Be Generous to the Poor

Transition from Legacy video / Robertson’s interview

Good morning!

Today is one of my favorite Sundays.

Recap:

We are coming to the end of our Generosity Practice.

There is no possible way to distill all Jesus’ teachings on money and generosity down to four weeks, but our best attempt was this summary of what we believe Jesus has to say on this subject:

There’s more joy in giving than in receiving.

Watch out for greed!

All we have belongs to God.

And up on the docket for today is our final theme: Jesus’ call, not just to be generous, but more specifically, to share our resources with the poor.

Over the last five weeks we have been highlighting each week a legacy lane. We have five legacy lanes for giving:

Global Missions

Local Missions

Next Gen

Leadership (Multiplication)

Church Growth

Extraordinary generosity. I want to share a story of two of my staff members and how the Lord has called them to serve with their time and talents.

Cory & Dave

Seam: I tell you these stories because it is a great example of someone refusing to live a “normal life,” and daring to put Jesus’ teachings on money and generosity into practice.

Dave and Cory are in a season that they can do this.

You may be in a very different season.

The point isn’t that you come work for the church in part-time salaries in FT hours.

The point is…think about how you can be generous with your life now. In whatever capacity God is calling you to.

Set up:

Jesus’ teachings introduce the generosity of the Kingdom of God. We read again and again through the library of Scripture what N.T. Wright would say…

The kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was all about a glorious, uproarious, absurd generosity. Think of the best thing you can do for the worst person, and go ahead and do it. Think of what you’d really like someone to do for you, and do it for them. Think of the people to whom you are tempted to be nasty, and lavish generosity on them instead.

N. T. Wright

There are roughly 500 verses in the Bible on faith and another 500 on prayer, but over 2,000 on God’s heart for the poor. And we see this heart on display in Jesus’ teachings.

Turn: Turn in your Bibles to Luke 12, and let’s look at one example:

Luke 12:13–21 (NIV)

Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”

Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?”

Two siblings are fighting over the family inheritance and Jesus refuses to get sucked in.

Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”

Notice again: Jesus has a very different vision of the good life.

And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’

“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” ’

That line can be translated:“Live it up! Eat, drink, and enjoy yourself.” (CEV) Or: “You’ve got it made and can now retire. Take it easy and have the time of your life!” (The Message)

“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’

“This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”

Explanation:

Now, this sounds a bit harsh to our modern ears.

But a little understanding on what is happening in this time and with this group of people: Most people in Jesus’ day were poor tenant farmers and a very small number were wealthy landowners. There was a merchant class — in fact, a few of Jesus’ disciples were fishermen — but the middle class was very small.

It was also an agricultural economy.

Which is unlike our modern economic system that has generated more wealth than any other era in human history, and where wealth is more of a social construct. I’m paid in numbers on a bank account, not sheep and asparagus, so wealth today is less of a zero-sum game because it’s based on an arbitrary social valuation. But in an agrarian economy, wealth was more limited because it was based on physical commodities such as sheep and grain.

This man is a wealthy landowner, but instead of sharing his excess with the poor all around him, he builds bigger barns.

And Jesus calls him a “fool.”

The irony is, this guy is living the American dream! Literally!

Then look down at verse 32. Jesus says this:

Luke 12:32 (NIV)

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.

It’s interesting, we tend to assume that the motivation behind wealth accumulation is greed, but for a lot of people (especially those that grew up in scarcity), it’s fear.

Fear of not having enough.

Fear of being poor like our parents.

Fear of looming disaster.

We’re back to Jesus’ abundance mindset: God is our Father-provider; his heart is to give to us, not take. We don’t have to be afraid.

Instead, we can do this:

Luke 12:33 (NIV)

Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.

Do you see how Jesus ties his call to be generous to the poor to his view of the age to come?

Jesus’ teachings on generosity will never make sense unless you view your financial decisions not in light of a human lifespan, but of eternity.

In light of eternity, giving is not loss, it’s gain! It’s an investment.

As Randy Alcorn put it,

“... We store up eternal treasure in the coming age by giving away temporary treasures in the present age.”

Randy Alcorn

Think about when you put some money into an investment. There’s often a little feeling of pain as you might have loved to use that money to buy something else. But you don’t lose that money. you put it where it can accrue interest over time, because of the longer-term dreams in your heart.

In the same way, giving is investing in the Kingdom of God; it’s putting your money where it can grow over time, in the one place where it can last forever.

In the upside-down kingdom, what we give away we actually keep.

And what we keep, we lose.

So, give it away, Jesus says.

Luke 12:34 (NIV)

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

We covered this sacred law of the universe in our first session:

Our heart follows our money.

And when we spend our money on things that do not last, our hearts are racked by fear and greed.

But Jesus has a solution: Give your money away to the poor.

Interestingly, this is actually the second time Jesus has said this in Luke’s Gospel.

Which is key because ancient writings were hand-copied. Every word was expensive, so if an author wanted to really emphasize a point, he would repeat it.

Just one chapter before this, Jesus says this to the Pharisees:

Luke 11:38–41 (NIV)

But the Pharisee was surprised when he noticed that Jesus did not first wash before the meal.

Then the Lord said to him, “Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? But now as for what is inside you—be generous to the poor, and everything will be clean for you.

Meaning if there is a silver bullet for greed, a practice to clean our hearts out and set our hearts free, it’s this:

Be generous to the poor.

Seam: It comes as no surprise that Jesus’ first apprentices did exactly that.

The Early Church:

In Acts 2, the first story we have of the early church, we read this famous passage:

Acts 2:44–45 “All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.”

They did it! And in a following passage, we read this:

Acts 4:32-35 “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own

[See the stewardship language there?],

but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.”

The early Church was wildly generous to the poor! Tim Keller called it “financial promiscuity.” He said:“The early church was strikingly different from the culture around it in this way — the pagan society was stingy with its money and promiscuous with its body. A pagan gave nobody their money and practically gave everybody their body. And the Christians came along and gave practically nobody their body and they gave practically everybody their money.”

In fact, one of the main criticisms from pagan Romans was that the Church’s generosity put the Roman world to shame.

In a letter, the fourth-century emperor Julian the Apostate wrote,

“It is disgraceful that … the impious Galileans [or followers of Jesus] support not only their own poor, but ours as well. All men see our people lack aid from us.”

Julian the Apostate

It’s hard for us to imagine now because of the impact of Jesus on the world, but there was no moral value in the Roman world for the rich to share with the poor. None. Nor were there any social services from the government or tax-based wealth redistribution.

Almost all that work was done by the Church.

Early on, churches and monasteries became sprawling centers of social justice. Saint Basil, the bishop of Caesarea in the fourth century, founded what was arguably the first hospital, which grew into a small town called the Basiliad. It had a hotel for travelers, hospice care for the dying, a leper colony, daily feeding program, and fixed-hour prayer. Soon this model spread all over the world.

One of the central practices of early Christians was “almsgiving,” which was basically generosity to the poor, but they would often give not only money, but time and relationship as well.

The Didache, one of the earliest Christian writings we have outside of the New Testament, says this: “Let your alms sweat in your hands, until you know to whom you should give.”

In the early Church, people would regularly bring offerings of money and extra food to the weekly church meal for those who were in need to take home.

But because so much of this work has since been taken on by our governments, it’s easy for us to forget that this is a core part of our calling as followers of Jesus.

Seam: Now, this raises all sorts of questions about how to practice almsgiving today.

The poor are often invisible to those of us who are middle-class and up because of the hurry of life, lifestyle enclaves, and because most of us live in zip codes with people in the same tax bracket.

And it’s hard to know what to do with the scale of the modern nation-state, the cost of living in our cities, and how it’s all tied to taxation.

But don’t let paralysis stop your heart!

Surely you can do something.

You can just see who in your circle is in need.

Did you see in the text that a synonym for the “poor,” is “anyone who had need”?

Often we think of the poor as those in abject poverty in another country or those living on the streets, which raises all sorts of questions about addiction and mental illness, but who do you know who has a “need”? We will trust in the Lord as we give generously.

The need could be a roof over their head, or it could just be to pay medical bills, send a kid to youth camp, or find transportation.

Who do you know? In our church? In your community? In your life?

And what do you have to give? Even if it’s small. Even if it’s twenty bucks or an extra plate for dinner. Or the gift of time.

No matter how small, a sacred law of the Kingdom is that God can do a lot with a little. Our five bread loaves go far beyond what we could ever dream.

So give what you have, not what you don’t have.

And remember, those in need are not the objects of your pity, but your brothers and sisters, your kin in Jesus.

Our goal isn’t just to give our resources to those in need, but to create a new kind of family. To blur the lines between giver and receiver.

You may have extra resources to give them, but they have far more to give you.

Our goal is to create a community where it could be said, “There was no needy person among them.”11

Follow the leading of the Spirit in your heart.

Sticky line: Don’t build bigger barns! Be generous to the poor.

As we close our time…

I want to share with you an exciting way that our church plans to put this into practice.

In the month of January - in partnership with Open Bible Pacific Region, we are starting to explore the possibility of creating a serve center. We will look to at an area of Spokane

To end…

Martin Luther said every disciple of Jesus must go through three conversions.

A conversion of the heart.

A conversion of the mind.

And a conversion of the purse.

I’m praying this Practice is a third conversion for you. And remember: This is about joy. “It is happier to give than to receive.”

And all of this is motivated by love.

We give our money away because Jesus gave his life for us.

We give our wealth to the poor because Jesus gave up the wealth of heaven for the poverty of the human condition.

And we do all this joyfully, because our true happiness is not in a practice, but in the person of Jesus, who

Ephesians 5:2 (NIV)

and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

Notes