Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations
Extravagant Generosity
2 Corinthians 9:11; Exodus 35:5; John 3:16
10-28-12
2 Corinthians 9:11
11 You will be made rich in every way so that you
can be generous in every way. Such generosity produces thanksgiving to God
through us.
Exodus 35:5
5 Collect gift offerings for the Lord from
all of you. Whoever freely wants to give should bring the Lord’s gift
offerings: gold, silver, and copper;
John 3:16
16 God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life.
For the last four weeks we have talked about the four of
the five practices of a fruitful congregation.
I have preached on the practice and then we have discussed them in small
groups. We have talked about Radical
Hospitality, Passionate Worship, Intentional Faith Development and Risk-taking
Mission and Service. Today we talk about
Extravagant Generocity. This sermon will
be a book end to the Five Practices Series and also the next couple of weeks as
I teach about the Nuts and Bolts of Finances when it comes to Church’s
finances, personal finances, and stewardship.
Then on Nov. 11th we will have a special time in worship when we ask
people to fill out an estimate of giving card.
I will get into that later on next week.
I know what some of you are thinking. Our current economic situation has been the
focal point of this election cycle. It
has been during the Presidential campaigns but also our gubernatorial campaigns
and even down to the park bond which is up for a vote here in Indian Trail. Everyone is talking about the economy because
it is still in horrible shape. There are
some people who are doing well but unemployment is still high, people are under
their house mortgages, college is more expensive than ever and the tree that
money grew on was cut down, ground up and made into toothpicks. We as a church are still struggling
financially. I will get into more of
that next week but we are still in debt to the conference to the tune of
$34,000.
I prayed hard about how to handle this practice of extravagant
generosity and how we could move into a stewardship campaign. I know that everyone in here is struggling
with money, in some form or fashion.
Maybe you are struggling with gas prices or the rising cost of
food. Maybe you are struggling with huge
amounts of debt or your job is not going well as you would like. Everyone is worried about the economy and
whether we are headed for an even bigger disaster then what we have already
lived through. I am right there with
you. I’m nervous, scared, worried, and
confused. Is this the right time to talk
about money in church? Is this the right
time to talk about giving and stewardship?
No, it is NOT the right time, it is the PERFECT TIME!
It is the perfect time because this crisis is making us
reprioritize our spending habits and our personal finances. It is the perfect time to realize that God
needs to come first in all aspects of our lives including our finances. This is the perfect time to stare at the dead
presidents on our bills and say to them, “you no longer have power over
me. I don’t work for you any more. You are working for me and my God!” This is the perfect time to talk about money
because money holds such power in our lives but that can change. There is nothing wrong with money but we have
a tendency to worship it too much. We
like to place it at the forefront of our lives and think that our life has to
revolve around it. Yet when we do that
we are placing money where God is suppose to be. Now is the perfect time to put God back where
he belongs.
A pastor was waist deep in a river as he welcomed people
into the sacrament of baptism. Bill was
the next one to be baptized. He was 57
years old and for the first time in his life he had a relationship with
God. He was excited about his new faith
and eagerly headed towards the river to be baptized. When his shoes hit the
water another parishioner called out to him.
“Bill, do you want me to hold your wallet so it doesn’t get messed up?” Bill turned around and said, “Nope, I’m going
to have my sins washed away and my wallet needs that too!”
Did you know that 7% of the Bible talks about money? There are over 2,300 verses that tell us to
be generous and good stewards of our resources.
One out of every seven verses in the Gospel of Luke is about money. 11 out of the 39 parables of Jesus are about
money. Jesus talks about money more than
he does about heaven and hell combined.
The Kingdom of God is the only thing he talks about more than
money. Like I said, this is an
uncomfortable topic to preach and for many of us to hear because it is
something that we hold so personal and intimate. Plus there is a ton of emotions tied up with
our personal financial situation. It is
impolite to ask someone how much they make a year or to ask how much they give
to the church. Those are topics that no
one wants to discuss and there are some people, maybe even some of you, who are
even offended when such things are talked about. But according to the Bible, according to the
life of Jesus, this is a topic we should be discussing, a topic I should be
preaching on, and we should be making a priority in our lives.
John Wesley, the founder of our denomination, had a
saying about money, “Earn all you can, save all you can, give all you
can.” He is right. God wants us to make money. He wants us to be fruitful and to use the
gifts and talents he has given us to earn a living, take care of our families,
and to be generous with. There is a
common misquotation of the Bible that gives the wrong impression on what God
thinks about money. Many people think of
1 Timothy 6:10 says, “for money is a root of all kinds of evil.” That is not true. What it actually says, “For the love of money
is a root of all kinds of evil.” Money
is really neutral. By itself it isn’t
evil or good. It is how we use it that
determines whether or not it is evil or good.
God doesn’t hate money. God hates
it when we love money more than we love God.
All of these 2,300 verses tell us how to have a right relationship with
God and money. God knows that money is
important to life, he just doesn’t want us to forget that God is the most
important.
That is what the Exodus text tells us today; “Collect
gift offerings for the Lord from all of you.
Whoever freely wants to give should bring the Lord’s gift offerings:
gold, silver, and copper.” When we
freely give to God, we are placing God above everything else. When we offer up our gold, silver, copper,
our money, we are saying to God; You are the most important thing in my life,
more than these things. We are saying to
the world; God is the most important thing in my life, more than these things.
I am not a financial genius and I don’t understand a lot
about our current financial trouble. I
don’t even own a house and have never had to get a mortgage. But I do know the reason we have gotten in to
so much credit trouble and why we are in such bad financial shape. We are spending money we don’t have and it
revolves around our lack of contentment.
We look at our lives and we struggle to be content. The things God tells us we should be content
with we aren’t and the things that God tells us we should be discontent with we
are content with. God tells us that if
he will take care of the lilies of the field and the birds of the air he will
take care of us. We should be content
with life’s little things. Yet we are
discontent with what we have. We think
we need to the newest and the most updated thing. We think our cars are getting old when they
hit year three. We are discontent with 10
TV channels and think we need all 1000 channels of cable or satellite can
provide. Yet we are content with our two
minute prayer lives, the amount of the Bible we know and understand, and the
time we spend in the presence of God each day.
We are content in our pursuit of justice and mercy and we are content to
watch the suffering of the world happen because that is just how life
works.
John Ortberg is a Presbyterian minister in California and
you may have done a study on one of his many books. He says there are four keys to contentment in
life. He says if you focus on these four
things, you will start to see more contentment in your life. First he says you need to remind yourself
that it could be worse. Just say that phrase when you look around at
your life. When you are attempting to
fix that leaky rain gutter on your house, say “it could be worse.” When your walk to your car and in the parking
lot you notice a newer model with better features and then you look at your
car, say “it could be worse.” When you
are sitting at the dinner table and you look over at your spouse, say…okay
maybe you should just think that one.
But when we think about how worse it could be we start to see how good
we actually have it.
The second thing you need to ask yourself is how long
with this make me happy. You all
remember toys you wanted for Christmas.
You were so excited about the gift and on Christmas morning you were
thrilled to get it. Then when New Years rolled around you were already bored
with it. Some things may look really
good but will they make you happy for the long haul. This can be said for anything we have in our
lives, from hunting equipment to shoes, from cars to clothes, from toys to our
TVs.
The third key is to develop a grateful heart. A consumer society is focused on telling you
that what you have is not good enough.
You cannot be happy with the original iPhone, which came out last June,
you have to have the 3G model now and then 5G a year from now. It is easy to get caught up in that trap and
so we have to retrain our minds to look at the things we actually have and what
we like about them.
A husband had a huge fight with his wife and he ran out
of the house to take a walk to calm down.
On that walk he started to yell at God, “God why did you create her like
that. She gets on my nerves so much when
she does that.” As he vented to God all
of a sudden he stopped and he started to change his tune. “God I cannot stand this but then I look at
who I am now and I realize it is because of her. I love the way she makes my favorite meal
when I have had a hard week or the fact she knows I need to be alone
sometimes. I love it when she looks at
me and tells me she loves me without saying a word or when I wake up to find
out that we are holding hands.” By the
time he got back to the house he wasn’t mad at her anymore and realized how
much he still loves her. Instead of
being consumed by dislike he was transformed into having a grateful heart.
The last thing Ortberg tells us is to focus on where your
soul finds satisfaction. The Bible
starts off by telling us we are made in God’s image and because of that we are
hard wired for God. There is something
in each of us that desires a connection with the One who created us. Many of us
search for something else to fill that connection. We look for it in other relationships or in
the pursuit of wealth and things. Yet
both of these Bible verses I read today tell us what we truly need to pursue
and where our satisfaction can be
found. 1 Timothy 6:11 says, “But you,
child of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith,
love, endurance and gentleness.” The
Hebrews text says, “Keep your lives free form the love of money and be content with
what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I
forsake you.’ So we say with confidence,
‘The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid.
What can anyone do to me?”
Out of a solid idea and feeling of contentment grows
generosity. Once we start to train our
minds and our hearts to realize that all of what we have is from God, whether
it is the roof over our heads, our loved ones, or even the air in our lungs, we
start to want to say thank you. When we
say thank you by placing God first that is what we call generosity, the
spiritual practice of giving.
True generosity is when we give not out of need but out
of the desire to simply give. There is
something in us, in each and every one of us, which calls us to be
generous. We feel this at Christmas,
when we purchase gifts for our loved ones.
We are so excited about the gift we are giving we cannot wait for that
person to open it. That is
generosity. Winston Church said, “We
make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” What we give away is how we are defined by
life. If you pass away while I am here,
I will stand behind this pulpit and talk about your life. I will do my best to sum up your entire life
and do you know where I will get that information…not from you, but from your
friends and family. It is when I am
sitting down with them after you have passed away that stories come out, trends
in your personality and nature are discussed, and what people thought about you
is discovered. That leads me to a
question you need to be thinking about, how do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be the first part of
Churchill’s quote, known for making a living or the second, known for making a
life? To do that means that we have to
live into the inner pull to be generous and to say thank you to God who has
given us so much.
Excuse the rudeness of this analogy but it fits
perfectly. When we look at our lives and
we see how God has blessed us, we need to give back in gratitude. If we don’t we get constipated. We are taking everything in but we aren’t
giving out. I’m going to stop there with
the analogy because it could go south very quickly. I think you are getting my point. If we are taking in all of God’s gifts and
blessings but we are not giving back, we start to hurt and be in pain. This will be because we are wondering where
our worth is? Our society tells us our
worth is described by what we own, but God tells us our worth is defined by
what we give. Christ is defined by what
he gave, his life. Once again, how will
you be defined?
When have a generous spirit we align ourselves with God’s
purpose. We are created in God’s image
and God is a generous God. We find that
in the John 3:16 text. “God so loved the
world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t
perish but will have eternal life.” God
loved the world so much that he was willing to part with this only son and send
him through hell and back for our sake.
If this is God’s generosity, a tithe doesn’t look that bad. But we will get to some of that next week.
Generosity changes you, it changes everything about
you. Generosity also changes the
community, the church, the people in your life.
It does this by placing God where God needs to be. A generous person realizes that true security
is not found in a 401K, a savings account, or a large house with all the
toys. True security is found in knowing
that we are serving a God who loves us and wants us to be with him for
eternity. A generous person realizes
that joy is found not in giving to yourself but in giving to God.
As we end this sermon series and move into the next there
is a question I want you to think about.
What percentage of my income is God calling me to give? Talk about it around the dinner table. Be looking at your current financial
situation and where you will be in 2013.
The only way you will be able to answer this question is through prayer
and preparation. But we will get to that
next week as we discuss some financial nuts and bolts. Until then, may you realize how truly blessed
you are and a generous God wants and has given you everything.
And all God’s people said…Amen.
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