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On Wednesday, August 15, our church will vote upon the 2018/2019 ministry budget. You will find a copy of this in several locations throughout our facility. A budget allows the ministries of our church to most efficiently exist while also maintaining the proper levels of accountability to the church membership. Several weeks have been spent by the leadership of the church in carefully and prayerfully piecing this document together. Each line item in the budget represents God’s call upon us to share the gospel of Jesus in unique and varied ways so that we might win as many as possible to Christ. However, the budget is in reality only a piece of paper which represents the manner in which God will provide through the faithfulness of His people. Some in the church have mistakenly divided faith from finances. The following story describes how easily this can take place.
There is a story told about Ivan the Great who ruled Russia as Czar in the 15th century. He was a warrior, a fighter, and a conqueror of kingdoms. The Soviet Union as we knew it a few years ago was basically put into place by Ivan the Great.
Ivan was so busy doing battle that some of his comrades became concerned because he hadn't taken time to get married and have a family. They came to him and said “You've got to get married because you've got to have an heir to the throne.” But Ivan said “I want to do battle and to conquer more territory, you go find a wife for me.” So they did.
Ivan's men found a wife for him from the daughter of the king of Greece, a beautiful girl. They said to Ivan, “We found a wife for you, but there's one problem.” “What's that?” he asked. “If you're going to marry her, you have to be Greek Orthodox,” they said. Ivan the Great said, “Well, if you think she'd make a good wife for me, that's no problem, I could be Greek Orthodox.”
The king of Greece was thrilled with this because it meant that Ivan wasn't going to invade his territory. So the Greeks sent tutors to Russia to tutor Ivan and 500 of his elite soldiers, everyone a great warrior. The soldiers required tutoring because Ivan said, “If I'm going to be Greek Orthodox, they're going to be Greek Orthodox.”
They tutored all these men in the Greek Orthodox faith and finally Ivan and the soldiers went down to Greece for the wedding. But before the marriage they had to be baptized into the Greek Orthodox church. It was an incredible sight as thousands of people came to watch Ivan the Great and his 500 soldiers all wade into the water at one time to be baptized by immersion into their new church.
Five hundred soldiers with full armor and five hundred Greek Orthodox priests were standing in the blue water of the Mediterranean Sea for the baptism, when all of a sudden the king of Greece said, “We've got a problem.” The problem was that in the Greek Orthodox church you could not be a warrior and a member of the church at the same time.
So they held a hastily-called diplomatic meeting in the water to ask, "How are we going to work this out?" They came up with a simple answer. Just before the priests immersed the soldiers, each man took out his sword, held it high above the water, and allowed the priest to baptize everything but his sword arm. This came to be known as “the unbaptized arm.”
There are many Christians today who have unbaptized checkbooks. They have dedicated every part of their life to God except their money. As someone has said, "The last thing to be converted is our pocketbook."
Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). May our hearts belong fully to Christ as we commit to sacrificially give to see His Kingdom come in and through our church.
Jason