Five More Great Reasons to Give
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Let’s pray together.
Lord, we thank you for all you give us. We pray that you just be with us and our church. Be with me today as I preach, as I bring the Word. May it be an honor to you and a gift to all of us, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well I read a great story this week about a man named Harry Stink. Now you can imagine a man with a name like that would take abuse his whole life for his name. His friends, after a long while, tried to talk him into changing his name. He finally decided he would do it and he went out and filled out all the paperwork. They asked him, “Harry, what did you change your name to?” He said, “I changed it to George Stink. And, for the life of me, I don’t know what difference it is going to make.”
Obviously, Harry, or George, didn’t get the meaning of the word in his name. I think that is true for many Christians, as well. I told you last week that the idea of stewardship is one of the keys to the Christian life. You might have thought, “Well, he must be desperate to get money out of us because stewardship means getting money, right?” Well, yes, it’s part of that; but it is so much more. The idea of stewardship is a Biblical idea that basically says that you and I are created beings and God is the owner and everything we have is a gift. Everything! God will ask us one day how we used all those gifts, including our money and our talents and everything that goes with that. So if you want to understand the meaning of life, literally, it isn’t real hard. You are a steward. You are a steward.
Within that stewardship is the idea of generosity. I talked about five ways, or great reasons, to give and I told someone this week that I could have come up with twenty-five and I have five more for you today. So let’s think about that today, as part of this stewardship idea. The first thing I want to say is that Generosity (you will notice I am using “G’s” today, I got a little creative.) GENERATES community, Generates community. I have a next door neighbor who is a younger man who is a pastor, also, at a local church. Because I am older and have more things than he does, he doesn’t have a lot of tools so he often comes over to borrow mine. I don’t mind at all. We have a good time, chatting with one another; we share our Christian lives. We share a little “shop” talk about the churches we serve. All kinds of things. And he gives back too. He helps me out with some things. While I was away for a year, he was able, by his kindness and generosity, to take the snow blower and blow the driveway for me. I worried about that when I left. What’s going to happen? I know Cyndi can do it, but I don’t want her to do it. So how’s that going to happen? And he did it for me. It was really good. So here we were sharing something the Bible calls, in a way, Koinonia. We translate that as fellowship but it is more than simply having a meal together and gathering together. It is the deep fellowship or connection that Christians have with one another. But Koinonia also means, in a bigger sense, community and community always comes about from generosity. You have to have generosity to have community.
Here are some examples from the Bible. (Philippians 4:15) “You became my partners in giving,” Paul says. Those words “partners in giving” are none other than Koinonia. (Hebrews 13:16) “Keep doing good and sharing your resources.” …the phrase “sharing your resources,” that same word, Koinonia. It is a word for community based on generosity. (2 Corinthians 8:4) “They begged us to let them have the joy of giving their money for God’s sake.” That phrase “joy in giving their money” is none other than Koinonia.
So many people today look at the Church in terms of, just like everything else, it is what you get; it is the product that you buy. We belong to this cruise ship, or this club, and we pay our dues and we expect to get service. The Biblical view is that it is a community that gathers together for fellowship with each other and God to build ourselves up spiritually and to perform a mission. That mission is to change the world a little bit at a time. We can’t change everything, obviously; but we can a little bit at a time. We do our part. That is why we are here, that’s what it is about. It depends on the generosity of your time and your money and your stuff. It is this idea of stewardship.
Notice what the Bible says. “All the believers were united in heart and mind(that’s that Koinonia idea). And they felt that what they owned was not their own, so they shared everything they had.” (Acts 4:32) This is the new believers at the beginning and this is the whole idea of the Church and what it is supposed to be doing.
The second thing is that generosity GUARDS your heart. A familiar passage in the Bible, (Matthew 6:21) “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Well what does this mean? I talked to a friend one time who, he wasn’t much of an investor, but, one day he decided to invest a fair chunk of change for him in the stock market. Lo and behold, you know what he found himself doing? He found himself checking those stocks everyday; but then he got a little excessive about it, and suddenly it became twice a day. You know, on the internet, every five minutes we can check how things are doing. Then for him it became three or four times, he became just totally concerned about how his money was doing. I think this is an illustration of this principle: “Where our treasure is, there our heart is also.” Now most of the time we treat Jesus’ words as a warning, as we should: “Be careful what you treasure. Be careful where your heart is.” It is not that investing is wrong but anything can become the “thing” in our lives—anything: a thing, a person, money, anything.
But I like to turn this around a little bit, too, because I think it is like two sides of the same coin. We look at it from a different direction and that is that if we give little, we will care little. If we give much, we will care much. In other words, wherever we put our money, our time, our effort, our energy, wherever we invest our “treasure” that is what will attract us. That is where our heart will be. For example, if you want to develop a heart for the Target Corporation or any business, buy some Target stock and you will begin caring about how Target does. I know some of you are going, “Yeah, yeah!” (those who work for Target because you want people’s hearts to be there to buy things there.) Same is true of any sports team. If you want to get a heart, at least for a week, of a sports team, make a bet in the office pool for that team, or in your fantasy league, however that works –you have certain players. That is where your heart will be.
Well the same is true for the Church. If you are generous with your time and money and effort to your church, you will care a whole lot about what happens there. If you give little, you will care little; but if you give much, you will care much. Now you might be saying, “Well, I can’t give a whole lot to the church. Does that mean I don’t care?” Well, not really. But there is the principle that if you really invest in a place, or people, or group, you will really care enough. For example, if a place fails… You know, a lot of people, I have found over the years, hold back to see what happens in a church or a business or a thing they are involved in. They kind of sit back and see how it does. Then they say to themselves, “If it does well, I will invest in it.” But it is like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you hold back it is hard for that place to succeed, that group. Then you can say when it does fail, “See, I told you.” We don’t know what is going to happen here or any other place. Every place has struggles. There are ups and downs in every spot. It doesn’t matter. No perfect place; but if you are here and you don’t give very much of your time or your stuff, it doesn’t matter if it fails, does it? In the end you can just go somewhere else.
Generosity also GROWS our faith. It grows our faith. Paul says, “Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly. And whoever sows generously will also reap generously.” (2 Corinthians 9:6) Do you really want to see God at work in your life? Then give more than you are comfortable with. Give more than you are comfortable with.
Some of us might remember a popular song way back when; it is actually enshrined in a Broadway play called Mama Mia. You probably know what I am talking about. “If you love me let me know!” (I won’t sing it for you, but) “Take a chance on me. Take a chance on me.” That is what faith is, isn’t it? …Taking a chance that God is going to come through, that God will actually come through. You know, so often when we are thinking about what we are going to give, “I can’t give that; I have this bill to pay and I have to do that and I have to do that…” Is God going to take care of you? Now, of course we use our brain and we decide what we are going to give and we measure it out; but where is faith in it? Are we taking a chance on God, or just straight numbers? You have to take a chance. You have to step out, literally, on God.
There is a man in our congregation, I won’t embarrass him by telling you his name, but I was talking with him just recently. He is an older gentleman and he was telling me about his life. He said, “You know, as I grew up my parents taught me to tithe, taught me to give, and I have never failed to do that; and I have seen God take care of me through my whole life.” Then he went on to talk about some of his relatives, again I won’t say any names or anything like that. He said, “You know there are a lot of folks in my family who don’t do that and their lives did not turn out as well.” Now here is a man who has lived a long time and he has discovered and sees very clearly that God has been faithful. He took a chance on God and God was faithful. He is not rich but God took care of him. Many of you could tell that same tale. I could. But then you might say “Well you are paid to say that.” But I have seen that in my own life so many times, that God has taken care of us even though we give a significant amount of money. I am not bragging; it just is. The Bible says if you give what you are supposed to, why should you brag about that. There is nothing to brag about. You just did what you are supposed to do. But God takes care of us when we take a chance on God. “Whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly.” Sometimes we think of that in terms of, “Oh well, if I give I will be given back to money-wise.” Well sometimes we are and the Bible does say that if we give, God will give back: “pressed down, shaken together”, in abundance. (Luke 7:38) Not necessarily in money, one for one, but God will take care of you.
Generosity also GENERATES health and happiness. Now I want to be careful here. I am not talking about the “health and wealth” gospel that we have all heard about over the years. But it is generally true that if we are givers, God helps us be healthy. Eugene Peterson’s take on Acts 20:35 (the Message), and it’s accurate, Paul is talking to the elders at Ephesus and he says, “You’ll not likely go wrong here if you keep remembering that our Master (Jesus) said, ‘You’re far happier giving than getting.’” Now why is that true? Well, I just want to tell you, I have said this kind of thing before but I want to say it again; God has made you to be that way. God has rigged the world. If you are a giver you will be healthier and happier in general. It doesn’t mean you are going to live forever and it doesn’t mean you aren’t going to have hard things happen; but in general you will be healthier and happier.
You know, it has been said many times, people have done surveys and have talked about that people who pray are generally happier and healthier. People who go to church, in general, are healthier and happier but God has rigged the world; rigged it. This is the way things are, that if you are a giver you are better off; but that is not what we think, not what the world says. The world says just get all you can get. And God says give all you can give. It is quite a principle.
Karl Menninger, famous psychiatrist, founder of the famous Menninger Psychiatric Clinic said this. He said, “Generosity is one of the essential components of mental health. We have found that generous people are rarely mentally ill.” On another occasion, he was asked, “What would you advise a person to do if he or she felt a nervous breakdown coming on?” He replied, “Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks find someone in need, and invest yourself in helping that person.” Egocentricity is unhealthy is what he is saying. In other words, having the world revolve around us… and all of us have to fight about that, fight ourselves. The biggest person I have to overcome is me. I don’t know about you. I have to fight Chris to get up in the morning, sometimes, and to give and to do what I need to do.
Last but not least, Generosity GLORIFIES God. This is probably the biggest reason to give. You know if you start reading the Bible and you…sometimes it is really good to read the Bible with a category in mind, or an idea. Just, if you want to read it in a different way, so it is really instructive to read the Bible with the idea of generosity in mind. If you do that you will find that God is the biggest giver there is in the universe, because God didn’t have to create the world or anything else; but God gave of himself to make the universe, to make the earth. Along the way you see God giving to people even though they don’t deserve it, most of the time, he gives and gives and gives and re-gives and re-creates. “God so loved the world that he GAVE….” (John 3:16) That is what grace is. “It is by grace you have been saved through faith –and this is not of yourselves, it is a gift of God.” (Ephesians 2:8) Everything is a gift. Everything. And we give partly to be imitators. Again, read the Bible with a category in mind. Read it in terms of imitation and you will find that everywhere we are called to imitate God, just as Paul says in Ephesians 5:1, “Be imitators of God, therefore…” He will say in Philippians, “You should be like Jesus who poured himself out, who gave everything he could, counted himself as nothing. Be like that.” Be like Jesus who came to be a servant and not to be served but be a servant and give his life as a ransom. We imitate God and that is part of what life is all about, again, is to imitate God. And also, we praise God, as well.
You know worship isn’t just about coming on Sunday morning, though that is a good place to start, and singing songs that make us feel good. It is wonderful. I love what Steve does, and the choir does. They are so committed they braved the ice and most of them are here today. Thank you. It helps worship. But it isn’t about that. Worship is about getting off the chair and doing something. It is about doing. It is about giving. When we are generous with our time, when we are generous with our stuff, when we are generous with ourselves, you know, you can’t have Koinonia unless you give of yourself, unless you share who you are. If you share something deep about yourself someone else will and suddenly you have a connection there you never had before. You have to be generous, you have to be brave sometimes to do that. You have to have courage. It takes courage to be generous with each other and with the church. When we give thanks we are worshipping our God. Giving is thanksgiving to our God. And that is the biggest reason.
I will close with a story that I read this week. It is really a Christmas story but I think it is to the point. It is about a little girl who was in a Christmas play and her job was to be “the Star” in the story. Everywhere in the Christmas play she would be there. When the shepherds were being told that Jesus was to be born, she was there holding her star up like that. When you see the baby Jesus in the manger, she is in the background doing this with the star, because everybody is looking to that. Then when the three wise men come, she is holding it in front of them as they come. After the play, she beamed and said, “I had the most important part. I pointed everybody to Jesus.” That is why we are here. That’s what it is all about and unless we are generous we can’t do that very well. Unless we are generous….looking at the church and all that we do, not just as being served but serving, not just about getting but giving, because we are here for that reason. Not just to be taken care of, not just to have somebody minister to us, and that is certainly part of what church is. It is about pointing people to Jesus who is “the way and the truth and the life.”
Let’s do that. Let’s pray.
Lord God, all of us here have decisions to make about this church and about other giving opportunities we have. We have all kinds of things pressing for our time and our money and all kinds of cares and concerns and we lift those things to you and place them before you. We just ask that you would help us. We ask you to guide us as we choose what we are to do each and every day, not just now, and we pray all this in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.