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The following message is preached by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman entitled, "Let the Excitement Principle Work for You." The scripture reading of the morning is from the Gospel according to Luke, the twelfth chapter. I begin at the verse numbered 16. "And Jesus told them a

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parable saying, 'The land of a rich man brought forth plentifully.' And he thought to himself, 'What shall I do? For I have nowhere to store my crops.' And he said, 'I will do this. I will pull down my barns and build larger ones. And there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, 'So you have ample

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goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.' But God said to him, 'Fool, this night your soul is required of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be? So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.'" And may God bless to us and to our understanding this

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reading from his Word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Robert Fulgham tells of sitting in the Hong Kong International Airport. A young American girl was seated beside him. She had been traveling for quite some time

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and her knapsack was full of souvenirs and she was ready for home cooking. But she was weeping, crying. He described her as a "monsoon of misery." It seems that she had lost her ticket. For three hours she sat there and went through her purse and bags and packages trying to find the tickets and becoming progressively more

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discouraged. A couple from Chicago invited her to join them for lunch and she accepted. And when she got up to go with them, she turned to pick up her purse and let out a scream, for there was her ticket. She had been sitting on it for three hours. Now there's a very real sense in which life is a journey and God

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gives us tickets. He gives us procedures. He gives us directions. He gives us principles to use in the making of that journey. If we use the tickets that he provides, then we have a great trip. If we sit on them, then we never really get off the ground. The question I asked this morning is this, "Why is it that so many

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miss the exciting journey which life is to be?" And the answer which I submit is this, "They spend their time sitting on their tickets." Now our text for this morning is one of God's tickets for an exciting life. "Bring ye," he says, "the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there might be food in my house, and put

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me to the test, if I will not open to you the windows of heaven and pour out an overflowing blessing." What this ticket of truth says is this, that if one tithes, that is, if one gives one-tenth of one's income to the work of the Lord, then one will have an exciting, overflowingly blessed life. Now please understand that

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the use of this ticket of tithing does not automatically guarantee wealth. There are some people who mistakenly believe that if you tithe, that you will be blessed with much more than the tithe as a return from God. They look upon tithing as a kind of no-risk, high-yield investment. But that is not what the

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Scriptures say. These people are quite mistaken, and it's not hard to understand why they are mistaken. If they've observed very many tithers, they have observed the fact that tithers are richly blessed of God, and many times those blessings come in very tangible terms. I mean, you only have to think of

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some of the great fortunes of America. Colgate, for example, in his toothpaste; Rockefeller and Standard Oil; H.J. Hines in his pickles; Crowell, who founded the Quaker Oats Company; Hyde, who established the Mentholatum Company; Kraft, who started the Cheese Company with his name; Mr. Baldwin, who had the

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great Baldwin Locomotive Works; Hershey, who makes the little Hershey Buds; Dewey Lockman, the head of the great Lockman Foundation; Proctor of Proctor and Gamble. All of these people were tithers, and when you know the stories of these people, and when you see the fact that God always sees to it that tithers have

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enough, well then it's easy to make the mistake of thinking that tithing is something that you do in order to be financially blessed by God. But that is not what the Scriptures say. The Scriptures say, "Bring ye the tithe into the storehouse, that there might be food in my house, and put me to the test, if I

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will not open to you the windows of heaven and pour you out an overflowing blessing." But it does not say that that overflowing blessing is necessarily going to be a financial one. What the verse suggests is that life is a science, and as in all sciences there are certain laws to be observed. Now if you

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obey those laws, then your scientific research is going to succeed. If you disobey those laws, then your research is going to fail. Now God says, "Tithing is one of the laws that I have built into the human experience. If you do it, you are going to know an exciting, blessed life." But in what ways does this blessing

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come if it doesn't come exclusively in financial terms? Well, one thing that one discovers in tithing is the excitement of blessing God. I have a girlfriend and she's about nine years old, and I first came to know her when she was four. And I really love this little girl, and I was visiting in her home some three years

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ago now, and she loves marshmallows. So I took a box of chocolate-covered marshmallows for her, and she was delighted, and she opened the box, and she said, "Thank you," as most little girls would do. But then most little girls would disappear into another room and emerge a little later with a half-empty

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box and chocolate all over their faces. But not this young lady. She said, "Here, you have the first marshmallow." I said, "Oh no, I brought these to you as a gift." She said, "I know it's a gift, but you must have the first marshmallow." Well, I already knew she was a wonderful child, but this confirmed it in my mind

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absolutely. And you see, this is exactly what a tither does. A tither is a woman who receives gifts from God, who says, "Thank you," and then immediately says, "And here, you, please take the first piece, the first marshmallow, the first tenth." Now just as I was delighted by what that little girl did, so God is delighted and

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blessed by those who tithe. I mean, when you love someone, you want to bless them. The person who loves God echoes Scripture, "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits." And when God is so blessed by people, there is in him a desire to bless them. That's not a very hard principle to understand, is it? You

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know, I've heard all kinds of excuses used by people to justify their not tithing. "I don't make much money," they say, "yet I know people who don't make much money and tithe." Or they say, "I am in debt, but I know people who are in debt and tithe." Or they say, "I barely get by as it is, but I know people who barely

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get by as it is, and yet who tithe." Comments like that are excuses. We all recognize them to be excuses. So what leads us to think that God doesn't see them for what they are? Excuses. God does not bless sanctified stinginess. He doesn't bless pious parsimony. He's not interested in loving kindness toward

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those who are caught up in the greed house effect, or of whom you can say, "When it gets to them, the buck stops there and stays there." That is not the kind of person who blesses God, and that is not the kind of person whom God blesses in return. As you know, we are focusing in our church this year on the Christian

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discipline of prayer, and I will be preaching on it each month. And I've been doing a lot of studying, and I've gone way back to the early centuries of the church. I studied the prayer life of Avigrius Punctus from the fourth century, one of the Desert Fathers, and of Bonaventure from the 13th century, and of

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Luther and Calvin from the 16th century, and of St. Francis Dessalet from the 17th century, and Simone Weil and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin from the 20th century. And what you discover in every one of these great prayers is the same elemental principles. Prayer, when it is real, begins with the lips, but it

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captures the mind, and it is ultimately an expression of the heart. Prayer is loving to bless God, so tithing, you see, is an expression of prayer, and it gladdens God's heart. Across the course of my life, I've done a number of things that have embarrassed my parents, and I've also done some things that they

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have enjoyed and felt good about. It's one of those latter kind of things that I want to talk about now. And I'm not going to bring my mother into this story because she's here and she'd be embarrassed if I brought her in, so let me use an example that just concerns my father. It happened to my dad and I in a

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hole in Egypt. That's literally true. I took my mother and my father with me on a trip to Egypt and Jordan and Israel. This was some years ago now. And one afternoon we flew down to the Valley of the Kings, and we were visiting the tombs of some of the Pharaohs. And at last we came to the smallest of all of the known

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tombs, but also the best known of all of the tombs, and I refer of course to the tomb of the boy Pharaoh Tutankhamun. It's only about 30 feet deep, consists of just two rooms. We went down the steps with our guide into this tomb and we stood there looking down on the golden sarcophagus of the young Pharaoh. And as

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I looked over at my dad, I saw a marvelous look on his face. You see, the tomb of King Tut was found by Carter in 1922. You remember all of the romance that was connected with it, the so-called legend of Lord Carnarvon and all the rest. And as a young man, he got very much caught up in this, very, very

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interested in it. And I could remember he had a scrapbook in which there were pictures of Tut's tomb, and there were various times across my life as a young man when he told myself and my brother about King Tut. And now here we were, standing in the tomb in that mysterious place where all of these events had

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transpired. What he had dreamed about was real in front of him. What he had envisioned was there. The romance of the whole thing was being enjoyed to the full by him, and you could see that joy on his face. And he walked over and he shook my hand, and my heart fairly exploded within me that I had been able

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to bring my dad to that place and to show him that which he had so long wondered if he ever would see. It's a tremendous thing when you can bless someone that you love, and it's exactly that that we do when we tithe. We bless the God we love, and that brings excitement and power into your life. But

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there's another excitement that comes with tithing, and that's the excitement of blessing the Church. Now I'll admit that when I talk about the Church, I'm not very objective. I mean, I was baptized in the Church, I grew up in the Church, I was educated in the Church's schools, I met Jesus Christ through the ministry of

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the Church. Corporations pollute our planet and also our minds. Government is corrupt, the media lies, the entertainment industry is still filthy and perverse, but I still know that I can walk past any church in the land, and the chances are overwhelmingly so that if I go in and talk to the man or woman of

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God who labors in Christ's name there, that person will tell me the truth. Oh yes, the Church has erred from time to time, but the Church has taken stands when nobody else would stand, and it's the Church's art that blesses my life, and it's the Church that gave me the Bible. It was the Church that wrote it, it

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was the Church that collected it, it was the Church that protected it, it was the Church that bled for it and died over it in order that I might have that Word of God to read every morning and every evening of my life. The Church is not perfect, but the Church is the most perfect organism on the face of the

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earth, and to bless the Church thrills me. That's the reason our passage says, "Bring ye the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there might be food in my house," that is, that the Church might be blessed. If you use this ticket, it brings excitement and dynamic stewardship into your life. Now of course

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not everyone agrees with me when I say this. As a matter of fact, we Presbyterians constitute today the richest Christian denomination in the world. Studies have been done of that, and as Presbyterians we control, own and control, more wealth than any other denomination on the face of the earth

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today, some of them much larger than ours, but we still have the most bucks. And in large measure that's because of the emphasis on hard work, industry, and frugality which are basic to Presbyterianism. But the Church also teaches about tithing, yet there are many denominations whose net assets are far

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below ours, and yet who give five times as much money to their church each year as Presbyterians do. In our own congregation, for example, the average gift per member per year is $845. Now if that is a tithe, then the majority of the people in our congregation should be on food stamps. Now why is it that so many

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of our people do not tithe? Well, the most obvious reason of course is lack of faith. Malachi writes here in our passage, "Bring ye the whole tithe into the storehouse and put me to the test," and they're unwilling to put God to the test. They're unwilling to run the risk of adventuring with God in tithing. Or these

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people disagree with Jesus when he said in Luke 6, "If you sow a little, you will reap a little. If you sow much, you will reap much." Or these people pay no attention to what Paul says in 2nd Corinthians 9 when he says, "God loves a certain kind of lover or giver." What kind? God loves a cheerful giver. The biblical

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word is actually "hilarious." God loves a hilarious giver. So a lot of people don't tithe simply because they lack the faith. But I think there are also a lot of people who do not tithe because they do not see the progress in the church's ministry that they would like to see. And you see, it's hard to respond to that

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because the kind of things in which the church is engaged, you can't put very well on a chart on a wall. I read early this last week a claim by a young man involved in ministry who said that as the result of his ministry this last summer that there were a hundred souls who had made decisions for Christ. Now of

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course that's a very obtuse statement theologically. It shows theological unsophistication. It's statistically non-verifiable. There's no way you could ever prove that. And it also has about it a bit of the arrogant. You know, not even Billy Graham, the greatest evangelist of the 20th century and one of the greatest

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evangelists of all times, says that all the people who come forward have made decisions for Christ. Why? Because you don't know that when someone makes that initial act of commitment. Jesus says "It's by their fruit ye shall know them." And you don't start seeing fruits the moment that the seed is popped into the

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ground. It takes a while to determine whether that commitment is real or not. And that's the way it is with all of the church's ministry. I think of our Boys Club and of our Girls Club and of our junior and senior high youth groups. We had youngsters involved in those programs who live in an X-rated world.

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Now when most of us were young, we had teachers who were full of joy and peace and who were determined that we would learn and we lived in a well-ordered clean society. Many of the youngsters who are in our Boys Club and our Girls Club and our youth groups, their principal teachers in the world are fear and pain

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and violence and poverty and disease and drugs. Kids like to talk about monsters, you know? That's the reason Halloween is popular with them and they like these scary movies and things of the like. A lot of the kids who come to these programs I've mentioned confront very real monsters every day of their lives.

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And we stand alone in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh and try to have a ministry to them to bring some light into their shadows. We only put the merest pittance from our budget into those ministries because that's all we have. But the people who lead those ministries, even though they can't hang a

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chart on the wall, go ahead with what they're doing because they are filled with hope, they are faithful and confident in Jesus Christ, and they are working as hard as they can to advance his kingdom. And that's the excitement that comes when you bless the church. You know, there's a story that I've heard at

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least a hundred times in my life about a strongman in the circus who used to finish his act by taking an orange in one hand and he would squeeze that orange. And then when he had squeezed all the juice out of it, he would issue a challenge to the audience. "If there's anyone here who can come up and squeeze

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one more drop out of this orange than I have done with my one hand, I'll give them $100." No one ever took up the challenge till one night one man came up. He didn't look very athletic, he was a rather diminutive fellow, and he came over while the audience laughed and the strongman put the shriveled rind of this

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orange into this little fellow's hand and he took it with one hand and the strongman said "You can use two hands if you want to." He took it in just one hand and he squeezed it and everybody was watching and one drop of juice fell to the stage and everybody broke into applause, including the strongman. And he

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handed the fellow a hundred dollar bill and he said to him "What's your name?" and the fellow told him and then he said "And where did you develop your fistic power?" And the young man said "Oh that's easy, I'm the treasurer in a Presbyterian church."

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You know, every time I've heard that story people laugh and I think it's very sad because what it says is that there are people who love little and so they give little and there's nothing to laugh about in that. We're not seeking the sympathy of our people, we want their minds, their muscles, and their money.

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That is what blesses the church and that is what makes for exciting stewardship. I have one last thing to say and that is that when you tithe you also have the excitement of blessing yourself. Now in a sense I've already said this, my first point was that you know the excitement of blessing God and when God is blessed

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he blessed in return. He says that in this passage, "Bring ye the tithe and I will pour out an overflowing blessing." God says that and he doesn't lie. And in the second point I said "Bless the church, that is tithe and make sure there is food in God's house and God in turn will bless that. I will pour out overflowing

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blessings," he says. That's God's Word and he does not lie. Jesus says "Where your treasure is there will your heart be also." So what's being said here is nothing other than this, that when you are a tither your heart is with God and that blesses your heart. So if there's no other reason why you should tithe, tithe

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for that reason. I have a minister acquaintance who was traveling on a train and they seated him in the dining car across from a married couple and the woman in this couple complained about everything. The car was too drafty, the silverware wasn't clean, the grapefruit was too bitter, and she went on and on

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until finally her husband said to my minister acquaintance, "Don't mind my wife, she's really a very pleasant person and very clever as a matter of fact. She's in the manufacturing business." And the minister said, "And what does she manufacture?" And her husband replied, "Why she manufactures her own unhappiness." And

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a lot of people do that. If there's anything I've learned in the ministry it's this, you're going to be exactly as happy in life as you really want to be. If you pay out that ticket of the tithe, you're going to have enough for the living of life, you're going to be energized by the blessings of God, and

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you're going to have dynamic excitement moving through you. Now if there's no other reason to tithe than that, shouldn't that be enough? Like that little sign that was on the wall by my bed in my hotel room in New York this last summer, it said, "Do not smoke in bed. The ashes you spill may be your own."

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Let me make a proposition to you. There are two and a half months exactly left in 1989. I invite you to tithe for two and a half months, to give one-tenth of what you earn to the glory of God for just two and a half months. Now if you're scared to do it all the way, then do it with what's left over after you paid

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your taxes. That's not the way it's held up in the scriptures, but if you're too frightened for that, then do it with what's left after taxes. And if you're still scared, then include in your tithe everything you give for all other charities, like the United Fund and the Heart Fund and all the other things that

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you support with atheists and other non-believers. Go ahead and take that all out too, but when you're done make sure that one-tenth of your giving goes to the church. I'm inviting you to put God to the test. That's exactly what he says here. "Bring ye the tithe into

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the storehouse, that there might be food in my house, and thereby put me to the test, if I will not open to you the windows of heaven and pour you out an overflowing blessing." You know, I know a fellow who's a millionaire who was visiting in a home one night to see the man who lived there about a certain

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business proposition. And he was waiting in the living room for this man to come in from the backyard to meet with him. And while he was sitting there in the living room, this man, this little four-year-old boy, came running through the living room and he stopped. And he looked at my friend and he said, "Hi." And

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my friend said, "Hi." And the little boy said, "My daddy says you're a millionaire. Is that true?" And my friend said, "Yes, that's true. I am a millionaire." And the little boy said, "My daddy said you're a self-made man. Is that true?" And my friend looked at him and said, "Yes, that's true too. I'm a self-made man." And the little

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boy looked at him very, very intently, from the top of his head to his feet, and then he said, "Well, if you're a self-made man, then why in the world did you make yourself as you did?" And with that, he ran out of the room. Why do you manufacture your own unhappiness? Why are you not making of yourself everything

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that you can be? Jesus said, "It is better to give than to receive." Don't go through life sitting on your ticket. Let the excitement principle work in you. Let us pray. Our Father, no word that any preacher utters is a word of thine unless thou

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dost make it so. It's a matter of wind and tongue and nothing more unless you anoint it with your Holy Spirit. If you will, in great mercy, anoint these words offered to you in Jesus' name and make them by your Spirit, your own, so that lives are made as exciting as they

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can and ought to be. Amen.