Living and Giving Expectantly
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Well, if you read the bible very much you’d find that God is a giver. First page, “And God said”. God didn’t have to create; but he did. He didn’t need us. He didn’t need anything; but he gave of himself because he wanted to create and create us, and in this particular spot, to love him and to have someone to love. God is a giver. You see it throughout the bible. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” when things went wrong so that he may remake us and renew us and heal this world. God is indeed a giver. We give back in response to that, and this morning I want to talk about five things, five reasons to give.
Would you pray with me?
Lord God thank you for what we have seen today, the joy of the choir and how wonderful they sound and their giving; and the boys, their wanting to give back to this place. We ask that you would be with us now and give us your Spirit as we listen and see, and may you move in our hearts that we may respond to you once again. We pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, why do we give? Well, the first answer to that is more of a philosophical or a theological answer. Big picture, if you will, it has to do with stewardship and what stewardship is. Stewardship is the key to understanding your life, believe it or not. It is. And why you are here. And why we are all here. Stewardship is actually an old word for manager, for manager. It really is about how we respond to God and what we are supposed to do. From Deuteronomy we read, 22 Be sure to set aside a tenth of all that your fields produce each year. 23 Eat the tithe of your grain, new wine and oil, and the firstborn of your herds and flocks in the presence of the LORD your God at the place he will choose as a dwelling for his Name, so that you may learn to revere the LORD your God always. That last phrase, revere, means to worship; it means to worship, to acknowledge that God is the Creator.
You know that the biggest idol we all have, the greatest temptation that we all have, is to worship ourselves. If you were to examine our checkbook and the way we use our time, you would see that we spend most of it on us, and taking care of our needs. I have often said about myself and most everyone, we all thinks our lives are our own. But, God is the one who made us and as such he is the owner, is the owner. When we give back to God we simply acknowledge that. It is the act of worship, because God is worthy and he is our God. And the other piece is that we are stewards, if you read in Genesis, Chapter 1, God tells Adam and Eve “Fill the earth and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.” It doesn’t mean to conquer. It means that Adam becomes sort of a sub-king, if you will, not as an absolute ruler. In other words, Adam was the first steward, the first manager, managed the earth. That was the task. We all have the same command. Our little piece of ground, if you will, of our lives, we are to manage because it belongs to God. And again, if we don’t believe that, why are we going to stand before God and answer for it? …Because we will. We will stand before God. Do we want to be able to say to God: All I did Lord was live as long as possibly as comfortably as possibly. That is not what I want to say. I am sure that I do that, but we are stewards. We are stewards and giving just reminds us of that. It is an act of worship.
Secondly, giving finds its primary motivation from past blessing, from past blessing. You know, again, we ask the question, how did we get here? The world says you got here by chance. You are the in-product of a primordial suit in which the little lightning and little heat got together and produced life and it sort of evolved all along the line and here you are, all by chance. But nothing happens by chance from the Christian perspective. In other words, you are here by the agency of your parents and your grandparents and many people before us because God put you here. You are created. And we start with thanksgiving of that. You know, it is easy to focus on what is bad and you might say: Well, golly, God gave me my life and my life is not so hot. What is that all about? You know a survey was taken many, many years ago of people who had disabilities and a question was asked, “Would you have wished you would never have been born?” And very, very few even of those folks who had massive disabilities said, “No, I would have never wished I would never have been born.” Life is a gift. Then we start going down from there, our abilities, our talents, our family, even the earth we are on. You know, it is another sermon; but it is just incredible that this incredible earth is here. If it were even just a few hundred miles closer to the sun, it couldn’t sustain life. We are surrounded by lifeless worlds; now I am not saying that God may not have made life someplace else. I don’t know. We’ll find out, someday, maybe. But in this particular spot, it was here before we got here, maybe millions of years in the making, just for us. It is what God has been doing.
You know sometimes gratitude really changes life and sometimes it is a matter of perspective, too. Many, many years ago I went to the country of Uganda. I was just twenty-five or twenty-six years old and I remember being taken to this village. It was the mud huts and grass roofs, the whole thing that you would imagine Africa to be like in some places. I met the chief of the little village. I had a shirt with me and I had used this shirt—I had waited tables in seminary. It was one of those shirts that was made of some kind of fabric; you could wad it up and get stuff on it and throw it in the washing machine and it would come out beautiful. And I had it with me, and I gave it to him. He shook my hand for ten minutes. I couldn’t get away, thanking me. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Of course, the thing swallowed him up. He was this big and I was this big. But he was thankful for it.
You know, sometimes when you don’t have much, even a little seems great; but when you have a lot like we do, we wonder why we don’t have more. I am not saying we should be poor, but sometimes when we have a lot, we are not very grateful for what we have. That is just human nature. And we need to change our perspective sometimes about what we do have and be thankful for the people that we have in our life, not what is wrong with them but what is right with them, and for the things that we have and all the stuff that we do have. We have a great deal compared to the rest of the world. I like to say that you should really take a mission trip someday, even to go the Tijuana, and to see how a lot of folks live. Eduardo, I think Dave Nodine shared this many times, but when we went down there, the last time I went, Eduardo takes his kids who don’t have much, to the more poorer places in Tijuana. Where they live is not that great, but one of the trips we took was down near the city dump where a lot of people are living. He takes food down there and hands it out, just to let those kids know that what they have and what these other folks have, which is not very much. When you see some of these people you just go, “O my goodness.” It changes your life, changes your perspective on things. You have to remind yourself of it. We give because God is a giver. You know Paul says in 2 Corinthians, “You will be rich in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion.” He was encouraging the Corinthians to give an offering to some very needy people in Jerusalem, and he says, “You will be rich in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God.” It is not only an act of thanksgiving; but when we give other people thank God because of us, because of us. In other words, it all goes back to that worship thing I mentioned earlier.
Giving also helps us to examine our motivation in the present. In one of the stories that Jesus tells, a parable, he talks about a very rich man who was doing just great and he did so well that he had too much to put in his barns. We said, “Well what will I do? I will just build bigger barns and accumulate more and more and more for my wealth and my house and my this and my that.” The whole parable is about how this man doesn’t think about the future in his own motivation. The end of the parable has Jesus saying, “Fool. This day your life is required of you. Who will get all that you have?” But that is the problem with us. Part of our sinful nature, if you will, is that we start out about being all about me, all about us; and the hard part about it is that we need to get out of that. You know, Jesus comes into our lives and changes us but there is a process. Unfortunately, God works in our lives and in our hearts but the last thing sometimes he gets to is our wallet. It is the hardest thing to crack open.
I heard on the radio the other day, you know, all this medical debate thing going on and I am not going to get into the politics of it, but I was just listening to an interesting story. One man was saying how he and his wife had to give up their medical insurance but then they began to examine their lives and how they spent their money. They discovered that they spent five-hundred dollars a month just going out. That was enough for insurance, at least basic insurance. Now I am not sure how many people are like that, but I suspect a lot of people in America spend a whole lot of money maybe doing that kind of thing. The point is for us that in our own giving I suspect we spend a whole lot more on the entertainment than we do to give to God’s work in the world. I suspect that when we start carving up that dollar bill, if we were to examine our giving, we always do what is left for God, not everyone of us do that, a lot of people don’t, but a lot of us, if we were to examine ourselves we spend a whole lot more on entertainment, our vacations – nothing wrong with our vacations. Nothing wrong with going to Las Vegas as Buck just did. I’m sorry, I am picking on Buck. Doesn’t he look relaxed? Apparently he had a great time. His sister lives out there. They didn’t go out there to do anything else. I, on the other hand, was working in San Antonio. No, actually I had to go to a thou-shalt-show-up meeting for the Army and got sick again and so spent three days in a very nice bed. That is all I was able to do. So at the risk of not being friendly, I am not shaking hands with anyone today. Just so you know.
I am just trying to encourage you. We forget about this notion of sacrifice and giving. Even the books I read on stewardship, they try to be encouraging. Do not guilt trip people because it doesn’t work. That is true, it really doesn’t, but you know, there really is a notion of sacrifice. Jesus said, “He who would be great among you will be a servant.” In other words, be a giver, be a giver; and God loves those who give. We all need to examine that. There is nothing wrong with having nice things. But what are our priorities? That is all we need to ask. What are our priorities? What do we spend on our entertainment, for example, versus, say, what we give to the church?
Giving really does help us to examine our motivation in the present, because Jesus gives us warning. “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money,” or, maybe another way of putting it is, materials or materialism.
Giving also expresses our expectation of what God wants to do in the future. This is repeated in several places in the New Testament. Paul says, “Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly. And whoever sows generously will also reap generously.” The idea of being a farmer, if you go out into a field and you just put a few seeds down you only get a few crops; but if you put a lot of seeds down you get a lot of crops. That is the promise in the Scriptures. Giving is really about faith. What do we expect God to do for us? For our church? A lot of times you get what you pay for in church or in our lives. What do we expect God to do for us?
We have such a small view of God. You know, I compare this to a person who has this beautiful home in the mountains, and yet, they built their house with a little bitty window out back. So all they can see is just a little bit of those mountains. Then someone comes along and says: Well, why don’t you just build a bigger window? They do, and suddenly they have this big picture window and they can see the whole view. Well sometimes our view of God is just like this and we need to expand our view of God. Or, another analogy would be, we have seen on newscasts how a camera is focused on this group of people, it looks like a huge crowd. Then it backs up and you get the whole view and there are just a few people there. When we expand our perspective of God and our expectations of God, maybe we will find our faith a little bit more, and our lives a little bit more powerful, about what God will do in our lives in here. And it does have to do with giving. Sometimes it does, because if we only give a little, you are only going to get a little. You are only going to get a little.
One of my favorite books – I love fantasy kind of literature anyway, but in particularly, children’s fantasy –I love the Narnia Chronicles. I have probably read them ten times each. In the second one, Prince Caspian, and they actually included this bit in the movie—I was a little surprised—I was glad, but when Lucy meets Aslan, who is the Christ figure, again, she says, “Aslan, you have grown. You have gotten bigger.” And he says, “No my child, you have gotten older. And as you get older, I will be bigger to you.” It is really talking about spiritually, spiritually. As we grow older, spiritually God gets bigger. Someone asked me about that one time and said: What is your relationship with God after thirty years of being a Christian? I said: I think that God is a lot more huge than he was before. So there is in some sense as much as I have studied and as much as I know about the Bible and a lot of other things, I am discovering more and more and more how little I know, because God is bigger. You can’t understand God to some degree but on the other hand you get to see just how big God is, but that is O.K. Giving has to do with faith.
And maybe this is the most practical reason of all. The greatest use of our money is to invest in getting people into heaven. I want to be careful with this. I am not saying that Christian life is all about being focused on getting people into heaven and all of that pie in the sky, bye and bye; we are just hunkering down and waiting for heaven, and those kinds of different things. But this world is not our home. We do have a destination, and as a matter of fact we are going to spend a whole lot more time there than we are here. Anyone of us would think that a person is foolish if all they lived for was, say, this week and not plan for the rest of their lives. If they just spent their money, you know, if you got a diagnosis that said you are going to die in a week and then you spent all your money and lo and behold the diagnosis was wrong. You had the rest of your life. What are we going to invest in?
There is a parable that Jesus tells about the dishonest steward. The dishonest steward is basically he discovers he is going to lose his job because he has been dishonest. So he goes around and basically bribes people so that when he gets fired they will help him out. Jesus commends him. It is sort of misunderstood. Is Jesus commending his dishonesty? No, not really. But he is saying that the people of the world know how to use money and wealth better than the people of the faith. We see it in the world today. We see million dollar bribes even in Congress for votes. We see how people use wealth to get what they want in the world. Well, what is Jesus saying? Is he saying that we buy our way into heaven? No, he says, “I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves.” What he is really saying is that, you know— well, let me put it this way. Sometimes I think it is a very valid imagination to imagine going to heaven and having a lot of people waiting for you to greet you. And when you get there, they say, “He’s here!” “She’s here!” Not because they are surprised, but because it is a homecoming. They have been waiting for you. All the friends that we know, that we have influenced, or they have influenced us. I can just imagine people coming up and saying, “Wow! I got to heaven because of you.” And you might say, “I don’t remember talking to you.” “No, because you gave to this organization, or this missionary, or this person, you influenced me.”
You know, that is how the kingdom works. That is the way the kingdom of God works. I tell you as a pastor, that often the frustration of a pastor is that you don’t see the result of your work all the time. Often you deal with people, you talk with people, and sometimes you talk with them and you never see them again and you never know what you did. But I am hoping to find out, to some degree. I think that is how the kingdom works. We talk to this person, we give this money, and it goes out like tentacles and God works that way. Part of it is I think God doesn’t want us to get the credit because our head might get too big. Part of it is it is just the way it works. So when we get to heaven we are making friends, spiritual friends we are making here and who we will see again in heaven.
And that is a question we can ask ourselves in a place like this. You know, the church has a lot of, and I am not talking about Faith Church in particular, but the church is a very inefficient organization sometimes. I work in two very inefficient organizations, the military and the Church. A German commander once said that the war is like chaos and the Americans do very well at war because they practice chaos all the time. The military is a wonderful thing but the German commander was right. But sometimes the church is that way too. It seems like, why do we give to the church? Why do I give my money to it? I know that the Kingdom is a lot bigger than just this place. It is. It is. But we get a lot for being here. It is legitimate to ask the question, what is in it for me? What is in it for you is a place to raise your children, a place to grow in the faith, a place through which we do missions, a place that we grow together, and learn together, and love together, where we enter into community. And community is messy, because we are all messes. That’s O.K. We are not saints to be on display. This is a hospital for sinners. So in my encouragement to you, just examine yourself and make a commitment to this place and give what you can.
Would you pray with me?
Father, Thank you for this church, it has been here for one hundred and twenty years, and I pray that you continue to make it healthy. I thank you for these people, these members, these visitors, these friends, and I pray that you would bless this place and fill it with your Spirit, strengthen us. May we stand on the solid rock foundation of Jesus Christ always, and it is in his name I pray. Amen.