeding the field and gathering the harvest, both doing the work that leads to produce and doing what you may with what you have produced. This week and next we will look at this from both sides. Farmers use their minds and hearts together in their stewardship, and so must Christian disciples. Sowers cannot just toss their seed to the wind and expect a harvest, but neither can they control the outcome of their labors by their work. They have to trust the Lord of the harvest that what they sow in seed they will reap in grain.

The images I have in mind this morning are two Van Gogh paintings. The reproduction in your order of worship is of two peasant women, bent over their shovels, digging in a field of snow. The other painting you will get next week. Take a moment and look at those two women in the painting. I have imagined them as sisters. And I have even named them, since as a preacher I like to make up stories. One of them I have called Prudence, and the other Hilary. Prudence and Hilary work side by side as sowing sisters. They need each other, just as we need both of the virtues their names represent to us.

Prudence is one of the four cardinal virtues, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, along with justice, fortitude, and temperance. Prudence represents right reason applied to action. Hilary is the name that comes from our text today, in which Paul says that God loves a cheerful giver. The word for cheerful in the Greek is hilaron, from which we get the name Hilary (please note I have spelled it with one l so as not to politicize the sermon). Prudence and Hilary need each other to form the proper degree of care. Left on her own, Prudence would be too careful and no fun at all—she would be a prude, don’t you know?! Left on her own, Hilary would be so carefree that she might be careless. Well, Hilary next week. Prudence today.

I have a basic premise in stewardship that assumes the best of you and goes like this: Many of you would be better givers if you had more to give. For some the problem is that you have too little to begin with. Poverty is a real, not an imagined, problem. But many Christians have another problem. They know they should be more generous and give at least the biblical standard of a tithe—that is, ten percent of their gross income—to the Lord. But many of those same people have done such a poor job of managing their resources that when it comes time to give, the Lord stands at the end of the line of creditors and goes away empty-handed month after month. It’s not that anyone wakes up in the morning and says, You know, today I am going to spend beyond my limits and make sure I have nothing left over to give to the work of the Lord as a sign of my gratitude. It turns out that way anyway, though, because you have not awakened with the thought of how you can be more thoughtful about your money. If that describes you, you lack a measure of prudence.

Listen again to what Paul says: Each of you must give as you have made up your mind. … In other words, you have to use your mind in your giving. But if you are going to do that, you have to use your mind in your spending and saving, too, in order that you have something to give.

Some of you are going to run in the White Rock marathon in a few weeks, and others of us will venture only as far as the three- or eight-mile Turkey Trot. Either way, you have to be prudent in preparation. You cannot go for a long run the day before the race and starve your body of food in order to carry less weight. If you do that, you will have nothing in the tank on race day. You will be spent, so to speak, because you haven’t held anything back for the big event ahead.

Likewise, too many of us imprudently spend our money without thinking about tomorrow. We fail to save for later. And the debt we accrue in so doing robs us of what we would otherwise like to do.

The Morning News ran a story last Monday about the Martin family from Midlothian . They are all too typical of Americans: they have an annual family income of $70,000 and a net worth of negative $14,941. They rent a house, drive newer cars than they should, and pay for premium channels on their satellite TV service. They deny themselves little, but they have little to show for their labors. The debt piles up, and they get only further and further behind. They could use a large dose of prudence. [Nov. 7, 2005:1D.]

Prudence involves discipline. You have to do the little things at the right time if you are to expect big things at a later time.

Those two peasant women digging in a field of snow know that some things need doing by way of preparation, whether the weather is favorable or not. A field needs cultivating. You have to break up the ground and make rows and weed and fertilize it. You must take care of the soil if you expect a harvest. What’s more, before there were feed stores to buy seed, you had to take a portion of your harvest from the previous year and save some of it to make seed for the next year. If you eat your seed corn, as they say, you will have nothing but a bare field the following year.

Well, some of you are eating your seed corn. You overspend on yourself and your family, and the day is coming when the credit dries up and you will be a bank slave. You simply must, right now, today—not tomorrow, today—make up your mind to change that. Get out of debt. Period. As a general rule, you should not carry debt on depreciating items. Ideally, that means only housing debt. Most people cannot buy cars without going into debt, but you can minimize that debt by not buying new cars. You simply must spend less than you take in. It is that simple.

If we are going to preach prudence to you in your personal affairs, you have a right to expect prudence in the church’s financial affairs. And that is one reason we recently put off a big building program. We knew that the cost was beyond our ability to live to within our means and still do that kind of missions work in the world we feel called to do. We may yet be able to move ahead with that plan some day, but we will not do so unless and until we think it prudent.

Now, some of you are cheering that decision, because you are fiscal conservatives politically. But are you that prudent personally? A couple of month ago The Morning News did a three-part series on Collin County called “The Price of Prosperity.” What they found was ironic: one of the richest areas in the , one of the “reddest” counties in the Republic. A place where they are always calling on government to make the tough choices to limit spending and keep taxes low so as not to hand out money to imprudent poor people who will not be accountable for it is the same county with enormous personal bankruptcy rates, huge credit card debt, and runaway personal spending. Go figure.

You’ve got to put yourself on a diet and stick to it. A financial diet is called a budget. It is a spending plan, just like a food budget is an eating plan. You can splurge once in a while, but you can’t splurge every day and expect to be in any kind of shape but miserable. Simple things go a long way. Pay off your credit card bill in full at the end of the month. Need less. Don’t buy things for status; buy for value. Little things.

If you ever want to get a hold on your financial life, you have to be prudent. And that involves taking an honest assessment of where you are and making a plan from there. Some pretend to be rich, yet have nothing, the proverb says; while others pretend to be poor yet have great wealth. If you are in the former category, get to work getting your house in order.
And if you are in the latter category, pretending to be poor, you need to realize that the reason you have wealth is to share it, not hoard it. Whether you are rich or poor or in between, prudence will help you do with your resources what will honor God and bless the world.

We are not giving out pledge cards this year, but we are giving you something to wor k w ith this year that is only for you. Make up your own mind about your giving, not reluctantly or under compulsion. Decide what you will do this next year and stick to it. The bookmar k w ill be a reminder. Stick it in your Bible. And if it’s there, and you open it enough, you ought to be able to stick to it.

Oseola McCarty is Ted Turner’s heroine. You wouldn’t think they would go together, but in 1998 the elderly, never-married Hattiesburg laundry woman gave her life savings of $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi . She had lived a simple life, always below her meager means. She gathered it little by little, as the proverb says. She believed in saving and doing good things that needed doing. When arthritis made her retire after 70 years of daily washing, she thought about how her life could matter more. I think the way we live matters, she said, not just for now but for always. There is an eternal side to everything you do. Well, Miss McCarty was able to do what she did because she lived prudently all her life. Her gift has been matched by $350,000 from others, and the money goes to scholarships.

That same year CNN founder and philanthropist Ted Turner gave a billion dollars to the United Nations to combat poverty and disease among children of the world. And yet he calls Miss McCarty his model, because, he said, She gave away her entire life savings. I just gave away one third—I’ve still got $2 billion left. She’s the one who really deserves the credit. [Southern Living (February 1998): 32-33.]

Well, now, wouldn’t it be nice if you were on either side of that debate about who was more generous? It can happen only if you will learn to save prudently and give hilariously.
To be continued …