"Honour the Lord with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase: So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine." Proverbs 3:9-10. 

God bless you. We give all the glory to God for the opportunity to deliberate on this topic.  

In this article, we will present a number of general principles, among others:

• The stewardship of resources including money.
• The finance organization (budget)
• Fidelity to God in time of crisis.
• God’s fidelity which is not in crisis.

The stewardship of resources including money.

"Moreover, it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful." 1 Corinthians 4:2.

Despite the times of crisis or scarcity, God is calling us to be faithful stewards of what God has placed in our hands.

God knows the periods of adversity, economic or pandemics. He knows everything that is going on in our world. He also knows what is to come.

Above all else, the Church of Jesus Christ belongs to the kingdom of heaven. God cares about how the adverse circumstances affect the lives of His children. These circumstances can sometimes be intense and painful, but there is no need for them to overwhelm us or steal our peace. God knows what we need and wants us to depend in Him and his provision every day.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:31-33:

"Be not therefore anxious, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the Gentiles seek; for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Be not therefore anxious for the morrow: for the morrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” 

Crises can provide opportunities for the people of God to flourish spiritually and lead others to Christ, who is our only rock and hope, not only in the present time, but for all eternity. 

• Look to God, instead of your need or lack of resources.

Our response to the difficult times will be determined by our perspective and where our focus is. In the midst of our needs, we pray to God so that He supplies our needs and we can become witnesses to the people around us, that we have a God who helps us in the crisis, gives us a response to our pressure and supplies us.

• Ask God for your needs and thank him for the provisions that are to come.

• Be faithful with your tithes and offerings

Ask God for provision, wisdom, guidance and grace to persevere and to manage what we have and to depend on God even in scarcity.

Have you prayed about it? Are you asking God to provide your "daily bread" and to show you what steps he wants you to take?

In Philippians 4:6-7, God tells us: "In nothing be anxious; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus.”

God is still the God of Provision. 

When the disciples had not caught any fish, Jesus said to Simon: “And when he had left speaking, he said unto Simon, Put out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught. And Simon answered and said, Master, we toiled all night, and took nothing: but at thy word I will let down the nets. And when they had done this, they inclosed a great multitude of fishes; and their nets were breaking;” (Luke 5:4-6).

When the widow had only a handful of flour in the jar, and a little oil in the vessel; (1 Kings 17:12), God made provision and in the years of scarcity, she never lacked.

When the widow did not have resources to pay her debts, God gave her the means to have enough oil to sell and be able to pay her debts and live with what was left over. (2 Kings 4).

If we are faithful to God with our tithes and offerings and even more in times of crisis, we show God our fidelity to Him. God will not fail to open the windows of heaven to pour out His blessings upon us until they overflow.

It is believing in God, that He is going to do and confess his Word, though we do not see it: "My God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:19).

• Present God the church and the lives that do not know Christ

Ask God to use this time of confusion and uncertainty to bring revival and spiritual awakening to our lives, our churches, our country and the world. (Habakkuk 3:2).

• Learn the secret of contentment.

The contentment comes from believing that God has provided everything we need for the present moment and that He will provide everything you need in the future (Psalms 73:25-26; Philippians 4:11-13; 1 Timothy 6:6-8).

Take the discontent out of your words or from your heart. Are you murmuring, or complaining, being anxious, expressing that what God has provided is not sufficient to meet your needs?

• Ask God to fulfill His purposes.

God is putting us through some processes so that we learn to believe Him amidst the trials and scarcity. To not depend on man but only in Him.

God uses adversity to show us what is in our hearts, to take out those things that God does not like in us, and to deepen our dependence of Him. Times of scarcity can become times of great blessings, because people bare their soul and their hearts turn to the Lord (Deuteronomy 8:3).

Are you more focused on the satisfaction of your own needs and solving your own problems than in seeing God's purposes be fulfilled in your life, in those around you, and those who do not know Christ? 

• Allow God to reorganize your priorities

In those times of economic difficulties or losses we have to identify any tendencies to accumulate "things" we do not need, and make us take measures to develop a more moderate lifestyle (Luke 12:15, 31, 34).

You need to redefine what are your "needs"? You need to make some adjustments in your expenses, in order to be able to live according to your possibilities and/or give more to meet the needs of others? 

We have to ask God for strategies to cope with economic crisis. Ask God for wisdom to organize the finances and to have a budget with what little you may have. When establishing a budget, we must set a priority in what are major expenditures and eliminate or postpone others.

It is very important is to adjust the budget and do not use credit cards for basic needs. If there is no possibility of payment, do not use the credit card, only in cases of extreme emergency.

We should analyze every project that is undertaken in order to see if we have the resources. Jesus gave us example in Luke 14:28.

Pastors must speak to the church that no matter the scarcity or crisis, never cease to be faithful to the Lord with our tithes. Upon that faith depends whether we see God moving
His hand on our behalf.

"Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee. So that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me." Hebrews 13:5- 6.

In the church, pastors must define the priorities for expenditure; and have a budget in place in order to help those who are going through a need.

In the crisis, the pastors with their church may devise activities to generate funds. 

• Put your trust in the Lord.

You can rely in Him. He loves you, He knows what you are facing, and takes care of you. God is on His throne and His purposes are being achieved in your life and in the world. Trust in Him to have your needs fulfilled, He will provide. 

• Remember what God has done in the past (Deuteronomy 8:2).
• Trust His Character (Psalms 36:5, 7).
• Remembers His promises (Joshua 23:14).
• Refuse to surrender to fear or anxiety (Psalms 46:1-3; Isaiah 54:10).
• Avoid taking matters into your own hands. Do not let that fear lead you to those places that God does not want you to go (Genesis 12:10; Ruth 1:1).

Practice giving as Christ did.

The natural tendency in times of financial uncertainty is to retain what we have and give less. But what a great opportunity to demonstrate the greatness and power of God with
Our offerings! Ask God how you can exercise your faith and reflect His generous heart in your giving at this time (2 Corinthians 8:1-4; 9:8).

Does your way of giving reflects the generous giving heart of Christ? How does God want you to grow in grace by giving during this time of crisis?

Rejoice in the Lord.

Regardless of what is going on in the world or in your personal financial situation, do not let the enemy rob you of your joyfulness! If you have Him, we are rich, we have everything we need, and we have reasons to rejoice! (Habakkuk 3:17-18).

HUNG UP THEIR HARPS
A BIBLICAL TOOL FOR THE MINISTER IN TIMES OF CRISIS

Psalms 137:1-2 “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. Upon the willows in the midst thereof We hanged up ourharps.”

The experience of exile had a profound impact on God’s people. Seventy years of captivity represented a hard blow to their morality and dignity, that can be explained by stages linked one to the other. The loss of their national independence was an enormous trauma for the Hebrews.

"At that time the servants of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up to Jerusalem, and the city was besieged…. And he carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valor, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and the smiths; none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land…. And the king of Babylon made Mattaniah, Jehoiachin's father's brother, king is his stead, and changed his name to Zedekiah." 2 Kings 24:10-17.

This verse will help us to contextualize the magnitude of the deportation or exile to Babylon and its effects on the emotional and religious stages. In addition to inflicting a heavy blow to the identity of the people of God, time was needed to process the reasons, motives, and the purpose of this event. We are bringing this historic example, since it leaves us with considerable teachings on how to confront obstacles so that we can be tested and approved when we exit the storm.

There are stages that can be listed in this process of exile and deportation, which were intended to purify the people of God despite the fact that they did not understand the purpose of it, they saw all this as a contradictory experience in every sense. The hand of God is always behind a critical experience, although we do not see it, perfecting His people.

The first stage we can define it as "confusion" for a people called to be a light to the nations.

The second stage was the "adaptation" to a new way of life, to a new culture, in another environment. The environment was a pagan and therefore hostile. The adaptation to the
unknown, is what causes the most fear in us, everything is new, everything is different and this generates a rejection that arises spontaneously. The complex is that there could not go out, it was something like a spiritual prison. That is how trials are, a kind of jail cell where the key to liberation is in the hands of God and from those prisons, only God can liberate us.

The third stage was the "disconnection” with the physical places of worship. For all Hebrews, Babylon is not the same as Jerusalem, nor the Euphrates River or the Tigris to the Jordan River. Nothing Babylon’s majestic could replace the attachment to Jerusalem and its temple. This can be seen when we pause in the Psalms to prove how important the temple as the worship center, shelter and comfort was. In that temple, God heard the prayer of Ana, "the sterile" and blessed her with many children. In that temple, God would manifest Himself in a supernatural manner and this invigorated his priests.

The fourth stage, was the "nostalgia" so well expressed in Psalms 137. The Hebrew people marked with fire by their origins and divine destiny, remembered from a distance, with sadness and pain, the gratifying moments that they lived in the promised land. What nation could convey the greatness of a God who opens the sea for his people so that they may cross it dry? Or that his prophets ascend into heaven in a chariot of fire? How can we forget his father Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and all the men that God raised up with the power to make them a powerful nation? In exile that was their worry, will we return to our land, will the Lord restore us as in the beginning of our days?

The fifth stage we can define it as the stage of “discouragement”, which comes with a loss of motivation and hopelessness. At this stage, perhaps one of the most critical (since the exile was prolonged), the people began losing the enthusiasm to praise God and "hung up their harps". It was not their loss of faith, rather it was a stage of great discouragement and despair because the future was uncertain.

And the sixth stage is to recover “hope”. God does not abandon us, nor leave us orphans. In the exile and deportation were many processes, but God took care to keep hope alive, that item which some say is the last thing to lose, and that we must never lose. Psalms 126:1-2 gives us a clear and vivid picture of the experience of restoration, because it is God who turns our sadness into joy "1. When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. 2. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen, The Lord hath done great things for them.". If something I learned over the years, is that human nature is the same in any period and nation. The human being has the same deficiencies, needs and limitations, despite the fact that the world has sophisticated itself, the heart of man is the same. The man has an inner emptiness that only God can satisfy.

Today we are living a similar experience in a certain aspect, we feel like in an exile that can affect us spiritually and emotionally. It has become more difficult to take up our harps
and worship with the same enthusiasm and motivation than when we did it in the Jerusalem of our temples, sharing with joy with each other.

Perhaps we have already gone through some stages experienced by the people of Israel:

1) Confusion, it is enough to look in the social media, the tangle of contrasting interpretations to clearly define the time that we are living. I have noticed that despite the years that we have been in the path of the Lord, we are observing with some amazement and surprise, something that the Word of God warned us about in several passages. Trials bring their dose of confusion and we have to proceed as "Asaph" to the sanctuary of prayer to understand clearly what purpose of all this has, because "the world, its fullness and those who live in it are the property of the Lord".

2) Adaptation, as believers we had to make a special effort to adapt to this tsunami that did not spare rich or poor, young or old, nor Christians and pagans. The change was abrupt and sudden. Changes when they are not favorable, are hard to digest; sometimes they are a bitter drink to swallow as that cup that "our Lord had to drink because it was the will of the Father". We could ask ourselves if we are willing to drink it, it is not pleasant, but it is the cup of obedience, the cup that teaches us that we must submit to the sovereignty of God, even though it is not to our taste. In order to drink this cup and face this adversity that resembles nothing known, we will have to enter the garden of the surrender of our comfort and convenience and say how Paul said: " for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therein to be content.". In order to reach this statement, surely Paul had to bend his knees a lot, but he learned the lesson. Perhaps today more than ever, where  we have nothing on this earth to cling to as a means of escape, we must strongly cling to the rock of our salvation and this is what teaches us to rely exclusively on God as neither man nor science we can offer the security and confidence that we find in the upper room. This will leave us with a lesson "The quality of a Christian is measured in the face of adversity".

3) Disconnecting, as well as in the third stage the Hebrew people became disconnected from its center of worship in Jerusalem, today we yearn for the day when we will be able to return to our meetings, but above all we are discovering how much we need each other, and how important is the house of the Lord. Someone said that "things are valued when you lose them," there is some truth in this assertion. There is something that I am listening to frequently and it is also my own experience, the value of each brother regardless of his rank, each one brings something valuable that I need, that edifies me. We now understand the importance of the church as the "body of Christ" where each ember has their value, their talent, their gifts, their spirit of service.

4) Nostalgia, we are in our homes, but somehow physically disconnected and yearn for that familial encounter, we are a family of faith. Nostalgia is in some way the memory, accompanied by sadness, for those things that were once ours, but today they are beyond the reach of our hands. We are in the exile of our homes, we see at the distance the temple, our family of faith with which we would gather to honor God. We yearn for the hug that today we cannot give or receive, the handshake. It is the lack of these affects, to a large extent, that make this hour of testing, the lack of something that we all desire. If there is anything good that we can learn in this adversity, is the value of that time where we met to share our joys and sorrows, our victories and our defeats, where the congregation surrounded us with its arms of support and comfort to proceed forward.

5) Discouragement, lastly, we are going to stop in this fifth stage that the people of Israel lived and experienced while in exile, the discouragement and hopelessness that led them to "hang their harps." At a determined moment, it became difficult to sing songs of Zion in a strange land, and in a time of deep sadness "They hung up their harps." There are periods in our life so strange and incomprehensible that we  are tempted to "hang up our gloves". We surrender in the face of this situation; we feel that it overwhelms us and we lose the spirit to fight. Brother, do not be afraid, this is not new. God’s servants have already lived this and it is embodied in the Word. 

The circumstances beat their emotions so hard that they decided to leave their activities and even their ministry, as was the case with Moses, and more explicitly Elijah, among others. Elijah went into exile in the cave of grief. But from there, the Lord pulled him out and gave him bread and water and strengthened by that food, he walked forty days and forty nights until reaching the God’s mountain. The circumstances change, there are dark days, nights without stars. But there are things that never change. First, God does not change nor is controlled or imprisoned by any circumstance that occurs on this earth; second, the Word of God does not change, and third, Jesus is the same today, yesterday, and forever. And that is what we are experiencing in our exile, that the light continues to shine, that God is still present, that the Word is still our food and the best is yet to come. Jesus said, "in the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world". Our faith is being tested in this difficult time. It is being tested to be purified like gold. 1 Peter 1:7 "That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ:". Are we in the oven? Definitely, and it is necessary that we be in it, there is rubbish that we do not see, but that God has to eradicate from our life, with the aim that we transform into vessels of honor.

6) Hope. We cannot deny that sometimes we do not see the light at the end of the tunnel. There are circumstances that not only rob us of our energies, but also do not allow us to look to the future with enthusiasm. It comes to mind those disheartened disciples who walked toward the village of Emmaus. For them the death of Christ represented failure, disappointment, disillusion. If we do not understand God's plans and his eternal purposes, we run the risk of losing hope. Hope was recovered when Jesus approached them on the way to the village and He opened the Scriptures and their comprehension so that they understood the Scriptures. Today the Scriptures remain our source of inspiration and the tool of understanding that the Holy Spirit uses to maintain us firm in the hope of the gospel. A question we need to ask ourselves in these times is: How much do I know the Word? What do we read it methodically or do we dust it off just to carry it to our services? Brother, do not forget that the Word has the answers to your questions, she enlightens our minds and is the sword of the Holy Spirit, useful for everything that contributes to our growth and spiritual health and emotional wellbeing. The Word also contains promises that rekindle hope, affirm us in the faith and arrange our thoughts. Let us take these tools that God has placed at our disposal and cross this valley of the shadow of death without fear because the rod and the staff of the Lord will comfort me. Brother, fellow minister, "Don't hang up your harp", take encouragement and begin to praise the great and powerful God and you will receive strength from above.