Thomas J Parlette
Another Trap
Matthew 22: 15-22
10/18/2020
Leadership is an important topic in today’s world. You know, there is a professor from University College London who has written many books on personality and leadership. And he has some strong views concerning incompetent leaders. He says incompetent leaders create a toxic culture that drags everybody in their sphere of influence down. And he claims that the number one trait that incompetent leaders possess is arrogance. According to this professor’s studies and experience, an arrogant leader is a toxic leader.
This professor put together a simple, but amusing, 10 question quiz to measure a leader’s level of arrogance. Here are some of the questions he asks:
“Do you have a special gift for playing office politics?”
“Are you blessed with a natural charisma?”
And this one, my favorite, “Are you just too talented to fake humility?”(1)
If you answer yes to too many of these questions – you might be a bit arrogant.
In our passage for today, the Pharisees join forces with the Herodians, and they try to make Jesus look like an incompetent leader. They lay yet another trap for Jesus by asking him a loaded question – “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?”
The Pharisees were sure that they had Jesus cornered. Whichever way he answered, he was going to make somebody angry. The Romans demanded heavy taxes from the Jewish people while at the same time oppressing them. Zealous Jews believed that paying taxes to Rome was not only a burden on them, it was also dishonoring God because they believed they owed their ultimate allegiance to God – not Caesar. If Jesus wanted to make himself popular with the Jewish people, he had only to say it was against God’s law to pay taxes to Caesar. However, if he did that, advocated in public against paying taxes, well the Romans would not be pleased.
Nobody likes paying taxes. And to be honest, the Pharisees didn’t really care about Jesus’ opinion – they only cared about ruining his popularity with the people. Jesus, of course, didn’t care about his popularity or even his safety. He cared about only one thing – doing the work of God. So Jesus didn’t have to struggle with his answer. He said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Just as some people resent paying taxes, some people would rather not give God the things that are God’s.
Pastor Brian Kluth tells of a friend’s four-year-old daughter, Amanda, who was determined not to put her quarter in the offering plate one Sunday. Amanda’s parents were trying to teach her to be a faithful and cheerful giver. But Amanda wasn’t having any of it. Her parents were embarrassed that they had to pry the quarter out of her little hand and drop it into the plate.
Later that afternoon, Amanda’s mom heard her playing on the backyard swing. Every time Amanda got the swing to it’s highest point on the swing set, she would shout at the sky, God, I want my quarter back! God, I want my quarter back!(2)
Some people are like Amanda – they would rather not give God that which is God’s.
Jesus wasn’t trying to pile extra stress on us when he pointed out our responsibility to both pay our taxes to the government and give to God’s work. He was trying to teach us an important spiritual principle – Giving is the ultimate sign that we trust God.
If you want to know what you really believe about God, examine your checkbook. Your level of giving toward God’s work matches your level of trust in God. Do you believe that, if you invest in God’s work, God will always provide for your needs? This where the rubber meets the road when it comes to faith. Do you trust God enough to give a portion of your resources to do God’s work?
Consider the story of Jerry and Muriel Caven. The Cavens had started numerous successful businesses over the years. As they reached retirement age, however, they realized that accumulating wealth was not what life was all about. They believed God was leading them to participate in a new venture. That venture was overseas Christian missions.
Instead of jealously protecting their retirement savings as most of us do, the Cavens decided to give away larger and larger portions of their income to God’s work. Jerry Caven says that their generosity was stoked by the realization that God was the true owner of all they had anyway. As he says, “Once we understood we were giving away not our money, but God’s money to God’s work, we had a peace and joy we never had back when we thought it was our money.”(3)
Trust in God leads to greater peace and joy.
Trusting in money and material things for our security or status or identity is a sure path to misery. Do you really want to put your trust in something you can lose? Trusting in material things leads to anxiety, fear, greed and conflict – all the qualities that are out of alignment with God’s will for our life. The path to joy lies in sharing with God in the work of the Kingdom.
God wants to save us from the empty, frustrating, meaningless insecurity that comes from putting our trust in material things. The life of greed is a bottomless pit. There is never enough to satisfy. But giving to the work of God gives our lives meaning and purpose.
And that brings us to the second thing Jesus was teaching us in this passage. First of all, giving is the ultimate sign that we trust God. And secondly, giving is the ultimate opportunity we have to impact the world.
Sometimes we look at giving money to God’s work, and we see a loss from our bank account – we see a minus sign on the balance sheet. And that’s where anxiety and greed kick in. But what if we looked at giving to God as an opportunity instead? Because our giving to God’s work is the greatest way to impact the world in a concrete way.
Pastor W.A. Criswell once told the story of a man who was asked, “What did you do yesterday.
And the man said that yesterday he taught a class in a church college. On Tuesday, he was down in the Rio Grande Valley working in a Vacation Bible School. On Wednesday, he was operating in a church hospital in Nigeria. On Thursday, he was teaching the Bible in the Amazon jungle. On Friday, he was building a church in the Philippines. On Saturday, he was preaching in Tokyo, Japan.
His friend stopped him – “You’re kidding me right? There’s no way you could do all that!”
And the man said, “But I do it every day. I make a pledge to my church and my money goes all over the world doing good in the name of Jesus.”(4)
It’s probably true that you may never physically go to Haiti to feed a starving child, or dig wells in Honduras, or provide after-school activities to needy kids in inner city Detroit. But through your giving, you can do all these things and more. Your money can fuel ministries that save lives all over the world.
You may be unsure about which ministries God is calling you to. You may be super-busy and not know how you can fit ministry into your schedule. You may not have much money and feel that your giving wouldn’t make an impact anyway – but you would be wrong. Truly every little bit helps. Through giving what you can to God, you can be in ministry all over the world. You can bring hope and resources and life and salvation to people everywhere – not because you have superhuman talents and a fat bank account, but simply because you trusted God and gave what you could.
In 2011, former University of Georgia football coach Mark Richt and his wife Katharyn, both devoted Christians, sold their second home – an eight room mansion worth almost 2 million dollars – so they could give more time and money to charities. Mark and Katharyn had been reading the book The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision.
The book created in them a passion to contribute to international missions. As Mark Richt said, “You know what? I don’t want to pour money into a home like that when I can use it for better things, for eternal things.”(5)
Most of us don’t have a 2 million dollar house to sell to give to missions, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t have the same joy that the Richts discovered. Every dollar we give to the work of God is an eternal investment in sharing life and hope.
Giving is the ultimate sign that we trust God. Giving is the ultimate opportunity to impact the world. And finally, Jesus is teaching us that giving is the ultimate pathway to joy. Every hard teaching of God results in a blessing for those who believe and obey. When Jesus taught, “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it,” he was teaching a profound and eternal truth. He was teaching us to live in faith rather than in fear.
Fear tells us that we need to maintain control of our lives because there isn’t enough to go around. Fear tells us that happiness is found in comfort and certainty. Fear is the little voice in our heads that says, “I’ll start giving to God’s work once I get a new job, or I pay off my car, or when the kids are grown.” But joy and peace and fulfillment are only found in following Christ and aligning our priorities with God’s will for our lives here and now. Today. Chances are that if you keep putting off making God first in your life, it will probably never happen.
When Johnny Jennings was 18 years old, he visited a children’s home associated with his church. He tells how moved he was when 3 little boys at the home came running up to him and begged to be adopted.
Johnny was too young to consider starting a family at the time. But he knew God was calling him to do something to help. So, at 18, he began collecting money to give to the children’s home. He would go around town collected cans and aluminum scraps, anything he could recycle. And he gave his recycling money to the home. This became his lifetime act of faithfulness.
That is why recently, at the age of 88, Johnny Jennings was honored by the state of Georgia for giving more than $400,000 to the Georgia Baptist Children’s Home through his recycling work. When asked why he dedicated his life to this mission, Jennings says, “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”(6)
Giving to God’s work is the surest way to maximize your impact and experience more joy in life. There is nothing else you can possibly spend your money on that can offer you a better return on your investment. But to experience that joy, you have to take the step of giving sacrificially to the work of God. So render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. But more importantly, render unto God the things that are God’s.
Your giving shows you trust God. Giving is the ultimate opportunity to impact the world. Giving is the also the ultimate pathway to joy.
So, in a few weeks, when you receive your pledge information from the church, I hope you will take advantage of an opportunity to give to God’s work.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. Dynamic Preaching, Vol. XXXVI, No. 4, p 13.
2. Ibid… p14.
3. Ibid… p14.
4. Ibid… p15.
5. Ibid… p15-16.
6. Ibid… p16.
