Be Generous

When we moved into our new home a couple of years ago, we replaced our crummy old refrigerator with a new model that has all the bells and whistles.

We were trying to figure out what model we should get, and it occurred to me that the refrigerator is the one thing in your house that you use 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

You want a good mattress, but you only use it 8 hours a day or so. It’s a good idea to have an HVAC system you can rely upon, but they’re made to be off and on throughout the day. In fact, if your heater or air conditioner are running all the time, there’s something wrong.

So, since this refrigerator was going to run continuously, I wanted to be sure we got one that would be reliable and include everything we wanted.

Annette wanted one with a water dispenser in the door, so we looked only at those models. I wanted one with a screen that connects to the Internet, because I love technology. So, the one we chose has those features and some other cool stuff, as well.

And as I was watching the guys who delivered it set up our new refrigerator in the kitchen, I noticed a couple of things I’d never noticed in our old refrigerators.

Did you know your refrigerator has a couple of special drawers that are supposed to be for keeping produce and meat especially fresh?

Ours has those special drawers. But it also has a drawer that’s even more special, one that your refrigerator probably DOESN’T have.

I call it the Res Spears, Stay Out of This Drawer, drawer.

That’s where Annette puts the things that are off-limits to me. Apparently, we’ve had problems in the past with someone eating things in the refrigerator that were intended for someone else. I don’t want to embarrass anyone, so I won’t mention names here.

Let’s just say that there have been certain moments of tension related to Annette preparing to make dinner and finding that a key ingredient was missing from the refrigerator.

So, that drawer in our refrigerator is like the closet that you can’t go into during the weeks before Christmas. What’s in there is a secret. It’s off-limits. It might get shared, but then again, it might not.

Now, someone pointed out to me that during the past couple of weeks of Advent, it has taken me a long time to connect the topic of my sermons to that particular week’s advent theme.

This week’s theme is joy. So, let me make one connection here and now. It brings me great joy for my wife not to be mad at me. So, I’ve learned to stay out of the Forbidden Drawer.

There are better and more theological connections between this week’s Advent theme and today’s text from Romans, chapter 12, but let’s talk about that text for a bit, and then we’ll see the connections.

Remember that we’ve been studying through the Apostle Paul’s 13 Imperatives for Christians and the Church during the past couple of months. You’ll find these commands in verses 9 through 13 of that chapter. Let’s read them together now.

Romans 12:9–13 NASB95

9 Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good. 10 Be devoted to one another in brotherly love; give preference to one another in honor; 11 not lagging behind in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; 12 rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to prayer, 13 contributing to the needs of the saints, practicing hospitality.

I hope that by now you’re already expecting me to point out that the umbrella imperative here is the command to love one another genuinely.

All of the other 12 commands in these verses are manifestations of this command to “let love be without hypocrisy.”

What Paul is saying is that followers of Jesus are to seek the best for others, even if that means sacrificing what might seem best for themselves. Even if that selfless love is not returned.

The love that Paul calls Christians to demonstrate isn’t love that waits until someone shows that they deserve it. It isn’t love that’s given because it might be returned. It isn’t love that’s based on emotions.

This agape love is the same kind of love that God showed mankind when He sent His only begotten Son to live among us as a man so that we could see the character of God in human form.

This agape love is the same kind of love He showed in that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

This agape love is the same kind of love by which we rebels whose sins made us enemies of God can now become adopted sons and daughters of God by faith in Jesus and because of His death on the cross for us and in our place.

What Paul commands Christians to demonstrate is a choosing, self-sacrificing love that seeks the very best even for those who might persecute us.

And then, he gives us examples of how such a genuine love should play itself out in the life of a Christ-follower.

We will hate what is evil, especially when we see it in ourselves. We will cling to what is good, knowing that the abundant life Jesus promised His followers depends upon doing so.

We will be devoted to one another as members of a family, the family of God. And that devotion will look a lot like giving one another greater honor than we do for ourselves.

We will be persistent and careful about doing the work we have been called to do as Christians, and we will have a fire within our spirits for this work, because we do it as service to our new master, Jesus, who purchased our salvation on a cross at Calvary.

We will be people of constant prayer who rejoice even in the midst of trials, because we have real hope.

We have the confident assurance that God is good, that He keeps His promises, and that He has promised followers of Jesus they will be raised from the dead into glorified bodies to spend eternity in the very presence of God.

Today, we’re going to look at the next of the commands, in verse 13. Paul says here that we are to be people who are “contributing to the needs of the saints.”

The first thing to understand about this phrase is that the Greek word translated as “saints” here literally means “holy ones.”

Now, this word has been misused throughout many centuries in a couple of different ways. It was never meant as a title for some small group of believers. And it also isn’t meant to elevate some believers over others. It doesn’t suggest that some people are more righteous than others.

Indeed, what Paul says elsewhere in this letter to the Roman church is that we’re all sinners — we’ve all fallen short of the glory of God.

In great ways and in small ways, every one of us has failed to represent the perfect character of the God who made us in His own image — to be like Him.

Any one of even the “smallest” of our sins was enough to create a chasm between us and God that we could never bridge.

He is perfectly holy and righteous, and beside His perfection, even our best good deeds were, as the prophet Isaiah put it, like filthy rags.

We were created for fellowship with the creator of the universe, but our sins have broken that fellowship.

In our sin, we are destined for physical AND spiritual death — in other words, eternal separation from the God who made us to share in fellowship with Him.

When Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, God could have put an end to everything right then and there. He knew that every person in every generation to follow would be just like our first parents. We would be disobedient; we would sin against Him.

But He chose to show us His love, His mercy, and His grace.

And so, a little more than 2,000 years ago, He sent His unique and eternal Son, Jesus Christ, to be born of a virgin and laid in a manger in Bethlehem.

Jesus would live a sinless life, showing us what perfect obedience to and fellowship with God looks like. And then He would give Himself as a sacrifice for us on a cross at Calvary.

There, He bore the sins of all mankind — yours and mine — taking upon Himself the just punishment for OUR sins.

And He did this so that we who place our faith in Him and His sacrifice could be saved from the punishment we deserve for our rebellion against God. So that we who place our faith in Him can rejoice in the confident assurance that death is not the end — that we will live in resurrected bodies, just as Jesus does.

We will be able to stand before God, not because of any righteousness of our own, but because we will be clothed in the righteousness of Christ.

Just as He took upon Himself OUR unrighteousness, we who have followed Him in faith have been given HIs righteousness to wear as a cloak.

So, instead of looking at us and seeing us for the sinners we WERE, God will look at us and see us as His holy ones, His saints, the ones who have been conformed to the image of His perfect Son by virtue of HIS righteousness.

So, the saints in verse 13 are all who have followed Jesus in faith. We are the holy ones Paul refers to here. We are all sinners saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone — and for the glory of God alone.

And Paul’s command to us in the first part of verse 13 is to be people who contribute to the needs of our brothers and sisters in Christ. It’s a call for us to be generous.

Now, there is certainly a scriptural call for Christians to be generous to the lost, as well. And we’ll talk about that a bit next week and then a couple more times in January.

But the specific command here is for Christians to be generous in helping to meet the needs of other Christians.

This command was especially important for the recipients of this letter. Rome at the time that Paul wrote this letter was a place where people were coming to faith from all walks of life.

There were still some Jews there who had professed Jesus as savior and Lord. And there were also some Roman citizens — even, perhaps, some high-ranking officials — who had done so, as well.

And all of these people were now adopted sons and daughters in the family of God.

They were learning to love one another genuinely. They were learning to be devoted to one another as family. They were learning to honor one another above themselves.

And they needed to learn to help one another to survive. They needed to learn to contribute to one another’s needs.

Now, this word that’s translated as “contribute” here is koinoneo. It means “to share in” something. And it comes from the same root as a word you may have heard before — koinonia. And the first place we see that word in the New Testament is in a description of the Acts 2 church.

Acts 2:42 NASB95

42 They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

The newly saved people of this church that was constituted by the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost were devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship — to koinonia.

And koinonia or fellowship or oneness is the main characteristic of this church that we see in the rest of that Acts 2 passage. Take a look, picking up in verse 43.

Acts 2:43–47 NASB95

43 Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe; and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles. 44 And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; 45 and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need. 46 Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.

Look at all the sweeping descriptions Luke uses in this passage.

“Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe.” “All those who had believed were together.” They had “all things in common.” They were selling property and sharing the proceeds “with all, as anyone might have need.” They continued with “one mind.” They were breaking bread “from house to house.” They were “taking their meals together.”

And we shouldn’t miss the response of even the pagan people of Rome to this unity within a church so diverse in character: These new Christians had “favor with all the people.”

There is something powerful in the witness of a church in which cultural and economic and class and racial barriers have come crashing down under the weight of the glory of Jesus Christ.

None of those distinctions will exist in heaven. So, if we as the Church are to demonstrate the kingdom of heaven here on earth, why do we ever allow them to exist in the church?

What we see in the Acts 2 church is a beautiful picture of koinonia — of fellowship itself as an act of worship.

And as we can see in this passage, koinoneo — in other words, generosity — was an integral part of that fellowship.

Now, some commentators have concluded that the people of the early church were socialists, that they all shared everything equally.

But that’s not what the text says. What it says is that everyone shared with everyone else AS THEY MIGHT HAVE NEED.

Indeed, there are many examples in the New Testament of wealthy people who followed Jesus, and some of them seem to have continued to be wealthy after their conversions.

Lydia, the seller of fine purple, is one of those examples. Philemon, the one who owned the wayward slave, Onesimus, is another example.

What Luke seems to be getting at here is that the church was looking after its own. Later in Acts, we learn that they were providing meals for the widows of the church. And those with larger houses were providing places for the others to meet and share meals from day to day.

Here’s what they were NOT doing (and I’m sorry for the analogy, Annette). They were NOT keeping a special drawer set aside that was off-limits for everybody else.

If they saw a need and they had the means to help meet that need, they did. They opened up that drawer and gave what they could out of genuine love for one another.

So what does all this mean for us? It means we are to be generous to one another.

Financially generous. Generous with our time. Generous with our compliments. Generous with our love. Generous from whatever surplus we might have toward whatever need might exist.

And generous in a way that is genuine, not showy. Generous in a way that blesses without expecting the blessing to be returned.

Jesus talked about this in Luke’s account of the Sermon on the Mount. You’ll see it in Luke, chapter 6.

Luke 6:34–35 NASB95

34 “If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners in order to receive back the same amount. 35 “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men.

“If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? … Lend expecting nothing in return.”

Let me ask you: What’s would you call a loan that you don’t expect to be paid back?

A gift!

I realized this some years ago, and ever since then, I never loan anyone money. If they have a need, and I am able to help meet that need, I will give them money to do so. But it’s never a loan.

Loans cause problems between friends and family. They can destroy relationships. I have experienced that myself.

I’d rather give you what I can afford to spare and keep the relationship than give you money I need back and risk souring the relationship if you can’t pay me back. This lesson came hard for me, but I have been happier — AND MORE GENEROUS — since I learned it.

This is the kind of generosity we’re called to in the body of Christ. But it requires genuine love.

It requires the genuine love of a giver willing to open up that secret drawer. But it also require the genuine love of a receiver who is honest with himself — and transparent with the church — about his real needs.

It requires the giver to honor the recipient in a gift given from genuine love. And it requires the recipient to honor the giver in a relationship FOUNDED in genuine love.

The Apostle John wrote: “We love, because He first loved us.” When we read that verse, we tend to put the emphasis on the second part. We love, because HE first loved us.

But I think the point John was making was that our love is a RESPONSE to God’s love. We LOVE, because He first loved us.

Love is the joyful response of people who have been loved. And genuine love isn’t lip-service. Genuine love does all these things Paul commands in the 12th chapter of Romans.

And genuine love within the church loves genuinely because that’s how God loves us. He loves us genuinely.

He is devoted to us in Christ. He gave preference to us by allowing Jesus to sacrifice Himself for us and in our place.

He allowed Jesus, the King of kings and Lord of lords, to serve us diligently and with a fervency that took Him all the way to Calvary.

Jesus persevered through trials and even death, devoted to His Father in prayer, so that we might have the same hope of resurrection He had as He died on that cross.

Our God, rich in mercy and grace, gave out of His riches His very Son to rescue the poor in spirit — to impart righteousness to we who had none, to we who had nothing to offer except rebellion.

This picture of generosity should truly bring us joy. And just as WE love, because He first loved us, WE are generous, because He was generous to us. In joyful response to His generosity, WE are to be generous to one another.

I have told many people in the past few years what a generous church this is, both to me personally and to others.

The generosity I see here is a true testament to your recognition of what Jesus gave at the cross. And I believe the Holy Spirit uses this generosity and this koinonia, this fellowship, to draw people into this fellowship. There is something very attractive about generous people. There is something very attractive about unity. There is something very attractive about genuine love.

Let us resolve to be generous to one another in every way we can. Let us resolve to be generous, because God is generous. Let us bless one another because we have been blessed.

Let us be quick to open up that secret drawer when we see a need.