Welcome to Delight in Grace, the teaching ministry of Rich Powell, pastor of Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. Christian generosity does not depend on your socioeconomic station in life, but instead on abiding in the vine. Our giving is the outflow.
It's the fruit of what's happening in our hearts. Humankind looks at giving differently than God does. When watching the rich throw their offerings into the temple treasury, Jesus remarked that the widow who gave out of her poverty was the one who had put in more than the others. In today's message, we will look at how God sees our giving from 2 Corinthians 8, 8 through 15.
This is the second part of a message titled, Liberality from Abiding, which was first preached on June 29, 2014. There was a story of a man, two brothers who were in business together, and they had less than Christian attitudes about business and their tactics. And one brother died, and the other brother decided to give to the church. Pastor, I want to give this amount to the church, he says, but there's one stipulation in the funeral. I want you to tell the congregation that my brother was a saint. But see, now he had a dilemma. There's this large sum of money that was coming to the church that could really help develop the ministry. But the condition was he had to tell the congregation that this gentleman that died was a saint.
So he says, let me think about it. And when he calls up the brother, he says, OK, I will do it. So he gets up there and he says, I want you to know that this man before us today, lying before us today in his business tactics, he was a liar. He was a cheat and he was a thief. But next to his brother, he was a saint.
So he got away with it. You see, there can be all different kinds of motives for giving. I'm going to give because maybe God will do this for me if I give.
Maybe I can find pleasure with God. Maybe he will overlook my indiscretions if I just give, said a pastor to his parishioner. This is a most generous donation. I thank you. The church thanks you. And if your unconfessed sin is still unbearable next week, feel free to give again. The real life example, Warren Buffett, the world's second richest man at the time, announced that he would donate 85 percent of his 44 billion dollar fortune to five charitable foundations.
Just for the record, we were not one of those. Commenting on his generosity, Buffett said, quote, there's more than one way to get to heaven, but this is a great way. Sadly mistaken. If there's any sense of buying God in our giving, then it loses every ounce of its moral value. Every bit of it. You can't buy God.
You can't buy his pleasure. Not in any sense. You know, there's the other side of the coin. We think of those who are able to give large sums to God's work. There are others of us who are in different tax brackets who feel like, you know, I can't give very much at all. Some of us, it's because some habits, you know, that we need to work on, budgeting, stuff like that. We'll talk about that a little bit later.
But we think, you know, it's just, you know, there's too much month at the end of the money. I don't have enough left over. I don't have anything to give God. Well, that's something we can work on here after a little bit.
We'll talk about that. But if you think that because all you have is just a little bit to give, that God's really not concerned or, you know, it's not going to make any difference. I mean, what little bit I have to give, what difference is that going to make?
It's the other side of the coin, if you will. One cannot legitimately excuse himself from participating in the funding of God's work because his gift may be small. You know what happens when you place something small in the hands of infinitude, in the hands of an infinite sovereign God? Take, for example, a young boy, five loaves and two fish, and it was placed in the hands of an infinite sovereign creator. And what did he do with it?
He fed over 5,000 people. A little as much when placed in the master's hands. And that master is an infinite God. You see, we have to think of a different kind of math. Not our math, but God's math.
What is God's math? There's an example of it in Mark chapter 12, where Jesus was using a teachable opportunity for his disciples, and people were giving. And they were observing, the Lord Jesus was observing.
Great religious leaders would go in, and many of them were really quite wealthy, and they were giving large sums of money. And then came a little widow, who gave a very small amount. A minuscule amount, comparatively.
But look what Jesus said. Surely I say to you, this poor widow has put in what? More.
You see, that's God's math. She has put in more than all those who have given to the treasury, for they all put in out of their abundance. But she, out of her poverty, put in all that she had. Her whole livelihood. She sacrificed. The other guys were giving surplus.
She sacrificed. In God's economy, that's more. The amount doesn't matter.
Not at all. Are we giving out of sacrifice, or are we giving out of surplus? Do we give God our leftovers? If you have too much month at the end of the money, if you're living paycheck to paycheck, do you give to God only if there's some money left over?
It's not a good habit. We need to develop the habit of generosity out of gratitude. I'm a missionary kid, I've spoken with many missionaries. We know what receiving leftovers is. Literally. I've been down to the rescue mission recently, and I see what some people discard at the rescue mission.
They just don't want to deal with it, so they give it to the rescue mission, and the rescue mission has to throw it away. Do we give off the top the idea of first fruits in the scriptures? Giving of the first fruits. What does that speak of? It's an agrarian example. You take the first crop that comes in the field, and you take a percentage of that, and you give it willingly, joyfully, out of gratitude.
Why? Because you understand that all of this is in abundance from God. And when you give of the first fruits, you're doing so out of gratitude and trust. Not mechanical obligation. You're doing it out of gratitude and trust.
Do it in a budget, for example. If you're looking at your budget on paper and say, oh man, we've got this bill, and this bill, and this bill, you know, all these bills you have to maintain the lifestyle that you can't afford, to spend money that you don't have, to please people that you don't like. It's the American way, you know. Keep up with the Joneses.
Of course, they're going bankrupt. Not these Joneses. When you give off the top, you know, make it that budget, give from the beginning.
Don't wait to see if you have any money left over at the end of the month. And do so out of an attitude of gratitude and trust. Go back to the gospel and say, Lord, I can't believe that you would do for me what you have done.
Sing the song, and can it be that thou, my God, should die for me. Go back to the gospel of grace. And as an outflow of that gratitude and entrusting the Lord, give him of your first fruits.
Don't leave the leftovers for God. Sir Henry Taylor said, he who gives what he would readily throw away gives without generosity, for the essence of generosity is in self-sacrifice. We're speaking of self-sacrifice, speaking of God's math. Here's an example from scripture.
The idea of sacrifice, like the widow gave, she gave out of sacrifice, not surplus sacrifice. Second Samuel records an incident in David's life in his reign. David was commanded by God not to take a census, but he wanted to do so anyway. Just a moment of hubris as king over his people.
He wanted to know what he had. So he took the census, even against all warning. Judgment was required. And the judgment that ended up was a plague on the land and many, many of his people died because of his pride. And so David wanted to make a sacrifice to the Lord, to offer up a sacrifice to the Lord, to plead with God to end the plague on the land. And he goes to buy a threshing floor on which to make this sacrifice to the Lord. And the gentleman who owns the threshing floor says, why is the king here before his servant? And the king says, I want to buy your threshing floor. And the servant says, oh, no, my king, here, I give it to you, it's yours, take it. And King David says this, I will not sacrifice to God with that which costs me nothing.
It's a good statement, isn't it? Because then it wouldn't be sacrifice, would it? It wouldn't be sacrifice. You see, this Christian liberality, this Christian generosity, which is a liberality that is the outflow of abiding, of remembering the gospel of grace, that Jesus on the cross absorbed the blow of God's wrath that you and I deserve. And in place of that, he gave you the richness of his righteousness. When that defines and becomes the parameters of all of my attitudes, then he develops within me and the outflow of that is generosity, self-sacrificing generosity. Thanks for joining us here at Delight in Grace. You've been listening to Rich Powell, the lead pastor at Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. The Delight in Grace mission is to help you know that God designed you to realize your highest good and your deepest satisfaction in him, the one who is infinitely good. We hope you'll join us again on Weekdays at 10 a.m.
