Generous & Cheerful

Our Generous God Does Not Change

9.14.25 [Malachi 3:6-12] River of Life (14th Sunday after Pentecost)

Mercy and peace are yours in abundance from your generous and gracious God and Savior. Amen. 

This summer, my family and I had the opportunity of a lifetime. Because of the kindness of my parents, our normal vacation budget took us to a place we never thought we would go: Italy. 

As curious tourists in a foreign country, we asked lots of questions about how to say this and what the word for that was in Italian. We learned the word for bat was pipistrello. We learned that polpette was meatball, but pulpo was octopus—which nearly resulted in a very different entree for Genevieve. But there was one word that we  learned that stood out among the rest. Generous. Yup—an English word. We thought we knew what it meant. But we learned we didn’t in our cooking class. 

Our teacher, an Israeli-Italian chef, was teaching our group how to roast beef. After playfully mocking my lack of knife skills, she told me to pour some olive oil into a roasting pan. How could I mess this up? 

So I coated the pan. She looked at that pan with as much disapproval as a teacher could and told me: No, generous. So I poured in some more. But it still wasn’t right. She looked at me, at the pan, and at the rest of our group and said: Not American generous. Italian generous! 

In our reading from Malachi 3, God is teaching his people what the word generous means. Like I did before that cooking class, we think we already know what generous means. But God knows we struggle with it more than we realize. 

In Malachi 3, the Lord Almighty tells the descendants of Jacob, the remnant of the nation of Judah, that they have a generational struggle with generosity. Mal. 3:7 Ever since the time of your ancestors, you have turned away from my decrees and have not kept them. 

Disobedience wasn’t something that just sprang up overnight or was just a problem for one particular generation. Israel had an extensive track record of disobedience. But look at how God responds. 

He doesn’t wash his hands of the whole covenant. He doesn’t smack Israel upside the head. He holds out his hands and says: Mal. 3:7 Return to me and I will return to you.  

Yet, even with that merciful offer, Israel responds with malice. Mal. 3:7 How are we to return? They act as if God is the one who shouldn’t be trusted—not them! Hesitantly and haughtily, they ask: What do you want from us? 

So God gets down to brass tacks. You’re ripping me off. Mal. 3:8 Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob me. You live in my house and take whatever you want and leave me with only whatever you don’t want. 

Of course, they didn’t see it that way. So they asked How are we robbing you? So God tells them: Mal. 3:10 You’re not bringing the whole tithe into the storehouse. My pantry is empty. 

The Lord Almighty had given his people strict commands about the tithe. In Leviticus 27, Numbers 18, and Deuteronomy 14, God laid out his expectations. A tenth of whatever the land bears belongs to the Lord—produce, products, and livestock. Each year, they were to bring some of it to Jerusalem. Every three years, they were to stock up their local food pantry for the Levites, widows, orphans, and foreigners in their community. And they were supposed to bring the good stuff—never the junk they didn’t want. 

But that’s not what was happening. In Malachi 1, we’re told that the people were bringing God Mal. 1:8,13 injured, lame, blind, and sick animals. They were tithe-shaving. 

Israel was living like a thoughtless teenager in the land the Lord had promised them. He gave them pizza and wings and ice cold Cokes, and they left crusts and bones and cartilage and those last swigs in the bottom of the can and had the gall to expect God to be happy with that. Mal. 1:6 God’s people were showing contempt for God’s name. 

And in Malachi 3, when God confronts them about their selfishness, they get defensive and accusatory. The attitude of Israel was: We’ll give you good stuff when we have more. How can you expect us to tithe when things are so tight? Why are you hassling us about this? 

God reminded them, they were under a curse and enduring a famine because they were being stingy and selfish. They were the problem. Not God. 

With the benefit of a couple of thousand years of hindsight, we can see how awful this behavior is. It’s a wicked concoction of selfishness and cynicism. But we don’t have to look two thousand years into the past to find it. We struggle with selfishness and a cynical attitude when it comes to living like generous and cheerful givers. 

We are quick to point out how expensive things are and how hard we have to work to make ends meet. Have we forgotten that the Lord is the one who has provided our strength, skills, health, and abilities? It is the Lord Almighty who has blessed us with steady paychecks, supply chains, savings accounts and everything we need for body and life.

We are also quick to identify all the other people who give nothing! We see unbelievers living it up and we envy them! We see immature believers who give sparsely and/or sporadically and it inflames our self-righteousness. We see ministers who live lavishly and we see ministries that are run inefficiently and we think: God, go deal with them and get off my case. I’m not the problem. They are!

Except we would never say any of that out loud. Because we know it’s wrong. Even when all those things are true they do not change God’s command to you and me, dear Christian. We ought to fear, love, and trust in the Lord our God and honor him with the gifts he has given you. 

When it comes to giving generously, we must remember why God cares. The Lord Almighty doesn’t need your dollars. He is the Maker of heaven and earth. He fed his people for forty years in the wilderness. He made the flour and the oil not run out in the house of the widow at Zarephath. He made two fish and five barley loaves feed a crowd of over 5,000 with 12 basketfuls of leftovers. God doesn’t need anything you have or can give him. But God wants you. 

The Lord Almighty knows that our hearts are tied to what we possess. Money is so powerful that it keeps us up at night and gets us out of bed in the morning. It’s where we look for answers and hope, our identity and security. We even have the gall to say it gives us “peace of mind”. Jesus puts it this way: Mt. 6:21 Where your treasure is, there your heart will also be. So God stakes his claim on what we possess because he knows it impacts the condition of our hearts.

But God doesn’t withdraw it from us the way that others have. Think about how the government does this. When the government taxes your income, it typically gets its cut before your check even gets cut. When the government taxes your groceries, it doesn’t ask if you’re cheerful. When the government taxes your property, it doesn’t care about your heart. As long as the check clears, the government doesn’t care.  

God could tax us. But instead, he redeems us. He wins our hearts and through the power of his undeserved and unconditional love, the Lord Almighty changes our attitude towards all that we have in this life. 

The Apostle Paul put it this way: You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich in every way—power, honor, glory, and material things—yet for our sake, he became poor, so that through his poverty we might become rich. Jesus came to earth and lived a life none of us would envy. No modern conveniences. No easy way to get his message out. No peace of mind at the bank of Galilee. No cushy nest back in Nazareth. Every day, he relied on the support of others. 

And not only that, but Jesus became impoverished in terms of power and honor and glory by becoming our substitute for sin. He died the death our sin debt earned. He suffered the wrath we should have faced for our selfishness. Yet, Christ never had a cynical attitude. He didn’t say that this would be wasted on so many people. He loved those who hated him. He died for those who cheered his crucifixion. He gave everything for those who had nothing to give him.  

If God did all this for us, Rom. 8:32 how will he not, along with life in his name, graciously give us all that we need for life in this world? When we give generously and cheerfully, we are reflecting our fear, love, and trust in God—our faith. We are putting our money where our mouth is. We are investing cold hard cash because our hearts have been warmed by his undeserved and unconditional love for us. We are not saying that every gift we give to support kingdom work or take care of the needy is used to maximum efficiency. We should strive for that, but we do not wait until that happens to be generous. God has not waited until we were perfectly righteous to shower us with his gifts. He is generous first and then works powerfully in our hearts and minds and lives to make us more like him. That brings glory to God. 

And it comes naturally when we remember James 1:17 every good and perfect gift is from above. All the blessings in our lives come from the Father of heavenly lights who does not change. He has given us the things we need for life in this world and the gift we need for life eternal. 

It’s a little like my cooking class. The chef got the kitchen ready for us. She assembled all the supplies. She practically put the tin of olive oil in my hand. I just needed to be generous. Not American generous. But Italian generous. And you know what happened a little while later? We sat down and enjoyed that beef roast together. Being generous put a smile on our faces. And she was right. Italian generous was better than my idea of generous. 

In the same way, God has prepared everything we need and more in our hands. He’s prepared the kitchen and supplies. He’s placed the blessings in our hands and said: Be Generous. Amen.