Honor the LORD with your wealth, with the firstfruits of all your crops; then your barns will be filled to overflowing, and your vats will brim over with new wine (Proverbs 3:9-10).

In a dusky college-town bar, on a stage played by local and regional garage bands, we gave our first-born son back to God.  It was around this time of the year, though I don't remember the exact date (since we were going off of the lunar/Jewish calendar instead of the more conventional solar/Julian calendar).  The weather was warm but not hot.  Our little boy had just been born into our family, some seven weeks earlier.  And since it happened to be the day of Pentecost -- the Celebration of the Firstfruits -- we decided that we wanted to use that occasion to dedicate our baby to God.  We weren't exactly following any standard religious instructions, but basically just trying to acknowledge the fact that our little boy was a child of God before he was a child of ours.  We wanted him to be used in whatever ways God wanted to use him.  Our little Elliot had been named after the great missionary-martyer, Jim Elliot -- and while we did not want our son to be speared to death at the hands of an Stone Age Amazonian Indian tribe, we did feel like God had given him to us at a strategic time in our lives, just as we were about to enter missionary service in a faraway country.  And we wanted his upbringing to reflect that.  As we had been reading about the ancient Festival of the Firstfruits, we felt that such an occasion as the Day of Pentecost would be a good time to express our sense of gratitude and dedication when it came to our family and our mission.  If we wanted our family and our mission to be blessed, we needed give them back to God.  We felt that we needed to honor the LORD with the firstfruits of our family, if our family was going to be given the opportunity to succeed as missionaries in Europe.  So that's what we did -- even though it meant doing so in the inauspicious settings of Upstairs Easystreet, among a bunch of college students in our church fellowship at the time.

Several years have passed since that bar-room baby dedication.  We've now been blessed with two other children, in addition to Elliot.  Our ministry in Amsterdam is in a place of satisfying development and fruitfulness.  And we're still looking forward to seeing what God will do in the years to come.  Neither our family nor our ministry are perfect -- and they certainly have not been easy -- but it seems to me that God has made good on His "end of the bargain," blessing us in extraordinary ways over the better part of the last decade.  He really has shown His extravagance in blessing our family and our ministry, despite the occasional hardships, and I can't help but see it as a direct application of Proverbs 3:9-10 (plus dozens of other verses from the Bible, which repeatedly reaffirm the value of honoring the LORD with our firstfruits).

Throughout my life, I've seen that God is pleased to be presented with the firstfruits of our lives -- be it time, or money, or relationships, or ministry.  When we take the things that are most important to us and put them at God's disposal, before coming up with our own schemes for their employment, we honor Him and allow Him to direct our affairs more completely.  As a result, I've become personally convicted that the first "bill" that gets paid in any given month is our tithe to the church (giving back the firstfruits of our finances).  I've become personally convicted that the first hour of any given day (which also happens to be the "best hour" of my day, given that I am naturally a morning person) is spent in personal devotion -- reading the Bible and praying and journalling.  I've become personally convicted that my children belong first and foremost to God, which has resulted in our dedication of all three children to God within the first few months of their lives (Elliot in the Bowling Green bar, Olivia in an Amsterdam attic, and Cor in an old Amsterdam wine-cellar).  But I want to continually be thinking of ways to give the firstfruits of my life to God, as a way to honor Him.  It's about the heart condition, more than the gifts themselves.  But if Proverbs 3:9-10 is true (and I sincerely believe that it is), then the returns could keep getting better and better and better.