SEP 20 2026 | The Spirituality of Giving S1E1 | Giving Before the Law

**Sea Change Church · The Spirituality of Giving** **S1E1 · "Giving Before the Law"** **Pastor Adam Stadtmiller · September 20, 2026** **Genesis 4:1-7** --- Like I said, we're moving into a brand-new series on the spirituality of giving, looking at what giving means. I want you to know that while it uses the word generosity, using generosity to form your soul, this series is about financial giving. A lot of times in the past, I think pastors are afraid to talk about the spirituality of actually giving your goats and your grain, so to speak, something that's provisional, your actual finances, because it's been done really poorly. I've seen it done poorly, especially in the 1980s on TV and all that.

So a lot of times there's this hesitancy to actually talk about it, or to talk about it in a way that's probably a little bit non-biblical. It is biblical, but they focus on one part of the Bible, the Old Testament, and then they try to make bridges to increase giving, or juice giving, or whatever that is. I want you to know that the spiritually formative aspect of how you deal with the provision you have, and how it relates to God, is one of the most important areas of your life where you can seek to know God and grow in that. So I really want to do a biblical teaching.

This is going to be very Bible-study based, but it's for believers. I had a Hindu gentleman here earlier who's not a believer, and after the message he said, "This is amazing, because we give so much sacrifice. So to understand the Christian idea of sacrifice was really beneficial to me." I didn't know I was crossing bridges to the Hindu world there, but we had this incredible conversation. I want to answer a few of the questions people ask most in this series. It's going to be a three-week series, maybe five. As I was going through this, I was just getting blessed, learning things I'd never seen before.

Here are a few questions I'm going to answer. How much am I supposed to give? Scripture in the New Testament is different than the Old Testament, so we'll look at what that means. Does God promise to reward you if you give? You'll hear a lot of that if you turn on the TV: give your dollar and God's going to make it two. Is that a thing, or is it not a thing? Doesn't Jesus promise a cross more than he promises to double your provision? We're going to look at that. I think there's some truth to it, but not as much as we're sometimes told. And where should my giving go?

A lot of people don't know this. A woman came up to me afterward and said, "I have substantial means, and I haven't known where to give." I asked another Christian one time, and they said, "Just give wherever there's a need." I think the Bible gives a plan to make things a little more strategic than that. So what does that look like? Where should my tithe go, and what's the difference between a tithe, an offering, and what they'd call the first fruits? The idea is so that you can grow spiritually, so we can have spiritual formation in your life. There are four areas that bring the most spiritual formation: health, family, future, and finance.

When something happens with your health, you usually draw closer to God. When there's an issue with your family, that draws you closer to God. We worry about our future. And the final one is finance. Those four are kind of the wine press of God's spiritual formation. One of the problems is we usually don't lean into the spiritually formative element of those areas until something goes wrong. But the biblical understanding is that you can get on the front foot of that. There are ways to pour into your health, your family, your future, and your finances that bring blessing before there's a crisis. One of the ways we bring blessing and covering over our finances is the way in which we spiritually steward them for God's purposes, and the Bible actually says that will bring a covering, a blessing.

Here's the big idea before we read the scripture, which is in Genesis 4. Giving happens immediately in scripture. You're in chapter 4 of Genesis, right after the garden. There was no giving in the garden. There was no sacrifice in the garden. It wasn't necessary or needed, and you won't see it in heaven either. Jesus will be shown as the sacrifice. But sacrifice and giving is something that happens between the bookends of the garden and the wedding feast, or in heaven with the Lamb. So the big idea for the message is this: the first recorded act of worship in the Bible was the giving of offerings to the Lord.

What I mean by that is giving a provisional, sacrificial offering, something that cost them goats and grain. It's the first time you see worship, and this is an act of worship that Cain and Abel are doing in chapter 4. It doesn't tell us exactly why they gave the offering. It could have been atonement because of what happened in the garden, but it was an act of worship, and you're going to see this act of worship throughout scripture. The first act of worship wasn't a song. It wasn't Cain and Abel getting together with a guitar or a fife and writing, "Oh Lord, we love you, we sacrifice to you, our sacrifice of praise." There's nothing wrong with that.

Scripture is clear that singing praise is important, and we're going to connect those two today. But the first act of giving early on was a sacrificial gift where it cost them something, where they gave of their goats and their grain. What I want to do in this message, to frame this up for believers, because Sunday morning church here at Sea Change is for Christians who go to Sea Change (if you're visiting, welcome, you can see what we do, but it's here to teach you), is show you theologically that you need to see the provisional offerings of your goats and your grain, your finances, your resources, in the same way you see sung worship, and that both of those are a form of worship.

We live in a Christian culture with a huge emphasis on what we sing. We put out worship albums. If you listen to the next big worship release, you'll see this huge emphasis on worship being sung worship. Now, scripture says you're a living sacrifice, so your whole life is an act of worship. But I think there's been an overcompensation for sung worship, and not enough for provisional worship connected to it. So if you haven't seen the giving of your financial resource, your goats and your grain, as an act of worship, I want you to frame that up now as part of your spiritual formation. The key word we're going to use today is first, because Abel gave the first and the best.

Let's go to verse one. Genesis 4, verses one through seven: "Now Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, 'I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD.' And again, she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground. In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell.

The LORD said to Cain, 'Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, and you must rule over it.'" The first thing I want you to see is the LORD's regard for the offering. It doesn't just say the LORD had regard for the offering, it says the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering. It's tying the individual personhood of Abel, and of Cain, to what they're giving. Scripture doesn't say why God rejected Cain's offering. It might be that it wasn't his best barley.

There's always this thought, because when it talks about Abel's offering, it says he brought the first, the best and the first. So maybe Cain brought the second best. Maybe he looked at his barley and thought, this isn't really good barley, it's kind of weak, so I'll just offer that. Or maybe it was his best, and he had a heart posture where, when he brought it to God, he was thinking, I'm bummed I have to bring this. What we see is there's a connection between the offering and the heart of the giver, and God will never separate the heart from the offering. You're going to see that as we move into the New Testament period too.

He won't separate that. So the one thing I want to show you from scripture that's important is that when you give, it can't be disconnected from your heart posture, and when you give, you want to give out of your best and the first of what you have as an offering to God. There are three periods you need to understand in regard to giving that will frame this up for you. The period of this passage is pre-Mosaic covenant. Remember, Moses shows up later and builds a law, and everyone has to follow the law. This is beforehand. Cain and Abel are making an offering and a sacrifice before they were ever commanded to do it.

This is massive. I had never really seen this before. I kind of just took everything in the Old Testament and merged it into one picture of Old Testament giving, but there are three distinct periods of giving, and they build on one another and come to culmination in the second covenant. The next period is when Moses shows up and God gives him the law. He gives him the law for a reason, to show people not only the best way to live, but what is required to have a relationship with God. But scripture even says that no one can actually follow that law perfectly, so it stood as a substitute, waiting for a better covenant.

That covenant comes on the day Jesus rises from the dead. On that day, the Mosaic covenant is fulfilled completely. It doesn't go away, Jesus says, but it's fulfilled, which means you're no longer under obligation to do the things that were commanded. You are no longer required to give God a tithe of your goats and your grain. There's no command anymore in the New Testament. Jesus has fulfilled that command. What's interesting, and I had never seen this before, is that when Cain and Abel give this offering to God, they weren't commanded to do so. They did it of their own free will. I want to show you why that matters, because God always wants you to give out of your free will.

He doesn't want you to give out of obligation. But he had to put the obligation in through the Mosaic law, to show you how it works, and that anything you do isn't sufficient on its own. That law needed to be fulfilled, and Jesus fulfilled it. Think about it like this with your kids. If you told your five-year-old, "Every day at three o'clock you have to come hug daddy," at first they'd think, cool, I get to hug daddy at three. By the time they're nine, they'll be thinking, "Ugh, I have to go hug dad," running over under obligation to the law. But you understand that it's actually for a good purpose: it shows you have a relationship with your father, a covering, a security.

God created the law, but his intention was never for you to have to hug him because of a command. He was waiting for the day Jesus would fulfill that law, so you could come to God freely, without a command. As a parent, you understand that completely. You don't want your kids hugging you because they have to. You want them to do it freely. So in this second covenant, the law has been fulfilled. Jesus has paid the bill, and you have zero requirement to give to anything. Most pastors won't tell you that. There is zero command to do so. But just because the command has been fulfilled doesn't mean we stop doing these things, for different purposes.

Going back to verse two: "Again, she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of the sheep, Cain the worker of the ground. And in the course of time, Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions." In most Old Testament sacrifice, rarely was there a sacrifice that didn't cost the giver something. By the time we get to David, he's singing songs, "I bring the sacrifice of praise," and there's a sacrifice in that too. But in the Old Testament, most of the time when you praised God, it cost you something, and it was giving of yourself in a way you could actually feel.

I'd say that in today's modern worship culture, if you asked most people, especially on social media, what worship is, they'd say, I love this worship artist, I love that one, they put out bangers, I just love worship. And if you look at worship content online, you'll see a thousand young people jumping and singing, and that's what gets seen as worship. But in a biblical context, that needs to be paired with people who actually want to worship through giving. Imagine saying to a room full of young people, "Tonight's a worship night, we're not going to have any music, just bring your wallet," and setting out five buckets for different causes.

I don't think a room full of people would show up with their phones out, excited to give like that. It's funny, but if you look at the biblical understanding, that's what worship and giving actually looked like together. There has to be some spiritual formation, in the next generation and in ours, so that we see the giving of our provision as something that costs us something. While you don't have to give, when you do give, I'd encourage you to make sure you feel it. If you can give and never feel it, I'd challenge you on that. That's not second-covenant giving. I'm telling you what you see mostly in the Old Testament and the Mosaic period: people actually felt their sacrifice.

Why does that matter? Because when God gave the ultimate sacrifice, his Son, he actually felt it. If we want to unite our giving to the giving God modeled through his Son, it should be something we feel, and it should be an act of worship. Here's something really interesting. With Cain and Abel, there was no command to give. Does anyone know the first time God actually commanded a person in the Bible to give something? Abraham, and what did God ask him to give? He went hard right out of the gate. Noah gave, but wasn't commanded, he gets out of the ark and makes a burnt sacrifice.

Cain and Abel give, without a command. You'd think God would feather the throttle a little, maybe start with a grain offering. Instead, the first command he gives is, "Give me your son." Why? Because all provisional giving is based on what God himself was going to have to do to build a bridge back to us. In other religions, we sacrifice to God so we can appease him. In Christianity, God sacrificed his Son to himself, so that he could build a bridge to us. What's also interesting, something you might never have seen before, is that in most of the Old Testament, in the Mosaic period, the offerings were burned up.

Bulls, burnt offerings, all through the period between the law and Jesus dying on the cross. It was also added in that they'd give offerings to support the work of the temple, which we'll talk about in a couple of weeks, and that giving wasn't all burned up. But imagine if I told you all to go to the bank, bring a thousand dollars each, we get a hundred thousand dollars in a bucket, and then I pour lighter fluid on it and light a match. You'd freak out. That's essentially what they did: they'd bring a bull that could have fed people or plowed a field, bring grain offerings, and just destroy it.

That makes no sense unless you understand what God was doing. Before Jesus, the sacrifice of Jesus himself would be destroyed. When Jesus died on the cross, he was given unto death and destroyed. So any giving before that, much of it, not all, because in the Mosaic covenant giving also supported the temple, but much of it was a burnt sacrifice destroyed unto God, because God himself was going to offer his Son, and his Son would be destroyed. That's why there was burnt sacrifice. Why don't we do that now? For one, you'd sue me. But the real reason is that Jesus, after being destroyed, was brought back to life and renewed, and everything that happens in his name after that sacrifice now renews and gives life.

So when you give now, you don't destroy it. You take that offering and it becomes regenerative, toward the next generation. God is using it to grow what's next. So when you give now, we don't burn our sacrifices. We give so that something else can have life, and it's an act of worship. We're going to talk more next week about giving under the Mosaic law, but I want to move to the second point: we don't honor God by giving him what is left, we honor him by giving from our first and our best. Verses three and four: "In the course of time, Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel brought of the firstborn of his flock and the fat portions.

And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard, so Cain was angry and his face fell." Abel brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. When it talks about "the course of time," believers would generally give offerings and tithes in season. If you've ever been to Scotland, lambing season is in February and March, and you'd see little lambs everywhere. It would be then, in the course of time, that they'd pick from their flock and give an offering. Same with grain, at harvest. Jewish festivals like Rosh Hashanah and Purim happen in connection to when the harvest was.

I'd challenge you, as a pattern for your own giving: whenever you have a harvest, seek the Lord and ask what you should give, because it says in the New Testament that these days you simply ask the Lord what you should give, and he'll tell you. I'd ask that question at every harvest. If you're paid weekly, that's harvest time. If you're paid monthly, that's harvest time. If you're paid yearly, that's harvest time. Find out when the harvests are in your life, and seek the Lord at that point. There's no longer a command to give, but I'd challenge you to tie it to worship, make it your first and your best, and tie it to a rotational bringing in of what God gives you.

I realize that so often, the way I give is an automatic transfer from my bank, and while that's convenient, I've been missing the blessing of it, because it just goes out as a line item at that point. I realize that if I'm going to tie what I give financially, my goats and my grain, to the sacrifice of Jesus, I need to add something in where I actually feel it more. I was brought up when I was nineteen to tithe ten percent. That's not a command anymore, I'm not telling you that you have to do that. It was easier to do at nineteen than it would be to come to me now and ask me to drop in ten percent.

There was a season where I was giving but not really feeling it anymore, so I want to set up some kind of spiritual, formative practice, maybe going back to writing a check by hand, some form where I'm actually feeling it. I want to finish with a story. I've been giving that ten percent since I was nineteen, and I'm sharing this for the edification of the church, not so you'll think I'm impressive. Recently, we were paying for my daughter's college. I had a big check to write, and I was expecting money to come in to cover it, but I found out the money wasn't going to arrive for another month, and I owed.

Point Loma Nazarene wanted their payment by a certain date or she'd be out. For the first time, fear hit me, and I thought, I can't pay my tithe this month if I'm going to pay for my daughter's college. There was so much guilt and shame that shouldn't have been there, because Jesus already paid for it, but I still felt it. In February of this year, I didn't tithe for the first time I can remember, and I intentionally didn't. I felt horrible about it. I thought, God's going to remove his covering, he's mad at me, all the things you don't need to carry. Five days after I didn't tithe, I got a check in the mail I didn't expect, for five times what I normally tithe.

I was unfaithful, in my own opinion, to something I'd done my entire Christian life, out of fear, and I was living in shame, and God sends me a check for five times the amount. I felt like he was saying, do you see my grace, do you see who I am? I'm not who you think I am, and it's not based on your performance. My mind was blown. I immediately went back to tithing. I still haven't paid back what I missed, I don't have to, but I'm going to. I tell you that story to give you some freedom. It's a little vulnerable to share, but I want you to know I'm normal, I'm just like you, and I have all those same fears.

With that said, giving financially has probably been one of the top three spiritually formative areas of my entire life. There are very few things that will grow you to know Jesus more, and that will bring you so much joy, than this. As a church, that's where we want to go. I want to share one more thing as we close. This church has five priorities I'll share one at a time over the next five weeks, and the first is that we want to be a culture-changing church by building a children's building and a preschool alongside it. If you decide you want to be part of this and give toward it, I want you to know what we're doing, and if you have any questions about the finances, come ask, any question, we are fully transparent.

The first thing we're doing is going after the next generation, creating a preschool where kids can go, and I want to create a Christian school that people can actually afford. I'm tired of Christian schools no one can afford to attend. The point of Christian schools and preschools is to raise the next generation of Christians, even if the playground isn't fancy. I want to build a Christian education that Christians who aren't in the top ten percent can afford, even if we just break even, because I'm not here to make money on it. All of our budget needs to be funded by what you give, not by side projects.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have other things, but our budget needs to rest on what you give. Knowing where we're going, we do need to hire a principal, and we're moving into this next area. I wanted to share this every week so you can get a sense of the culture change we're trying to bring, and the spiritual formation we're pursuing. If you have questions about this, or if anything felt unbiblical to you, please come talk to me, I'm more than willing to have that conversation. I hope you were challenged, I hope you were inspired, and I hope you come to know Jesus more by what you give.

Amen?