The Lord said
to Gideon, “You have too many men. I cannot deliver Midian into their hands, or
Israel would boast against me, ‘My own strength has saved me.’” (Judges 7:2)
By
the time you read this message, Old Union Church will have paid off the
mortgage for our new building. At a
meeting on May 13, the session voted to cash in the building fund
investments. This money, together with
the money in the building fund checking account and the expected profits from
the garage sale and car cruise, are enough to pay off the final $26,000. Generous donors and eager helpers at our
fund-raising events enabled us to reach attain this goal far ahead of schedule.
Some
background information may help you appreciate this accomplishment. At a congregational meeting on June 2008, we
voted to take on a $300,000 loan to build our fellowship hall. The total cost of the project was $750,000,
and we had raised $450,000. It was not
an easy decision to take on this loan, and many of us worried that it was more
than our church could handle.
Construction began in October 2008, at the worst possible financially
time for more than a generation. The
financial crisis that began the Great Recession took away a third of the money
we had saved for the project. In December
we had to increase the loan by 50%, from $300,000 to $450,000, in order to
complete what we had already started.
What had begun as a daunting challenge now seemed insurmountable. And yet here we are, less than ten years into
a twenty-year mortgage, making our final payment.
It
would be easy to congratulate ourselves on what we have been able to
achieve. But if we do, we would fail to
see God’s mighty action. As I wrote in
this column after we had to increase our loan, “If we could complete this building
project on our own, where would the faith be?
But if we are brought to our knees and realize that the project will
indeed succeed only with God’s blessing, then we are well on our way to living
out our faith.”
When
God called Gideon to battle the Midianites who had invaded the land, he
mustered an army of 32,000. But God told
him that these were too many soldiers, and he whittled Gideon’s army down to
only 300 men. He did so in order that
Gideon and his countrymen would realize that the victory came not from
themselves, but from the Lord. In the
same way, when God called us to build, he whittled away our resources so that
we would realize success could only come from his hand and not our own. And now we see how God has provided for us
beyond what we thought possible.
Paying
off the church mortgage is only the most recent example of the astonishing
things that God does in our congregation and through its people. It is only the latest reminder that God is at
work in his church. As we make plans for
the future of our church, and as we face challenges and opportunities in our
personal lives, remember the lesson of The Too-Big Mortgage That Got Paid in
Half the Time.
