Generous God: What Everyone Ought to Know About Giving and Getting

Introduction

New series: Generous: What Everyone Ought to Know About Giving and Getting

Today: Generous God

Scarcity and Abundance

Industrial and technological revolutions - greatest advancements in human history

Jobs, wealth

Everything it seems is at our fingertips and we can get what we want most of the time without leaving our homes.

Belief: We can have whatever we want and get it when we want it with maybe a little effort.

- Examples: car? Amazon.

- For a while: a better life: walk into a church building

- Don't have the resources to get what we want: ask God because after all, he's in the business of giving us what we want, right? God will provide, right?

And yet...

A question we all will face: What if he doesn't? What if we never get what we ask for? That better paying job that gives your family some breathing room. The person you ask God to heal of cancer isn't because there wasn't enough money raised for treatment.

How is it we’ve come to think that God’s job is to give us what we want and when we don’t get it, somehow, God really isn’t God?

Living Scarce

“Futurist Paul Saffo the industrial manufacturing age was born on the impulse to overcome scarcity at the turn of the last century.

Scarcity

Fear - will I have enough?

Significance - am i winning?

Manipulation - what do I get out of this?

The result is what he calls a “producer economy”—the hero became the manufacturer.

The producer economy gave us mass meetings, fundamentalism, and the world missionary movement.

Eventually these factories became so efficient that they were able to not only overcome scarcity, but to overproduce. As we created and accumulated more than we needed, consumption became the primary impulse.

Overproduction gave us what we all recognize as a “consumer economy,” whose hero was the marketer, the one who could convince us to want what they were selling.

The consumer economy is revealed in entertainment-driven, need-meeting, market-savvy megachurches.

Around November 2008 the consumer economy gave way to the newest shift, toward free services, social conscience, and creating value with our lives—what he calls a “creator economy.” The hero is now the entrepreneur, the artist, and the innovator.

The financial crisis and skepticism about consumer systems of the early twenty-first century has given birth to a new sensibility. Scarcity has given way to abundance.

Enough to go around

Generosity in everything - spiritual, material, justice...

People are no longer looking to produce or consume material goods; we long to create. If we are looking, we can see these shifts in the church too.

If Saffo is right and people no longer want to define their lives by what they produce or consume, perhaps scarcity as a way of thinking and living where we define life by what we produce or consume and are afraid there will never be enough will finally give way to abundance in the church and we will begin to understand and experience generosity in new ways.

— Underground Church: A Living Example of the Church in Its Most Potent Form by Brian Sanders

https://a.co/4yv2BEs

Abundance

Kingdom Life/Life as God intends is to be lived from an understanding of abundance.

Matthew 7:7–11 ESV

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

The first thing everyone ought to know about getting and giving is this:

Everything we know about what is good ex: generosity comes from some where. We didn’t just make it up.

Prodigal Son

Youngest of two sons asked for his share of the property (inheritance) early (that is coming to me).

Likely against his better judgment he said OK and divided his property between the boys.

You may know how the story goes and it’s not great; the younger son blew it all.

A famine hit and the only job he could find was to feed pigs. Hey, it’s a job, right?

There was no animal as disgusting to Jewish people than a pig. Not allowed to eat it

Ancient Judaism - didn’t even say it’s name

Symbol of hypocrisy

It got so bad, he wanted to eat what the pigs were fed because no one gave him anything.

As you can imagine, he longed for home, decided to humble himself with his father by offering to be a servant on his farm.

His father saw him coming, ran to him, hugged and kissed him and then for the son who by all accounts was at best a disappointment, wasted away everything he was given - including his life - threw him a party with the best of everything.

Older son wasn’t having it. I’ve done everything right and you never so much as gave me anything to celebrate with my friends. But you threw a party with the best of everything for this one who wasted all the good things you gave him on bad. What kind of father are you?

Here’s how the father replied:

All I have is yours. Abundance

It was the right thing to celebrate because your brother was dead and lost (far off, separated from me) and is alive and found (restored to me).

The Christian faith is rooted in the understanding that God is good and selflessly concerned about the well-being of his creation.

Effort and energy to draw us close to him - Jesus

Not stingy and ready to share everything including justice

Generosity has no limits - abundance

The Radical Nature of Matthew 7:7-11

Resources were scarce for most of his audience

Little interest or effort given to their well-being, growth

Justice was seldom fair

Changing the narrative: you have only experienced scarcity, let me introduce you to the abundance of God who is generous.

Three Commands

All who ask will receive

All who seek will find

All who knock will be let in

Regular family life

Persistant kids…I paused at their requests. They kept asking…we would talk…the kept asking...in different ways…we would talk...then they would start to ask for different things.

Ex: rather than giving them what they first asked for, how can I earn the money for it?

Why did I jerk them around and not just give them what they wanted and make them happy?

What is good for them? Often through their persistent asking and our ongoing conversation, it became clear and it’s what I gave them.

Fatherhood is at the Heart

It is innate for us to give good things to people we love.

IF even the worst of us know how to and will give good things to those we care about, how much more will God respond and give good things to those who ask?

-No bait and switch with God (bread/stone)

God Wants to respond with what is good but what don’t always know, want or ask for what is good or best.

-What constitutes good things and what purpose will they serve?

It’s a question I’ve had to wrestle with when asking God to heal someone.

-Persistent asking gets us to the heart of the Good God wants to give. And in some cases, it may be something else.

Everything we know about what is good ex: generosity comes from some where. We didn’t just make it up and here’s the second part of that;

Where it comes from is God who is abundantly good and wants to give you and I what what we need and what we need is most often more than we’ll ever ask for.

Keep asking and what you will be let into the generosity of God where you will find what you are looking for where what you will only get what is good.