Extravagant Generosity - 4 - Declarations of Your Heart: Extravagant Generosity is an Expression of Your Heart

Scripture: John 3:16, 2 Corinthians 8:24

John 3:16 NIV

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

2 Corinthians 8:24 NIV

24 Therefore show these men the proof of your love and the reason for our pride in you, so that the churches can see it.

11/24/2024

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Ministry Celebration - Bringing Forward Pledge Cards

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 4: Ministry Celebration

Bringing the estimate cards forward at the end of service.

Opening Prayer:

O God, you made us in your image and loved us enough to give us the best of what you have, your only Son, Jesus Christ. Grant that we who have received so much from you might reflect that love and devotion, living proof of the hope that is in us so that all may know your glory. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.

Declarations of Your Heart: Extravagant Generosity is an Expression of Your Heart

Tough Subjects

Money is a tough subject.

When I was a teenager, a young, growing disciple, trying to grow in my faith and learn to live a life. Following Jesus, my pastor gave me a book called Money, Sex, and Power. It was a book written by Richard Foster back in the 1980s, and it claimed that most of our temptations landed in the categories of money, sex, or power. Those temptations stayed in separate boxes in those days, tossing us back and forth like they were playing catch with us. That book helped me to realize that by simply running away from one sin, we sometimes run right into the arms of another. Each sin is just as bad as another.

But things have changed since then. It seems that somehow, the temptations of money, sex, and power have joined forces. Whenever I see or hear people struggling with the political climate and polarized culture we live in today, it’s all three of these things, all at once, all the time. They are not staying in their lanes anymore. We are all getting hit with everything they’ve got, and Jesus is getting pushed out of the picture.

Jesus taught us godly responses to all three temptations. We could easily spend three months learning how to tackle those challenges with Jesus. Can you imagine a world or people free from the influence of money, sex, and power? What would we do with all of that extra energy we wouldn’t spend worrying and fighting with one another?

Today, we have time for one. We’ve spent this month reading, learning, and studying about gratitude, generosity, and how we use our money through giving in a way that pleases God. Today, we will focus on how giving can take the temptation of money and turn it into something that helps make us holy. Therefore, when Jesus comes back, and we see Him face-to-face, we can hear the words we all long to hear:

“Well done, good and faithful servant.”

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Money and the Bible

Money is a challenging subject.

One of the devotions from the second week of the series shared a story about a church custodian who gave money from his pocket to a homeless man while a pastor looked on in disbelief. I usually breeze through those short devotions, but that one caught my attention like a thistle. You see, I have been a church custodian, giving cash to people from my pocket when I didn’t have much. I’ve also been a pastor for about 20 years, and every church I’ve served in has tried to meet the needs of the less fortunate in their communities. I have sat through 90-minute council meetings where capable, faithful, and loving people desperately tried to figure out how to help one person get back on their feet and avoid a life of destitution.

I’ve experienced the heartache of recognizing that the needs of a single individual can be so complex that money can sometimes do more harm than good. I’ve been at the table when we all walked away, convinced that the first and best thing we can do—sometimes the only thing—is to get to know them and pray for them. That devotion had little to do with helping homeless people.

The homeless man in the story didn’t even have a name; he was just a prop. Instead, the moral of the story was that we are responsible for the money we have. God will judge us based on what we do with our money, not what others do with theirs.

Our culture often uses varying amounts of guilt or shame to convince people to give us money. The saddest and loudest stories tend to be the most effective. In many cases, we often prefer to give 100 children one dollar each rather than invest $100 in one person to see what they can achieve. We don’t trust people we don’t know, and at times, we also don’t trust those we do know, often for specific reasons.

That was not the culture of the early church. Those first Christians in Jerusalem sold all their possessions and gave all their money to the apostles, trusting those leaders to care for them while waiting for Jesus to return. The followers of Jesus outside of Jerusalem may have participated in something like this on a much smaller scale. However, when persecution broke out in Jerusalem toward the Christians, they scattered to many of these other cities and countries for safety and a chance at a better life. Many of those leaders were left behind, needing the prayers and financial support of those who moved away. Paul knew about this firsthand because he arrested, imprisoned, and oversaw the execution of some of those first Christian leaders. After he became a follower of Jesus himself, he tried to send aid to some of those Christians in Jerusalem whom he had once persecuted.

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Second Corinthians is a fundraising letter Paul wrote to the church in Corinth to raise money for Christians persecuted in Jerusalem. Don’t let that discourage you from reading and studying it. It is not very different from many other books in the Bible. God inspired every book in the Bible. Each text’s original readers found them inspiring and useful enough to pass on to others. Every book has a story—whether that story is told outright or implied between the lines—and each was written with a particular purpose.

Many of Paul’s letters were written to congregations to address their specific troubles and correct wrong teachings they had picked up over the years. Bible scholars believe that Paul wrote four letters to the Christians in Corinth, but only two were deemed useful and practical enough to be shared with the world and included in the New Testament. Second Corinthians may be the last letter he sent to them. While this letter addresses questions about God and teachings about who we are as a church, like every good sermon, it has a main point and something the author wants us to do. In this case, Paul used his powerful command of language to help a struggling church put aside their differences, give cheerfully, joyfully, and sacrificially, and help meet the needs of Christians they had never met.

Corinth had many needs in its community. When we think of news, we often envision missions that imply sending money to assist those without access to basic needs or to help spread the word of Jesus to those who have never heard of him. Paul was not asking the Corinthians to send money to a third-world country; instead, he requested them to contribute to their home base. This money went to the disciples and their families who had introduced Jesus to the world and were now suffering for their faith.

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Raising Love and Money

Paul didn’t tug at their heartstrings to entice them into giving more money. He never mentioned the plight of Christians in Jerusalem. Instead, he appeals to their ego. He reminds them of how much they gave last year and how he boasted to other cities that the Corinthians were the first to give, eager to be honored for making this offering. He bragged about their love for those imprisoned saints and revered them for their faith and willingness to spread the message worldwide.

Consider this: the New Testament had not yet been written. The authors of the New Testament were still living, as were many of the people in the gospel stories. If you lived when the writers of the New Testament were still alive and came to know Jesus through their testimony and then found out that they were in desperate trouble, how much would you be willing to give? They already knew about the dire situation of followers of Jesus in Israel. Paul would not have to convince them about their needs any further. He knew they loved the founders of the faith, so he asked them to prove it by their actions.

Today is about proving our faith through our actions. You may not know about our generosity if you are new to this faith family. We gather and pray for each other weekly and send cards to those we’ve lifted in prayer by name. We visit, call, and care for those in our family who are in need. We are not perfect, but we are working and growing to be better together each day. We also support missions that reach our community. In 2023, we gave about $12,000 to missions. This year, we nearly doubled that in the first six months. As of last week, we are just a breath away from announcing that amount. We are a generous family of faith, and we encourage others in our community to be generous with us.

We are generous when we feel like it and when we do not. As a family, we make and keep promises or covenants with each other and God. Last year at this time we gathered and made promises about our giving for this year. How many of you remember what you promised God, whether you put it in writing on a card or not? Those promises become living ministries when they move from wishful words to intentional generosity in action.

Have you kept your promise?

We also strive to be wise stewards. This year, we worked to eliminate unnecessary expenses, ensuring our facilities operate efficiently while placing Jesus at the center of our ministries. We know that if we follow where Jesus leads us, He will show us how to provide for those needs. Although we are not perfect, we are improving each day.

Many people say the church is about ministry, but there are also bills to pay. I don’t like that phrase. Anything in life that has value requires time, energy, and resources. My dad started his own business when he was 14 years old to help bring in money for the family after Grandpa broke his neck and became paralyzed. He invested in his family because he loved them. People often take on extra work or find things to sell to raise money to take care of those they love. It is no different in the church.

Many heart cards we received expressed gratitude for being part of this church family. Our ministries are how we care for one another and grow closer to Jesus, allowing us to offer something to our community, country, and the world. When we don’t care for each other, we cannot provide anything for anyone else.

You all know this. Your prayers together, your time invested in serving in all our church ministries, your commitment to growing closer to Jesus, and your efforts to ensure no one is left behind demonstrate your love for this family of faith.

I could take a lesson from Paul and stroke your egos, encouraging you to feel honored to be part of the Bethel family. There is truth and honor in that. However, a greater honor is at stake. More than Bethel, we belong to the family of Jesus. We are brothers and sisters in Christ, and the generosity of that family far outshines any local church, denomination, organization, or group in the world.

We did not gain our faith by picking ourselves up by our bootstraps. Instead, we stand on the shoulders of millions of faithful disciples who gave everything they had: their time, energy, money, and even their lives to hear about Jesus in a way we can understand and relate to. None of us had to learn Greek or Hebrew to learn about Jesus; someone else did the work to bring Him to us. They did that because someone did the same for them. Then, someone helped them grow in serving Jesus and encouraged them to share Him with others, including you.

Most people who invested in us got nothing in return but did not do it for reciprocation. They loved and invested in us because someone else loved and invested in them. This line of love continues through generations until we reach the origin of our family: Jesus himself. Jesus was infinitely wealthier than the richest person who would ever live, and he gave it all up for us. He suffered with us and for us and then gave his life so that we might live forever with him. He is the model of faithful giving, and by proving his love through his sacrificial giving, He is also the standard for our family. If we want to claim Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we need to learn to love and live like Him. Otherwise, we don’t have the actions to prove our words mean anything.

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Just Between You and Jesus

Money is a tough subject.

What you choose to give is between you and Jesus, but you need to know that His standards are much higher than mine. I understand what it means to give more than you think you can, and I know how it feels to hold back selfishly because the things of this world have a hold on your heart and mind. I’ve been a fool with money and had moments when I let Jesus lead. You won’t face much judgment from me, but Jesus... that’s another story.

Matthew 25 tells the terrifying parable of the sheep and the goats, in which Jesus explains that we are rewarded with heaven or punished with hell based on whether we gave. It is not about how much we gave or how often, but rather, it is based on whether we served Jesus when he came to us as the least of our brothers and sisters. We could easily interpret that as a command to give to the poor, except for a tiny detail: in that parable, no one, not the sheep or the goats, ever recognized Jesus in the poor. Yet some were rewarded while others were punished. So the difference between them was that the sheep, the ones rewarded with heaven, gave freely and generously, perhaps believing that God only blessed them with money to pass that blessing on to others. The goats, condemned to hell, held themselves back from opportunities to give. It didn’t matter if it was out of supposed wisdom or malice; they didn’t use the money to love Jesus but instead chose to live for the love of money. They were possessed by their possessions and lost everything.

As the story about the pastor and the custodian tells us, we are not judged by what the rest of the world does with their money. We will only be judged by what we do with what we have. We won’t judge each other. We will be judged by the one who held nothing back but chose to give it all to us.

Brothers and sisters, what will you choose to do with what God has given you?

Closing Prayer

Jesus come and lead us today to live and love and give like you. Amen.

In just a moment we are going to invite you forward to bring your estimated giving card for the coming year as a promise between you and God and place it in the basket here up front. I want to emphasize that this is an invitation into deeper discipleship with God, not a requirement. Some of you came prepared today. Others may not be ready to bring your card forward. We will take a few minutes and have some music playing in the background to give you a brief time to pray. When we are finished, I will pray over these sacred promises before we sing our closing song together.

If you are not ready to bring your card forward today, you are welcome to bring it to Pastor Bekah or myself any time. This covenant affects and connects us together as a church, but it is ultimately founded on a promise made between you and God and we want to honor and encourage your faithfulness to Him in every way possible. We invite you now to come forward as the Lord leads you.