Cultivating Generosity

SERMON: 2016-06-05--cr0916--cultivating-generosity-part-1 SOURCE DURATION: 00:38:10.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.98 APPROVED: false REASON: The candidates describe a cohesive narrative arc detailing a personal journey of faith and financial application (tithing/resupply), which constitutes pastoral application within the sermon. Candidate 15 serves as the concluding rhetorical summary of this main point. Since all provided material is continuous sermon content, it represents the final segment of the message. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Let's pick up then where we left off last week. If you were here last week, you will recall that we saw that there are essentially four different attitudes that people have towards managing their resources. Let's take a look at that together. There is the self-absorbed owner. His mantra is, "I have full authority over my stuff because it is 100% mine." There is the obligated owner. His mantra is, "I have full authority over my stuff, but I feel obligated to give something." And I mentioned last week, your average secular charitable giver falls under that category. I have to return to society a measure of what has been given to me. The average Canadian charitable donation, as of 2013, stood somewheres in the neighborhood of $531. The median, however, was only about $147. And what median means is that half the population who makes donations are under that number, and the other half is above. The third category that we looked at is the obedient owner. The obedient owner brings God into the picture. I will obey what God says. I should do with my stuff. Notice it's still my stuff. 90% is mine, but 10% is God's. And this is the person who sort of used tithing as a payback to God for God's generosity to me. Now, mind you, most people end up cheating on that 10% because the poor say, "I can't afford 10%," and the rich say, "I can't afford 10% because that's too much money." And so most people tend to fudge the figures a little bit. What God is looking for is the love-inspired steward. He is the one who says, "Everything that I have is a trust from the Lord. I am to steward it. I am to manage it on His behalf, and I have given God total authority over His stuff." Now, what I want us to understand afresh is that through faith in Christ, God wants to move us from being a self-absorbed owner to an obligated owner, to an obedient owner, to a love-inspired steward. Because you will recall that on the day of eternity, when we get placed as stewards over God's brand new creation, our place in the new creation is determined by our faithfulness over our stuff in the present creation. Jesus says it repeatedly, "He that is faithful over little I will put over much. He that is not faithful over little cannot be trusted with much." And so, the resources that are entrusted to us in the here and now aren't merely a mechanism to keep ourselves alive and comfortable and to keep the world's economy going. For God's people, it's a lot more than that. For God's people, it is a training ground, it is a learning ground, so that I can learn to be faithful to God. God wants me to be a love-inspired steward, so that having been faithful to Him, He can ultimately entrust me with eternal glory and eternal riches. It blows the mind, if you really think about it, and puts a whole different perspective on how we manage life and how we manage a resource. So the big question then is how do we become a love-inspired steward? How do we grow away from that self-obligated position to an obligated owner, to an obedient owner, to a love-inspired steward? In the time that remains this morning, I want to give you what I believe are three basic principles that we need to not only understand but also practice. And here's the first one. Being a love-inspired steward, surprise, surprise, does not come naturally. It does not come naturally. The reason for that is that we're all sons and daughters of Adam. By nature, we are alienated from God. We don't really trust Him. We don't really want to obey Him. We have bought into what the Bible calls wisdom from below. As Benjamin Franklin put it many years ago, "We tend to believe that God helps those who help themselves." And diagrammatically, I've shown this to you many times. It looks like this. God is effectively removed from our lives. We are under Satan's dominion. We have bought his lie that God is either not there or if He is, He doesn't care about us. And so we have become extremely self-centered. It's all about me. When I have enough about me, maybe I will share it with you. But even that is questionable because when do I ever have enough? The reality is that no matter how rich you are, it tends to never ever be enough. Because as I said last week, it's not how much you make, it's how much you spend. Now, understand this. This does not mean that the natural man cannot be extremely generous. Because they can be. Canadians have just donated, as of last week, over $149 million for relief of the folks in Fort McMurray. We had our own offering for that last week. Many of you were able to contribute to that. The world's two richest men, do you know who they are? Bill Gates, who is the other one? Warren Buffett? They teamed up back in 2010 and they formed an organization called the Giving Pledge. And the idea of that organization was to try to convince other very wealthy individuals within the world to make their resources available to better the conditions in the world. As of March of this past year, they had signed up 142 other millionaires or multimillionaires or billionaires. And their collective worth at this point is somewhere in the neighborhood of $731 billion. That's a lot of money. And that's a lot of money to make available eventually, and that is their plan, to make this money available for charitable causes all over the world. You don't have to be a Christian to be generous. And you can be an unbeliever and be extremely generous. But understand with me this, being generous does not automatically equal being a love-inspired steward. Because you know just as well as I do that there are many, many different reasons that people give towards charitable causes. One is simply for the tax benefit. Government regulations in countries like Canada are of such a nature, as many of you know, that as you give a donation towards a registered charity that can be a deduction in part from the income tax you pay. Why stewards take advantage of that? And that's perfectly legit. Canadians, by the way, donate in the neighborhood of $12 billion annually to charity. About 40% of that is charitable donations to churches or to religious organizations. By far the largest single category of donations that are made. The second category, I think, is health institutions, and that's less than $2 billion a year. And then there are some other causes like that. Some people make donations to charitable organizations for the sake of public recognition. You can go to virtually any hospital, including your own, walk through that corridor of donors, or as in Kingston General, they have this beautiful tree in the foyer with plaques on it for people that have donated to the hospital and to health care. Bill Hybels tells the story of walking into a hospital like that and seeing a big plaque with the name of one of his friends on it. And so next time he met up with a friend, he ribbed him and he said, "I see that you made a large donation to that particular hospital." And the guy kind of chuckled a little bit and he said, "Well, you know, I'm just reserving a bed for the time when I need it." And that's undoubtedly a tad facetious, but you understand how money can be used to grease the way to where you're going. I'm not saying that's all a wrong thing, I'm just saying there are many motivations in making generous donations. Not the least of which is to exercise control and power over the economic or the political system. Why do you think it is that until recently, at least in Ontario, you had unions and corporations making huge donations to virtually every political party that had an opportunity of getting into power? It wasn't all charity, I can guarantee you, it's to have a place at the table when the decisions are being made that determine where the economy is going and where the business deals are going to be handed out. Now, they're changing that law if you've been following the news because it can be tremendously abused, as you know. But I'm just saying that just because somebody is generous, that does not make you a love-inspired steward. Even if your motivation is pure as the driven snow and you give it out of the goodness of your heart, it's still not necessarily a love-inspired stewarding of resources that God has entrusted to you. Because what would happen if the Lord Jesus came along, as he did with the rich young ruler, who said, "Lord, what do I need to do to inherit eternal life?" Do you remember what Jesus said to him? "Sell everything that you have, come follow me, and you will have treasure in heaven." How do you think Bill Gates would feel if Jesus came along and knocked on his shoulder and said, "Bill, let's have a little talk here about the wealth that I have entrusted to you. It's not about how much you give away, it's about how much you give. How about you give it all away?" How would you feel if the Lord came along to you, tapped you on the shoulder, and said, "I want it all." I'm not saying that he would do that, though he did it for the rich young ruler. And to be a love-inspired steward is to know that all that I am and all that I have comes from God, and if he wants me to surrender it to him, I can trust him that he will provide for me. That's what God is looking for. And I think if you're honest with yourself, and if I'm honest with myself, that don't come naturally to you or to me. That takes the grace of God. Aren't you glad you came to church today? It gets better, though, because the second thing that we need to understand is that to be a love-inspired steward, we must be born again. We must be born again. The phrase, you may recall, comes from the third chapter in John's Gospel. It occurs in a conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. Nicodemus is one of the religious leaders of Israel. He is intrigued by Jesus, but he is ashamed to be seen with Jesus because of his colleagues, and so he comes to Jesus by night. And it's in conversation with Nicodemus, trying to understand spiritual things that Jesus says to him. You can't understand spiritual things unless you are born again. That's a great puzzle to Nicodemus. How do you get back into your mother's womb a second time? And Jesus has to explain the whole process of the new birth. It's not my purpose to dwell on that this morning other than to point out that the new birth means we receive new life from the outside. We receive the life of Jesus himself. Why is it that we have such a hard time being love-inspired stewards naturally? It's because, as I said earlier, we're sons and daughters of Adam. We do not fundamentally trust God. We do not fundamentally believe that God looks after us. We have fundamentally believed the lie that we must look after ourselves. And if we look at life's experiences, that has indeed be the case. We've all found ourselves in moments of poverty or in moments of want. We have all found ourselves in situations where money wasn't raining from the sky. And so we grow up with a mindset that says God helps those who help themselves. That's human nature. Human nature cannot be dressed up to become a love-inspired steward. For that we need life from the outside. And if you understand the Gospel, then you understand that's why God sent his Son into the world to be our Redeemer. First of all it demonstrates God's generosity in giving his most valuable relationship to you and to me. He held nothing back. And then it illustrates in the person of Jesus a love-inspired stewardship before the Father where he so values the Father that he is prepared even to lay down his life on a murderous cross out of obedience to the Father. Which, as you've heard us say many times, is why God has given him the name that is above every name because Jesus can be entrusted with all authority in heaven and on earth because he will never put himself ahead of the purposes of God. And that Jesus, when our eyes have been opened to him and we're joined to him by faith, comes to live in us by his Holy Spirit which is what we call the new birth. And when Jesus comes to live in us by his Spirit, he begins to change us from the inside out and he gives us the power to start moving from self-absorbed owners to eventually becoming love-inspired stewards. That's why Jesus, in his conversation with Nicodemus, puts it this way. He says, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to Spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, you must be born again." Now there's lots of different interpretations about what it means to be born of water in the Spirit. Some people think water refers to the waters of natural birth. Other people think it refers to waters of one form of baptism or another. But the point that Jesus makes is very plain. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit. Don't ever be surprised when you find a lack of generosity and unbelief to be part of your heart. That is the natural order of things. The doctrine of total depravity, which means we cannot perform any saving acts before the face of God, is one of the most liberating doctrines of the Christian faith, though a lot of people think it's a negative thing, because it means we don't have to perform out of our own flesh. Your own flesh will always be flesh. But thank God, in Christ, you're born again. In Christ, you have a new nature. And just as it is the nature of a plan to reach upward towards the sun and to spread its branches to the heavens to receive the good gifts from God, so the new life in us that we have in Christ wants to move towards the purposes of God. Paul says the same thing in his great chapter on the resurrection in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, when he says, "The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven." The first man there is Adam. The first man was of the dust of the earth. You know that Adam was created from the dust of the ground. The second man from heaven, Jesus, came from heaven, embracing and embodying heaven's values. "As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth. And as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven." An alternate reading of that in the margin of your Bibles will tell you that it says, "So let us also bear the image of the man from heaven." You see what he's saying? In Christ, we have received new life, and that life, if it's cultivated and fed and watered, will change us from the inside out. Why is it so important to understand that? Because it means that being a Christian is not merely trying harder to be better. That's what Nicodemus was doing. That's what the Pharisees were doing. They made laws upon laws upon laws to curb the fallenness of human nature and to try to be good before God, and all it did was make hypocrites out of them because they couldn't keep up on the inside what they were professing to believe on the outside. Jesus said, "You must be born again, because if you're born again, then God's Spirit within you will change you from the inside out." Paul puts it this way, writing to the Thessalonians about brotherly love. "We do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other." You yourselves have been taught by God to love each other. Well, I don't know what you're going to say. If that's true, then why do we still struggle so much? And that brings me to the third practical principle that we need to not only understand but also practice, and that is this. We must learn to live out the life that we have in Christ. The Bible calls that "walking after the Spirit." Paul writes about that in these familiar words in Galatians 5. "So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law." What Paul is saying there is this. Once you're in Christ, you now not only have your old nature, if you will, but you've got a new nature. This new nature doesn't automatically come to expression because the old nature has to be put to death, and the new nature called forth into life. But he says you've got to remember that in Christ, the old nature has already been crucified. And as he points out in the book of Romans, you and I need to consider that as a statement of fact. The old, selfish, self-serving me is dead. In Christ, I am a new creation, I am alive, I have new resources. And as I cultivate that relationship, build on it, my life changes from that self-absorbent owner, increasingly to a love-inspired steward. And one of the keys to that, I believe, is what Paul is talking about in the passage that we have read earlier, where he talks about the law of sowing and reaping. Let's read those couple of words again. Paul says this, remember this, "Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. 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 to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work." In all ways, in all things, having all that you need to abound. Now again, think this through with me. What makes us stingy? It's because we aren't so sure that we're going to have enough for the day of tomorrow. We aren't so sure that God who owns the cattle on a thousand hills will sell one of them and provide us with the resources so that we can do what we need to do. So we measure out things very carefully, and as well we should. But we measure things very carefully with a view to controlling our own future, because we don't really believe in the generosity of God, and most of the time we don't really understand the law of sowing and reaping. Because the law of sowing and reaping, which is a universal law, and this works to a large degree for non-Christians as well as it works for Christians, says that if you want to reap a harvest, what is the first thing that you need to do? You need to sow seed. And Paul says if you sow sparingly, guess what happens? You're going to reap sparingly. If you sow generously, you're going to reap generously. Now this law applies across the board. The most obvious place where we see it working is in the field of agriculture. Any of you that are gardeners or farmers, what's the first thing that you in the spring? You work up the soil, and then you take the seed, and you place it in the ground because you know that unless that seed dies in the ground, it cannot sprout and bear fruit. As I told you before, my brother-in-law, Conrad van Dyck, does a lot of relief work in one of the poorest nations of the world, Sierra Leone. And he's a chicken, he's a poultry specialist, and he's been working there for years to try to encourage people to build their own poultry industry as a means of alleviating poverty. And one of the reasons poverty is so difficult to eradicate is that people often live in a mindset, "I don't know what tomorrow is going to bring, and so I'm going to consume today." So why feed my corn to the chickens when I can use it to feed myself and all my extended relatives, which in the African culture is always a big issue? And why put it into the ground if I don't know that I'm going to reach a harvest tomorrow? And so the cycle of poverty in many nations runs out of a mindset that says, "I cannot trust God to provide for me." But any farmer will tell you, certainly in the Western world, "Yes, you're taking a risk, but unless you sow, you're not going to reap." Now it not only works in agriculture, it's equally true in relationships. Why is it, what if you've ever thought about this, why is it that some people have more friends than they know what to do with? And other people, they can't even hold on to the friends that they've gone. Well, it's because to him who has will more be given, to him who has not even the little that he has is going to be taken away. If you want to have friends, you have to invest in the lives of people around you. If you don't do that, apart from a few Christians who are willing to be martyrs and to be givers rather than takers, you're not going to have a lot of people around you that want to hang around you because all you do is just suck the life out of everybody. Given it will be given to you. Full measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over. You want to have friends? You be a friend. Now, again, same thing is true in the area of resources. Why do some people have more than enough and other people never have enough? We're inclined to say, well, you know, some people are just lucky, right? And some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouths and things just go well. I've not been born with a silver spoon in my mouth and nothing that I ever touched ever went right. And there may be truth in that. There are blessings and there are curses. Things are very complicated. I don't ever want to make it sound simplistic. But scripture in the book of Proverbs puts it this way. And Proverbs is a book of wisdom. Proverbs 11, 24. "One man gives freely, yet gains even more. Another man withholds unduly, but comes to poverty." Paul here is writing to people who are as poor as poor can be. They are taking up an offering for the saints in Jerusalem, the mother church out of which all of them have received the message of the gospel. The Jerusalem church is impoverished for a number of reasons, including persecution. Their whole economic life was turned upside down. And Paul's argument is, you know, you have benefited from them spiritually. Now it is your obligation to let them benefit from you materially. And so out of their poverty, not out of their abundance, out of their poverty, they're clamoring. They're clamoring to be allowed to make a contribution to the needs of the saints. And Paul encourages them and he says, "You never have to worry about out giving God. He who supplies seed to the sower and bread to the eater will multiply your harvest and your righteousness so that you not only have enough for yourself, but you have enough for others around you." The problem is, that takes faith. And faith comes by degrees. And faith comes as we take those little steps of faith and obedience to the Lord and we trust him to direct our steps and he reveals himself and he encourages us in our journey so that we move away from this self-absorbed owner to becoming a love-inspired steward. And just to kind of try to bring this all together, one little video clip of a message that Bill Hybels gave just recently where he described his own experience in learning this journey as an 18-year-old. Watch this and then we'll close this off. You know I became a Christian when I was 17. And within that first year, I had an interesting thing happen to me about this kind of issue. I was living in Kalamazoo, Michigan at the time, a friend from Chicago wanted me to drive over to hear a young guy who was in Central America helping some under-resourced kids. So I drove 160 miles over to his church and I listened to this youth worker talk about serving these poor kids in Central America. The host of the meeting afterwards said, "This guy barely has enough money to get back to help the kids. Let's pass the hat, see if we can help this guy a little bit." I was moved. I wanted to give. But I took out my wallet. All I had was a $20 bill. And like if I give that $20, I probably can't reach in for change. Have you ever tried that in our offerings here? Yeah, try that sometimes. So I was like, "I don't think I can get change." And I knew I had a $1.05 toll to pay on the Indiana toll road between here and Kalamazoo. So I quick remembered, "Do I have enough gas?" "Yeah, I got enough gas, but I don't have that buck five. And if I give this 20, so I'm all torn." And I felt that tap on the shoulder. God says, "Be generous. I got your back." Again, I'm 18 and a brand new Christian. I was like, "How is he going to have my back? How is this going to work out?" So I give the 20. I felt good about it. I get in my car, and all the way toward the Indiana toll road, I'm like, "I don't have the buck five." And every mile I got closer, I was like, "What if I get arrested? What if they throw me in jail? I got to call my dad and all this." So I get up to the toll booth, and I say to the woman just as honestly as I could, "I've got no money." And I thought she was going to like read me the riot act, call the police or something. She says, "Well, that's just unbelievable because you don't need any money because, and I've never had this happen before, but the guy who came in front of you said he wanted to pay his toll, and whoever came behind him." And I was like, "No, no." I said, "That can't possibly be." And she said, "I've never seen it before. That's exactly what just happened." I said, "Who was the guy?" She said, "I don't know who the guy was." I pull off to the side of the road, I'm just shaking. It was my very first experience with seeing God involved on the backside of me being generous, and it rocked me. In other words, I heard others talk about stories where God had done stuff for them. I didn't have a single story to tell about God moving in my life with regard to generosity. And I decided on the trip, on the rest of the way home, I said, "I'm going to find every verse I can find and memorize verses about generosity and resupply." And so, 18 years old, gang, I'd only been a Christian for a year. So I start memorizing, you know, verses like Philippians 4:19, "And my God will supply all your needs, or resupply what you need, and according to his riches in Christ Jesus." Matthew 633, "If you seek me first, follow me first, all these things that you worry about will be added under your life. Trust me, I'll resupply." I memorized those texts. In fact, it was that experience and the memorizing of those texts that first gave me the faith to start tithing. Because I just thought, "Well, wait a minute, I'm going to obey God in this, and until such time as he doesn't resupply, if he doesn't resupply, it's not going to work, so I'm just going to step out in faith and do this." That's how we all get over that tithing hump, you know. [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:38:02.000; remove through 00:38:10.000] We just say, "If that promise of resupply is real, why wouldn't I take this step?" [CUT] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:38:10.000; resume after this marked segment]