Often times a sermon series on giving is driven by a church’s financial need. It may be a new building project, or a renovation, or the launch of a new ministry endeavor, or perhaps a budget shortfall that prompts a pastor to preach on the need to give. And I believe that approach may be necessary from time to time in the life of a church. But that is not what led to this sermon series. The elders have talked about the church budget and how it is our desire to see new possibilities for fulfilling our mission open up as a result of greater generosity among our people. But we can honestly say that our primary concern with this sermon series is not the church budget; it is that you would treasure Christ more than money. If some of you were to move somewhere else tomorrow and either join or plant another church, so that Cornerstone never received another dime from you, but you gave faithfully and generously toward the fulfillment of the Great Commission at another church, we would consider that a success. It would be evidence that the Word of God had done its work in you with respect to money, and that is our primary goal. Yes, a budget that balances and grows is a wonderful blessing of God—one that we hope for and pray for—, but discipleship is what we really want, even more than that.
And 2 Corinthians 8-9 is a great passage to teach us how to be disciples of Christ with respect to money. As part of his apostolic ministry, Paul had begun a collection among Gentile churches in the Roman provinces of Macedonia and Achaia (Corinth was located in the province of Achaia) to relieve the suffering of Jewish Christians in Jerusalem who were enduring persecution and, as a result, had come into great financial need. The Corinthians had initially expressed support for this endeavor, but after Paul left Corinth, false teachers moved in and began to turn the Corinthian church against him. As a result, the collection had stalled. Paul sent what he calls a “severe letter,” which has not been preserved for us, by the hand of Titus to call the Corinthians to repentance. In his letter, 2 Corinthians, he notes that Titus has returned to him in Macedonia and has given a good report: the Corinthians have repented. Paul sees that it is now time to instruct this repentant church on rededicating themselves to the collection for Jerusalem, and one of the purposes of 2 Corinthians (which is also being delivered to them by Titus) is to do just that.
We saw in 8:1-7 that, while Paul is among the Macedonians, they have taken the initiative to join in the collection effort in spite of their extreme poverty, and so Paul has held them up as an example to the Corinthians. But we also saw in 8:8-15 that Paul has anticipated several misunderstandings that the Corinthians could have about the collection, and he has answered those. Now in this section Paul’s purpose is primarily to commend to the Corinthians his partners in this work of getting the collection ready—Titus and two unnamed brothers—and then to let the Corinthians know that he will be on his way to them soon, and he wants the collection ready to take to Jerusalem when he comes.
This section is concerned with administrative details regarding a very specific situation that is foreign to our own experience. As such, it may seem that God has nothing to say to us here. But all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable to us, and as we will see, nothing that Paul writes is ever devoid of theological content. And so I continue to urge you from this passage as I have urged you throughout the sermon series: abound in the grace of gospel-driven generosity. From Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians here we will note three more characteristics of gospel-driven generosity today.
The first characteristic is this:
The new covenant is what defines the church, and it is what God has ordained to regulate our relationship to him. The letter of 2 Corinthians is a defense of Paul’s new covenant ministry, an argument that the sufferings he endures do not call into question the legitimacy of his ministry but rather display the work of the Spirit as he proclaims and suffers for the gospel of Christ. As those who have believed the gospel and received the Holy Spirit, we are new covenant people.
But you may ask, where in the world is the new covenant in this passage? It is subtle, but it is there. Notice particularly verse 19: “And not only that, but he has been appointed by the churches to travel with us as we carry out this act of grace that is being ministered by us, for the glory of the Lord himself and to show our good will.” Three key terms appear in this verse: “grace,” “ministered by us,” and “glory.” All three of these concepts are associated with Paul’s new covenant ministry earlier in 2 Corinthians. He speaks of grace extending to more and more people through his ministry in 4:15. He says that the Corinthians are a letter from Christ “ministered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God” in 3:3. And throughout chapter 3 he compares the glory of the old covenant with the surpassing glory of the new covenant. With this trio of terms, then, he ties together this work of the collection with his new covenant ministry.
We know that Paul was a minister of the new covenant in his preaching. But what does this work of the collection for the saints at Jerusalem have to do with Paul’s new covenant ministry? I think the connection is the Holy Spirit. The definitive mark of the new covenant people is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. And Paul sees the generous heart that joyfully gives away its own money to bless brothers and sisters in Christ as a manifestation of the power of the Spirit. Here it would be profitable to contrast the ministry of the new covenant with that of the old covenant, the covenant God gave to Israel at Mount Sinai. The old covenant was not a covenant that changed sinful hearts. The Holy Spirit was not given to the nation of Israel as a whole. With regard to their money, God laid down the law of the tithe: Israelites were required to give ten percent to support the ministry of the Levites. But under the new covenant, there is no such law. Why not? Because new covenant people have the Spirit. Their hearts have been made new. Giving for the good of others is no longer a compulsion but a joyful act of love produced by the Spirit of God dwelling in our hearts. The elders will not impose on you a law that says you must give so much percent of your income to the church. We don’t believe such a law is fitting for a new covenant people. We want you giving out of the joy of the Spirit at work in you.
But notice here that I said gospel-driven generosity is a new covenant ministry of the church. Paul is leading this ministry, but it is a work of Gentile churches throughout Macedonia and Achaia. It is a cooperative effort that includes Titus (vv. 16-17), an unnamed brother who is well-known for preaching the gospel (vv. 18-19), and another unnamed brother who has great confidence in the Corinthians (v. 22). While Titus is Paul’s partner in ministry, these two unnamed brothers are, according to verse 23, “messengers,” or “apostles” of the churches, which probably refers to the churches of Macedonia, the province to the north of Corinth. It is clear that this collection for the saints involved a widespread, cooperative effort between numerous Gentile churches, for the common purpose of bringing relief to suffering believers in Jerusalem.
Notice furthermore what Paul says about the churches. Starting in the middle of verse 23: “And as for our brothers, they are messengers of the churches, the glory of Christ.” Some argue that Paul refers to the messengers of the churches as the glory of Christ, but I think it more natural to see this as a reference to the churches themselves. The church is the glory of Christ, which means that the church publicly displays, or makes visible, Christ’s worth. Of course, this happens by the church’s very existence, but the glory of Christ is especially on display when the church, by the power of the Spirit, cooperates in self-giving love to care for fellow believers and foster stronger unity in Christ.
What is the upshot of this for you? It is this: my goal is not merely that you would be a generous individual, as wonderful as that is. But I want you to be a generous individual who gives joyfully in cooperation with your fellow church members to support the mission of this church. Obviously, there are many worthy ministries and institutions out there that depend on the support of individual Christians. I support some of them, and I work at an institution that depends on Christian generosity. So keep giving to those worthy ministries and institutions. We need them to do what they do. However, don’t let that be your primary focus in giving. Think of giving the way that you think of other aspects of Christian worship: prayer, receiving the Word, singing. These are all things that you can and should do individually, but your individual practices should be gravy on top of coming here to pray corporately, to hear the Word proclaimed together, and to sing together with your fellow believers. The same is true for giving. Yes, send off your checks to worthy causes. But don’t do so at the expense of bringing an offering with you to the worship service as an act of cooperation with the mission, not only of this church, but of Christ’s church throughout the world. When you give joyfully to the offering plate, you join in a cooperative effort, not only with the other members of this church, but with some 40,000 other churches of the Southern Baptist Convention who partner together for the cause of making disciples of all nations. In doing so, you help display the unity of the body of Christ, and thus his glory is put on display through you in a way that it otherwise would not be if you only gave to various causes as an individual Christian.
I know that a number of churches have moved toward an electronic system for receiving offerings. Members can go online, put in their credit card number, and donate to the church with only a few clicks. I am a fan of efficiency, and if this method results in churches being able to bring in more money to send the gospel around the world, I will be thankful for that. But I can’t help but think that if a church moves to that system, something has been lost. The act of giving has been removed from the corporate gathering of the body. I think there is something special about bringing an offering with you and placing it in the offering plate in the middle of a worship service. The occasion is more solemn, worshipful, and visibly cooperative than entering credit card digits on your laptop. So I encourage you to bring your offering to church with you and place it in the offering plate as an act of corporate worship, for the fulfillment of the shared mission of this church and all other true churches of Christ. In doing so, you perform a new covenant act, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit in you.
A second observation from this text emerges in the middle of Paul’s commendations of Titus and the two unnamed brothers:
I remember when the Buffalo Bills made it to the Super Bowl four years in a row, from 1990 to 1993. And four years in a row, they lost. Did you know that prior to every Super Bowl, both teams order Super Bowl champion T-shirts featuring their team, so that if they win, they can break out the T-shirts immediately and celebrate? But what happens for the team that doesn’t win? The NFL stipulates that the T-shirts of the losing team must never appear in public or be sold. So they end up being donated to charities that send these T-shirts to Africa. So you can imagine that somewhere in Africa there are whole communities of Buffalo Bills fans who may believe that the Bills are the greatest football dynasty ever.
It is a common practice for Americans to send surplus clothing (like Buffalo Bills Super Bowl champion T-shirts) to Africa. But did you know that this is a practice that often does more harm than good? Many places that receive this free clothing have their own textile industry. Can you imagine what it does to a local economy when large quantities of clothing are brought in by outsiders and given away for free? Think of the harm it does to businesses and the people they employ. Americans, on the whole, tend to be generous people when compared to other nations. But we are not always thoughtful and wise about our generosity, and we don’t realize that often our attempts to be generous cause more problems than they relieve.
God does not call us to be naïve in our giving. Can you have a generous heart without being thoughtful about where your money goes? Yes, of course. But a mature generosity will be a generosity whose primary goal is not to make the giver feel good for giving, but to be a real blessing to the one who receives. So in a world where there are so many charlatans, con-artists, and sincere but misguided attempts to do good, we should also be concerned about the wise stewardship of our resources.
I draw this idea primarily from verses 20-21: “We take this course so that no one should blame us about this generous gift that is being administered by us, for we aim at what is honorable not only in the Lord’s sight but also in the sight of man.” It is clear why Paul is sending Titus to Corinth: he wants Titus to oversee the collection effort before Paul gets there. But why send two other brothers with Titus? These other brothers are there for the primary purpose of demonstrating public accountability. They are representatives hand-picked by the Macedonian churches. They are not “Paul’s men.” They will accompany Titus to Corinth and, eventually, Paul to Jerusalem with this large sum of money gathered from the Gentile churches. Paul would have it no other way, because he wants to avoid any impression whatsoever that he is taking up this collection to line his own pockets. He wants men of integrity with him, men who represent the churches, who can ensure that every cent is accounted for at every step of the journey. And this is not because Paul fears he will be tempted to embezzle funds if he is left alone with the money. Paul treasures Christ, not money, so I doubt the idea of stealing from the churches ever crossed his mind. But his aim, as he says in v. 21 (alluding to Proverbs 3:4), is to do what is honorable, not only before God but before men as well. It is not just that he is the kind of man who won’t steal. He is also the kind of man who won’t even leave the door open to accusation that he has stolen. His gospel ministry is too precious to risk compromising with unwise practices that leave him exposed to accusations.
So Paul is a wise steward in this ministry. And this further reveals that Paul does not expect the Corinthians to give away money to him without this mechanism of public accountability in place. He does not expect the Corinthians to give out of naïve generosity. He expects them to give with wisdom to a ministry endeavor that will give a public account of where their money goes.
Although I can’t speak to every situation, I think that in general this means that we should lean more toward giving to trusted organizations that have public accountability for their spending than to individuals who don’t. When you see someone begging for handouts at a traffic light, my guess is that most of the time, a handout is not going to help that person. You can’t know where that money is going, and even if it goes to buy food, is begging at a traffic light really the best option for that person? Whatever money you hand out probably would have been spent better at RIFA or at the Care Center, ministries that are not about handouts but about loving people, getting involved in their lives, and helping them become more and more self-reliant.
And I will say this about what you give to Cornerstone: we have a faithful deacon who counts everything that is collected in our offering plates. But he does not count it alone. He always has someone else present to ensure accountability. And the money that we take in is counted, recorded, and then counted again to ensure accuracy. Everything the church spends is recorded, and financial reports are made available to our members every quarter at members’ meetings, where your questions about the budget are welcomed. We want to be above board on everything we do with the money that you give to us. We don’t expect you to give naively. We want you to give in wisdom, knowing that you can trust the church to be a faithful steward of your offerings for the task of fulfilling the mission Christ has given us.
I know that there are endless possibilities for your financial support. I hope that Cornerstone is your primary focus of giving. But in addition to that, you have to make decisions about where your money goes. I want to recommend a book to you. It is entitled When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor…And Yourself, by Brian Fikkert. It is a great resource that teaches you how to think about what really does and does not help those in need. It will be a great asset to guide your generosity toward greater fruitfulness. Let’s not be naïve givers, but rather wise givers whose goal is not just to give, but to give with a clear, God-honoring purpose.
Gospel-driven generosity is a new covenant ministry of the church, and it is carried out in wisdom. That brings us to a third and final characteristic from this passage:
In Paul’s letters, boasting refers to praising God for his grace. In this passage Paul speaks of how he has already boasted about the Corinthians to the Macedonians. He has pointed to their example and said, “Look at how the grace of God has changed their hearts! They are eager to give of their own hard-earned money to be a blessing to fellow believers of a different race in a faraway land that they have never met.” Paul even says that his boasting of the Corinthians to the Macedonians “has stirred up most of them” (v. 2), meaning it has stirred them up to give, as Paul has already recounted in 8:1-7. If that seems strange, the chronology probably goes something like this: Corinth had initially pledged involvement with this collection. Acting on the knowledge of their pledge, Paul had boasted about them when he was among the Macedonians, stirring up the Macedonians to give sacrificially. But then sometime later Paul found out that the collection had stalled among the Corinthians, so now he is writing to them again (even using the Macedonians as examples to them!) to see that they follow through and do not render his boasting empty.
So in one sense, he has no need to write to them about the collection, as he acknowledges in verse 1. He knows they had been eager for it in the previous year, and even though their relationship with Paul had been disrupted, they have now expressed repentance, so he believes he can count on them to resume the collection.
But something is about to happen, and Paul wants to make sure it happens one way rather than another way. That something is that Paul himself is coming to Corinth. It will be his third visit there. The last visit he made had been a painful one, where he had to confront some people. He wants this visit to be different. Furthermore, there will likely be some more representatives of the Macedonians with him, and if he arrives with them to find the Corinthian collection effort in disarray, that will show that his former boasting in them was empty boasting, and that the grace of God really had not transformed them in a way that he previously thought. So Paul is sending Titus and the two Macedonians ahead of himself to ensure the collection is ready to take to Jerusalem when he arrives.
Paul conceives of two possibilities for the collection when he arrives. Look at verse 5: “So I thought it necessary to urge the brothers to go on ahead to you and arrange in advance for the gift you have promised, so that it may be ready as a willing gift, not as an exaction.” One possibility is that Paul will arrive in Corinth to find the collection all ready to go. This would be an indication that the Corinthians had participated willingly, out of hearts made new by the gospel. On the other hand, Paul could arrive in Corinth to find that the collection had still gone nowhere, forcing him to wring it out of them with threats of judgment for failing to keep their promises. And if that scenario occurred, it would not give any evidence that Paul had reason to boast of the grace of God at work in the Corinthians.
At a recent elders’ meeting, I want you to know that we boasted about you. We have seen the evidence of how God is moving in some of your hearts, either to become faithful givers, or to increase your giving because you have now seen more clearly how the gospel connects to generosity. So we stopped in the middle of our meeting and thanked God for the work of his grace that has already been evident among you. And oh, how we long to do that more and more! What a joy it is to give thanks to God for the clear evidences of grace among his people! When you give joyfully and faithfully, I want you to know that your giving is cause for boasting in divine grace. It is one way that you bring glory to God.
We have seen three characteristics of gospel-driven generosity from this passage: that it is a new covenant ministry of the church, that it is carried out in wisdom, and that it is cause for boasting in God’s work in his people. I want to close today with some broader pastoral reflections on that third characteristic: boasting. It is interesting to note that Paul, knowing all of the messiness and sin of the Corinthian church, nevertheless boasted in the work of God’s grace in them. Their path toward contributing to this collection was twisted and convoluted, but in spite of the struggles, they eventually got there. When Paul made it to Corinth for the third time, one of the things he did while he was there was write the letter to the Romans. Flip over to Romans 15:25-27. At the conclusion of this letter, he writes to the Roman churches, “At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem bringing aid to the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia [that includes Corinth!] have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. For they were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them.” The Corinthians came through, Paul says, and they were pleased to do it. Paul’s boasting was not in vain.
There’s something about knowing that story of Corinth’s messy, convoluted, but ultimately successful participation in the collection that makes me marvel at the grace of God all the more. It reminds me of how messy and convoluted our lives are. As a pastor, I know about sins and struggles in some of your lives that remain hidden from others. In some sense, it is a burden that we carry as your elders to know these things. But it is also a source of deeper joy and boasting. As pastors, we get to see, in a way that others don’t, how God has carried you through your failures and has made you more than conquerors in Christ. We see that the grip of divine grace is stronger and more tenacious than your sin. We see that no one will snatch Christ’s sheep out of his hand. We see these truths playing out in your lives, often privately, and it gives us all the more reason to boast in the grace of the God who will not give up on you.
If you have not tasted of the goodness of God’s grace and don’t know what it means to boast in it, then I want to share with you the best news in the world. You may not realize it, but you stand under the threat of condemnation. God, who is supremely good, will one day set all wrongs right. And that means judgment is coming upon this sinful world. That judgment is pictured as destruction of this present creation and the casting of those who are still in their sins into a lake of fire, where they will be tormented forever away from God’s presence. God, who is supremely good, will not allow those who cling to sin to remain in his new creation and corrupt it. But the good news is that, even though you deserve to receive this judgment that is coming, the God who loves you offers you escape from it. Because God so loved the world, he gave his one and only Son, Jesus Christ the God-man, so that he might live a life free from all sin and yet might suffer under the divine judgment that we deserve. So Christ went to the cross, and on that day the sky was darkened, and the earth quaked, a foretaste of the undoing of creation that is coming at the final judgment. And he cried out, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” as the Last Adam, the representative Man, dying under divine condemnation. And they placed him in a tomb, where his lifeless body lay from Friday afternoon to Sunday morning. But on that Sunday morning, his chest began to rise and fall rhythmically, his heart began to beat, his muscles, stiffened by rigor mortis, loosened, and he got up and walked out of his tomb. God raised him from the dead, overturning the condemnation of death and giving him the life that belongs to the new creation. And now he lives forever, never to die again, as the covenantal representative of a new human race, those who belong to him.
So the grace of God is this: God offers Christ to you, to be joined to him by faith, so that your condemnation may be exhausted in his condemnation, and his life might become your life. If you will be joined to Christ—marked by dying and rising with him in baptism—you will have already passed through the final judgment with him. Your sins will be forgiven, and you will have a claim to the life of the age to come, the certain hope of resurrection with Christ one day. So if you are still in your sins, call out to Christ. Trust in him to deliver you from the wrath to come. Turn from your sins and confess him as Lord through baptism, and you will have eternal life.
If you are a believer in Christ who is in good standing with a church, I invite you to partake of the body and blood of Christ once again at the Lord’s table. We never get over the gospel. We only go deeper into it. So let us remember and proclaim again, with our eating and drinking, that God’s grace in Christ has made us new. And may we say with this act that Christ crucified, not money, is our treasure.