When thou vow'st to bow unto God, defer not to pay it, for he hath no pleasure in fools,
pay thou which thou hast vowed.
Better is it that thou shouldest not vow than thou shouldest vow and not pay.
Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy flesh to sin, neither say thou before the angel that
it was an error.
Wherefore should God be angry with thy voice and destroy the work of thine hands?
For in the multitude of dreams and many words there are also diverse vanities, but fear
thou God.
So what is he saying?
Look, even if you make a vow and you don't keep it, you can't be like, well, I made it.
It was an error.
It was a mistake.
I didn't know what I was saying.
No, God still expects you to keep it.
That's how serious this matter of a vow is.
Now let me say this.
This is the primary reason for me why we do not have altar calls in our church.
Now how many know what an altar call is?
Anybody know what that is?
At my old church, and look, not just at my old church, most of you who came from an old
high B church had altar calls, okay?
Now look, I'm going to explain to you why it's wrong, but let me say this.
I was part of the altar calls.
I did altar calls.
I went down to the altar and let me say this, I made good decisions when I went, in fact,
the first time I ever went down to the altar was when I got saved.
I came down to the altar.
Someone was there for me.
They led me to the Lord.
I got saved, and I could think of various times throughout my life where I actually
went down to the altar and I made a good decision.
But let me say this.
I guarantee you there are times that I made vows that I did not keep, and I could probably
look back at the consequences that I faced throughout my life as a Christian and link
them to the fact that I did not keep certain vows, probably fact, okay?
But here's the problem with altar calls.
Number one, altar calls are not in the Bible.
Some people come and just worship at my feet and just kneel down and make all these decisions.
It's not in the Bible.
You don't see New Testament church doing that, okay?
You never see that in the Bible.
But here's the danger of the altar call is that preachers will have their people come
down and make a decision, coax them in to make a decision, peer pressure them, and to
make a decision for God, whether it's giving a certain amount of money, you know, who will
give $100?
It's like, man, I'm negative $100, but yeah, all right.
Who's looking at me?
Who's going to give it?
And people like are raising their hands to like, you guys know what I'm talking about?
You know, donate all kinds of money, and then it's just like, I can't pay that.
Well, you just made them out.
And you wonder, we wonder why so many churches are just crazy in debt because God can't bless
a church that promotes vows that they don't keep.
Now I got saved at a youth conference, okay?
I'm thankful for it.
I'm thankful for the decisions that I made at the altar call, obviously, ignorantly.
But one thing that I do remember is altar calls at youth conferences, I mean, scores
of teenagers and adults just coming to the altar, giving their life to God.
I'm going to be a missionary.
I vowed to God that I'm going to be a pastor.
I'm going to go start a church.
I'm going to get the sin out of my life.
I'm going to start reading my Bible.
God, I promise, fill out a little sheet, I promise I will read my Bible every single
day, and those same teenagers don't even come back to church the next week or something.
They backslide.
Not good.
So these pastors, they coax these people to make these vows, these spiritual vows, but
because these kids, these teenagers don't have the character to maintain that vow, they
actually sin, they cause their flesh to sin.
And then they end up suffering the consequences because of it later on.
This is very dangerous.
And this is something that was done constantly.
I mean, you have, for example, missions conferences, right, where they do like a faith promise.
You guys ever heard of that?
Or this is really old IFB, you're like, faith promise?
Okay, let me explain.
Back in the old IFB, we had this thing called faith promise missions.
You fill out a card, and you're going to give this amount of money for X amount of
weeks and on a weekly basis, and then you do your major missions offering once, which
is like 1,000 bucks or whatever, and they give you all the slides there.
We didn't use slides, they actually had videos.
And then they pull your heartstrings, you're like, oh man, those poor little Southeast
Asian kids, they don't have the gospel and stuff like that, yeah, let me throw 50 bucks,
I'll figure it out somehow.
You know people sometimes don't keep those vows.
Building programs.
Well they have you give money to the building and vow, and look, there's a reason they have
a card.
So to bind you.
So what they'll do is they'll like, they'll have a card, right, and they have you write
your vow on one side and your vow on the next side, then they'll go like this, throw this
into the offering, and you keep this for your personal records.
In other words, this is to remind you that you just bound yourself to this vow, okay.
That's how it works.
And look, people who do it, some people do it ignorantly, like myself, but we need to
get back to the Bible and recognize this is not good.
Better to just not vow and give whatever you can at whatever time you want, right.
You know, we're not going to have offering Sunday here where you got to make sure you
vow that you're going to give tithes, that's between you and God.
Because if you don't tithe, the devourer comes.
That's on you, you know, and look, me, I don't know if I've even preached a full length sermon
on tithing.
I probably did it when I taught through 1 Corinthians, but that's not a sermon that
you hear very often, right.
I mean, am I mistaken?
Can someone prove me wrong on there?
Like, well, hold on, I remember this one sermon.
I really don't talk about it.
Why?
Because I'm not fixated on money.
And sometimes these churches, they constantly preach, you know what you constantly preach
on?
That's what you're always thinking about.
That's why sometimes these church services, the sermon is about money, and then when the
guy comes up to pray for the offering, they give a little sermon in about money.
The beginning of the service, you got to give a verse about money, everything's about money.
Because that's all they're thinking about.
No, you know what, if we want God to bless our finances here, obviously we're going to
talk about money when the time calls for it, but let's just serve God.
Why don't we just stand for, why don't we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness
and these things shall be added unto us.
Oh, but you don't understand, Pastor Bruce, these things doesn't include a nicer car.
These things don't include nicer suits and these things don't include bigger houses and
all these things.
Yeah, it includes food and raiment, which the Bible tells us is there to be content.
The reason they keep pumping these people with all these vows of making money, because
the pastors are greedy of filthy lucre.
They want to make some money.
I was going to say loy, loy is Cambodian for money, sorry.
They want to make some money, it's what they do.
Okay, look, I want to be rich spiritually.
I want to be rich in faith.
And just let God take care of my needs of food and clothing.
I just want to have fun serving God.
I want to preach whatever the heck I want, sowing and win people to Christ.
Give me my two meals a day.
Give me something when I'm cold.
Just live a normal life and be rich in faith.
That's what we want.
Don't you want tens of thousands of dollars to be poured into this ministry?
Yeah, of course.
But not so I can have a Mercedes Benz.
It's so we can take mission trips.
It's so we can get gospel tracts.
It's so we can make documentaries.
It's so we can get the word out.
It's so we can serve God more efficiently.
That's what we need, is to pay the bills.
It's to keep this light going.
It's for the lame AC unit in the back, you know.
It's to keep the operation going.
But you know, we don't have to make a vow to get that, to get those things, keep those
things running.
We just serve the Lord, you know.
What if you need something extra?
Then look, this is what we do.
If we want something extra, we look to see if we have the money.
If we have it, we get it.
If we don't, we don't get it.
Well, don't you want to do like a faith promise where they fill out the sheet and they put
their signature?
No.
I don't think we need to do that.