6. Financial trustworthiness is an apostolic honour to Christ
6. Financial trustworthiness is an apostolic honour to Christ
Let’s look at upward and downward accountability. We tend to think that we are upwardly accountable to bodies such as boards and funding foundations and donors and the government and legal authorities, and downwardly accountable to our beneficiaries, that is, to those who actually receive from our ministry, those whom we are serving. However, the direction of our accountability is the reverse. Our upward accountability is to those who occupy the position Jesus was referring to when he said, ‘Inasmuch as you do it to the least of these my brethren, you do it for me’ (see Matthew 25:40). Those our ministry is serving are actually Jesus to us. So our accountability to them is really our accountability to him—which is ‘upward’. When we serve others in our ministry, we are serving Christ. We are honouring him in serving them.
Paul says in several passages that discharging this financial responsibility in a trustworthy manner is an honour to Christ, not just a matter of transparency before men. It was important to do the job with honesty and integrity. But even more, it was important to do it for the honour and glory of Christ. Look first at 2 Corinthians 8:18–19. Who were these people who were administering the gift? Paul says, ‘We are sending along with him [Titus] the brother who is praised by all the churches for his service to the gospel. What is more, he was chosen by the churches’. Titus was an honoured person whose life was already seen to be honouring to the Lord and honouring to the gospel, and therefore Paul and the Corinthians could trust him with their money. And the way he handles the money will also be honouring to the Lord and to the church. Honest finances are honouring to Christ (with the obvious implication that dishonesty dishonours Christ).
The point is even more explicit in verses 23 and 24.
As for Titus, he is my partner and fellow worker among you; as for our brothers, they are representatives of the churches and an honour to Christ. Therefore show these men the proof of your love and the reason for our pride in you, so that the churches can see it.
The word ‘representatives’, used there, is actually apostoloi, apostles. It is used in the weaker sense that occurs several times in the New Testament to refer to others beyond the twelve apostolic pillars of the church (the twelve disciples, minus Judas Iscariot and plus Matthias in the Book of Acts, and then the Apostle Paul). In this slightly looser sense, the word apostolos meant someone who was an emissary or a trusted delegate of the churches. There seem to have been a number of these apostolic delegates—Titus, Timothy, and others who are mentioned in 3 John and elsewhere. So Paul says, these apostoloi, these chosen delegates of the churches who are being entrusted with the responsibility of handling finances within the churches, especially this large financial gift to Jerusalem, are an honour to Christ.
What a commendation! What a way to speak of an accountant or treasurer! These people are entrusted with money. And by being faithful in that trust, they are not only an honour to Christ, but also they should have church approval (v 24): ‘Show these men the proof of your love’, because we want them to be seen by all the churches.
Look at how Paul speaks about Epaphroditus in Philippians 2:25–30. He says, ‘I think it is necessary to send back to you Epaphroditus, my brother, fellow worker and fellow soldier, who is also your messenger.’ Again the word is apostolos, your apostle. Epaphroditus was not an apostle in the sense that Paul was, but he was the emissary, the representative, the trusted messenger of the church, and hence apostolic. Paul continues,
whom you sent to take care of my needs. For he longs for all of you and is distressed because you heard he was ill. Indeed he was ill, and almost died. But God had mercy on him, and not on him only but also on me, to spare me sorrow upon sorrow. Therefore I am all the more eager to send him [back]. . . . Welcome him in the Lord with great joy, and honor men like him, because he almost died for the work of Christ, risking his life to make up for the help you could not give me.
What Paul is describing is Epaphroditus’s handling of the financial and material gift that the Philippian church had made to Paul when Paul was in need. And Paul says in effect, ‘That service of Epaphroditus was a work of the gospel; that was a work born out of love for Christ and for his church. Epaphroditus nearly died doing what he did and, therefore,’ Paul says, ‘honour him. What he is doing, he is doing for Christ’s sake’.
In Philippians 4:14–19 we find another reference to the same thing, the gift that was sent to Paul through Epaphroditus. Verse 18 reads, ‘I have received full payment and even more; I am amply supplied, now that I have received from Epaphroditus the gifts you sent. They are a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God.’ Epaphroditus’s role then, says Paul, was an apostolic honour: serving God and serving Christ by serving the servants of God. In serving the servants of God, people like Epaphroditus are deserving of honour and respect, because they are an honour to Christ himself.
To administer financial affairs with trustworthiness, with transparency, with honesty as did Epaphroditus and others in the New Testament, is a Christ-honouring thing to do: we do it for him.
When I was the principal of All Nations Christian College near London, there was a time when issues arose that affected me personally. The chairman of the college Board of Directors was a very wise, godly brother whom I greatly respected. I was required to give account of some aspects of how I was running things and reasons for decisions that had been made. That was not easy; it is not comfortable to have people poking into everything that is going on. That is true even if you have nothing troubling your conscience. I knew that in relation to the college I had done nothing wrong, but still I had to accept the questioning. At one point, the chairman of the Council said, ‘Chris, accountability is not a burden; it’s a gift. It’s a gift that we give you. We hold you accountable, and that is for your good; it’s for your protection. It’s not something we are imposing upon you. It’s something we are giving to you because we love you, because you are a brother in Christ, and we want to affirm your integrity by expecting proper accountability’. I thought that was a very helpful, positive way for me to look at the demanding challenge of accountability. I learned to see it, not as a threat or an insult or ‘beneath my dignity to be questioned’, but as something that was honouring to me and also, of course, to God.
Summary Principle 6: In 1 Samuel 2:30 God said through a prophet to Eli, ‘Those who honor me I will honor’. If we want the Lord’s honour, we need to be honourable in the way we handle money and in the way we hold ourselves accountable; we need to be transparent men and women of integrity in everything. Let us make Paul and his teaching on this matter a powerful and authoritative model for ourselves.
May we all pray for God to grant us the courage to live and work with complete integrity, and may we honour one another by expecting—and giving—accountability to one another and to the Lord.