Today’s passage is Leviticus 27:16-34. A field dedicated to the Lord is to be valued according to what it produces based on the time to the Jubilee year. To redeem it, a man must add a fifth of its value. The firstborn animal is already the Lord’s, so it can’t be dedicated to him. Everything devoted to the Lord cannot be redeemed or sold because it belongs to God. Tithes of everything can only be redeemed by adding a fifth to the price. No substitutes.
1(19) Am I willing to give more to the Lord because I’ve changed my mind about something I’ve already given but want back?
2(26) Am I trying to cheat God by promising something that I already give or do regularly?
3(28) Am I unmindful of something I’ve dedicated to God because my circumstances have changed?
Holy House
A few years ago my wife and I bought a piece of land in YangPyeong with the plan to build a house on it. Our idea was that building a house is cheaper than buying an apartment.
We did this without a thorough vetting of the idea with our community.
We were dedicating our house without a clear understanding of what we were doing.
As time went by and problems and delays with the house construction multiplied, we had time to talk with the people in our church community who might be making use of the house. In our minds and their minds, the reality of that house’s eventual use was established.
During the time of delayed construction and then design mistakes, we had been living in very small apartments, unable to hold couples mokjang, which increasingly frustrated me as mokja because I was not doing my duty to my mogwons. I was not being responsible to the role given to me by my church.
My frustration at not doing my duty and the impossibility of using the YangPyeong house drove me to cry out to the Lord for a solution. Because I had a sincere focus on my mokjang, the Lord showed me the way to buy a ground floor apartment with an unusually big living room to host mokjangs. In worldly terms our apartment is nothing special, but in spiritual terms it is wonderful, and we are profoundly grateful for the good coming from our meetings.
After we bought our apartment, suddenly the government gave the permission to build our house in YangPyeong! So we changed the floor plan to reflect our church commmunity's use.
But along the way, because of the mistakes made by the builder in our design, we became disappointed with the house. The worst mistake for us was putting the floor we chose in the house next door! We looked at all the mistakes and said, “This is not our house. We can’t live here.” We began to forget what we had promised to God.
The church use of our YangPyeong house receded from our minds.
We now thought about selling it, but no one was interested because it doesn’t have a normal floorplan or a normal color or normal alignment on the land. We had made it for church use, not normal family living. When one of our church members visited it, he immediately loved it because he saw how perfect it was for mokjangs.
He visited it three times!
When church members heard that we planned to sell the house, they felt disappointed that they wouldn’t get to go to it because they’d been looking forward to going.
We felt guilty. As we read through Leviticus, we began to question ourselves and our motives in wanting to sell the house. When we read Chapter 27, especially verses 14 and 28, we felt the conviction of our sin.
We had dedicated our house to the Lord without considering our decision deeply.
It was really a half-hearted dedication, but God had taken us seriously!
We realized we had to follow through no matter what the cost to us.
We had made a promise and now we had to obey. Not to obey was to invite big trouble, as verse 33 makes clear.
We are both contrite for our sins and grateful to the Lord for his generous waiting, allowing us to come to our senses.
Application: proclaim our house dedication on our church home page and then follow through.
Prayer: Lord, thank you for the troubles with our house and the action of your Holy Spirit in us, leading us to see our sin and guiding us to obedience and to keep our boundaries.
