What is this that I hold in my hand? It’s a $20 bill. It’s money. But what is money? You might say that money is a kind of green paper. But that is what money is made of. What is money itself? Money is power. It is power to take possession of virtually anything this world has to offer. I hold in my hand a measured amount of power to exchange for anything in this world that costs $20 or less. The more money you have, the more power you have to take the world into your possession. If you have enough money, the whole world can be yours. And though that sounds very enticing, we must remind ourselves of how the gospel cuts the root of desire to possess this world. Paul writes in Galatians 6:14: “Far be it from me to boast in except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” Because money represents power to possess this world, to love money is to love this present age instead of the promises of God about the age to come. It’s no wonder that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, as Jesus said. Those whose hearts are set on money have hearts set on this world.
Where is your heart with respect to money? There is certainly nothing wrong with seeking to better yourself financially. But is financial gain the most important factor in most of the major decisions you have made in your life? Do you think about other factors as well? On the other hand, if you are not as well off financially, do you spend many waking hours thinking about the money you don’t have and dreaming about the day when you will have it?
Money itself is not the problem. In itself, money is neither good nor evil. It is the love of money that is the root of all kinds of evil, as Paul says in 1 Tim. 6:10. Or, as Jesus said, a slave cannot belong to two different masters at once (Matt. 6:24). You either are enslaved to God, seeking above all to do his will, or you are enslaved to money, seeking above all to possess more and more of this world. And your heart with respect to money can be measured by what you do with it. The amount of money you have is a measured amount of power that God has entrusted to you. Are you using that power almost entirely for yourself, or have you made a conscious decision to dedicate a significant and noticeable portion of it to the service of God in the church, for the support of the ministry of the Word, for the relief of the poor (especially church members in need), and for the spread of the gospel throughout the world? There is nothing about our church budget that prompted me to want to preach a series from these two chapters of 2 Corinthians. The elders have dreams about what we could do to fulfill our mission better if we had more money, but this is not a sermon series to kick off a capital campaign. This is a sermon series focused on discipleship. My primary aim is not the church budget but your heart. If we never apply the gospel to your attitude toward money, then we have failed as pastors to proclaim to you the whole counsel of God, and we have left you exposed to the deceitfulness of the American dream.
And so I am calling on you today, as Paul called on the churches of Corinth and the wider region of Achaia, to abound in the grace of gospel-driven generosity. I choose these words carefully. I speak of “gospel-driven generosity” because I am not going to lay down a new law for you today. I am not going to say, for example, that you are morally obligated to give 10% of your income to the church. Israel was required by law to give a tithe, but we are not under the same covenant. New covenant giving is driven by the gospel, not law. When we recognize how much God has given for us—giving his own Son over death for sinners who deserve nothing from him—our natural instinct should be to let our joy in God’s grace overflow in generosity toward others. And, if I were a betting man, I would bet that if you put two churches side-by-side, one that made tithing a law, and the other that had no tithing requirement, but it was a church in which all the members allowed the gospel to impact the way they thought about money, it would be the second church that outgave the first. Generosity is an implication of the gospel.
That is what Paul argues in these two chapters of 2 Corinthians. Briefly, I want to lay out the situation that gave rise to Paul writing these two chapters as part of the larger letter of 2 Corinthians. Paul was getting ready to finish his ministry in the eastern portion of the Roman Empire with a collection taken from a number of Gentile churches that he would present personally to suffering believers in Jerusalem and the region of Judea. Why did Paul want to do this? One reason is that poor believers in Jerusalem were suffering. They were undergoing persecution from their countrymen, which often resulted in the loss of economic opportunity. There had also been a famine in that part of the world, and the effects of it may still have been felt. Paul envisioned what a glorious thing it would be to demonstrate the unity of Jews and Gentiles in Christ by raising a collection from Gentile churches to be used for the relief of suffering Jewish believers. The more the Gentile churches gave, the more they would demonstrate that the gospel unites those who otherwise would have no connection to each other. And if the saints in Jerusalem accepted the gift, they would, with that action, give public demonstration of their acceptance of Gentile believers as coheirs with them in Christ. So Paul had sent instructions to the church at Corinth to begin the process of collecting money in their church gatherings. He wrote instructions to this effect in 1 Corinthians 16:1-4. Unfortunately, sometime after Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, his relationship with the Corinthian church began to deteriorate. It appears that some false teachers moved in to Corinth who prompted a good portion of the church to begin questioning Paul’s ministry, and that led to a halt on the collection for Jerusalem. So Paul had to make an emergency visit to Corinth, one full of confrontation, and then after he had moved on again, he wrote to them a severe letter calling them to repent. This letter has not survived, but we know that he sent Titus to deliver it to them. In chapter 7, Paul has just said that he came to Macedonia (the province north of the Corinthians) and that Titus has returned to him with good news that the Corinthian church has expressed repentance. Paul is overjoyed, and he now sees that, since their relationship with him has been restored, it is now time to resume work on the collection. But in the meantime, Paul is overwhelmed by the way the churches of Macedonia have given to the collection, and he draws from their example as he writes to the church of Corinth.
As we work through these seven verses today, let us note four characteristics of gospel-driven generosity. And may these characteristics inspire us to abound in it. First,
“Grace” is the key word in this passage. Paul says in verse 1, “We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia.” Paul also uses the word “grace” in verses 6 and 7, and the word translated in the ESV as “favor” in verse 4 is actually the same word. This is a passage dominated by grace.
So what is grace? It is God’s undeserved favor shown to us, supremely in the cross of Christ. But grace is also something God does through us, as is clearly demonstrated here. The churches of Macedonia have given to relieve the suffering of Jerusalem believers, and Paul calls that an act of God’s grace. In this sense, Paul is speaking more in line with what we might call “spiritual gifts,” or grace-gifts that come from God and operate through individuals in the church for the good of others. The Greek word for “grace” is charis, and one of the words that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 12 to refer to spiritual gifts is a related word, charisma, or “grace-gift.” God’s grace is both given to us in Christ and demonstrated through us as he works in us to bless others.
So the churches of Macedonia gave, but the real giver here is God. They gave because God gave: he gave his Son for them, he gave them the message of the gospel that they believed for salvation, and he gave them the desire and ability to bless others with their money. As Scott Hafemann writes, “Giving is not a way of showing God how much we can do for him, but a way of illustrating how much God has done for us.”
God does not need us to give. “The earth is the Lord’s and all its fullness,” says Psalm 24:1. Everything, including our wealth, is already his, and he will use it as he pleases. And so we give, not to enrich God, but to acknowledge with a token gesture that it all belongs to him anyway. When you eat a piece of fruit, your body draws energy from it. But the real source of that energy is the sun, which nourished the plant that grew the fruit. It is the same way with giving. An individual or a church may exhibit generosity, but ultimately all giving comes from God.
Don’t you find this image of a gospel-driven community of givers, where the grace of God is on display to the glory of God, attractive? Don’t you want to be a community like that one? Let us seek the grace of God to be such a people.
That is the first characteristic of gospel-driven generosity. The second is this:
Whatever your financial situation, you may be tempted not to give, or to give very little. For example, if you make a million dollars in a year, and you are thinking about giving away just 5% of it, that 5% represents $50,000, which is enough to pay for multiple automobiles. Because you are dealing with large sums, you will be tempted to think that you are giving too much and denying yourself too many good things by doing so.
On the other hand, if you have less money, your temptation will be to hold on to what you have to protect yourself from going under. You may think, “I can’t give anything right now, but once I make it through this season of life and work up to a more comfortable income, then I can start giving.”
Well, if anyone had an excuse to avoid giving, it was the churches of Macedonia. Notice verses 2-3: “for in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of their own accord.” So the Macedonians were going through a “severe test of affliction,” which probably refers to persecution. And that persecution had the effect of making life economically difficult. In many places in the Roman Empire, where the Christian faith clashed with pagan ideology, the result was often that Christians were pushed to the margins of society, where they could not get or keep good jobs, or where their businesses were at a major disadvantage in the market. So Paul notes that they were in “extreme poverty.” Clearly, if anyone had an excuse to say, “I can’t give anything right now,” it was the Macedonians.
But what happened while Paul was there among them? Their abundance of joy and extreme poverty overflowed in a wealth of generosity! Now, I can see how abundance of joy can overflow. But how can “extreme poverty” overflow? It sounds self-contradictory, but the grace of God makes these kinds of things happen. When God shows up, barren women conceive, the blind see, the lame walk, the dead are raised, and extreme poverty overflows.
In other words, they gave, even though they had little to give. As Paul testifies, they gave “according to their means,” and even “beyond their means.” Paul doesn’t mean they gave more money than they had. He means they gave more than would have been considered wise from a human perspective. They voluntarily deprived themselves of what, to human eyes, looked like money they would have needed to pay for some of their basic necessities. But they gave it joyfully, and Paul does not fault them for doing so. He does not say, “The Macedonians wanted to give beyond their means, but I told them not to be foolish.” He commends them for taking such a risky action and sees it as a work of God’s grace.
In this, you can’t help but call to mind the story in Mark 12, where Jesus and his disciples observe the offering box at the temple, and while they see many people putting in large sums, they also notice a poor widow who drops two small copper coins, collectively worth about 1/64th of a day’s wage (in other words, next to nothing) into the box. And when Jesus sees this, he turns to his disciples and says, “Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
If you don’t have much money, don’t be tempted to think that you have less potential to store up treasure in heaven than your brothers and sisters who have more than you do. Storing up treasure in heaven does not work that way. You are no more limited than anyone else who has more than you do, not even one iota, in your ability to manifest the grace of God through giving. So whatever stage of life you are in, and whatever your income, make giving a habit now. Don’t put it off and wait until you have more to start giving.
Gospel-driven generosity has no regard for the giver’s wealth or poverty. It’s not a matter of the dollar amount that you can or cannot give. It is a matter of where your heart is. And that brings us to the third characteristic:
If you read closely, you notice something amazing: Paul did not expect the Macedonian churches to give anything to this collection. Apparently, Paul thought that the churches of Macedonia were having a hard enough time, and he didn’t plan on asking them to contribute. So when he didn’t ask, they asked him! Note that it says at the end of verse 3 that they gave “of their own accord,” and then verses 4-5 read: “begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints—and this, not as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord and then by the will of God to us.” The initiative to give came, not from Paul, but from the Macedonians. Paul certainly did not coerce them; he did not guilt them; he didn’t even ask them! But they gave.
Furthermore, notice what they gave: verse 5 says they gave “themselves.” When you give away money that you have worked hard to earn, you are not just giving away money. You are giving away a portion of your life. If you put, say, $100 into the offering plate, you are giving away that portion of your life—your time, and your energy—that you spent earning that $100. You are giving away yourself. I don’t say that to make you think, “Well, I had never thought of it that way. I shouldn’t be giving so much of myself away.” I say it to make you think: “Yes! I want to give myself away! Just as Christ gave himself for me, just as it is God’s very nature to go outside of himself for the good of others, I want to bless others by giving a portion of my life to them!” I want you to see the significance of what you are doing when you put money in the offering plate. You are loving your neighbors by giving a portion of your life to them, and that is an act of godliness.
But let me also point out one more thing here: gospel-driven generosity is not, first and foremost, about giving yourself to other people. It is about giving yourself to the Lord. That is what Paul says the Macedonians did: they gave themselves first to the Lord (meaning the Lord Jesus), and because they did that, they gave themselves also to Paul, the apostle of the Lord, to contribute to the fulfillment of his mission. Paul’s mission is the Lord’s mission.
So, let me draw these observations together: (1) the Macedonians gave by their own initiative, without Paul even asking them; (2) in giving money, they were actually giving themselves; (3) their priority was to give themselves to the Lord, and in doing so, they gave their money to the fulfillment of Paul’s mission as a demonstration of their devotion to Christ. All three of these observations point to one conclusion: the Macedonians’ hearts had been made new by the gospel. You see nothing here of a grudging obedience to a law. You see instead joyful participation in Paul’s mission, fueled by the experience of God’s grace and by devotion to Jesus Christ.
When I sit down to do my taxes every year, I have absolutely no motivation to give to the IRS one cent more than the law requires. So I look for every deduction and every credit that I can find. In fact, many of you know that my wife is pregnant now. In our first two ultrasounds we ended up with conflicting due dates. One said January 1, but another said December 26. I am rooting for the early date. Even if the baby is born on the very last day of 2014, I still get the tax deduction for the whole year. Paying taxes is typically not something we do with warm hearts, eager to hand over as much as possible to the United States Treasury. We do it because it is required of us by those in authority, but they can’t make us enjoy it.
But when you give to the fulfillment of God’s mission in this world, everything should be completely different. Your focus should not be on skirting by with the minimum amount that keeps you from having a guilty conscience. When you drop money in the offering plate, it should not be with a cold heart that says views the church in the same way we view the IRS. If you are giving in that way, you are missing the whole point. What God is after is not ultimately your money. He is after your heart! So let your heart pour out through what you give. As the gospel has made you new, let it show by your eagerness for generosity. Don’t be afraid that you might accidentally give too much. On your tax returns, yes, keep as much as you possibly can from the government (in fact, all that you give to the church is tax-deductible, so we can help you with that). But when you give of yourself in fulfillment of God’s mission, let it be from a heart that is given over completely to the Lord, and is therefore eager to give lavishly and sacrificially.
Gospel-driven generosity is a manifestation of God’s grace; it has no regard for wealth or poverty; it comes from a heart made new by the gospel. Finally,
In saying this, I am not really saying anything different from what I said regarding the first characteristic, namely, that gospel-driven generosity is a manifestation of grace. But viewing it as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit does present it from a different angle.
Having celebrated the generosity of the Macedonians, Paul turns in these last two verses to what he wants the Corinthian believers to do as a result: he wants them to follow Macedonia’s example: “Accordingly, we urged Titus that as he had started, so he should complete among you this act of grace. But as you excel in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in all earnestness, and in our love for you—see that you excel in this act of grace also.” You will notice that there is no mention of the Holy Spirit in these verses. So why do I say that gospel-driven generosity is a manifestation of the Spirit? It is because of the list in verse 7, specifically the words “faith,” “speech,” and “knowledge.” I’ll get to the other items in a minute, but first I want to focus on these three.
In a previous letter that Paul had written to the same church (1 Corinthians), Paul addressed the issue of spiritual gifts—or, abilities that the Holy Spirit gives to individuals for the purpose of building up others—in chapters 12-14. Listen to what Paul writes in 1 Cor. 12:7-11:
“To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom [speech], and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy [speech], to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues [speech], to another the interpretation of tongues [speech]. All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.” Comparing this list to Paul’s mention of “faith,” “speech,” and “knowledge” here in 2 Corinthians 8:7 indicates that Paul is talking about manifestations of the Holy Spirit among the Corinthians. They were a church that abounded in gifts of faith—referring to a special assurance of God’s will that has not been clearly revealed in Scripture and leads, therefore, to confidence in prayer—in gifts of speech (prophecy, tongues, the utterance of wisdom, etc.), and in knowledge (the ability to understand spiritual truths). The letter of 1 Corinthians indicates that many in the Corinthian church were quite proud of the fact that the Spirit was manifest among them, so Paul is appealing here to something that strikes close to home for them.
But Paul goes on to add two other things to this list that the Corinthians abound in: “earnestness,” by which he means earnestness for him. He has just said in chapter 7 verse 7 that Titus had told him “of your longing, your mourning, your zeal [earnestness] for me, so that I rejoiced still more.” So the Corinthians also abound in earnestness for Paul, indicating their relationship with him is healing. And then the last item on the list shows that the relationship also moves in the other direction: “and in our love for you.” It sounds strange to say that the Corinthians abound in Paul’s love for them, so strange, in fact, that some Bible translations follow a manuscript tradition that actually puts it the other way: “your love for us.” But I am very confident that “our love for you” is the correct reading. With this, Paul is showing them, not only that the Spirit is manifest in them by their gifts of faith, speech, and knowledge, but also by the loving relationship they have with Paul.
So Paul moves then to clinch his argument by saying, “If you abound in the Spirit in all these ways, see that you abound in your generosity as well.” Foremost among the marks of a Spirit-filled community is love. And believers who love one another in the Holy Spirit are believers who are willing to give of themselves for the good of their fellow believers.
In the case of the Corinthians, that meant that one preeminent manifestation of the Spirit would be in the form of their willingness to give of their own resources for the good of their suffering brothers in Jerusalem. In your case, it takes the form of your willingness to give of your resources to support those who labor diligently to proclaim the Word of God to us, to bless those in need in our congregation, to supply what is needed for ministries in our community that care for the poor and proclaim the gospel, such as the Care Center, and to support those who are taking the gospel to the ends of the earth.
As the elders have talked over the last several months, one of the things we have discussed is our desire to lead the church to a greater awareness of the presence of the Holy Spirit among us. We want to cultivate greater openness to the Spirit, by which we mean conformity to his will and obedience to his leading. One sign of a Spirit-filled community is joyful, lavish, eager generosity. If you aspire to true spirituality, keep that in mind. True spirituality is manifest preeminently in your love for this body. Love is manifest in a thousand different ways: when you enjoy conversation together, when you prepare a meal for someone else, when you spend time praying for a hurting church member, when you take time out of your schedule to lend a hand to a church member in need, and when you put money in the offering plate that you otherwise could have spent on yourself.
We are a blessed people. The Spirit is indeed at work in us. I have never known a more loving church than this one. And since we abound in showing love in so many ways, let us abound in gospel-driven generosity as well.
You might think that the appropriate way to end this message would be by passing around the offering plates again. But we’re not going to do that. Although I have called upon you to give this morning, my immediate invitation for you is not to give, but to receive. I don’t want us to be a church that gives out of guilt or compulsion. I want us to be a church that gives because we are overjoyed at what we have received from God.
If you do not know the wonder of what it means to receive God’s grace in Christ, I want to speak to you for a minute. One day, God will set all wrongs right. There will be a final judgment, a day when it will become abundantly clear that good is good, and evil is evil, and God is on the side of the good. Every one of us will stand before God to give an account of ourselves to him. Now, you may think that is good news for you, because you may feel like you are a decent person. But the Bible teaches that we are all, at heart, selfish and sinful, even the best of us by human standards. Because we are fallen, we do not love God above all; instead, we chase after things God has made, and we make these things our god. We are fundamentally oriented against God and for ourselves, and this has earned for us the coming wrath of God, which will result in our eternal separation from him in Hell. If there is ever going to be a perfect world (and there is), it must be free of all stains of imperfection. And since I’m not perfect, and you’re not perfect, neither of us has any business being there.
But God is a God who loves his enemies, even though he hates their sin. So the gospel—the good news of Jesus Christ—that I have been referring to is the wonderful message that God, in love, has taken his wrath away from all who trust in Jesus Christ. How did God do this while still remaining utterly opposed to evil? He did it by taking his wrath into himself! He sent his Son to become man, so that Jesus Christ was actually God in the flesh—fully God and fully man—walking among us. He lived a life without sin, but he willingly went to the cross, where he was crucified, suffered, and died in the place of sinners! And on the third day, God raised him from the dead, overturning the curse of death that lay upon the human race since Adam. Now Christ reigns at the right hand of God, and his promise to you is that if you turn from your sins and give up all paltry attempts to stand before God on your own but instead trust in him, your sins will be forgiven. You will be delivered from the wrath of God that is coming to purge this world of all evil. And instead of being cast into hell away from God forever, you will be raised on the last day, as Christ was raised, to eternal life with him. If it is your desire to turn to Christ in faith today, he commands you to do so publicly by baptism.
If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, you have declared your faith publicly, and you are a member in good standing with a gospel-believing church, I invite you to come and receive grace from Christ again. Receive again the signs of his broken body and shed blood as tokens of his deep love for you. You will have opportunities to give later, but now Christ bids you come and receive. Amen.