OUTLINE
ANCIENT CONTEXT – CORINTHIANS
• PAUL IS ADDRESSING A LOT OF CHURCH ISSUES
• PAUL ALSO ADDRESSING FAMINE
• HE TAKES UP AN OFFERING AMONG CHURCHES TO HELP THE JERUSALEM CHURCH
• MACEDONIAN CHURCHES ARE VERY GENEROUS
• PAUL USES THE MACEDONIAN CHURCH AN EXAMPLE OF GENEROUS GIVING
MODERN CONTEXT EXAMPLE
WHY DID THE MACEDONIAN CHURCH GIVE SO MUCH?
THEY HAD DEVELOPED A CULTURE OF GIVING WHICH UNDERSTANDS
• THE ABILTY TO GIVE GENEROUSLY IS FROM GOD
• THAT EVERYONE HAS THE ABILITY TO GIVE SOMETHING
• YOU DON’T HAVE TO STRONG-ARM PEOPLE TO GIVE
• GIVING BOILS DOWN TO A HEART ISSUE
SERMON
If you have your Bibles, please open up to 2 Corinthians 8:1. I think in the red pew Bible, you can find it on page about 1,146. We have been going through the four values of worship, discipleship, outreach, and community. Some of you want to know how much longer we are going to be going through these core values, and actually, we have bout four more weeks. We will take it through the month of May and then go into some sort of summer series that hopefully will keep you attention through the summer. Today, we are going to continue on talking about the value of community. Specifically authentic community, the community known as the church, body of Christ on earth. You should know by now that the church is characterized by many things, including it is a culture of giving. That is what we are going to look at today.
A little bit of background. Some of you are familiar with the book of 1 Corinthians and possibly 2 Corinthians. Paul was believed to have written at least two letters, possibly three or four, but the ones that we have are 1 and 2 Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians, you may recall Paul is dealing with a lot of issues in the church. He is dealing with issues such as lawsuits against believers. He is dealing with the issues of disunity. He is dealing with issues of sexual morality. He is dealing with issues of disruptions in worship and those sorts of things, much like what we deal with today. Amen. A lot of those same types of issues. Paul is dealing with all these issues at this church where he spent 18 months. In addition to all these issues he is dealing with, he is also dealing with a severe famine that is going on throughout the Roman Empire. At this particular time, there was a severe famine going on throughout the entire Roman Empire, and it seemed to really hit the churches hard. Because, again, the churches were already dealing with a lot of things like persecution and job loss and that sort of thing. Paul thought this might be a good opportunity for the churches in the north, particularly the Gentile churches, the non-Jewish churches, to help out the church in the Jewish church in Jerusalem. So he decides to take up this special offering to help out the church in Jerusalem. What he does is he decides he is going to visit. I am not sure of the period, but it is probably at least a year or more when he is traveling around or his associates are traveling around and basically hitting up the churches for a donation to this particular collection. He goes out to the churches in Macedonia. He goes to the churches in Corinth. What he finds out is that the churches in Macedonia, although they have less disposable income, in other words, although they are poorer than the church in Corinth, they actually give more money. They actually give a lot more money. They actually give an excess of money. What we find here in this second letter is that Paul is not only following up with some of the issues that he addressed in the first letter, but also he is treating this as a follow-up to this collection offering. In other words, what he is doing is he is using the example of the Macedonians to encourage, or in Paul’s way, slightly strong arming them to give more money to this particular collection. So that is a little background into this chapter. We are going to read just through the first nine verses of chapter 8 in 2 Corinthians. (Scripture read here.)
Again, this is pretty much self-explanatory, but to put it in a modern context, let’s say there is a church in Africa that is experiencing some sort of a huge famine or something like that, and I decide I want to take up a collection to help them out. I go throughout the churches in Pittsburgh and ask them if they will chip into this collection. So I might go to the churches on the North Side and get some money from them and I might go to some of the wealthier churches in, let’s say the North Hills or Fox Chapel or Franklin Park or some of those places. What I might find out, similar to Paul, maybe the North Side churches, although they had less disposable income, they were more generous than the churches in Fox Chapel and Franklin Park and the North Hills. That is really a contemporary example of what is going on back then. The issue today is not why the churches in Corinth or the churches in Franklin Park or wherever don’t give more money. The question is why did the Macedonians give so much. That is really what we want to look at today. What we should see, as you might have guessed, is that the Macedonians had developed a culture of giving. That is what we are going to look at today. Although the information is limited in this particular book, I think by looking at a few key passages, we can glean some pretty good information about the idea of what makes up a culture of giving. So that is what we are going to do.
The first thing that I think we would find out if we were to really examine the culture would be that people that live in a culture of giving understand that, ultimately, in order to give over and above what is normal that comes from God. In other words, it is a gift of God to be able to give more than what is normal. Paul kind of spells this out in the first line where he says “And now brothers, we want you to know about the grace that God has given the Macedonian churches.” This is one of those throw away lines. It is easy to skip on by because this sounds like just Paul talking about grace. But I think he is letting the readers know up front that this ability to give so much has nothing really to do so much with the Macedonians. It is just that God has given them this unique enlarged capacity to be generous. This underlying word that we translate grace can also be translated gift. Really what the Macedonian churches had was a spiritual gift that enabled them to give over and above the norm. In order to do that, they had to still practice so they could get used to it. As they practiced that gift of giving, the capacity would increase until they were just able to give way, way, way over and beyond what is normal. Really there are people like that. I am sure there were people in the church and there are people in the church today who have this unique capacity to give. In the past, we have talked about the idea that everybody has a spiritual gift and some people have the spiritual gift of giving. That is actually one of the spiritual gifts. It means that they have this unique capacity to give over and beyond what the normal person would give. It has nothing or little to do with income level. It is just that these people have this ability to go way beyond what is normal, over and above what is normal when it comes to giving. They are always the first one to write the check. The first ones to give a handout when there is a request out there. They have this unique gift of giving.
Really, we know that the Macedonian churches must have had this gift because Paul goes on to say “Out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity.” Now these are phrases, that we normally would not string together in a sentence. I suspect that no one has ever seen those words strung together anywhere else but the Bible. What these words are saying is that these Macedonians didn’t just give during the good times. They didn’t just give when they had extra disposable income. No, they gave when times were tough. They gave in the middle of the severe trials when they were under persecution, when they were under attach, and when everything was under attack, including their lives, their finances, their homes, their marriages and everything, they went over and above what the average person would do.
As I thought about this, it kind of reminded me of my sermon a few weeks ago. Some of you were here for the sermon I spoke on that I called kairos moments. It was the idea that God places these trials in our life as really an opportunity to kind of test our response. What we see here with Macedonians is that they went through those types of trials, and they came through with flying colors. If you were here a couple weeks ago, I showed some diagrams. I am going to show a few of them again just to refresh your memory. You may recall the black arrow represents your timeline, your life. You are going along in life and everything is looking pretty good and then you hit what I would call a life trial. A life trial could be anything. It could be something related to finances. It could be something related to health. It could be something related to marriage or whatever it is. We hit this life trial. What happens whether you are Christian or not, we often fall into kind of a pit. We often get stuck in some sort of a pit. But the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian is our response. Do we respond like the world responds and kind of freak out and panic or do we respond like a Christian to respond and see it as an opportunity to grow in their faith. When you think about the Macedonians, when they hit these severe trials related to poverty, related to persecution, or whatever it was, they didn’t respond like the world. They responded in the total opposite way of the world. When they hit these extreme trials, when they hit the severe poverty, it welled up in overflowing joy and generosity. As I said a couple weeks ago, what happens is basically when you respond appropriately to what God is trying to teach you in the moment, he takes you through what I call breakthrough. He breaks you out of this pit because you basically passed the test and you go on and experience some sort of a new growth in your relationship with God and possibly head off in an entirely new direction in life. Again, that is what we see with these Macedonians. They were able to, “Out of their severe trail, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in a rich generosity”. To be honest, that has got to be a gift because that is not natural for most people and it is not even natural for Christians to do it on a whole. It is not natural for pastors to do it. I will be honest with you, I struggle with this. This is not my first response. When I am struggling with something financial, when I feel a hit on my pocket book or my checkbook or whatever, my first response is not let’s give more money. Let’s be more generous. I suspect this last week some of you finished your tax returns. Hopefully a few of you got it in on time and hopefully some of you even got a refund, but I suspect that maybe some of you actually had to pay some money back. We had to pay this year. I was caught off guard because as nice as it is to get kids out of the house because it gives you a lot more space, unfortunately, you can’t take the same amount of deductions on your tax return. We got caught off guard, so the Gohn household was not a happy house on April 15. My response wasn’t, hey Debbie let’s go out and give some more money to the church. It wasn’t give any money to anybody, but by that time it was too late because Debbie already bought the red shoes she has on. But it was a response of we have to tighten up our belt. We have to consider where the money is going including the money we are giving to the church and to various nonprofits and missionaries we support. Then God kind of knocked me upside the head and said you know what you are preaching on this week Chuck? You are preaching on generosity. It kind of woke me up and I said get ahold of it and brought me out of that kairos moment and realized that, again, we are not to panic. But I say that just to say that I am human too and just as Christians struggle with it, entire churches struggle with it.
Over 10 years ago, what was it 2008 or so, we hit the big recession that hit people really hard, especially the churches and especially the nonprofits. This church saw one-third of their savings taken away just like that. It was a lot of money. It was bad news. It was particularly bad because we, as a church, I hate to admit this, but we were living off of our savings. It hit us really hard. The response could have been let’s panic. Let’s start looking at ways that we can cut back. Let’s look for missionaries that we don’t need to support any more. Let’s look at local organizations. Let’s look at The Shepherd’s Door and see if we should continue to support that. Let’s look at all these things. Fortunately, we didn’t panic. We made some adjustments in areas that didn’t directly impact our ability to continue to do ministry, and we just continued to give in those areas. In fact, we have increased giving over the last few years while still having a deficit between the offering and the expenses. The good news is that we are seeing that gap close. In fact, over the last nine or ten years, we have seen it close substantially. That is good news. I suspect that if the giving and the attendance continue, we are going to see, within two or three years, we will basically need to no longer rely on the savings for operating costs. Which means then we will be able to use the savings to begin new ministries and support existing ministries. We will begin to look at our finances and not ask ourselves what is it we can’t do but we will begin to ask what can we do. Right now, we have to say we can’t do this, we can’t do this, but if we can get over that hump, we can begin to look at what is God telling us to do.
Going back to this original idea of the culture of giving, the bottom line is in order to give extravagantly, whether as an individual or a church, you have to understand that that ability to give, the capacity to give beyond what is normal comes first and foremost from God. The second thing that would contribute to a culture of giving is just simply an idea that, although some people can’t give extravagantly, everyone is able to give something. Paul goes on to say “For I testify that they gave as much as they were able and even beyond their ability.” Thinking about this first century church, as I have said before, it was very unique because it was made up of a lot of people from different social status, different economic strata, so you had slaves and merchants and business owners and professionals all worshiping together. The bottom line is some people in that community were able to give more than others.
That is not much different than it is today. What I like about this congregation is it is made up of all sorts of demographics, people from all sorts of social strata, people from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds, and people from all different levels of income. In this congregation, we have some people who are just simply better able to give more than others. Just to give you an idea of what that might look like, I asked Marilyn Johnstone, our Treasurer, to give me some figures that show me how that breaks down in our congregation as far as where the giving comes from. Last year, in we collected $261, 041. That is good because about ten years ago the collections were $80,000. So we are making progress which is good. As far as how that number is broken down, the miscellaneous offerings basically are offerings that we don’t know who gave it, just money thrown in the tray without an offering envelope or whatever. That accounted for about $13,718 or 5% of the overall giving. The next line is 74 envelopes which really represents 74 families or the technical term is giving units. It could be a single person or it could be a family of four. It represents a family. So 74 families gave $137, 626 total, which is equal to 53% of the total offerings. There were 10 envelopes, 10 families or individuals that gave a total of $109, 697, which represents 42% of the total giving. As a side note, I have no idea who these people are. I don’t want to know because if I did know it might skew my opinion of some people because, like many churches, I’m sure there are people here that complain the most but often give the least. That happens. I don’t want to know because really I think it might cloud my judgment a little bit. I show this just so you can see that there are people in this congregation that are able to give a lot and they give a lot.
My point really is that every person, if you are not a Christian I exclude you from this, but every Christian is able to give with few exceptions, very few exceptions. Most Christians are able to give something. The question is why don’t they give. Really, I think it is quite simple. As you know, you are sitting down and writing your bills at the end of the month and what do you find out? There is more month than there is money. I think, statistically, I just read, which was interesting, that apparently the average American spends 110% of their income on a given month. That doesn’t leave a lot of money left for the church. Of course a person in that situation, in their mind, they are going to say I paid all the bills and there is no money left so I am not able to give anything to the church. That is not right because clearly what they are saying is I’m not able to give to God because first I had to give to the god called Verizon or I had to give to the god called Comcast or I had to give to the god called Wal-Mart or Target or iTunes or Apple or whatever. I had to pay those gods first. Our God comes in second. If there is no money left, nothing goes. Most of you know that in the Old Testament is where we get the concept of tithe, which basically means give 10% of what you bring in. They weren’t just talking about money. It could be fruit. It could be apples. It could be cattle. It could be money. The bottom line was you were to give 10%, your first fruits, to God. You were to bring it to the temple and give it to God. I know there are probably some people that are saying, well, Chuck, that is nice but we aren’t Old Testament people. We are New Testament people. That is true and the sad thing about that is that you know what? Jesus says give it all. Jesus doesn’t go by the 10% rule because he had the people that were giving the 10% patting themselves on the back and saying I tithe. He was saying so what. Give it all. In other words, he didn’t lower the standard of the Old Testament. He raised the bar. He said give it all. Give it all. In the mind of Jesus it’s not how much of our money we decide to give back to God. It is how much of God’s money we decide to keep. Do you see the difference there? There are a number of verses in the New Testament and one of them is in 1 Corinthians that says “On the first day of every week, each one of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with his income.” That is pretty straight forward there. It is not a fixed number. I say 10% and I know that scares some people but really 10% is considered a minimum. But if you are not used to giving 1% or 2%, you are not going to jump right to 10%. But you are going to go in that direction. You are going to consider 10% a minimum and then just keep going because what God wants you to do is stretch your ability to give. That first century church gave according to their ability and beyond. When we think about the culture of a church that has a culture of giving, we remember that that giving is strictly a grace from God and that everyone has the ability to give according to their income and beyond.
The third thing I want to point out is that in a culture of giving you are not going to really have to strong arm people to give. Paul goes on to say “Entirely on their own, they urgently pleaded with us for the privilege of sharing in this service to the saints.” Entirely on their own. I have to be honest with you. I don’t like preaching on giving. I don’t like giving sermons on giving. I hate giving sermons on giving. I could probably count on one hand the number of times in the past nine years that I have given a sermon on giving. I don’t like it because I never liked to listen to it when I was out there. Some churches that is all they do and some churches are really good at it, especially those Pentecostal churches. I went to a church down in Florida. I heard two preachers talk and I thought we were ready to leave. Those were just the warm-ups. Those were just about giving. There were just a couple sermons on tithing and then they were going to have the main sermon. Some churches are over the top when it comes to preaching sermons on giving and that is not the way that I am. I was naïve enough to think that when I got here if I just preach Jesus, if I just preach the cross, if we just have a Christ-centered focus, people will come in, they will receive Christ, their hearts will go towards God, and their outflow will be giving. Right? It doesn’t happen that way. The bottom line is we have increased in giving so to a certain degree my strategy has worked. If you grow people up to maturity, they will ultimately give. But the bottom line is even the most dedicated Christians need to have an occasional reminder of the importance of giving, especially as we go into the summertime. I don’t know what it is, but you hit summer and why do offerings go down in the summer? People think I’m on vacation from work so I’m on vacation from giving. The church must be closed down. No. Try that with your electric company at home. Try that with your other bills. We’re not going to pay our bills because we are on vacation. It doesn’t work that way. The church keeps going. The church continually has money to shell out. Mature believers understand that before they go on vacation, they will make arrangements to either make the offering ahead of time or to set it up with their bank account so even while they are gone we continue to get an offering check in the mail. If you don’t know how to do that, Marilyn Johnstone would love to teach you how to do that. She is an expert at it. Very easy. All kidding aside, you have to teach people, even the mature Christians, because we all struggle with it. We all struggle with this idea of giving. We especially have to teach the new believers that giving is a part of Christian living. It is. Really there are not a lot of places to teach them other than the pulpit or possibly in a connecting class, so we have to have opportunities to tell them about the importance of giving, to tell them about the tithe. And also just to give them a realistic picture of the church, of what it costs to run a church nowadays. A church is an organization which many of you are part of a lot of different organizations. Some of you are accountants. Some of you pay the bills. You know how expensive it is to run an organization. Month after month after month, we are writing checks not only to overseas missionaries, we are writing checks to Sam’s Club and Staples to buy everything from paper towels to toilet paper and everything in between because it costs money to run the church. It costs a lot of money to keep this thing called the church afloat. In fact, the average amount of expenses where we are at right now in any given year is somewhere between $350,000 and $370,000 a year. Just to put it in perspective, we brought in $261,000 last year, which works out to be, if you figure 100 families, about $2,600 per family. But based on our needs, we need about $3,500 per family.
Now I don’t tell you that to make you feel guilty. Please, this is not a sermon about guilt. It is a sermon about perspective. Because I know, again, there are families that could never give $3,500 a year, but I know there are families that could give double and triple that amount. It is just an average of what we need to run the church. It is just a reality. A church that has a culture of giving does not have to resort to strong arming the people because the people just naturally do it on a voluntary basis. In fact, as Paul says, they plead for the opportunity to give. I’ve been here 11 years and I never had anybody begging me to give more money. He says the people in Macedonia begged Paul to participate in these offerings. The question is what is up with that? How could that be? Maybe it is that the Macedonian churches understood something that the Corinthian church didn’t understand and what most churches don’t understand today. Giving looked at rightly is a privilege. Why is it a privilege? Because again, God is about grace. God’s nature is to give. The currency in God’s economy is grace. One of my favorite passages that speaks of this is John 1:16 that says “From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another.” You’ve got God up there opening a valve of grace. That grace can come in millions of different forms. Coming down and coming down and coming down. That grace comes through people. It could be miracles. It could be finances. It could be all sorts of stuff coming through that grace. The Macedonians knew if I give, I am participating in God’s grace. I am stepping into that fountain of God’s grace. I am joining in partnership with God as he spreads his grace all throughout the world. They figured out this is a privilege. When there was an opportunity to give, especially an opportunity to give something where they knew God had his hand on it, where they knew God was at work in that particular ministry, they said please let me be a part of that. Because they knew that they were participating in grace and that they could not out-give God. The more that they gave the more that came back and filled up their capacity to give. Again, not just finances but just the joy, the satisfaction of being part of God’s grace as it flows out into the world. When we think about the culture, we understand that it is God who initiates it. It is God who makes that grace available to us. Everybody is able to give. We shouldn’t be strong arming. It is a privilege to give.
The last thing though is really what I think the Macedonians understood the most. When it comes to giving, like so many things in the Christian life, it boils down to a heart issue. What is going on inside here? It is a heart issue. That is why Paul goes on to say “I am not commanding you, but I want to test the sincerity of your love by comparing it with the earnestness of others.” What he is doing is comparing the heart of the Corinthian people to the heart of the Macedonian people. A little money is not the only gauge for how well your heart is. It is a pretty good one. It is not something that Chuck is making up. It is not something Paul made up. It is something that Jesus stated back in the gospel of Matthew. He says “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.” Jesus knew that. Jesus knew the grip that money would have on us. He chose to use that as kind of an indicator of how you do it in your heart. Paul basically says to the Corinthians you think you are so high and mighty but the poor Macedonians have a great heart. They have a huge heart. A huge capacity to give. Paul also knew that when it comes to giving you can’t just point to other churches as an example. You can’t just point to other people and say look what they are giving and you should give that. He knows you can’t do that because what you are doing is playing on guilt. What he does is he points to God’s heart, to the size of God’s heart. Specifically what he points to is the grace that came out from the love of God as manifested through Christ on the cross. That is why he says in 2 Corinthians 8:9 “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that though he was rich, yet for your sake’s he became poor so that through his poverty you might become rich.” He is giving a shortened version of Philippians. Remember Philippians talks about how Jesus had had this majesty, these riches in heaven all before the world began, but he chose to willingly set aside those riches to come to the earth and basically act as a slave to all mankind. So much so that he was willing to go to a cross and die as a criminal on a wooden cross. What he is saying is because of that sacrifice by Him becoming poor, we became rich. We become rich. But again we are not talking about material wealth because material wealth is nice but it is no match for the heavenly wealth that God desires us to have. Some of you people have been here long enough or been a Christian long enough to know that having money is nice but you can’t put a price on a saved life or a life turned around or a marriage restored or whatever it is because of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. While he was rich he became poor so that we might become spiritually rich.
In closing, we have this idea that when we think about a culture of giving, it begins with the understanding that the gift of giving to the degree that God wants us to give starts out by being a gift from God. God gives us the capacity to give and we have to act on it. As we act on that capacity, our capacity to give continues to grow. We are also reminded of the fact that every person is able to give something. All people have the ability. It might take going home and looking at your checkbook and where the money is going. I imagine if you look at your checkbook pretty closely, there are places to give. I am not saying you have to start at 10%. Start with something and build up to 10% and then move on beyond that. Everyone is able to give. And also the idea that they are not strong armed into giving. We shouldn’t have to strong arm them. It should be a culture of giving where it just becomes second nature. We are Christians so we give. That is what it is. Christians that live in a culture of giving see it not as an obligation. They see it as a privilege. As an opportunity to be able to step into that grace, those blessings upon blessings that are coming down from above to open our eyes and see those blessings and by our giving be able to step into those blessings and experience with God that grace that goes out into all the world. Ultimately, in a culture of giving, we know that it doesn’t matter what another church is doing. It doesn’t matter what another individual is doing. All that matters is what is going on in this heart. Ultimately, when it comes to giving, giving is a heart issue. It is a matter of the heart first and foremost. We always have to be examining that. We are not comparing it to the heart of an individual next to us or a church down the street. All we can do is compare it to the heart of God that expressed through the grace of God through Jesus Christ. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that though he was rich, yet for your sake’s he became poor so that you through his poverty might become rich.” Let us pray.
