November 4

How Much Should We Give?

November 4, 2007 Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

There is an old story about many people on an airplane. Something happens; the plane is going down; things are looking grim. Finally one of the co-pilots comes back and says, “Is there a minister on the airplane?” One man raises his hand, and the pilot says, “Quick, do something religious.” So he took up an offering. It may surprise us to learn that taking up an offering really is a Christian thing to do. We see it again and again in the scriptures where an offering is taken up. Every year the Israelites were expected to bring an offering of their bounty of their harvest to the temple – ten percent – the first fruits – to take care of God’s house and the ministry that took place there. We see various offerings in the bible. David takes up a huge offering for the building of the temple and other offerings are taken up for other things. Today we come to another offering that is taken up by Paul for the churches in Palestine. He has already been to Macedonia and taken up an offering there and now he is writing to the Corinthians, talking about the same kind of offering and how they need to do this. What’s interesting about this passage is that it is full of instructions about how to give, the attitude in which one is to give, and how one is to do it, talking about who is in charge here, it is God, and other things. So as we read this I would ask you to listen carefully about what God has to say in terms of giving, not only your abundance but yourself. This is part of a series I began last week. It is, of course, stewardship season when we talk about such things as we put together our budget; but as we all know, stewardship is not just about money, though it is that as well. My title for this particular sermon is about “How Much Should We Give,” but I use the word ‘much’ a little bit tongue-in-cheek because I don’t plan on telling you how much you should give in terms of writing a check or your time; but you will see what I mean in just a minute. So listen to God’s word as it comes to us from 2 Corinthians, chapter 9 beginning at verse 6.

2 Corinthians 9: 6-15

Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. As it is written:

“He has scattered abroad his gifts to the poor;

his righteousness endures forever.”

Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness. You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God.

This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of God’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God. Because of the service by which you have proved yourselves, men will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity in sharing with them and with everyone else. And in their prayers for you their hearts will go out to you, because of the surpassing grace God has given you. Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God!

Would you pray with me?

As always Lord, we come before you and ask that the word spoken would touch each heart; that something would be said that we would need to hear, each of us individually and as a church. We pray Lord that you will be with this word that is preached and be with him who gives it. I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

How much should you give? Well using ‘much’ in a broad sense, I would say first and foremost you need to give willingly; in other words, it is an act of the will in which you give of yourselves and of your stuff, your wealth. You know, I believe that in previous generations we had a greater sense of personal responsibility. People knew that they could make choices and that they ought to be responsible for their choices, but it seems in our day we have become so powerless because more and more it seems we are seeking reasons for our behavior. It kind of boils down to several categories; they fall into these. One is “My grandfather did it to me;” in other words, it is genetics. I am how I am, I did this because I was born that way, or I have the influence of ancestors that I can’t change, or my parents did it to me. They didn’t raise me well, they treated me terribly, they potty trained me in the wrong way. Whatever – it is their fault – or something. It seems that we are always looking for excuses. Now I know that these things have influence, genetics has an influence. How we were raised has a huge influence about how we are. That’s absolutely true, but we also have choices to change and to do. Yet we seem to be blaming our employer or how we were raised or how much money we have or education, or whatever. In a broader term, we can always blame at least one person. It is always, at least, George Bush’s fault. You can always point to him. Now I am kidding, but it is part in parcel of all we hear; but you know what, yes, we have influences but in the end we can choose, particularly how much of ourselves we give. We do usually what we want to do in the end, particularly, how we give.

I remember in my own life many years ago I was feeling that God was calling me away from a church I was serving. This had been a great church. I loved it, yet I felt like God was calling me somewhere else; and that somewhere else was to go back to school and get a degree in counseling. I was fighting it all the way because the church was a good place but deep inside there was something else going on in my heart. I knew if we moved from where we were out to Colorado where the school was it was going to cost a lot of money. We would have to make a living somehow and I wouldn’t be working. I had a fair amount saved up and I was thinking that I don’t want to give all that up. Well in the end, the day before I had to make the decision and I did, I said, “OK Lord everything I have is yours, even though it is a savings account.” About two weeks later God had taken care of all the details including all the money we needed to go. The lesson for me at that point was that I had to make a choice. In my will I had to say “I will follow you, even if it costs me everything.” We all do what we want to do. We are to give willingly, not under compulsion, not because someone forces us to, or reluctantly, as Paul says. We also should give generously. We should give generously. Did you know that generosity is a mark of the child of God? Sometimes we ask the question, “Who is a real believer?” We don’t always know. We don’t know what’s in a person’s heart. We might think, “Well, the person who is the most righteous.” Certainly there is some truth to that but God says things so often like, “if you want to be like me, you need to be like me who gives rain upon those who believe and those who do not, between the just and the unjust.” Jesus says things like “if you want to be my follower, love your enemies, do good to those who hurt you, if you do good to those who love you, what good is that. Do good to those who don’t love you.” The mark of the believer, the child of God, is generosity and another word for grace is generosity. Jesus tells a parable about a land owner who hires some laborers early in the morning, O’Dark Thirty, as we say in the Army. They are hired for a particular wage and they go out and work all day for this wage. Well along the way the land owner hires somebody at noon, at 2:00 in the afternoon and then 5:00 right before quitting time. All the people who had worked all day said “Oh good, we are going to get more money than he told us.” The land owner didn’t do it; he gave them what he agreed to. He gave the same thing to the people who worked an hour. They said that was not fair. The land owner said “How dare you determine what my generosity should be.”

God is the same way. He is generous. It is a mark of followers to be generous. We not only give generously, we give joyfully as well. I read a story about a psychologist who was asked to go visit a woman who he heard was very depressed. She was very religious and independent and wealthy and reclusive. This man was Milton Erickson and he was asked to go and talk to her. When he went to see her, and looking around, he said, “I saw that she was a very wealthy woman living alone, idle, attending church but keeping to herself. As I looked around I saw three African violet plants in a potting pot with a leaf in it being sprouted as a new plant. So I knew what I had to do for her in the way for therapy.” He told the woman to go buy a couple of hundred gift pots for African violets. He told her that she was to grow new African violets; and, that whenever there was an announcement of a child’s birth in her church, she was to send an African violet. She was to do the same for every christening, for every engagement, for every wedding, for every sickness, for every death, for every church bizarre. Within six months this woman was written up in a newspaper article as the African violet queen of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She had endless number of friends and her depression, surprise, surprise, had gone away. In fact, she was downright joyful. Which comes first, joy or giving? It’s kind of the chicken and egg question, isn’t it? But I say to you that if you aren’t a giver, or you give reluctantly, you are not going to be joyful, “for God loves a cheerful giver.” The word cheerful is interesting because it is the same as hilarious. So God is saying in a sense, be a hilarious giver. Is that going too far? Well, maybe, but I’ve come to believe that God’s default character mode is joy. We see it in the very creation, where he creates with joy and says “It is good.” “It is good.” How are we to worship God? It says in the Psalms “enter His gates with thanksgiving and enter his courts with praise and joy.” Paul says “Rejoice in the Lord always.” You might say to yourself, “Well, whenever I give, it really bums me out; so if I am to be joyful, maybe I shouldn’t give.” Well, of course, that’s not right either. You can always count on the fact that if you are unhappy when you give, you’re going to be miser-able, because that is where ‘miser’ comes from. Maybe you should give and then ask the Lord to give you joy in that giving, not only joyfully, but expectantly.

I was visiting someone this past week, it was Rosie Pavelka. She showed me an envelope and it was from some church somewhere in Arizona. It was soliciting gifts from her. It talked about all these testimonies of people who had given to this church, and how when they gave to this church, one had gotten a big apartment or house and another one had gotten a car, another had thousands of dollars put in their bank account. You know it is that old garbage out there that says “if you give to my church, God is going to make you rich.” You know you hear about that and you sort of forget it’s there and then this kind of stuff shows up. But that’s not what is going on at all, of course. You know nine/tenths of the truth…well the devil uses the one/tenth to make it all a lie. The bible does say things like “give and it will be given to you.” “Press down, shaken together,” it’s the image of the market place where grain will be put into a basket and instead of just handing the person that measure of grain they would press it down and put more in. You know, I have confessed to you several times along the way that I really am addicted to ice cream. I know I shouldn’t eat as much ice cream as I do. Sometimes I call myself kind of dieting; and so what I will do with my ice cream, instead of putting it into a bowl, I will put it into a coffee cup, thinking I will have less. But you know what I really do, I dig out the ice cream and I put it into the coffee cup and then I take my spoon and will push it down as far as I can. I will get every air bubble out of that ice cream and then I will put more in and press that down. Oh, I have a coffee cup of ice cream, but if you were to really measure it….. Well that’s the image I am trying to give you. Jesus says this, “This is the God you worship that you should be expecting of his blessing, press down, shaken together.” What is he really talking about? Well Paul talks about this in this passage we read today. There are really three things going on here. One is, yes, God will bless you if you are a giver of yourself and your stuff. It’s not that God is going to make you rich, but He will take care of your needs. Watch Him do it. He says that he is going to do it. He talks about it this way. He says “And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need you will abound in every good work.” He goes on to say, “He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed.” So there is the idea of stuff, but then he goes on to talk about spiritual blessing and “will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness. You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion.” In other words, God is saying that if you are a giver, God will make you a bigger person, that you will grow in your awareness of Him and your ability to follow. He will make you even more generous.

And lastly, it makes our witness bigger. He says “and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God…. because of your service by which you have proved yourselves, men will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ.” So often we ask, how can I be a witness to my neighbors? How can we as a church witness to our community? It’s by being generous. It’s by being generous, by being graceful to those around us, becoming known as generous people, not misers.

We give expectantly but we are also to give systematically. In ancient times, the people would bring their harvest and they would bring the first fruits of their harvest. So as the grain began to ripen they would literally carve out ten percent and bring it to God as first fruits. In other words, they gave to God first and what was left over was theirs; and God, as being generous as He is, leaves them ninety percent. But so often in our calculations of our own time, our own talent and our own money, we usually give to God what’s left over. A story I have told several times about a man who was given by God ten apples, three for his clothing, three for his eating, three for his trading to earn other money and one to give back to God as a tithe. Well with the nine he did what he was supposed to do. He traded with three, he bought clothing with the other three, and he bought other needs with the other three. But then he looked at the last apple that was so beautiful and so tasty looking. He decided that since God owned all the apples anyway, He didn’t need any. So he ate it and then gave God the core. He gave God what was left. Is God getting the core in your life? You know, it’s very practical, particularly in giving. We give to God first a percentage of our income. I need to just pause for a minute and just say a couple of things. Some of you are just visitors with us and some of you are either members or you might as well be members, you are part of our community, you think of Faith Church as your church. I would say to those of you who are visiting with us, we don’t expect of you to give of your money to us. If you want to give, that’s great, but we don’t expect it. We hope that you will give to God but we don’t expect it here. But if you are a member or this is your church, it is your obligation to give here a portion of your income. If you are not a member you still have an obligation to give to God, I would hope it would be somewhere. We are all under the same obligation, to give to God first. You might say “Oh, ten percent of my income, I can’t do that; that’s way too much.” It may be for you, but the point is systematic giving. Get used to giving systematically. Choose a percentage, one or two or three to start with and then move up. As you do that and get the discipline, you will find that God will enable you and will bless you. I have seen it happen in so many lives. Choose a percentage and give to God first – not what’s left over.

And lastly, how much should you give? Well, maybe in the end, your whole life. An old story, again, about a little girl who was watching the offering plate go through the church and she didn’t have anything to give. So when the plate came around to her, she put it down on the floor and got in it. Maybe that’s what you need to do too, in your heart. Recommit your life; give your life to God. It isn’t about money really. It’s about everything. It’s about our lives. It’s about our attitude. It’s about our willingness. It’s about our generosity. It’s about all kinds of things. It’s about thanksgiving. Think about where your life is and how much you are giving to your God in gratitude for what he has given to you. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.