Giving: How To Trust God With My Resources
The whole point of this Survivor Series to identify the most necessary habits and disciplines Christians must keep if they hope to keep growing in their faith. Jonathan has shared three of those so far: Bible Study; Prayer; and Evangelism. Today I’ve been assigned the task of talking about Giving.
There is no doubt in my mind that Giving is “basic strategy” and a necessary habit for Christian growth. In some ways I believe giving is the first step to growth as a Christian. Even before Bible Study and Evangelism, giving must first take place. You can’t be saved until you give God your sin and your life. You won’t read your bible until you give God your time and attention. You can’t tell others about Jesus unless you are willing to give them the love and grace God has given you.
In fact, every step of growth you will experience as a Christian will be as a result of God giving himself to you in exchange for you giving yourself to God.
I know a lot of good pastors. God has blessed me with some great relationships with some great men who really love the Lord. Of all the pastor’s I know, I am not aware of one that gets excited about preaching on giving. In fact I wondered if Jonathan set this series up so he would be out of town for this message. People really seem to struggle with the whole giving thing. 2 Jokes - I saw this cartoon – (baptized with wallet above water).
With all the controversy and skepticism regarding corrupt preachers and money hungry evangelists, a talk about giving is rarely an exciting one to deliver. Yet these men of God will regularly grit their teeth and teach their people about the importance of giving. Why? There can only be two reasons why a preacher preaches on giving –
1. The pastor wants more money
2. The pastor loves his people enough to let them in on a key to living that will radically deepen and widen their lives
Let me assure you that the messages you’ve heard on giving in recent months have come from a sincere desire to help you experience all that God has for you
If you’re going to get this message this morning, you’ll need to move past cliché reactions to the subject at hand. God wants you to give your life to Him – which means everything, including the checkbook, your time and even the special abilities he has blessed you with.
He wants to learn about giving money, giving kindness, giving grace, giving time, giving mercy, giving up, and giving in…
The greatest kind of giving we can perform is “giving in” to God. Relinquishing our rights and trusting God’s plan.
This message will hopefully help us learn about giving the right thing at the right time in the right way and for the right reasons.
Why Give:
Three quick reasons why Christians must learn to give:
1. To Please God
2. To Be Like Jesus
3. To Experience Abundant Life
You see the meaning of life, is as best I can tell – very simple. We are here to love God with our lives. Every night when Ang and I pray with our little girls at bedtime, I always wind up saying the same thing. “Lord, help Sarah and Brooke love you with their lives.”
An important guy came up to Jesus and said – what is the most important thing God ever told us to do? Jesus said – “Love the Lord with your lives. With your body and your mind and your soul – give everything that you are, in love, to God.
So what does loving God have to do with giving? Everything. I have discovered that you can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.
So the issue of giving is fundamental to us. We will not be able to love God without giving Him our lives, our resources, our hopes, our rights, our jobs, our futures, our desires, our dreams, our bodies, our minds, our talents, our everything. To hold anything back from God is to withhold a measure of our love from God.
So when we talk about giving today – we are including everything you have something as small as money to something as important as your next breath of air.
Giving Quotes:
I have tried to keep things in my hands and lost them all, but what I have given into God’s hands I still possess. - Martin Luther
When it comes to giving, some people will stop at nothing. - Jimmy Carter
I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. - C. S. Lewis
He who gives what he would as readily throw away, gives without generosity; for the essence of generosity is in self-sacrifice. - Sir Henry Taylor, quoted in New Beginnings
Do your giving while you’re living so you’re knowing where it’s going. - Anonymous
God judges what we give by what we keep. - G. Mueller
It’s not what you do with the million if fortune should ere be your lot, but what are you doing at present with the dollar and quarter you got. - Anonymous
The trouble is that too many people are spending money they haven’t yet earned for things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.
Give according to your income, lest God make your income according to your giving - Peter Marshall
If you give what you do not need, it isn’t giving - Mother Teresa
Where your pleasure is, there is your treasure; Where your treasure is, there is your heart; W here your heart is, there is your happiness. - Augustine
If you want to know God – then you must learn what it means to give.
In order to live a lifestyle of giving you need God’s grace expressed in the following ways:
I. A Person Modeled
“Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.” – Philippians 4:9
A Great Cloud of Witnesses:
Sometimes it helps to identify people who have the grace of giving and seek to emulate their examples. It is difficult to find these people in our culture. My wife and I have turned to men of God from history to teach us how to be faithful and generous in our giving.
Here are some books I recommend that can get you in touch with godly models of generosity and faithful stewardship.
George Mueller
John Wesley
Borden
The Giving Nature of the Godhead:
We look at faithful men and women who have been transformed by the master…The great cloud of witnesses all testify the same account—God is faithful. So the real person we model is Jesus Christ.
“I am not commanding you but I want to test the sincerity of your love by comparing it with the earnestness of others. For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that thought he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor, so that through his poverty you may become rich.” – 2 Corinthians 8:8-9
The most memorized verse of the Bible says a lot about the giving nature of God…
“For God so loved the world that he gave…”
God’s nature is to give…
The Generosity of God:
True
Timeless
Total
Transforming
II. A Proper Motive
We give to bless others:
“I rejoice greatly that at last you have renewed your concern for me…”
“Yet it was good of you to share in my troubles”
We give to be blessed:
“…I am looking for what may be credited to your account”
We have to be even more careful with this point. When I give, I know I will be blessed, but if I become a blessings broker – simply trading spiritual stocks for higher return then I have missed the point. There is nothing wrong with giving for a greater reward – that’s kind of the whole point of Christianity. God tells us to expect to be blessed when we give anything to him. Yet we never know how He will bless us. Sometimes, the last thing we need is more money – he may give us more peace or patience instead.
We give to bless God:
“…They are a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God.”
This morning I went to get some jelly filled donuts and thought while I was at the store I’d pick up the latest copy of playboy. On my way home, some church folks in a big Cadillac pulled out in front of me and I slammed on my horn and yelled and cussed at em for a few minutes. Driving up Bottom Avenue towards the church, a puppy was looking at something in the gutter, I swerved and ran right over the little thing. As fur flew everywhere, I laughed. I saw a little girl standing in the door way with a tear streaming down her face. I couldn’t resist so I backed up and rolled down my window and yelled, “you ever heard of a leash?!” I then pulled into the church parking lot where I fixed my tie, grabbed my bible and headed for the sanctuary. Here I am now, feeling fine about my life…why? I’ve got my tithe check right here! 12%! After I give this, me and God will be alright!
Just in case some of you are secretly planning a lynching after church, please understand, I totally made up that story. I would never buy jelly donuts, I like the crème filled ones!
The point of that totally fictional story is to illustrate God’s real desire for our lives. He wants us to live in such a way that our lives show Him how much we love him.
III. A Promise Made
“And My God will meet all your needs according to glorious riches in Christ Jesus”
We come to believe that to give anything is to be left with less. Generous people learn that the opposite is really true.
The crossover effect: When I give money, I will be cared for in a material sense but I will also be given blessings that have nothing to do with my original gift. That is the crossover effect that giving sets into motion. The result is an opportunity to be generous in other areas. And so on.
“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 in you, so that in all things at all times, having what you need you will abound in every good work.” -- 2 Corinthians 9:7-8
“Give and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” – Luke 6:38
Men of the Bible times used to wear robes with a belt tied around the waist. It was possible for them to store a bunch of stuff in the upper part of their robes.
I was always perplexed by Psalm 126 until I went to the Sahel, that vast stretch of savanna more than four thousand miles wide just under the Sahara Desert. In the Sahel, all the moisture comes in a four month period: May, June, July, and August. After that, not a drop of rain falls for eight months. The ground cracks from dryness, and so do your hands and feet. The winds of the Sahara pick up the dust and throw it thousands of feet into the air. It then comes slowly drifting across West Africa as a fine grit. It gets inside your mouth. It gets inside your watch and stops it. The year’s food, of course, must all be grown in those four months. People grow sorghum or milo in small fields.
October and November...these are beautiful months. The granaries are full—the harvest has come. People sing and dance. They eat two meals a day. The sorghum is ground between two stones to make flour and then a mush with the consistency of yesterday’s Cream of Wheat. The sticky mush is eaten hot; they roll it into little balls between their fingers, drop it into a bit of sauce and then pop it into their mouths. The meal lies heavy on their stomachs so they can sleep.
December comes, and the granaries start to recede. Many families omit the morning meal. Certainly by January not one family in fifty is still eating two meals a day.
By February, the evening meal diminishes. The meal shrinks even more during March and children succumb to sickness. You don’t stay well on half a meal a day.
April is the month that haunts my memory. In it you hear the babies crying in the twilight. Most of the days are passed with only an evening cup of gruel. Then, inevitably, it happens. A six- or seven-year-old boy comes running to his father one day with sudden excitement. “Daddy! Daddy! We’ve got grain!” he shouts. “Son, you know we haven’t had grain for weeks.” “Yes, we have!” the boy insists. “Out in the hut where we keep the goats—there’s a leather sack hanging up on the wall—I reached up and put my hand down in there—Daddy, there’s grain in there! Give it to Mommy so she can make flour, and tonight our tummies can sleep!”
The father stands motionless. “Son, we can’t do that,” he softly explains. “That’s next year’s seed grain. It’s the only thing between us and starvation. We’re waiting for the rains, and then we must use it.”
The rains finally arrive in May, and when they do the young boy watches as his father takes the sack from the wall and does the most unreasonable thing imaginable. Instead of feeding his desperately weakened family, he goes to the field and with tears streaming down his face, he takes the precious seed and throws it away. He scatters it in the dirt! Why? Because he believes in the harvest.
The seed is his; he owns it. He can do anything with it he wants. The act of sowing it hurts so much that he cries. But as the African pastors say when they preach on Psalm 126, “Brother and sisters, this is God’s law of the harvest. Don’t expect to rejoice later on unless you have been willing to sow in tears.” And I want to ask you: How much would it cost you to sow in tears? I don’t mean just giving God something from your abundance, but finding a way to say, “I believe in the harvest, and therefore I will give what makes no sense. The world would call me unreasonable to do this—but I must sow regardless, in order that I may someday celebrate with songs of joy.”
“Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him.” Psalm 126:5-6
“He has scattered abroad his gifts to the poor; his righteousness endures forever.” – Ps. 112:9
IV. A Praise Magnified
“To our God and Father be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”
Our giving brings glory to God!
“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.” – 2 Corinthians 9:11
How I give ultimately affects how I will live.
(note: the following verses in 2 Cor. 9:11-15 are really good for this point).
Romans 5:17
Why should tithing become the first step? Because babies can’t handle abstract thinking. They learn through doing.
