FINANCIAL PLANNING
AND TIME MANAGEMENT

SERIES: PRACTICAL ISSUES IN THE CHURCH

by Doug Goins

Our passage in this message focuses on two very practical issues: how
we use our money and how we use our time. Virtually all the junk mail
that comes to the Goins house and to me at the church, even Christian
junk mail, is focused on those two issues. In this passage Paul is
going to specifically help those of us who have chosen to live under
the lordship of Jesus Christ to know how to make decisions in our
giving to the church and to other Christian ministries, and how to
think about planning our time.

These are very personal (some would say very private) issues. I know I
can get very defensive about my own use of time and money. My dad
would warn me that this is the kind of sermon for which I could be
accused of meddling. Well, we\'re going to see what the old meddler
himself, the apostle Paul, has to say here, because throughout this
letter to the Corinthians, he has felt the freedom to address all
kinds of personal, practical issues that we deal with as individual
believers and as a church family collectively.

The issues that this first-century church struggled with are amazingly
contemporary. Paul dealt with the issue of unity in the body of Christ
and all the things that feed into disunity: competition, divisiveness,
envy, jealousy. He addressed sexual morality and legal ethics. He
discussed lifestyle issues of marriage and divorce and singleness. He
dealt with issues of idolatry, both in the world and in the church. He
examined church life in terms of leadership, worship, and the unique
contribution each one of us has to make to the life of this body
because of our spiritual gifting from the Lord. He addressed the fear
of death in a beautiful, exhilarating reflection on the resurrection
of Jesus Christ and its implications historically and spiritually.

Now in this message and the next (Discovery Paper 4541), we\'re going
to allow the apostle to challenge us in some practical areas with some
very personal, direct exhortation and some explanation about
itineraries. (He will finish the letter with some heartfelt greetings
to people in the body whom he loves very deeply.)

FREEDOM IN GIVING

The first four verses of our text focus on our lifestyle of giving. We
are to give away everything we have and everything we are for God\'s
glory. The goal is to live with a wonderful sense of freedom in our
giving. In 2 Corinthians 9:7 Paul is going to use the term \"not under
compulsion.\"

The opposite of compulsion is freedom. But this freedom is controlled
by the Holy Spirit of God. First Corinthians 16:1-4:


Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I directed the
churches of Galatia, so do you also. On the first day of every week
let each one of you put aside and save, as he may prosper, that no
collections be made when I come. And when I arrive, whomever you may
approve, I shall send them with letters to carry your gift to
Jerusalem; and if it is fitting for me to go also, they will go with me.


\"The collection for the saints\" and \"your gift to Jerusalem\" refer to
a voluntary collection for the poverty-stricken Jewish Christians in
the Jerusalem church. Jerusalem at this time was a very poor city
anyway, and the economy had deteriorated because of a severe famine.
Then the Christians found themselves being persecuted because of their
faith in Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul had been asked by the
apostolic council in Jerusalem to help raise support for the poor
there. So all during his third missionary journey, probably for over a
year, he had solicited contributions from Gentile Christians in the
provinces that he traveled through or wrote to: Galatia, Macedonia,
Asia, and now Achaia (in Greece), which is where Corinth was.

Paul had several reasons for giving this very high priority wherever
he preached. First, he was a Jew, and as Romans 9-11 reveals, he had a
great heart for his people. He felt solidarity with them, and he
probably had very close personal friends in the church in Jerusalem
who were suffering physically.

Second, he probably saw this collection as an opportunity to bring
unity to the church, to break down the barriers between Jews and
Gentiles. In his mind, if the Gentile believers, together in an
expression of generosity and love, gave a gift these poor Jewish
Christians, it would just deepen bonds of love and relationship.
Remember, the Jewish Christians were a little suspicious of this
swashbuckling Gentile missionary outreach spreading across the empire.
So Paul wanted to bridge the differences between the Jewish Christians
and the Gentile believers.

Third, as Paul tells the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, this
offering will be a great testimony to the world. When nonbelievers saw
their generosity, their open-heartedness, he hoped it would overwhelm
them. He also says that other churches will be encouraged. Their faith
will be strengthened when they see the response to this need in Jerusalem.

I hope you know that we today are folded into this universal
responsibility of giving. He says, \"...As I directed the churches of
Galatia, so do you also.\" In his greeting in 1:2 he wrote, \"...To the
church of God which is at Corinth, to those who have been sanctified
in Christ Jesus, saints by calling, with all who in every place call
upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours....\" The
words \"in every place\" imply in every time and every generation as
well. In our modern times the opportunities to give and the needs may
be different, but the responsibility to respond in generosity is
universal.

Why is that? Well, first of all, Jesus said, \"...Freely you received,
freely give\" (Matthew 10:8). We\'ve been given the incomparable gift of
eternal life, so we\'re to respond with generosity in every way we can
imagine, including materially. Earlier in this letter, the apostle
Paul wrote to the Corinthians, \"...You are not your own...you have
been bought with a price....\" (1 Corinthians 6:19b-20a). Those very
words are written across the front of our auditorium at PBC. Jesus\'
own shed blood bought our salvation. He paid a tremendous price. So if
we don\'t belong to ourselves any more, and everything that we are
belongs to him, then all of our resources-our time, money, homes,
investments-also belong to him. I just talked to a brother last week
who told me about when it broke in on him that all the money he had
saved, invested, and was managing wasn\'t his anymore, it was God\'s,
and he was a steward of it. He said, \"That was a turning point in my
life. All of a sudden it got a lot easier to give when I realized that
it belonged to the Lord.\"

PRINCIPLES FOR GIVING

In verse 2 there are five phrases that each express a powerful
principle for giving. They\'re very straightforward. The first is \"on
the first day of every week.\" Giving was a central part of the Sunday
worship experience of the early church, and it was to be a regular,
ongoing practice. You could paraphrase it \"Sunday by Sunday.\" Offering
for them was not perfunctory, it was central. This phrase implies a
persistence in giving on the part of the individual believer. Our
giving is to be done regularly, not sporadically. It doesn\'t happen
only at special times of the year, such as just before the tax
deadline, or when there\'s some really big emotional appeal.

The second phrase in verse 2 is \"let each one of you.\" Giving is a
matter of individual, personal obedience. This is wonderfully
all-inclusive. None of us as believers is exempted or excused from
giving. We\'re all to be involved in giving regularly, whether we have
a lot of money or we\'re impoverished, whether we\'re children or the
most senior adult. (I do believe that we must help our children learn
when they\'re very small how to give back a portion of what they have
to the Lord.) In 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 Paul tells us that the poorest
saints in Macedonia delighted in giving generously to help their
poverty-stricken brothers and sisters in Jerusalem.

The amount doesn\'t matter. God cares about the heart motive behind the
gift. Remember, one of the amazing examples Jesus used of spiritual
giving was a widow who could give only what would amount to one penny
today, and yet he commended her for her heart toward the Lord (Mark
12:41-44). But the Old-Testament prophet Malachi warns us that if we
do have resources and we refuse to give, we\'re robbing God and other
believers in the community of faith (Malachi 3:8-10). Our giving is to
be a personal expression of love from hearts that overflow with gratitude.
The third phrase in verse 2 is \"put aside and save.\" Our giving ought
to be the result of thoughtful planning. The New International Version
translates it, \"...Set aside a sum of money in keeping with his
income, saving it up.\" In first-century employment, people got paid
every day at the end of the day. They would bring home their wages or
perhaps produce if they were paid in kind, and every day they would
set aside the part that they were going to bring to church on Sunday
morning to contribute to the life of the body. Most of us don\'t get
paid that way nowadays. Most of us get bimonthly or monthly checks or
quarterly dividends. But the point of this phrase is that we need to
plan, to budget, to deliberately put aside money on a regular basis
that we\'re going to give. It suggests a systematic approach to giving.
So the amount we give regularly is not to be determined impulsively or
emotionally. And it should never be an afterthought.

Candy and I plan our giving just as we do the rest of our budget. We
usually do adjustments quarterly. We pray, \"Lord, how do you want us
to allocate the funds?\" And we write the giving checks off the top. We
do respond at times to spontaneous things, but we\'re able to do that
because we\'ve set money aside for special needs and unexpected
opportunities to serve. I remember when this church generously gave to
the Christian village in Pakistan, Shantinigar, which Muslims had
destroyed. We did the same for victims of Hurricane Mitch.

The fourth phrase, \"as he may prosper,\" tells us how much to give. It
speaks of giving in proportion to God\'s provision. The reality is that
God has prospered each one of us differently. The Biblical perspective
is that even the abilities, talents, and skills that we have by which
we earn a living are God\'s provision. The amount of money we make is
not due to our hard work and doing such a great job. It\'s because God
chooses to bless and prosper us financially.

The issue is proportionality, or what each person has to give. I
already said the amount isn\'t important anyway. Some of us are blessed
with a great deal of income and are able to give much more to the work
of the Lord. Some of us have very little income, and we\'re going to be
severely limited in how much we can give to the work of the Lord. I\'ve
known families who were at both extremes. They had good jobs and
financial security, and they were able to give more, and then through
unemployment or whatever they had virtually no resources, and they had
to adjust the proportion of what they were able to contribute.

The New Testament does not advocate flat ten-percent giving. In
reality, the Old Testament \"tithe\" was closer to thirty percent when
we total up all the different responsibilities the Israelites had for
supporting the priesthood and the temple. But a ten-percent arbitrary
figure is too easy in a number of ways. There are people I\'ve been
involved with in our body who in no way could afford to give ten
percent of their income. Two percent might be stretching it because of
where they were. And I\'ve known people who could afford to live off of
ten percent of their income and give ninety percent away. So the
spiritual principle is be sensitive to proportionality: How has God
prospered us, and how does he direct us in how much we ought to be giving?

The fifth phrase in verse 2 is, \"that no collections be made when I
come.\" Paul was concerned that they give in response to the prompting
of the Spirit and not because of human pressure. He didn\'t want the
Corinthian Christians to wait until he got there to decide how much to
give and where to give it. He didn\'t want the pressure of his presence
to influence them. As I\'ve mentioned, Paul devotes 2 Corinthians 8 and
9 to the issue of giving. He tells them that he doesn\'t want their
giving to be under compulsion, which means external pressure. Paul
knew his Corinthian brothers and sisters could be easily moved to give
by powerful personalities or emotionally manipulative appeals, and he
didn\'t want to capitalize on his arrival there to ask for a large
gift. His challenge to them and to us as well is to allow God to lead
us in our giving.

Now, appeal letters and so on do have their place. They can lay out
needs and possibilities and opportunities, and we need to listen
carefully. But the voice that ultimately should direct and define for
us what we ought to give must be the voice of the Lord himself
speaking through the Holy Spirit. Giving is something we ought to be
very prayerful about, and we must make decisions apart from the heat
of the moment when an appeal is being made.

Last Sunday morning, Steve Zeisler and Bob Fenech presented us with
the opportunity to financially support the high-school ministry in
Tijuana in a number of specific ways. But they also expressed the
confidence that we would take that to the Lord and decide what part of
his prospering us we should allocate to meeting that specific need.
Perhaps some weren\'t moved to respond to that, and that\'s good,
because they were listening to the Lord, not just to Steve\'s and Bob\'s
appeal.

The last two verses of this section are really an important word to
any church or ministry organization. They\'re a challenge to fiscal
integrity, to accountability for us in Christian ministry. Look at
verse 3 again: \"And when I arrive, whomever you may approve, I shall
send them with letters to carry your gift to Jerusalem; and if it is
fitting for me to go also, they will go with me.\" It\'s the
Corinthians, not Paul, who are going to select their own team to
handle the money. That\'s very wise on his part; it diffuses any
possible misunderstanding about why he\'s taking up the collection and
how it\'s going to be used. Perhaps these letters of apostolic
authentication he mentions will detail how much money there is and who
these men are who are bringing it to Jerusalem.

At the very least, we as a church are to keep honest financial
records, and the body here should hold us leaders accountable for how
we manage and disperse the funds on its behalf in the work of the
kingdom, for God\'s glory. There are far too many churches and
ministries that have brought reproach on the Lord\'s name because they
have yielded to the temptation to indulge in financial dishonesty or
irresponsibility. We all have a right to be able to trust the people
we give our money to.

Now as I said, this is straightforward. There are no pledge drives, no
big, complicated fund-raising approaches here. It\'s a matter of
individual people before the Lord looking at opportunities, evaluating
how they\'ve been gifted by the Lord financially, and then deciding
prayerfully how to direct the funds that God has entrusted to them.

FLEXIBILITY IN MAKING PLANS

If our giving isn\'t to be under compulsion, then certainly the way we
prioritize our use of time shouldn\'t be controlled by external
pressures either. Again, the goal is to become inner-directed as we
plan how to spend our time and our energies. The next section, verses
5-12, is interesting because it\'s basically an itinerary. He\'s talking
about plans to travel to Corinth for himself, for Timothy, who works
with him as an apostolic associate, and finally for Apollos, one of
the former pastors of the church.

Last week in preparation for this I reread some summary statements
Paul made in 2 Corinthians 5. He defined what motivated him, what
really controlled him, the kind of compulsion that was legitimate in
terms of deciding where to go, when to go there, what to commit
himself to and what not to commit himself to. There were three
statements that jumped out at me. Paul says first of all, \"...Knowing
the fear of God....\" (verse 11). Ultimately he\'s responsible to God
for his use of time. He\'s not controlled by other people\'s agendas.
The second statement was, \"...Christ\'s love compels us....\" (verse 14,
NIV). The word \"compulsion\" doesn\'t have a negative connotation here;
this is a control that comes from loving, intimate relationship with
the Lord Jesus. And the third statement was, \"...All these things are
from God....\" (verse 18). Every opportunity, all that we do in life is
from the Lord. It\'s in the Lord that we respond. And that\'s what gave
Paul confidence to move into opportunities as doors were opened and to
be responsive when doors were shut. These principles were kind of like
Paul\'s gyroscope; they kept him stable in decision-making.

Now look at verses 5-9 where he talks about his own approach to
planning. The thing that jumps out at me is how flexible and open to
change he was.


But I shall come to you after I go through Macedonia, for I am going
through Macedonia; and perhaps I shall stay with you, or even spend
the winter, that you may send me on my way wherever I may go. For I do
not wish to see you now just in passing; for I hope to remain with you
for some time, if the Lord permits. But I shall remain in Ephesus
until Pentecost; for a wide door for effective service has opened to
me, and there are many adversaries.


Paul\'s plans were always an interesting mixture of certainty and
tentativeness. He left room for the unknown in a very relaxed manner.
In verse 6 he says \"...Wherever I may go.\" That suggests that Paul
wasn\'t all that sure where he was going. And when you look at his life
and his writings, he seldom seemed to agonize over the will of God in
terms of where to go next geographically. God gave Paul more
life-changing revelation than any other New-Testament author, but he
rarely told Paul where he was going to be the following week. J.
Vernon McGee says that Paul was in the wonderful position of being
\"gloriously unsettled.\"1 Do you find it glorious to live in an
open-ended way, not being sure where you\'re going to go next? Well,
Paul did. Paul made plans, submitted them to the will of God, and then
relaxed and accepted circumstances as they came along.

He does tell the Corinthian church, \"I am going to come visit you some
time during the next year.\" Rather than coming by boat, he wants to
travel over land and visit churches in Macedonia on the way. He says,
\"That means I\'ll spend the whole winter with you. I don\'t want to just
drop in briefly and then take off again.\"

The other thing that jumps out at me is that he hasn\'t yet raised all
the money for his trip, and he doesn\'t even think he\'ll have it when
he leaves to go visit them. The phrase in verse 6, \"that you may send
me on my way,\" means that he hopes that they\'ll give him financial
provision for travel expenses when he leaves them to head for the next
place. Verse 7 makes it clear that all this planning depends on God\'s
will: \"...If the Lord permits.\" Paul doesn\'t set his plans in
concrete. He is walking by faith, not by sight. He is avoiding the
Silicon Valley syndrome that I would call the Palm Pilot mentality.
I\'m not really against Palm Pilots. You may have a Day-Timer or some
other kind of calendar book you carry around that defines your life. I
have a seven-star diary that I use. Mike Benkert on our staff has a
Palm Pilot. Mike was looking at my diary, and he said, \"How quaint! A
page for every day!\" But all these tools represent the way we fill our
lives. We define our lives so tightly that there is no room for the
Holy Spirit to do anything. There is no room for serendipity, for the
unexpected blessing or opportunity. That\'s not how the apostle Paul lived.

Paul is writing from Ephesus, as he mentions in verses 8-9. He
describes tremendous opportunities, but he was also kept there by
circumstances, specifically the weather. He couldn\'t travel in the
winter by sea or by land, so he was going to stay where he was. He
wasn\'t going to get frustrated because he couldn\'t take off. Acts 19
explains the tremendous opportunity that Paul had for preaching,
teaching, and seeing people being won to Christ. The \"many
adversaries\" he talks about are also described in Acts 19. With the
opportunity came challenge and opposition. All that did was energize
him. God was on the move, everything was right in front of him, and he
wasn\'t going to get distracted and want to go wandering off to seek
the action someplace else. \"God has put me here for now. There is
tremendous opportunity here. Yes, there\'s opposition, but I\'m going to
finish what God has started here and be faithful and submissive to him
in the process.\"

ESCAPING THE PARALYSIS OF ANALYSIS

Now look at what Paul says about Timothy, his younger brother in the
faith. His planning for Timothy, again, is very tentative, \"gloriously
unsettled.\" Verses 10-11:


Now if Timothy comes, see that he is with you without cause to be
afraid; for he is doing the Lord\'s work, as I also am. Let no one
therefore despise him. But send him on his way in peace, so that he
may come to me; for I expect him with the brethren.


Remember, Timothy was the gifted young pastor whom Paul had won to
Christ and who served with Paul for a number of years. He didn\'t have
the same temperament, boldness, or courage that Paul seemed to display
all the time. He was timid, shy, and not very confident in himself,
his leadership skills, or God\'s ability to use him. We know that he
struggled with chronic illness. And he was probably too young in that
time to be in pastoral leadership. So those realities in Timothy\'s
life would define his own feelings toward planning and setting
priorities. He would be much more marked by apprehension and fear of
making the wrong decision instead of being controlled by the Spirit
and living out of freedom. Today we might describe Timothy as
struggling with the paralysis of analysis: having to keep checking
everything over and evaluating it to make sure he wasn\'t doing
anything wrong.

Paul wrote two pastoral letters to Timothy to encourage him in these
areas, but here Paul asks the Corinthian Christians to be sensitive to
these problem areas in Timothy\'s life. How the church in Corinth
treats this young pastor is important, including the encouragement of
financial provision for his travels (\"send him on his way in peace\" is
identical to the language Paul used in verse 6). So God is going to
use the Corinthian encouragement; the fact that they value Timothy\'s
ministry even though it\'s different from Paul\'s ministry, because it\'s
from the same Lord; their financial support; and their willingness not
to hassle him about his areas of weakness to help deliver Timothy from
fear and discouragement, to help him grow into freedom in his own
personal planning.

Perhaps you are much more like Timothy than Paul when it comes to
planning. Then be encouraged by this wonderful, warm-hearted word from
Paul on behalf of this younger brother. Even in your weakness and
struggle in these areas, God can still use you.

THE FREEDOM TO SAY NO

Verse 12 is the one that got hold of me and exploded my thinking all week:

But concerning Apollos our brother, I encouraged him greatly to come
to you with the brethren; and it was not at all his desire to come
now, but he will come when he has opportunity.

(Once again, \"...He will come when he has opportunity\" is that
glorious unsettledness.)

Paul founded the church in Corinth, and Apollos followed him as the
next pastor there. This verse tells us amazing things about both Paul
and Apollos. First, Paul is not jealous of another teacher of God\'s
word. He encourages him to go to Corinth, even though, as we saw
earlier in this letter (Discovery Paper 4513), there was a very vocal
Apollos fan club in the church who didn\'t especially like Paul or his
preaching. Paul still wants him to go in response to their invitation.
And Paul didn\'t throw his weight around or try to exert apostolic
authority over Apollos, his brother. Paul respected Apollos\'
inclinations not to visit Corinth at this time, even though he thought
Apollos ought to go. He doesn\'t disparage or criticize Apollos, he
just says, \"That\'s the way it is. I thought he should come; he doesn\'t
think so. But he\'ll be there when he feels that the time is right.\"
Apollos exhibited maturity and wisdom, just as Paul did. He felt total
freedom in the Lord to resist both the Corinthians\' desire to have him
visit and Paul\'s suggestion that he accept the invitation. In all
probability, he decided that the cause of unity in the body would be
strengthened if he didn\'t visit Corinth at that time. He didn\'t want
to feed the divisiveness between the Apollos party and the Paul party.
He would travel as the Spirit led him when the time was right.

Here were two mature Christian leaders who saw the circumstances, the
need, and the priorities differently, but they trusted each other as
brothers in Christ, and they both submitted to the lordship of Christ
in their own lives and in the life of the church they loved in Corinth.

This really struck me forcefully. I want to be like these two men, to
have no envy, no competition in ministry, to live out of the freedom
to agree to disagree with others in spiritual leadership, and to say
no to people who I think are terrific, and to people who think I\'m
wonderful. Saying no to people who think that you\'re the greatest may
be one of the hardest things about pastoral ministry.

I remember someone saying to me a few years ago, \"Pastor, you feed me
the best of anyone.\" To me in my immaturity, that felt terrific,
especially knowing all the people who didn\'t like how I fed them.

But Apollos in his maturity and wisdom refused to be swayed by that
personal pastoral loyalty. He cared too much for the good of the
whole, refusing to play to spiritual immaturity. Paul in the same way
wasn\'t swayed by the criticism of his own ministry among the Corinthians.

What stabilized Paul and Apollos, and what strengthened Timothy in his
planning and prioritizing, was the great truth we find in 1
Corinthians 15:58: \"Therefore [referring back to the glory of the
resurrection of Jesus Christ and the resurrection power in which we
now live], my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always
abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in
vain in the Lord.\" Again, it speaks of throwing ourselves full tilt
into the life of service and ministry, giving with abandon. This verse
supports the view we\'ve gained in 16:1-12 of giving resources and
spending our lives, time, and energy. Eugene Peterson paraphrases this
verse this way:


\"With all this going for us, my dear, dear friends, stand your ground.
And don\'t hold back. Throw yourselves into the work of the Master,
confident that nothing you do for him is a waste of time or effort. 

