Is God into spending money on a building?

Sunday will be our "final four" championship here at Stone Church. What a great day it is going to be!

To follow up on some of my thoughts of yesterday, another question that can come up during a building campaign is this: "Maybe, George, God does care about buildings (as I blogged about yesterday), but he certainly wouldn't want us to spend very much money on a building.

Oh really? Who says?

The truth is that some of our objections aren't really biblical objections at all. They can spring from our culture or feelings of materialism and stinginess.

"God certainly wouldn't want us to spend much money on a building." Who says?

We at Stone Church are committed to not building anything that is gaudy or glitzy. We really want to devote our resources to building lives.

That's what we are into.

Yet, if you take a close look at 1 Chronicles 29, at the construction the Temple, you will find that in cost, with just the gold, totally apart from the silver, precious stones and cedar logs (that were so numerous in the Temple that they didn't bother to number them) just the gold, alone, in today's dollars would cost $3,360,000,000.00.

You read that right. Three billion, 360 million dollars!

And when you take into account the wages that would have to be paid to the workers, (especially if they were unionized - these were expert workers, they were stone masons and jewelers and master carpenters)- if we were building the Temple today (with the cost of the building permits on a place like that) all of that included would mean in today's dollars it would be around 10-15 billion dollars.

So our 5.9 million dollar project is really not that big when it comes to projects that God has ordered in the past.

Let's continue to believe God for a great work by faith!