This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to hope alive, applying God's word to your daily life. Hi, this is Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and have been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open up.
His word to you and allow you.
To see him and to know him and to know his will, that you might glorify him and that you might walk in faith and power each and every day, especially today, in Jesus name.
Well, good morning. Welcome to Lake Community Church's morning Bible study. We are in Leviticus, chapter 27. Leviticus, chapter 27. And we're talking about. Talking about redemption. We're talking about redeeming things dedicated to God. And you're going, I don't really understand that. Well, you know, oftentimes when we think about giving to God, we always think money. We. I mean, we. It's what we think. We think money because that's how we've been oriented. That's how we've grown up. That's how we've lived. The actual cold, hard cash is the thing that we think about. It's the thing that we consider. And so it's hard for you to think through these processes oftentimes, because the truth is, we've been. We've been trained to do that. We've been trained to think a certain way, and it works for our economy. I'm not saying it's necessarily bad. It works for the way we do business, the way we do economic systems, how we actually function. It works for that. But it's actually not a. It does. It's not helpful for you to live in a situation, live in a way of life, and not have a understanding of why it works that way. And what's interesting to me, as I study through Leviticus here in chapter 27, is that God told the children of Israel not to charge interest each other when somebody had a need. And then we get to verse 13 and 16, and when somebody dedicates a piece of property to someone, to God, and that's what's going on. It's a dedication of either a house or a land, and that's what it says. When a man dedicates his house to be holy to the Lord, the priest shall value, set a value for it, whether it is good or bad. As the priest values it, so it shall stand, meaning there's going to be a somebody come in and make a valuation of the piece of property. They're going to make an estimate of its value, and that person's going to be the priest. And he says, and if he who dedicates it wants to redo his house, he must add one fifth of the money of your valuation to it, and it shall be his. Meaning, he gave the house to the priest, he gave the house to God, and then he needs to redeem it back. For whatever reason. There's not a determination of whether or not the house is going to be used for good purposes or bad purposes. That's not the issue. The issue is it was reminant. He gave them the house, and if he gives them the house, they're going to place value on the house, and then they're going to add 20%. 20% is going to go to 20%, plus the value of the house is going to go to the property. It says, and if a man dedicates to the lower part of the field of these possessions, then you're to value, then. Then your valuation shall be according to the seed for it, Homer, or barley seed, shall be valued at 50 shekels of silver. Notice what he's saying is you're going to value the land based off of its production, how much it produces. And if he dedicates this field a year, a jubilee, according to your evaluation, shall stand, meaning the valuation that they give. But if he dedicates his field after jubilee, then the priest shall reckon to him the money due according to the years that remain till the year of Jubilee. And remember that 70 years. I mean 50 years. And it says verse 20. But if he does not want to redeem the field, or if he has sold the field to another man, it shall not be redeemed anymore. But the field, when it is released in the jubilee, shall be holy to the Lord as a devoted field. It shall be the possession of the priest. Now, notice there's a mechanism by which you can give it to God permanently, and that's what's going on here oftentimes. And then in verse 22, it says, and if a man dedicates to the Lord of field, which he is bought, which is not a field of his possession, then the priest shall reckon to him the worth of the valuation up to the year of Jubilee, meaning it wasn't in his family, it wasn't a family property, and it's going to go back to that family at Jubilee. In the year of Jubilee, the field shall return to him from whom it was bought to the one who owned it, the land as a possession. And the valuation shall be according to the shekel of the sanctuary, 20 garros to the shekel. Now, I think it's important for you to understand some things and. And get just some rudimentary understanding of money and of valuation and of the things that have value when you're thinking through this, because God's trying to teach his people here how valuable land and property is and how it's valued in relation to what we call money, which would be in verse 25. And you shall, and all your valuations shall be according to the shekel of the sanctuary, 20 garros to a shekel. And you're going, what does that mean? Well, it's talking about the purity of that money. And you go, well, what is the purity of money? Well, let me. Let me. Let me go through a few things with you so that you can understand it. And I think this Bible study is actually going to be more economics in a biblical perspective than it's going to be anything else, because I think God's people don't understand that. And when they don't understand what God has given you, the great gifts God has given you, you don't value them properly. And then you live your life not valuing them properly, and you miss out on God's blessing. God made the universe. Okay? And you're going, oh, yeah, I know God made everything. But do you really know how God made everything? Well, you don't. I promise you, you don't. You probably have never thought about it this way. God made the universe. How did he make it? Well, he made it according to laws, according to a certain way. In fact, he said every time he made something, that it was good. And what are those laws? Well, those laws are what we call the laws of physics, and. And they are forces that hold energy together. Uh, and you go, well, what are they? Well, there's four of them. It's real easy. There's the electromagnetic force. There is the, uh, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the gravitational force. Okay? And you go, what does that matter? Well, it matters a lot, because those forces hold together the energy of the universe so that we actually live in a physical universe. And those forces come from God. And he made those things so that you could actually have a physical universe to live in, so that you could actually have a physical planet to live in, so that you could actually have physical land to live on, and you could build physical houses to live in, and you could eat physical food, and you could have a physical body. And your body and everything that God made is based off of energy that is in a physical form due to the forces of nature, okay? God made those things. And by the way, in the garden, God gave them to Adam. He gave him dominion over the physical universe. He said, the physical for your universe is yours. I'm placing you over it. In fact, he gave an animals and sub named these animals. Now, they're a little bit different because the animals actually have a soul. They actually, they actually have a personality. They actually are living beings. But the actual physical land of the garden, the actual physical place where Adam was, God gave that to him. And so that was an innate part of what God gave Adam. He gave Adam a few things that have great value, okay? And are valuable. He gave him land. He gave him the land that he lived on. He gave him a wheel, okay? He created Adam with a will, and it gave them, gave him this thing that is very important that we, we spend every day, and that's called time. He gave him land, he gave him a rule, and he gave him time, okay? Now, those things were given by God. And we're going to study a little bit this Sunday about how John saw it. But anything that is given, any good gift has to come from God. Why? Because he's the author and maker of all things. And so anything that is of really ultimate value, meaning permanent value, anything that has a permanent value to it comes from God. And so understanding that, and understanding that the things God has given you have great value and should be spent, should be spent in a prudent, wise way so that you might bring about the very best for your life, is important. Now, I want you to notice the one thing that I did not mention that God made that you, that you think to be really valuable in your life, and that's money. He didn't make money. Money is literally. Money is literally, is the mechanism by which we exchange the things of value that God's given us, okay? And sometimes that money is. Is actually of some value itself. Like if I came to you and I gave you a gold coin and I said, I want to buy this from you, this piece of property or this physical thing, I want to buy it from you, and I gave you gold for it, well, it would be money. It would be a method of exchanging something that I had done or traded for that gold coin. And then that gold coin was given to you, it would be a value, and that would the gold coin be mechanism, exchange and the gold coin actually had value. But the memo that you have today does not have any value innate to itself. The only value adds is the good faith and credit of the United States government, which, by the way, is sinking every. Every day. So the truth is, is that the currency that you use to buy things really doesn't have any value. What value it actually has is its ability to exchange, maybe my time that I use working and my labor. See, I set my will to do work for someone, and I. And I give them my time, and then they give me money for that. But that money doesn't have any value. I take that money and I exchange it for, you know, my rent, or I exchange it for my car, or exchange it for food or exchange it for clothes. Notice it's a medium of exchange. It's how we exchange things. Okay. All right. So it's important to understand that you need to place value on the things that matter, on the things that count, and not on the actual physical currency that you carry or the currency that you think is in the bank. And it's really just an electronic transaction. It's a debit or credit at the bank, and then you transfer that. That credit to somebody else, and. And it's a debit on your bank account. I mean, that's how it works. And. But the things that are of value are the physical things that God has given us to be, to have dominion over. It's the time that we have it and the will that we have to choose to do those things. And then. And we see that in our constitution. I mean, in our declaration of independence, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator. We're certainly not in your rights among them. Not all of them. Among them are life, meaning God gave us our actual physical life, liberty, meaning the freedom of our world to choose what we want to do. And the pursuit. And they said the pursuit of happiness. But really it was supposed to be the pursuit of property, meaning? Meaning that we have a right to have our own physical property, either physical things or land. We have a right to those things. And by the way, life, if you say, well, there's time in that, well, that's life, you only have a certain amount of time to live, and God has given you life, and then he's giving you the time in which to live it. And nobody should cut that short. Nobody should take that away. You should be able to live it to its fullest. You should be able to live according to your own will. And then you should be able to use those things to pursue gain or property. And by the way, those gains and that property, in whatever form it is, we oftentimes give to God as a we given. We're giving it to him as. As a. As an offering, as a. As a. As a token of our gratitude for who he is and how we live our lives. And that's what. That's what giving to God is ultimately. Listen to me. It's not giving him money. Money is a medium of exchange for the things that are really important, okay? Money is a medium of exchange for the things that are really important. And like I said, sometimes money can have actual value. But most of the time, the money that we spend does not have an actual value to it, okay? It doesn't have a value of its own. It's. It's, uh. It's. It's a. It's a medium of exchange. And so what really matters is that we think about, uh, think about things and value them properly. And so actual cash is not what we think about valuing properly. What. What is. What does cash represent? Well, cash represents my life and my time, which I may trade for something. I may trade some of my time during the day to do something for somebody, and they give me some cash so that I can buy something else. It might be. It might be my freedom, my free choice to do those things. It might be my free will to decide to do this or not to do this. And then and then finally, it is the ability to acquire and to own our own work, our own labor, our own property. And that's the product of our work or our labor. Our time is oftentimes, it's not money. It's property. And so, understanding how things are valued and under understanding how. How the universe works is important for God's people. And so then you begin to place proper value on things. Well, I place proper value on things. Well, I place. I place value on the things that God places value on. He places a lot of value on life, and so let's import it. Well, people are important. My life's important. Other people's lives are important. People are really, really important. Life, liberty, my will, my choosing to. To place my will under his will. That. That conversion process when I was. When I repented and turned toward God's will, I'm choosing to choose God's will over my will, his ways over my ways. That's very valuable. And by the way, God sees it as valuable. He sees it as very, very valuable to him. And then the actual product of what I do, what I produce with my life. And by the way, God says he wants to put, that's one of the things that he promises, that, that what you invest your life and time, what you invest your will in. He says if it's according to him, his will, if it's, if it's in line with your relationship with him, he will, he'll bless it and produce a harvest of property. Really, that's what it is. He says, I'll produce a harvest of property for you. And so understanding that, that, that's how God does things, that when you produce, when you, when you give him your time, you give him your life, you give him your will, and he, he takes that and makes great property out of it for you. Remember, the property's his, too. And so obviously in the old testament, you could give him some property if you wanted to. You don't just have to give him an animal, which would have been life. You didn't have to give him some of the product of your labor, meaning grain and fruit. You didn't have to give him just that. You could actually give him the property that maybe your labor or your life produced, or you might give him some property that he gave you. And that's what they did. When they gave him the land, God gave them the land, and it was, that was going to be theirs, and it always went back to them. And so if they willed to give God the land and make it holy to God, they had to send it out. It had to be their land. But, but you could give God the 20 years left before the day of Jubilee on land that you bought from somebody else, and then it would go back to that family because it was a gift from God to someone else. And so you say that, you know, this whole giving thing is much more intricate than just putting some cash in the offering plate. And by the way, if, if you will begin to see it God's way, you will begin to place emphasis on the things that cash makes valuable or the things that make cash valuable. And that's really the way it is, the things that make cash valuable. Cash is nothing but a medium of exchange unless it has an eight value to itself. And so the true value is your life, your time, your will, and those things that it produces. And God loves that. God wants that. God desires for you to have a lot of produce from your life and your liberty. And so I would just say to you today, you think about it that way. If you think about it that way, then things get a whole lot more clear about how we should live. Just a thought. Take it and run with it. See where God leads you.
As you go today. I pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you you, that he'll make his face to shine upon you, and that he will give you hope and peace today. In Jesus name.
