The notion is going around in some circles that poor people are happy people. Have you heard that? It’s a kind of romantic idea, that poor people are happy people, that when you have nothing you at least have each other, you at least depend on God … you know all the usual things that are said.
I believe it’s what they call "genteel poverty". The idea that we may be poor but we are proud, that while we have no treasure here on earth, that we have a good deal of treasure laid up in heaven, and that makes it OK to be poor. Poor people, it is said, are happy people.
Well, if you can make it work for you, more power to you. If you can sit down at the desk and struggle with the bills and wonder how the mortgage will be paid and determine which kid to put shoes on this time, and still find happiness in that, more power to you. I rather suspect that most poor people are not all that happy, and that if they are happy with nothing in the kitty, they would be even happier with the bills paid up!
In fact, wouldn’t it follow that if poor people are happy people, then, conversely, that rich people are miserable people? I don’t know. Donald Trump doesn’t look miserable. I just haven’t found a whole lot of folks willing to give it all away in order to gain happiness! Somebody said that it may be true that with money you get misery, but at least you can afford it.
I should add that if you want to give it a try, I would consider it my duty as your pastor to assist you by relieving you of all that green stuff that is making you so miserable!
No, it’s very doubtful that you can say, as a generality, that poor people are happy people.
And yet it is possible to link poverty and happiness, but it has to be done in a very special way. You can be poor and be happy, but you have to work at it in a particular kind of way. In fact, in the Scriptures there is a formula to describe what I’m talking about. It goes like this: Joy plus poverty equals wealth. Joy plus poverty equals wealth.
If you take equal parts of joy and poverty and put them together, you will create wealth, a very special and important kind of wealth.
Let me take you to the scripture to discover how Paul said it. He writes to the Corinthian church, "The churches of Macedonia … their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of liberality."
If you listened to that verse carefully, you heard the formula I’m trying to teach: Joy plus poverty equals wealth. "The churches of Macedonia ... their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of liberality."
Let me set the backdrop here for you. The apostle Paul has been crisscrossing Greece and Asia Minor, trying to gather an offering from the churches out there in order to help the poor and destitute mother church in Jerusalem. The Jerusalem church, so far as we know, had exhausted its resources by caring for the huge numbers of poor people who had come to the city, had become Christians, but who then had no means of support.
And so Paul is trying to help. The Corinthian church, to whom this letter was written, wasn’t doing so well. They had started to collect this offering, but they stalled. They quit. And Paul is trying to jump start them. In order to convince them of their obligation to take this offering, he tells them about the church in Macedonia, not very far away. The church in Macedonia, though they have little money, though they have been persecuted and plundered, though they are small and weak … still the church in Macedonia has responded beautifully and has given generously. And Paul says to the Corinthian Christians, who seem to lack for nothing, I want you to learn from your brothers and sisters in Macedonia. I want you to learn this principle: joy plus poverty equals wealth.
"Their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of liberality."
What really happens to make this true? How can it possible be that joy plus poverty equals wealth?
I
First, we learn that the Macedonian Christians made this work by setting the right priorities. "First," says Paul, "First … at the top of the priority list … first they gave themselves to the Lord and to us by the will of God."
The secret of the Macedonian Christians was that although they were poor themselves, in great poverty, yet they believed that if they gave themselves to the Kingdom first, then other things would fall into place. They set the right priorities and thus began to blend this joy and their poverty and create wealth.
Folks, the Kingdom of God will not be made out of leftovers. It will be made out of the right priorities, and not out of leftovers. In my home church in Louisville, on Wednesday nights we would have a family dinner and then we would break up into various groups to accomplish certain things. The pastor would say, the Sunday School teachers will meet for training in Room 1; the deacons will meet for discussion in Room 2; the youth will have choir practice downstairs in the basement; the children will go to their study hall." And then he would break into a grin and say, “The leftovers, the folks who aren’t doing anything, will come with me to the chapel for prayer meeting."
The trouble with that is that while all these other things were important, vitally important, we had set the wrong priorities when we made prayer a function of the leftovers. And so it was the lazy and the infirm and the leftovers who were doing the praying. We had not given a priority to our relationship with the Lord.
Paul says here that the secret of the Macedonians is that they gave themselves first to the Lord and then to us by the will of God. They gave themselves … their hearts, their intentions, their wills. They gave themselves, and then it was no problem for their pocketbooks to follow.
Jesus said it too, "Seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness and all these things shall be yours as well."
We have to get the priorities right for the formula to work, "Joy plus poverty equals wealth." If I am going to open my checkbook at the beginning of the month and add up all my debts and then see if there is any left over for the Lord, I’ll never create any spiritual wealth. The month is always longer than the money, isn’t it?
But if I write that Kingdom check first, if I set the Lord’s work as top priority, then I find some joy and I begin to create a wealth of possibilities. Joy, right priorities, even with poverty, equals wealth.
If I attend to my household chores and do my work and fit in my club and calendar my card game and then see if there is any time left to serve on a church committee, to visit a sick neighbor, to share the gospel with a lost friend, I will never find the time. I will serve God with leftovers, and the Kingdom just will not be realized in me. But even if I am squeezed and pressed and have no time, but give the time I do have to the Kingdom first, I will be surprised at the joy and the possibilities that will show up. It works, folks, it works. Give a busy person a big job to do, because he or she will know how to make time for what matters even when there seems to be no time.
Let me add something else here. If I am going to ask you to give yourself first to the Lord and to the Kingdom, I think I’d better also say to you that we as Takoma Park church need to become a Macedonian church. Takoma Park church needs to put the Kingdom at the top of the priority list. A couple of years ago we rearranged our budget format and put missions at the very beginning of the budget, just to say to you, this is first. This is top priority. And we have begun over the past two years or three to increase our missions giving. But we still only give away about 6% of what we receive: 94% for us and 6% for others does not sound to me like the right priorities. And so I will challenge us as a people to give ourselves first to the Lord and see what happens. I believe it can happen for us as it happened for Macedonia, with the joy we know and the resources we have, even though we may think we are poor, we can create a world of wealth for the Kingdom.
Priorities. I know a church in Montgomery County which a few years ago was about to go under. The bank was threatening to foreclose on the mortgage. The pastor chose to leave because there was no money. The people panicked and began to bring in all kinds of things to bail out the church. They brought in diamond rings, they took out mortgages on their homes, they emptied their savings accounts, and bailed out the church, called a new pastor, and seemed to get on with their work. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
But do you know what? It’s happened all over again. They are in trouble again, just a little while later. And the new pastor has left. Do you know what he told me about a month before he resigned? He said, "These folks will not do anything unless it ‘s a crisis and they have to save themselves. I could never get them to do anything for missions."
Priorities. Last week I mentioned that we now have the names of 300 people who have moved into this community and who ought to be contacted for the Lord. Only one person took me up on that. Frankly, however fine the revival series was, I am not sure we are a revived people if reaching others for Christ is not a priority.
Priorities. Joy plus even poverty creates wealth when we as a people of God give ourselves first to the Lord and to the Kingdom, and everything else takes care of itself.
II
The second secret of the Macedonian church was that they understood that giving is supposed to be both proportionate and sacrificial … both proportionate and sacrificial. Sounds a little complicated, but it isn’t. Let me just repeat Paul ’s words; they make it quite easy to see. "They gave according to their means and beyond their means" "According to their means and beyond their means." Proportionate and sacrificial.
I want to speak a word for proportionate giving this morning. I want to say a good word for a principle of fairness. When we encourage you to tithe, we are really encouraging you to be fair. If each of us would give according to our means … a tithe, or ten per cent of what we receive, then the load would be distributed and we could all handle it.
And more than that, if some of us were to give beyond our means, beyond the tithe, we could create joy and possibility here the likes of which we have never seen.
May I do a little dreaming with you? Not long ago I received a statistical profile of this community. I am not going to overwhelm you with numbers. But I figured out that if we are average folks for this community, this zip code, then if every member of this church were to tithe for one year, we could raise over one million dollars for the Kingdom’ s work!
Now I see the skeptics at work. And some of you are saying, well, how many members is he counting. Don’t we have a lot of dead wood on the rolls? Well, yes, we do. We do have dead wood on the rolls. Deader than RFK stadium after a Cowboys touchdown (there, Walt, Davis, you said you wanted equal time). Yes, we have plenty of dead wood, so let’s just count the number of folks who worship here pretty regularly. Count them, count us, and we could still raise over a half million dollars a year if we would all tithe and would learn this scripture: that they gave, each according to his means.
But I do need to tell you what is really happening. I do need to tell you that the average weekly gift is a little less than $6.00 per person, counting the dead wood. Or around $11.00 per person, just counting those who give at all.
Folks, I don’t hear much fairness in that. I don’t hear us giving, each according to his means. You can spend that much on a night at the movies with only one bag of popcorn. You can invest that much at a restaurant and come away still hungry. You can spend that at a pet store for a week’s supply of dog food. But somehow that’s what we’ve decided we will do for the Kingdom. A tip for God instead of a sacrifice. Come to think of it, a tip would be 15%, and that’s more than a tithe … looks like for most of us it works out to 2 or 3%.
We just need to be fair. We just need to give according to our means. And we need even to think about giving sacrificially, beyond the tithe, if we expect to make the formula work. What’s the formula? Joy plus poverty equals wealth.
III
But there is one more ingredient in the formula. There is one more reason why the Macedonian church made it work for them, even though they had so little to give.
And that is, that they saw it as a privilege to be able to give. They did not wait to be manipulated, they did not give out of guilt, they just saw the joy, they considered it a privilege to be able to give.
Paul says, "They gave of their own free will, begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints."
Of their own free will, they begged for the chance to give. Wow. In an age in which it is assumed you have to pressure people to give, it speaks to me to know that this church just wanted to give.
Down in Charlotte this week a jury convicted Jim Bakker on a variety of counts. At the heart of Bakker’s failure was not only his own greed, it seems to me, but also his assumption that you have to push and manipulate and make people feel guilty before they will give. That jury convicted not only Jim Bakker; that jury also convicted a host of Christians who give in all the wrong ways to all the wrong things, for all the wrong reasons.
Macedonian Christians know that they can just be eager to give and do not have to be pushed and pressured.
I see some of that in us, here. I see some truly generous spirits. I see some people who look for ways to give. Last week when we made a low-key appeal for relief goods for the people of storm-ravaged South Carolina you responded with all kinds of things. A whole truckload went on its way this week, and more is still coming. You begged for the favor, the privilege of giving, and you are creating wealth, spiritual wealth, as you help them.
Each year for the past three years now you have increased giving to Kingdom causes through the church by 12 percent a year. I have been astounded to keep track of this and to be able to say to you month by month that you are making a wonderful recovery from the low points of five and six years ago. And I know that this has to mean that some of us are truly discovering the principle I’m speaking about, that joy can be blended with poverty, with only modest monies, and still create wonderful wealth. Some of us have found that out.
I pray it for more of us. I pray that more and more of us will learn that if we give of ourselves, God’s very best, it will help and encourage others to give. I pray that more and more of us would know the profound joy that comes from being a part of a winning church, a church that really gets excited about reaching others.
I pray that more and more of us will stop asking, "How little can I do?” and will instead be begging for the privilege of doing more. I pray that more and more of us will discover that our giving creates a wealth of mature young people, a community of contented senior citizens, a church property that serves our needs, a ministry of witness that seeks and saves that which is lost, a mission spirit that embraces the world, and on and on and on.
I pray for us, Takoma Park church, that we become the Macedonia church, that our abundance of joy and our poverty overflow in a wealth of liberality.
