Hosanna Restoration Church

How amazing it is to think that God is going to honor us? The New King James translation says that He will exalt us! Those thoughts alone certainly should keep us feeling pretty humble! This of course is typical God planning. When we humble ourselves before Him we are giving Him honor and of course we cannot out give God.

When we were speaking before about managing our gifts, we must remember to honor the owner of those gifts. We possess the gifts, but we do not own them. They belong to God, and are intended to reveal His power and His generosity toward His creation. We are in management, but He remains the owner. Forgetting this often leads to disaster.

For instance, if one manages their gift of speaking and begins to feel like they are the gifted one rather than remaining humble before God and giving Him the glory for the gift, they are a prime target for the enemy to come take them off into a land of pride. In that land they can begin to use the gift for personal advancement and scripture clear says that pride goes before a fall.

We must also understand that it is not just public gifts that can result in a crash. Every gift that God gives us has potential for both good and for evil. They are good when God gives them, but we have a choice in the direction that we use them.

There have been people gifted in the realm of finance that began humble before God and grateful for the wisdom He gave and then ended up using that very gift to scam others. The moment we fail to honor the owner, we open the door to the devil. Verse 8 warns us to watch out for attacks from the devil our great enemy. Don’t think for a moment that you cannot be deceived. Most of us can easily think of places where we failed to consider honoring God with our gifts.

One of the most obvious places that people neglect to honor the owner is with their tithe. We need to be careful that we do not treat God like the tax man and look for ways to trim the tithe. As a child the church I grew up in always sang a song during offering that talked about giving Him what was His already. Never made any sense to me as a child, but I belted out the song all the same. Now I see what it meant.

Bottom line is to be confident that God has given the gifts for every situation and that they are all ours to manage for the glory and honor of God. This will keep us humble before God and in a position to be honored and blessed of God in return.