Cultivating Generosity 2

So let's begin this morning then with a quick review of where we left off two months ago.
At the end of May and the beginning of June, we were doing a little mini-series on what
it is to be a steward of the resources that God has entrusted to us.
And we saw at that particular time that there are four dominant viewpoints of how a human
being relates to material possessions that we have been granted.
Here is the chart that we've looked at before.
The first point of view is that of the self-absorbed owner.
He says 100% of what I have is mine.
This is every natural human being's reaction.
Then there is the obligated owner.
He says everything that I have is mine but I owe society and so I will be at least a little
bit generous in sharing my goods with people around me.
Then there is the obedient owner.
This is the guy that's become a Christian.
He's learned about tithing.
He knows that God deserves the 10% might not always reach it but tries but 90% is still
my own 10% is God's.
And then there is the love inspired steward.
And the love inspired steward understands I don't own anything.
I am a manager on behalf of God.
God owns everything and because God owns everything my responsibility is to be accountable to Him
and to steward the resources that He has given me faithfully on His behalf.
And we saw together then back then that what God wants to see happen is He wants to see
His move from the self-absorbed owner to the obligated owner to the obedient owner to
the love inspired steward.
That process of transformation does not happen easily.
And I gave you last time three simple steps that I believe we need to understand and lay
hold of if our lives truly are going to change.
I'll walk you through them really quickly.
Number one, that kind of love inspired steward ship does not come naturally.
I don't care how generous you are by nature letting it all go and seeing yourself as a steward
instead of an owner, that's not you and me.
By nature we are graspers, we clench.
Secondly we saw that we must be born again in order to become love inspired stewards to
be born again is to be born from above the secret to the Christian life is not trying harder
to be something that we are not.
It is drawing the life of Jesus who is the perfect reflection of God the Father and having
Him live through us, Paul said for me to live is Christ and to die is gain.
And then we saw that we need to learn to leave that out by walking in the spirit.
To walk in the spirit is to be propelled, it's to be changed from the inside out by the
spirit of Jesus.
It's to have Him point out to us the places where we don't have faith, it's to point out
to us the places where we are greedy, it's to point out the places where it's all about
me and not about God and not about other people and to allow Him to change that.
And as step by step I walk after the spirit, I learn to trust the Father, I learn to put
to death my own selfish inclinations and I become transformed, I become increasingly
a love inspired steward and I may never attain it to a full hundred percent in this life.
That's not the issue.
The issue is God wants us by faith in Christ to move towards that.
And so one good question to ask ourselves in terms of testing the validity of our faith
is has my generosity in terms of time talent and also treasures, has that changed, has
it increased as I'm walking with Jesus.
That's where we want to pick it up because what happens now when I start living this way?
What starts happening when I learn to walk after the spirit and I learn to put to death
my selfish and myself center tendencies and I start learning to live by faith, seeing
myself as a manager of God's goods instead of an owner.
We'll see how far we get this morning but there's a number of things that flow out of that.
And the first is this, we will increasingly reflect the character of our Father who
is in heaven.
Notice that.
We will increasingly reflect the character of our Heavenly Father.
In Matthew chapter 5, the sermon in the mount, Jesus gives us a very interesting teaching.
Let me just read you a couple of verses here, 43 to 48.
You have heard that it was said love your neighbor and hate your enemy but I tell you love
your enemies and pray for those who persecute you that you may be sons of your Father in
heaven.
He causes his son to rise on the evil and the good and he sends rain on the righteous
and on the unrighteous.
If you love those who love you, what reward will you get are not even the tax collectors
doing that.
And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others?
Do not even pagans do that.
And then he ends with this, be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.
That's quite a statement, isn't it?
Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.
Now the word perfect there is the word telos in Greek, teleos is another form of it.
It means completion.
It means maturity.
It means perfection.
And what Jesus says there is that if you only love the people around you, then you're
no different from a Gentile because anybody can do that.
But he says the character of God is defined by indiscriminate generosity.
He makes his rainfall on the just and on the unjust and the sun to shine on the good
and on the bad.
God's, one of God's distinguishing characteristic is his incredible generosity.
You see that generosity in the creation of the world.
You see his generosity in how he provides for every living creature.
And of course, most of all, you see his generosity in what?
The gift of his son, John 3.16, everybody knows the verse, but it really captures it.
God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him
shall not perish but have eternal life.
God gave his son.
It's the ultimate mark of his generosity.
And it's that generosity that God wants to see reproduced in your life.
And in my life, it's not coincidental that here in 2 Corinthians chapter 9, the passage
that we read, Paul ends with verse 15, "Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift.
Our generosity," whatever form that may be, "is rooted in the character of God."
And so what Jesus is saying in this particular passage is that as we grow as children of
our Heavenly Father, we increasingly begin to reflect his character of generosity.
Paul echoes that same thought, Ephesians chapter 5, the verses 1 and 2.
He says, "Be imitators of God as dearly loved children and live a life of love just
as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to
God."
Of isn't just a feeling, it is a giving of oneself as God the Father did and as Jesus did
for your salvation and for my salvation.
So one of the tests of growing in Christ is does my life increasingly reflect the character
of my Father who is in heaven?
And people look at me when people look at you.
Do they see a little glimmer, a little glimmer of our Heavenly Father?
That's what God's after and that's what happens if by this spirit we put to death the
works of the flesh and by this spirit we start putting on the new nature that we have in
the Lord Jesus.
So that's one thing that happens.
The second thing that happens according to the passage before us is that our giving capacity
grows.
Our ability to give multiplies.
Listen to the verses 8, 10 and 11 as Paul develops this theme in the passage of our text.
He says, "God is able," now notice, particularly the letters in yellow here, "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."
Then he goes on to say in verse 10, "Now he will supply seed to the sower and bread for
food, will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of
your righteousness.
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."
This is the law of sowing and reaping that we've talked about earlier and that Paul mentions
earlier in the passage, whoever so sparingly will also reap sparingly, whoever so generously
will also reap generously.
And here the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the world are diametrically opposed to each
other because wisdom in the world says, "First I must gather, first I must make sure that
all of my needs are met, I must be very secure for my future, and then maybe just maybe if
I have something left over, I will share it, but only to the degree that it doesn't jeopardize
my own sense of security."
We all think that way because that's how we operate naturally.
But in the kingdom of God, you don't increase the store of your supply by sitting on it,
locking it down, making sure that nobody can steal it.
You get it by investing it by sowing your seed and trusting that God will multiply it.
That is a teaching that runs throughout all of Scripture.
Proverbs 11, 24 puts it this way, "One man gives freely, yet gains even more, another
with holds unduly, but comes to poverty."
And then earlier on, the Lord Jesus, given it will be given to you, a good measure pressed
down, shaken together, running over, will be poured out into your lap, for with a measure
you use, it will be measured to you.
Because in faith and in obedience to the Holy Spirit, not foolishly, not with magical thinking
not in order to try to manipulate God or use God to get rich.
You hear lots of those kind of schemes in Christian circles.
But as out of obedience to God, He breaks the cycle of greed and selfishness in our
hearts, and in obedience to the Holy Spirit, we step out then God promises to enlarge
the harvest of our seed so that in every way we can be most generous.
As I said, stands in opposition to worldly and to intuitive thinking.
And we were in holidays, Michelle and I had an opportunity to visit with an elderly cousin
of hers who was celebrating her 80th birthday.
And this is a very godly woman and has been in health for quite a period of time and keeps
asking the Lord to take her home when wondering why he doesn't seem to be in any hurry to do
that.
But she is what's known as a "prepper."
If you heard of "preppers," I never heard of "preppers" until a couple of months
ago, somebody in the congregation here explained to me, "A prepper is a person who expects
the imminent collapse of our economic system and social structures and who therefore lays
up treasures to make sure that they can be sustained during a time of economic collapse."
And so of your part of the prepper movement and a number of telet evangelists promoted
strongly in cell products, just coincidentally, to help you get ready for those days then
you lay up a store of at least six months worth of food.
Now there's nothing wrong with planning for the future, you know, even ants in the book
of Proverbs, lay up food in their storehouses and so on.
But whenever I hear a prepper talk, then my next question is always what about your neighbors?
What's going to happen when your neighbors know you have food and they don't?
What's your Christian obligation?
And I had this conversation with somebody about another family that is "preppers" and
I was told that that family had made up their minds that come hell or high water.
They weren't going to share their food with the other people around them.
Makes good sense, doesn't it?
If you're going to hold on to what you've gone, then you can't afford to share it.
But you know, that's the kind of trouble war is made of.
Isn't that true?
I mean, if people know you have food and they don't have food, they're going to come
after you and break into your house and they're going to steal your food and probably kill
you in that process.
Now I'm not, you know, judging the preppers, I'm not being lighthearted about it.
But when I heard that story, it made me think of the, let me get the name right, the Mully
Children's Family in Kenya.
You know, the children's choir, they've been here.
I remember when they were here not this last time, but a couple of years back, Kenya, where
they are, were in the midst of a terrible three-year drought.
Some of you will remember the pictures, the rivers were dried up, the crops were feeling
and the, you know, this organization at any given time has 3,000 kids in their care that
they're trying to feed, an incredible organization.
And they're totally dependent on God's provision.
So they had to struggle with his question.
This drought is affecting not only us, but it's also affecting our neighbors.
What does reflecting our Heavenly Father in this situation look like?
We've got barely enough food, maybe not even enough food to feed our own children.
What about the community?
And I remember being so struck by their story that they made the declaration that they
would choose to trust God to provide for them and not only for them, but for the people
of their community.
And as I recall, there were tens of thousands of people in the community that became dependent
on them, and they had to trust God for his provision, not only for themselves, but also
for them.
Now that is faith, and that is believing that if I'm sowing my seed in obedience to the
call of God on my life, then God will bless it and He will give me what I need not only
for myself, but also for other people around me.
A lot of you have heard this story, there's this traveler, he's going through the desert,
he's run out of water, he is absolutely parched with thirst when, to his great amazement
and surprise, he comes along and meets up with one of these old pump wells in the middle
of the desert, you know, y'all remember that one.
Sitting next to the well, to the pump, was a little container with a note that says
this container contains water, and what you need to do if you want this pump to work
is pour all the contents of this container into the well to prime it, and then you will
be able to supply your own needs and please make sure that you fill this container when
you're done.
Now I don't know about you, what would you do when you are parched with thirst?
And here is, I know what I would do, you know what I would do?
I would at least take a sip just in case it didn't work, wouldn't you?
And isn't that how we think about the things of God?
You know, like Ananias and Sapphire of old, I'm going to take a sip and hold it back just
in case it doesn't work.
With means stepping out in obedience to the call of God and learning to trust Him that
He will provide for us.
We're all familiar with that verse in Melachi, chapter 3, verse 10.
Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in my house.
Just me in this says the Lord Almighty and see if I will not throw open the floodgates
of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.
Only place in Scripture that I know of where we are invited to test the Lord and see if
He will not be faithful to His promises.
So here's the challenge for you and for me, if we want to increase our giving capacity
and we're talking not just in the context of material goods, but we often talk about
time talent as well as treasure, our capacity to give increases with giving.
You don't build muscles by not exercising them.
You don't learn to be an Olympic champion by lying in your bed and safeguarding your
energy.
You grow by stepping into it and then learning in that process to become stronger in your
faith and stronger in your resources.
So, first thing that happens is that we will begin to reflect our Father who is in heaven.
Second thing that happens is that our capacity to give, our faith, our ability, our resources
will multiply so that in all things and in all ways for every situation we will have
more than abundance.
And then third thing to note in this particular passage then is that obviously other people
are helped by our generosity.
Notice how the text continues, verse 12, "The service that you perform is not only supplying
the needs of God's people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God."
Let me talk just about that first part.
The service that you perform supplies the needs of God's people.
One of the biggest social issues in the world, and you know this, is the gap between the
rich and the poor, so that's true.
And generally speaking, the world's economies are geared so that the rich get richer and
the poor get poorer.
But always the case, some rich people become poor, some poor people become rich.
But generally speaking, the poor become poorer and the rich become richer because that is
a universal law of nature.
Jesus himself puts it this way, "Whoever has will be given more and he will have an
abundance, whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.
Whoever has will be given more, whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from
him."
It doesn't sound very fair, does it?
But it's the way the world works, think of it in terms of debt.
Why is debt something to be avoided?
Because once you're in debt, you're behind the eight-ball.
And once you're behind the eight-ball, it's always costing you more.
Compare that to if you have more than enough, now when an emergency arises or a situation
arises, you can take advantage of that situation and you can make your investment because you
have the resources to do it, a good reason, by the way, to avoid debt like the plague.
The borrower is always a slave to the lender.
And what happens in the world is that the gap between the rich and the poor creates huge
social frictions because the rich are almost always a much smaller group than the poor.
I know, you know, in politics, everybody's talking about the middle classes if everybody
can be happy in between, but the reality is the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
When that gap becomes too big, you get social unrest and you get social revolutions.
And so governments, countries, have a vested interest in trying to bridge the gap between
the rich and the poor.
And without going into a lot of detail, fundamentally, there are two opposing approaches that governments
use, free enterprise, government intervention.
You'll recognize the one as being the rallying cry of conservative party in Canada, the
Republicans in the US and the other to a considerable degree, the liberal party of Canada and
the Democratic Party of the US. I know that simplifies things, but for simplicity's sake,
let's just say that is.
The free enterprise people say people should rise to the level of their competence or
sink to the level of their incompetence.
And as people do better, there will be a trickle down effect and it will impact the people
of the lower classes.
People who believe in government intervention say it doesn't really work because greed
is to be found wherever you can find it.
And so we need government regulation to make sure that the poor are also looked after.
Taxation is one of the ways in which we do it.
You see it with a recent decision in the part of the government to charge 15% tax on foreign
home buyers because the markets in Vancouver and in Toronto are going through the roof.
And our own people are being excluded from the market because of money coming in from
places like Hong Kong and other places.
Now, it's not my purpose to talk extensively about an economic system other than to point
out that neither of these two particular methods can ever totally solve the problem of the
gap between the rich and the poor.
Free enterprise, left unchecked, gives opportunity for the rich to become richer.
The fact that we have a lot of corporations in North America sitting on billions and billions
of dollars that are not being invested into anything right now is a good example of that.
At the same time, government intervention robs people of their initiative and creates
a situation where people just get smarter about hiding their money.
And so you've heard all those discussions about the Panama papers and all the offshore
money that corporations are hiding from the tax man.
I have a nephew and I had quite the conversations with him over the holidays.
He is a judge for the CRA, the Canada Revenue Agency.
Now, most of us don't love the Canada Revenue Agency, so that was quite a conversation
that he and I had because it's his job to judge whether taxpayers are being treated
fairly or not by this particular organization.
He says you wouldn't believe how many stories you hear about the dog ate my paper or my
house just burned down or my kids took off with my receipts and all of this kind of thing.
But here's the point that I'm trying to make.
The gap between the rich and the gap between the poor can only be addressed by a transformed
change of the human heart, isn't that true?
Communism failed because communism tried to create equality in society by force.
The enterprise fails because human greed gets in the way.
Government intervention fails because it robs people of the necessary initiative in order
to get anywhere.
And I said this not the time to talk about a biblical system of economics though I believe
such a system exists.
In the Old Testament, the Year of Jubilee, every 50 years, your debts were cancelled, your
slaves were set free, God's provision for Israel that the rich would not infinitely get
richer and the poor wouldn't infinitely get poorer.
Everybody starts all over again.
So what I'm trying to say is this, God wants to take you and me as His children.
He wants to have us rooted by faith in His generosity and He wants us to give generously
from the heart, not by force or by compulsion, as Paul talks about in this passage.
And by our love motivation that freely gives from the heart, and I believe that when the
new creation comes and we're all deeply rooted in God's provision and God's love and
both love and faith will have been perfected.
Our hearts will overflow with generosity and the kingdom of God will come with great power
and great glory.
There's a lot more that I want to say about it, we're going to let address there, but let's
ask ourselves these questions then.
Since coming to faith in Christ, has there been growth in my understanding of stewardship?
Have I learned to say no to my selfish desires, to accumulate and to possess and to own?
Have I grown in my ability to see other people's needs or the needs of God's kingdom?
And when the Holy Spirit stirs within me, do I find myself willing to step out by faith
into those places where God challenges me so that I can grow in my understanding of stewardship
and thus become increasingly a reflection of God the Father?
And if that's been difficult in your life, then ask the Lord to show you what the place
is in your life where you can take an incremental step by faith or you can pour the water into
the pump to prime it to see if you can test God to see if He will not bless you to overflowing.
Wouldn't it be neat for a church like this, we're so blessed by God with our time talent
and our treasures that we are so full of Him that it flows out of us to bring life and
light and healing and restoration to the whole community around us?
Isn't that what it is to belong to Jesus and to have God as our Father?