Foundation for Living #12 January 1, 2006
Our Scripture reading this morning is in Psalm 119. I began reading through Psalm 119 a couple of weeks ago, a meditation on the importance of knowing the Word of God. It is based on the Hebrew alphabet, so each section begins with a different consecutive letter in the Hebrew alphabet. We read through the first section two weeks ago, we will read through the second one this morning, the section called Beth, which extends from verse 9 through verse 16. Beginning in Psalm 119:9:
9 How can a young man cleanse his way?
By taking heed according to Your word.
10 With my whole heart I have sought You;
Oh, let me not wander from Your commandments!
11 Your word I have hidden in my heart,
That I might not sin against You.
12 Blessed are You, O LORD!
Teach me Your statutes.
13 With my lips I have declared
All the judgments of Your mouth.
14 I have rejoiced in the way of Your testimonies,
As much as in all riches.
15 I will meditate on Your precepts,
And contemplate Your ways.
16 I will delight myself in Your statutes;
I will not forget Your word.
Before we get started this morning we need to make sure we are in fellowship. The Lord has given us a grace provision in 1 John 1:9 that in order to recover from sin and failure, no matter how egregious it might be, all we need to do admit or acknowledge our sin to Him and He instantly forgives us and cleanses us from all unrighteousness. We are restored to fellowship, we recover the sanctifying ministry of God the Holy Spirit, known as the filling of the Holy Spirit, so that we can resume our walk by means of the Holy Spirit. So we always begin with a few moments of silent prayer to give you the opportunity to use 1 John 1:9 if necessary, and then I will open in prayer.
Father, we are indeed grateful, as we begin this new year, that You have given us salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ. Your grace has been shed abroad in our hearts, and we have come to understand the magnificence of Your love for us, as demonstrated by the fact that You sent Your Son to die on the cross for us. Father, this is the beginning of the Christian life, when we have faith alone in Christ alone, and then we have duties and responsibilities as we advance in the spiritual life. Now, Father, as we continue our study on the basic responsibilities of our priesthood and duties of our ambassadorship we pray that You would help us to focus on these things and understand them perhaps in a fresh way, that God the Holy Spirit would use this as He produces spiritual maturity in our lives. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.
In the last few weeks we have been continuing our study on the basics related to the Christian life. And I have organized this section, called the Foundation for Living, in three ways. We looked at the foundations, or the basic spiritual skills over the first five weeks, confession, filling and walking by the Holy Spirit, the faith rest drill, grace orientation and doctrinal orientation. Then we shifted to talk about the duties and responsibilities of our priesthood and the duties and responsibilities of our ambassadorship. I thought I would put this together in a chart.
Chart
As a believer, you have duties and responsibilities towards God in relationship to your priesthood, and you have duties and responsibilities in your ministry to mankind, and this relates to the doctrine of ambassadorship. So we are both royal priests and royal ambassadors. Under the priesthood we looked at prayer, because prayer is directed toward God, and is pictured in the Old Testament through the burning of incense. And it shows the intercessory prayers of the saints, of the believers going up to God, that is part of our priesthood. Last time, two weeks ago, before Christmas, we looked at Bible study. This incorporates two aspects, not only the coming to church and studying the Word in an in depth environment where you have a trained pastor teacher who is taking you into the depths of the Word of God and teaching not only the milk of the Word, but also the meat of the Word, which is necessary for spiritual growth, but also, that you as an individual believer priest need to be reading your Bible. Not because you can necessarily grow as a result of that, as I used the analogy last time of somebody panning for gold, there are principles you will be reminded of, there are promises that you will be reminded of. You need to know the people, the places the events of Scripture, just to be reminded of that and to learn about that, so when a pastor is teaching the Word, you are not out there wondering who he is talking about when he mentions people like Mephibosheth or Maher-shalal-hash-baz, or some of the other people in the Old Testament. See, that will give you something to do today. Look those names up in a concordance and find out who they were. But, Bible study at both levels is important so you are a knowledgeable believer.
This morning we are going to look at an aspect of our priesthood related to giving. Giving is interesting because it is relates both to our priesthood and to our ambassadorship. As Scripture says, giving is part of the sacrifices we bring to God, so that relates to the priestly function and it is often used, the giving to the local church, it is used for support of the local church, for missions and other ministries, and so that relates to our ambassadorship. So giving can fall under either of these two categories. Then, when I get back from Ukraine, we'll talk about witnessing as a function of our royal ambassadorship. So this just orients you to where we are going.
The last class on witnessing will come, as I said, when I return, and that will be the last class in the series, and then at the end of January, we will go back to our study in Revelation.
So, this orients you to where we are in terms of our priesthood and our ambassadorship.
Let's look at what the Bible says about giving. Giving is one of those doctrines that, at least from my background and my perspective and many of the pastors I associate with is something we don't like to talk about. We are so sensitive, I think, to the pastors and ministries and television evangelists that over emphasize money and put it in a wrong perspective, and teach error about it and basically spend most of their time dunning the sheep or fleecing the sheep for financial support instead of teaching the Word that we err by going in the opposite direction and we hardly say anything about it. Every now and then, when I get into this study, I get corrected a little bit as a pastor and recognize that it is important to talk about giving. The Bible says a tremendous amount about money and how the believer is to responsibly use his money as unto the Lord. So we shouldn't shy away from the topic, even though at times it seems like it gets a little close to home, because it starts hitting us in our pocket books.
There are several misconceptions that people have about what the Bible teaches about money. Most of these are the result of not understanding the distinctions in the Scripture between the Old Testament dispensation of the Mosaic Law and the New Testament dispensation of the church. In the Old Testament there were two types of giving, there was mandatory giving and there was free will giving under the Mosaic Law. If you go back to Genesis 1, and begin to go through Genesis, the first time you have any mention of financial giving or the giving of financial gifts, is when Abraham gives a 10% offering from the spoils when he defeated the four kings after they had invaded down through the Jordan valley and wiped out the cities of the plains. After Abraham defeated them, he brought the spoils back and gave 10% to Melchizedeck. That was called a tithe, which is an old English word for 10 %. One of the misconceptions I often hear is that unlearned people use tithe almost as a synonym for giving. Tithe is really a type of giving, it was a 10% gift, and you only have two examples of giving in the book of Genesis. You have Abraham and Jacob, and they both give a tithe or a 10% offering to the Lord. But they are not mandated, there is no place anywhere in Genesis where you find instruction from God to give 10%. So they are free will offerings to God, they are a 10% gift because that was pretty much the norm in the ancient world. We have examples in the Code of Hammurabi and from other ancient law codes that this was a standard figure for taxation and for giving of gifts to various deities. So they gave 10% to God, but is was a free will offering, it was not mandated, and as far as we can tell, it was the only time in the course of their lives that they gave this. It was a one time free will gift based on 10 %. When the Mosaic Law came along, there were tithes and free will offerings that were laid out in the Mosaic Law. There wasn't just one tithe though, there were actually three tithes. Each tithe was a 10% offering to the Lord. And these were mandatory, for the purpose of supporting the government. They would be equivalent for us of what we pay in terms of taxes, we pay property taxes, we pay income tax. This was a 10% income tax that was designed to support the government, the government under the Mosaic Law was a theocracy. In a theocracy, God is the head of the government, God rules, and God was the ultimate ruler, but He administered the kingdom initially through the priesthood. So the priests and the Levites were equivalent to the bureaucracy in the theocracy. So the first tithe was a 10% tithe for all Jewish citizens which included both believers and unbelievers and it was for the maintenance of the Levites for their teaching, for the service in the Temple and for their teaching of the Word of God. This is given in Numbers 18:21 & 24. Of course, that could not be pertinent today because we don't support a temple priesthood, or a tabernacle priesthood. We don't have a formal priesthood anymore, so that could not apply in any way. The second tithe was again a 10% tithe for all Jewish citizens, both believers and unbelievers, to support the cost of the Lord's sacrifices in the temple. This is laid out in Deuteronomy 14:22-24. So 20% of the income went to the nation to support the Levites and to support the ritual in the tabernacle and later, the temple. And then every third year there was another 10% tax, so you have 20 % every year, and every third year, it's 30%. This tax was equivalent to their welfare program. It was to provide a financial resource to provide a safety net to widows and orphans. It was true biblical charity, it was not socialism. It was a 10% income tax that was paid by all the people. The money was kept in the temple in the Old Testament. That was typical in almost all the ancient religions, the temples served as banks. This is the background for understanding a passage that is often misunderstood, misquoted, taken out of context, and that is Malachi 3: 8 and 10. This takes place in Israel after their return from the Babylonian captivity. And as they are reestablishing the priesthood, reestablishing temple worship, they also failed to apply much of the Mosaic Law, so there is a challenge to them in terms of paying their tithes
Malachi 3:8 says:
" Will a man rob God?
Yet you have robbed Me!
But you say,
' In what way have we robbed You?'
In tithes and offerings..
They had failed to give their tithes to the Lord.
Malachi 3:10:
Bring all the tithes into the storehouse,
Now, I can't tell you how many times I have heard that phrase mentioned in some sort of giving message in various churches. It doesn't have anything to do with the church, it does not say bring all your tithes into church, it says bring all your tithes into the storehouse, and the storehouse was the temple treasury and that is where the money was kept.
10 Bring all the tithes into the storehouse,
That there may be food in My house,
So you see, the purpose for the tithing goes back to supporting the people and supporting the widows and orphans, as well as supporting the priesthood, as well as the bureaucracy of the theocracy. Ant the Lord says:
" If I will not open for you the windows of heaven
And pour out for you such blessing
That there will not be room enough to receive it.
So God says, if you will go back to the principle of following the mandates, the tithes, then blessing will come from heave. That was just standard in the Mosaic Law, that obedience to God would result in physical blessing, they would have agricultural prosperity and fertility, productivity, and the nation would be financially healthy. Now that all related to just paying taxes. But, over and above the mandatory giving in the Old Testament, there were also free will offerings, or voluntary offerings. These took various shapes. You could bring a voluntary offering to the tabernacle or temple for various reasons, these were associated with different types of offerings, and then for the greatest example of this would be when the Jews were going to construct the tabernacle at the foot of Mt. Sinai, and Oholiab and Bezalel were appointed directors of the building program, to gather all the materials together, to construct the tabernacle, and the people were called upon to look at what they had, what their possessions were, and to bring whatever the Lord led them to bring, to give to the builders to use in the construction of the tabernacle. So the construction of the tabernacle was built on the free will offerings of the people. So you had two categories in the Old Testament: a mandatory tax that went to the support of the government that took care of the support of widows and orphans in the nation, and then you had a free will offering which was grace oriented, the amount was not set, the word tithe is never used in relation to that and the amount was determined by the individual believer as unto the Lord.
Now when you moved from the Old Testament, into the New Testament, there is a change that takes place dispensationally. No longer is there a nation that is operative for God's people. The church is not restricted to one ethnic group, it is not related to one nation, it is spread throughout all the nations. There are Jews and Gentiles alike who make up the body of Christ. So the body of Christ is international in its scope, and it is not related to one particular government. So the mandatory taxation to support a government in light of a theocracy no longer exists. However, the principle of taxation to support whatever government you are under, still exists. For example, Jesus said, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. He recognizes it is a legitimate function of a national entity to raise taxes in order to support the government. Now how that is done is a different subject. But in principle, the principle of taxation is legitimate and recognized by the Lord Jesus Christ. That is mandatory, but in terms of the Old Testament tithe, it no longer exists. So we have a mandatory giving, as it were, which is related to taxation. Then we have free will offerings. That is the support of the local church and various missionary ministries. And so churches are dependent today upon the gifts of people in the congregation, on their financial support, their response to the grace of God in their own lives. And to support local ministries, and these ministries may be missions, they may have to do with what is usually classified as domestic missions, home missions, where you support various ministries that are involved in evangelism, seminaries, Christian camping, things of that nature that are operational in this country as well as foreign missions where you are supporting people like Moses Omwubiko, or Jim Meyers, or Ralph LaRosa, or any number of these missionaries who go to another culture and spend their lives teaching the Word and evangelizing in those foreign cultures. So you have all of these different functions that are completely dependent on the grace giving of believers. As God oversees the church, part of our responsibility as priests, is to recognize that what God gives us, in terms of the amount of time that we have in life, whatever spiritual gifts and resources that we have in terms of our natural talents, plus our spiritual gifts as well as our financial resources are given to us by the Lord so that a portion of that time or talent or treasure is used to serve the Lord either in support of the ministry or mission or something of that nature, and that is where giving relates to both our priesthood as well as to our ambassadorship. So in the New Testament dispensation, the emphasis is on free will giving. It is between the believer and the Lord Jesus Christ as to how much he gives to the Lord's work, whether it is to the local church or some other mission. In the New Testament we have an example of giving and Paul's instruction related to giving in two epistles that are both directed to the same congregation, and that is the congregation in Corinth. And so, to get the background, I want you to turn to 1 Corinthians 16 and we will go over few background items just to make sure that you understand the context. 1 Corinthians 16:1-4 gives us Paul's first written instruction, actually, it is not even his initial instruction, he had given some instruction earlier to them, but this is the first written instruction that we are aware of related to a specific offering. There is further information about this given in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, and we will go there eventually this morning because that is where you have the greatest amount of teaching related to giving in the New Testament. When we come to Corinthians we have to recognize where it is, there are some geographical designations here.
MAP
So you can orient yourselves. This is the area of the Greek peninsula, the area up in the North is Macedonia, where Paul first went on his second missionary journey. He landed at Neopolis and first he went to Philippi where he founded a church and that is where he witnessed to Lydia who was a merchant, she was down by the river with other proselytes praying, and he led them to the Lord, and from that core group he established a church in Philippi, and from there he went to Thessalonica, and then he went to Berea. These are all the Macedonians, and there is reference to the Macedonian believers in both of these passages. Then he headed south to the southern part of Greece which is known as Achaia, there is a reference to Achaia in these passages and that gives you an understanding of where Achaia was located. On a peninsula there is the city of Athens, then there is an isthmus that goes down to the Pelaponese, which is the southern peninsula, and just as you cross the isthmus, you have the city of Corinth. Paul, at the time he wrote 1 Corinthians, is across the Aegean Sea, at the city of Ephesus. That gives you a geographical orientation to the places that we are discussing.
1Corinthians 16:1, Paul says:
Now concerning the collection for the saints,
The now concerning here in the Greek is peride, which indicates a new subject. Paul, after founding the church in Corinth, which is covered in Acts 19, at the end of his second missionary journey went on to Ephesus, and while he was in Ephesus, he founded a school, and stayed in Ephesus a couple of years, was training pastors and evangelists who were taking the gospel throughout the Roman province of Asia. (map) What we call the western part of Turkey. We usually think of Asia as being much further east, but this was the Roman province of Asia, and Paul sent out evangelists and they established churches in places like Colossi, Laodicea, Sardis, Philadelphia and Thyatira,
all those various churches were established during this time period while Paul was in Ephesus. While he was in Ephesus, he received a letter from the Corinthian church with a number of questions. There were also some problems that he learned about so he wrote the epistle of 1 Corinthians in order to answer these questions and straighten out some of the problems. So each time he addresses a new question he does it with this Greek phrase peride, so the last question he is answering in the letter had to do with finances. And the Corinthian church had been taking up a collection. It is apparent they know what he is talking about when he says, now concerning the collection. It is not an indefinite collection, he is not talking about a collection of money as a principle, he is talking about a specific collection they are already familiar with. That he had been working for over a year in churches in Galatia as well as in Rome. In Romans 15:6 he mentions the fact that he had urged them as well, to participate in this collection to take money back to the church in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was an impoverished church, the believers there were going through various problems, there had been famines in the past, and so the church could not support itself. So Paul was going around to the different churches he had established, in Galatia, the church in Rome, the churches in Madedonia, and in Achaia and he was instructing them to periodically take up a collection to send back to Jerusalem. This had been going on for a year, and so there is a question from the Corinthian church as to what to do. So he is answering the question, and he says,
1 Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I have given orders to the churches of Galatia, so you must do also:
Now there are a couple of things we ought to observe here. First of all, he has given them instructions about how to collect money from the congregations. So there is nothing wrong with taking up a collection. Different churches do it different ways, some folks pass a plate, some folks have an offering box in the back or side of the church, in which people put their offerings, the Scripture does not dictate one way or another, just that there is a regular collection of money for the support of the local church as well as missionaries.
For over a year Paul had been giving these instructions to them and the word he uses is an interesting word, it is the Greek word diatasso, which means to command, to appoint, to ordain, or to set an order. It has the idea of giving specific instructions and mandates to a local church. So Paul is not afraid to talk about money, and he uses a very strong word when he does so. He says, I gave you specific orders, specific instructions as to how to handle this financial situation. Then we come to verse 2 where we learn what those instructions are.
2 On the first day of the week let each one of you lay something aside,
Now, in that culture it was typical that a worker would get his weekly pay at the end of the week, so at the situation was such, that after you got paid on Friday, then on Sunday when the church gathered, you would put aside a certain amount of money that would be stored up, and to do this over a lengthy period of time, it has been going on, we know, for over a year, so a couple of observations are in store.
First of all, Paul recognized the principle of having planned giving. It is something you should think about, it is between you and the Lord, but it should be planned, regular and consistent. Another thing that we note here is that Paul recognizes that the legitimacy of taking up a collection for specific purposes, for specific situations or specific problems. For example, we have some things that are coming up here. We have a pastor's conference in March, and there are various people who have asked questions, if there is a way to financially contribute to help support that. We are hoping that we can provide a number of things for the pastors while they are here so this does not become a financial burden for them. Many times these men are unable to come to conferences because they are pastoring small churches and they do not have the financial resources to travel across the country or stay in a hotel room or pay for their meals, so we are trying to provide a scholarship for them in terms of hotel rooms, and to provide breakfast and a noon meal for the pastors and so we have got about half the money set aside already that we are going to need for that, but we need more. So there is a precedent in Scripture for collecting money for specific tasks. Further down the road, as a church we are going to have to buy property, so we need to start setting money aside now for that future time when we want to buy property, when the time comes, we don't want to say, okay, we need to raise 4-5 hundred thousand dollars in the next couple of weeks, let's do it now. We need to plan on it ahead and take a certain amount of money each week that is set aside for the purpose of that eventual purchase of property. That is what we do every month at the end of the month, after we balance the books, whatever comes in, for now we are following this procedure, whatever comes in above and beyond our monthly expenses, we are setting aside 50% of that amount for the future purpose of property. For now we are using some of that just to finish dealing with things that have to be done with this new property. That is how we are approaching that. There are also things that people can do individually in terms of their own financial planning, estate planning, things of that nature, in terms of giving to the local church or for various missions.
So Paul is not at all reticent about telling people how they should go about giving and how this should be prioritized in their lives.
2 On the first day of the week let each one of you lay something aside,
Notice he did not say lay 10% aside, he said lay something, it is indefinite, it is between you and the Lord as to how much you give.
storing up as he may prosper,
That is the guideline, it is proportional giving, in proportion to how the Lord has
prospered you. It is a response to God's grace in your life, it is an expression of
gratitude. Then he concludes that verse by saying:
that there be no collections when I come.
Paul recognized the wisdom of this, that if they take up a collection every week over a period of a year that the amount that he is going to have to take back to Jerusalem is going to be much greater than if he took up a collection when he showed up. There would not be very much at that time, so he recognizes the principle of long term planning in giving to a local church.
That is the background for understanding 2 Corinthians 8, so turn with me now to 2 Corinthians 8. Here, Paul is pointing out the example of the Macedonians in giving, and this is under the inspiration of God the Holy Spirit, to point out the basic principles of giving.
1 Moreover, brethren, we make known to you the grace of God bestowed on the churches of Macedonia:
What had taken place between the previous epistle and this epistle, is that apparently the Corinthians, the gift had not been picked up yet, and they had fallen off in their contributions to this need in Jerusalem, so Paul is having to encourage them again to continue with what they had originally started, to stay with the original plan. And he is going to encourage them by way of the example of the churches in Macedonia. As we look at this, we recognize that the motivation is going to be their understanding of the grace of God and their gratitude for God's grace. So verse on reads:
1 Moreover, brethren, we make known to you the grace of God bestowed on the churches of Macedonia:
2 that in a great trial of affliction the abundance of their joy and their deep poverty abounded in the riches of their liberality. 3
Now this gives us an idea of what was going on . None of these churches were wealthy, not by our standards at all. They were made up of people who were from the lower echelons of society, though there were some aristocrats, there were some who were fairly well to do, the vast majority of believers were not people who were wealthy, yet they were willing to give and to make sacrifices. Now the concept of sacrifice, as we study this, does not necessarily entail the killing of an animal. Sacrifice, if you look in Webster's, there is an excellent definition in the English, is an act of offering to a deity something valuable, the act of giving up something or setting aside something of value, such as time, money or energy in order to do something else. That is what the sacrifice is. It is recognizing, sure, I could take this money and I could use it to go out to eat, I could use it for whatever personal pleasure I might want to use it for, but I recognize that this is needed in other places, it is more important for it to be used by the Lord, there are people who have need, there are ministries that have need, so a decision is made to give a certain portion to the support of local churches, and support of missions. What we see in this example with the Corinthians is that they are not giving out of the excess they have, they do not look at their paycheck, and after they pay all the bills, decide, okay, I want to give this much, they look how much the Lord has provided and what the need is and they make a decision to give a certain amount, and having made that decision, they are going to adjust their other expenses in order to make that possible. You often see something like this when you go to other cultures, whether it is believers or unbelievers, and I have been in places when I have been on travels in Kiev and in Russia, when people will open up their home to you and invite you to dinner, and they will spread out an enormous feast, and what you don't realize is that they have taken the entire weeks budget for food and spent it in that one meal, so they have literally gone without food for several days in order to have the resources to put together this particular meal. And that is the idea we have here in Macedonia, that in great trial of affliction, it was not easy for them to give as generously as they gave, they had to set aside a number of personal comforts in order to do that, but they were motivated to do that by their joy, their mental attitude, their inner happiness, their happiness in life was not dependent on what they had or what they did, it was dependent upon their service to the Lord. So their mental attitude is grounded in an orientation to grace. Because they are oriented to grace, they have happiness and stability that is not based on what they have, or the amount of money in their bank account, and Paul goes on to say out of the affliction of the abundance of their joy, their tremendous mental attitude, plus their deep poverty, this is their circumstances. There are many people who use their lack of financial ability as an excuse for not giving, not supporting local ministries, and yet here is a classic example from the New Testament period of a congregation that did not have anything, and yet, Paul characterizes their gift as the riches of their liberality, the riches of their generosity. They understood grace, and this is the foundation, as we will see, for their giving. So in verses 1-3 we see that they give, not from their excess, but they give from their poverty. In verse Chapter 9:5 we see the basis, the motivation for giving, orientation to God's grace. Paul says,
5 Therefore I thought it necessary to exhort the brethren to go to you ahead of time, and prepare your generous gift beforehand, which you had previously promised, that it may be ready as a matter of generosity and not as a grudging obligation.
The point is that it is motivated by grace. It is motivated by gratitude, and as they come to understand the Word of God and all that God has done for them, then they give very generously. Back in verse 3, Paul says that he bore witness, that they gave, not only according to their ability, but beyond their ability. They were freely willing, there is no oppression, there is no guilt manipulation, Paul is not trying to use any gimmicks to get money out of them, it is based on their relationship with the Lord.
Now this phrase, For I bear witness that according to their ability, yes, and beyond their ability,
That does not mean that when they gave beyond their ability that they went into debt to do it. What it means is that they gave beyond what you would expect them to give.
Because of what they had, what their resources were, you might expect them to give only a certain amount, but they were willing to give up in other areas, so they could give even more. You do not want to get into debt. You need to be very careful about this in giving. Frequently I make the point when I teach on giving is that too often believers today get caught in traps related to indebtedness, credit card debt is just out of control. We carry debt on credit cards, on our cars, on our homes, all of these things, and then, when we hear of certain financial needs, and we would really like to help, but we don't have the financial resources because we are strung out on debt. So you should manage your finances in such a way that you are able to pay off all your credit card debt every month, so that you can go from month to month, and if needs come up that the Lord brings to your attention, you have not hamstrung yourself by getting into debt. I taught that several years ago, and recently I was talking to someone, and they said, you know, it has taken me three years, but I am out of debt on my credit card of this month. I said, really, what encouraged you to do that, and they said, you did. Amazing, somebody listens to me every now and then. He said, it really hit me when I realized how it hindered me in being able to properly give to the local church and other ministries because I was having to pay off this enormous credit card debt. So I made it a point to pay it all off and get out of debt. This is something we should all pay attention to.
The motivation for giving is our orientation to God's grace. The Macedonians recognized that giving was partnership with other believers in serving the Lord. In 2 Corinthians 8:4 Paul says:
4 imploring us with much urgency that we would receive the gift and the fellowship
that word is koinonia for partnership,
and the partnership of the service, or ministering to the saints.
So giving is a way in which we become partners with one another in achieving certain goals. When we look at someone who comes to the Lord on the mission field, we are
On the mission field, we are partners with that by virtue of our financial support. Sometimes you see somebody go on the mission field and they are there in a particular are for 10, 15, 20 years and one person gets saved. And it may cost $50 – 200, 000.00 to support that that missionary for all that time, but that one soul is worth it. And over time we never know what the fruit of that ministry might be. So we need to become excited about the opportunity of being participants of the ministry, whether it is with the local church or with various missions.
But the foundation for giving is then given in verse 5
5 And not only as we had hoped, but they first gave themselves to the Lord, and then to us by the will of God.
So the foundation and the priority in their giving was first of all their relationship to the Lord, and secondly the giving. Wee, giving is not a means to spiritual growth, a means to spirituality, it is the result of our spiritual growth. As we learn more about the grace of God, we learn more about what He has done, we learn more about how He is working through various ministries around the world, then we are motivated by our relationship with the Lord to get involved financially with these ministries. We don't get involved with those ministries thinking that somehow we are going to gain favor with God and impress Him with our generosity.
Let's skip down to verse 9. In verse 9 we see again that the foundation is understanding God's gift of salvation. Paul says to the Corinthians:
9 For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich.
So the standard for giving is what Jesus Christ did on the cross.
John 3:16 For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.
That is the standard for giving. It is a standard that goes beyond measure, it is generous, it is based on love. So giving is directly proportional to our personal love for God the Father, and is indeed in this passage a test for our love for God.
Verse 11 stresses the importance of consistence in giving.
2 Corinthians 8:11
but now you also must complete the doing of it;
See, they had made this commitment initially that they were going to take up the collection weekly for the saints in Jerusalem, but somewhere along the line they stopped and quit taking up the collections. So now Paul is challenging them to complete what they had started.
that as there was a readiness to desire it, ( you were very enthusiastic at the beginning, but you have lost that enthusiasm) so there also may be a completion out of what you have.
Finish the task. This is one of the important things in any ministry. There are two types of givers, those that give every week or twice a month, or whatever your pattern is, there are those who give every month, and that is needed, because ministries run on monthly bills just as everybody's household does. Every month you have certain bills that come in that are consistent. You need to have that regular consistent income that you can count on so that you can pay those bills, so you can plan and budget for the future. But then, there are also one time needs, needs for computers, needs for special projects, whatever it may be, and there are folks that like to give large amounts of money to one time type of needs or gifts. You need both. And we have been blessed with people who provide for this church in both ways. Both are necessary and if you are someone who gives, you need to recognize that it needs to be consistent so that people who are in charge of planning for the church have some concept of what is going to be coming in so we can make plans for the future, so consistency is important.
Volition is also important. Verses 12 and 13 emphasize this; sometimes there is a desire, but God has not prospered you so that you can give. I think there are a lot of folks who would give a lot more if they had it. Sometimes we think, if I just won the lottery. Well, are you consistent with what you already have, or what you are already giving?
2 Corinthians 12&13 Paul says:
12 For if there is first a willing mind, it is accepted according to what one has, and not according to what he does not have.
God honors a desire, even if He does not give you very much in terms of resources in order to give.
13 For I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened;
So Paul goes on to talk to them.
Let's close by looking at the last point, which is that grace means generosity, and this is laid out in 2 Corinthians 9:6-10.
The principle of sowing and reaping is laid out in verses 6 and 7. Now too many people have taken this out of context, and they want to give in order to get. This is known as the health and wealth gospel. That if you give God 10% He will return over a hundredfold.
And I have talked to people over the years who have been suckered by these religious frauds who tell them that if you give, God will return it tenfold or a hundred fold. So they have taken all their money out of their bank account, and given it to a ministry thinking that God will, sometime down the road, return that investment to them ten fold or a hundredfold. That is not what this is talking about. It is talking about the fact that a person who sows sparingly, and your giving may not be financial, it may be in terms of you life, your energy, your time, it can apply to many different areas, that if you sow sparingly, then the return is going to be sparing, but if you sow bountifully, if you give of yourself, give of your time, give of your treasure, then you will reap bountifully. It may not be in the same kind. You may give generously financially, and not see any financial return. But it will be returned to you in other ways, so the principle is laid out in verse 7:
So let each one give as he purposes in his heart,
Not 10%, not 15 %, what you determine, between you and the Lord.
not grudgingly or of necessity;
There should never be guilt manipulation when it comes to taking up a collection in church. I don't have near enough time to tell you some of the things that I have seen in this regard over the years. It is just incredible the manipulation that takes place in churches to get money out of peoples pockets. We need to learn to relax and trust God the Holy Spirit to move people and to provide the resources. God's work in God's way is never going to suffer for God's resources. We need to trust Him and He will provide. The attitude is one of joy. God does not want people giving and then saying, well I wish I didn't have to give that money, I would rather use it some other way. God would rather you use it in some other way. God wants your orientation to be towards His grace and to be giving joyfully, because you recognize everything that God has done for you.
Verse 8 states:
And God is able to make all grace abound toward you,
God is going to take care of you, God is going to provide for every one of us, and as we give, and as we are involved in financial giving, then the Lord is going to take care of us because He is the One who sustains us in every area of life.
And God is able to make all grace abound toward you, that you always having all sufficiency in all things, may have an abundance for every good work.
God is always going to supply everything that we need.
This is concluded in verse 10:
Now may[c] He who supplies seed to the sower, and bread for food, supply and multiply the seed you have sown and increase the fruits of your righteousness
So Paul is praising the Corinthians because of their desire to give, but they have fallen short, and they haven't come through with it, but now he is challenging them to move forward.
What we have learned from this is the foundation for giving is our understanding of the cross. Giving is a result of our gratitude towards God's grace. There is not a set amount in the church age, it is proportional as God has prospered each one of you. And yet, it is the gifts of the congregation, gifts of individual believers that has sent missionaries throughout all the world. You cannot imagine how many missionaries have gone out from Britain in the 19th century and the United States in the late 19th century and 20th century that have taken the gospel all over the world, and most of the gifts that support most of those ministries, the camps, the seminaries, the churches, are not the big gifts, $1,000.00, offerings or $5, 000.00, the gifts from wealthy individuals, those are great, those are needed, but the vast majority have been the gifts of ten dollars here, fiftydollars there, thirty dollars here, eighty dollars there. Faithful saints consistently giving the support to local church ministries out of out of their gratitude for what God has done.
Let's bow our heads in closing prayer.
Father, we do thank you for Your grace, that You gave us everything at the cross, that You sent Your Son to die for us. And as we think about all You have provided for us, not just in our salvation, but for our spiritual lives, and all the tremendous, infinite blessings that You have given us, we realize how little we give back. Father we pray that You would challenge us in this area of giving, to be honest before You in our own lives that we might recognize and look at it as a barometer of our own spiritual growth.
Father, there may be someone here this morning who is unsure of their salvation or uncertain of their eternal life, and they need to respond to Your gift to them, which is eternal life. Jesus Christ came to die on the cross for your sins, He paid the price for your sins, He paid the penalty in full, so that all that is left for you is to receive the gift, to accept the free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ by believing on Him. Simply trusting in Him for your eternal life. This is your opportunity to make your salvation
certain. Right now, right where you sit if you believe Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins, then God knows what you are trusting, and at the instant you put your faith alone in Christ alone, you have eternal salvation, and it can never be taken away from you. It is a permanent gift that is always yours. Now Father, we pray that You challenge us with the things we that we have studied this morning. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.