My first dollar was earned by pulling weeds. My father promised to give me a penny for every ten weeds I pulled out of our lawn. I think there were more weeds than grass. More dollars were later made by mowing lawns, working for a landscaper, and then working in a grocery store. Each dollar was carefully placed in a savings account at a local bank. When I entered high school, I was very pleased about the nice bank account that I had.

Then, one day, my “financial world collapsed.” I was sitting in church listening to a guest speaker from the Gideons’ organization. He was telling us how many Bibles and New Testaments they were placing in hotels, hospitals, prisons, and distributing to schoolchildren.

Suddenly, God reminded me of a verse in the Bible. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal” (Matthew 6:19–20). That was the first jolt. I knew what God had in mind for my hard-earned bank account. At 20 cents a Testament, I figured out how many I could sponsor with my money. The struggle to do what I knew God wanted and hang on to what I wanted became intense.

Then the second “bomb” dropped from heaven—another passage from the Bible that I had learned. “Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings” (Malachi 3:8). That was convicting. I suddenly realized that I had never given God his portion of any of the dollars I earned.

My bank book

So I began to bargain with God. “Lord, I will give you 10% of my bank account!” Somehow, that idea did not seem to even reach his ears. So I upped the offer. “I’ll give you 50% of all that I earned.”

It was then that the rest of the passage came to my mind. “Prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it” (Malachi 3:10). That settled the matter. I wanted to prove God with 100% of my money. This meant taking the funds that I was going to use to buy a car and turning them into New Testaments for schoolchildren.

What happened during the following year is an amazing testimony of God’s ability to open up the windows of heaven and shower out blessings. It is important to note that the passage does not say “shower out money” because the blessings of God usually involve things that are more valuable than money, such as faith, fellowship with God, inward peace, joy, genuine love, health, and creativity.

However God chose to show to my youthful mind that He could also pour out money for the things that I needed. A man who worked for a steel company learned that I had built a photo lab in my basement. He asked if I would be able to develop film of highly magnified steel. The molecular structure of the photos would reveal the amount of various types of alloys in the steel and its related strengths. I gladly did the work after school, and he paid me well.

In one year, I had a car and two times what I had given away in the bank! I was thrilled with my car and my bank account, but God was “nervous” about them. We both knew very well the Biblical truth, “Where a man’s treasure is, there will his heart be also.” God discerned that my heart and my treasures were on earthly things, so He did something about it.