Generosity Series

Generosity

We have been working our way through Genesis, as part of a deep dive into scripture. I was talking about Abraham in my last sermon, before Easter, well actually, before cafe church. I talked on Abraham’s journey being a journey of faith and that the journey of faith is ours also as heirs to God’s promise.

I Hope you all had a great Easter, the opportunity I had to preach three times over Easter was for me a real privilege. The whole idea of what Jesus did for us all at Easter to me is mind boggling and changed my whole life, prior to coming to Jesus my life was one of worry and darkness that changed to one of freedom from worry and being directed into God’s light, super bright light that has and continues to illuminate my path. If you are sitting there thinking I’m a bit lacking in some area, you would be surprised by the improvement from who was before I came to Christ. When we commit our ways to him, he is faithful to us. Not to say I’ve landed yet.

In the next four weeks, we going to tackle in part a topic that links us into God’s promises, the first example of this being in Genesis after Abraham rescued Lot and his family from the invading Kings. What occurs, well let's read it Genesis 14:16-20. There will be some discussion on God’s abundant provision and how we respond to that, using our time, talents and resources. Be warned there will be some reference to money.

But back to Abraham and his response after the rescue of Lot.

16 He recovered all the goods and brought back his relative Lot and his possessions, together with the women and the other people.

17 After Abram returned from defeating [King] Kedorlaomer [which incidentally sounds like a medical condition]and the kings allied with him, the king of Sodom came out to meet him in the Valley of Shaveh (that is, the King’s Valley).

18 Then Melchizedek, king of Salem brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God Most High, 19 and he blessed Abram, saying,

“Blessed be Abram by God Most High,

Creator of heaven and earth.

20 And praise be to God Most High,

who delivered your enemies into your hand.”

Then Abram gave him a tenth of everything.

This is the first example in scripture of someone giving a percentage of what they had had to a priest of God.

An interesting thing here is that in scripture Melchizedek is given the name King of Salem and Priest of The Most-High God, Salem is the city of Jerusalem by an earlier name. Salem/Jeru-salem. Melchizedek’s name incidentally means the “King of Righteousness.” A wee connection to Easter is that he brought Abraham bread and wine. Jesus many years later we know, would use these two things to describe his body that was soon to broken and his blood poured out for the forgiveness of sins, at the last supper.

It is no wonder that Jesus is compared with Melchizedek by the writer of Hebrews in Chapter 7. For those of you who are taking notes I will leave you to refer to the matter in the letter to the Hebrews at home, or on the train.

As we are doing a deep dive into scripture this is an opportunity to dive into the subject of God’s ownership of all things and how we respond to his ownership. I could tackle this as a one-off meeting, but the teaching on the subject works well with some Territorial resources that we have accessed from THQ.

To be completely up front we are going to look at the subject of God’s generosity to us along with the subject of our response to his generosity. In that God has entrusted us with everything we have, our time, talents, and possessions. As we respond to him with our time, our talents and our treasures he abundantly enhances our lives with peace, relationships, community and other spiritual blessings, we serve a generous God.

I am using some material provided by THQ, including a 21-day devotional that I will hand out today, You may already have it, the devotional is a dive into scriptures that relate to God’s generosity and our response to what he has given us, I would ask that you use the devotional over the next three weeks and prayerfully consider it. There is no pressure in this teaching. I will also refer to some teaching by Dr Harry Wendt. As some of you will know we have used some of Dr Harry’s “Bible’s Big Story and See through the Scriptures” material. Dr Harry was a very good teacher of scripture, a Lutheran pastor and scholar. We had the privilege of meeting Dr Harry at BCM during our training. He was a very wise Biblical teacher, who produced the see through the scriptures and Bibles Big story material that we have used some illustrations from in our preaching.