God said it’s harder for a rich man to enter into heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of the needle, but what is “impossible with men” is “possible with God” (Luke 18:27), hallelujah!  How?  When we’re rich toward God.

I don’t know how many times you’ve done this, but I know I have on numerous occasions in the recent years–whether it’s during worship service or following prayer services, whether it's communion or family night–just looked around and thought, "How rich we are that God has given us each other!"  Amen?  God has placed us in a fellowship where God is feared, His Word is reverenced and obeyed, and we are rich (hallelujah!) with the blessings of the Lord.  In Proverbs, we see that wisdom that God has said belongs to us, as we continue to obey and to keep His commandments, the commandment to “honour the Lord,” in Proverbs, “with thy substance.”  Most of us are tithers.  Most of us give offerings to God.  

Malachi makes it very clear.  The Scripture is very clear that we’re to bring offerings to God to honor Him.  Your tithes are not offerings.  That belongs to God.  That’s God’s.  The Bible says, “The tithe is the Lord’s” (Leviticus 27:30).  That is not a free-will offering.  That’s obedience to a commandment.  To honor God with our hearts solely, each man giving what God has put into his heart, those are offerings to God, whether it was offering (like we see in Corinthians) to go back and help those in Jerusalem, or it was the different offerings that came in (as we look at the book of Acts) where every man divested himself and gave as the Holy Spirit led them to give.  We’re blessed as a fellowship.  Of course, everybody could always do more; amen?  And so can we as a fellowship.

Malachi goes on and says, 3:8, “Will a man rob God?  Yet ye have robbed me.  But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee?  In tithes and offerings.  Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation.”  Well, God is being pretty straight here; isn’t He?  We have known the blessings of the Lord, but some of us have attributed to God being the source of our blessings, when in fact some of us here have been blessed by Satan.  Just as Jesus was being offered all those things on the Mount of Transfiguration, some of us have accepted riches from Satan and called it the blessing of the Lord.