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2 Cor 9:6-15
Yesterday on the front of the business section of The Age was this article: “Ramsay billions willed to charity”
Paul Ramsay who founded a private hospital company died last Thursday of a heart attack at 78. And his entire fortune of $3.4 billion is to be transferred to a charitable foundation that he set up.
Are we as generous as that?
Are we rich in giving to others ?
Are we surrounded by people from our own culture who are joyful in giving money and time to other people?
Are you part of a generous family?
Finally after you soak up all these influences around us, are you generous as an individual?
Or do we tend to hoard things up for ourselves and our own security and status?
I ask this question because the NT commands us to be generous.
In 1 Timothy 6:17 we read:
Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant, nor to put their hope in wealth... but to put their hope in God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds and to be generous and willing to share.
We are COMMANDED to be generous. We are not asked or begged to be generous towards the things that God cares about. We are commanded!
Why might we become more generous?
- It might be Our thankfulness to God for all that he has given us
- Or it might be because of Our security before God. He loves us now in the same way that he loves his Son.
- It might be because we think about Our future inheritance. We have a gloriously wealthy future inheritance if we will only persevere now in faithfully following Jesus. For a little while we face sufferings and groaning as we wait for God to make things right with the world. But our present sufferings are not worth comparing to the glory and wealth that we will be given by God in the future in his new creation.
There are also many reasons why we might not be generous.
- Our own family experience. My own family was extremely good at hoarding up things for itself. When people came to the door asking for money for various charities my father used to shout at them and slam the door. He was shaped by his own experience of losing everything he had in Nazi Germany in the 1930’s and having to flee from Poland as a refugee. He came to Australia on a ship with his sister in 1939 with nothing but the clothes he was wearing. He spent his life accumulating a security buffer of money and possessions to avoid this ever happening again.
- Our own surrounding culture. For example, amongst your friends is it OK to ask someone how much they earn and how much they spend? In general in Australian culture that would be regarded as a rude question. But is it something we can talk about with other Christians at church?
- Our own greed. We want things for ourselves. We think we will make ourselves look good and feel good if we have really expensive possessions. This is a deep seated part of human nature that crosses all cultural divides.
So there are reasons for generosity and there are powerful forces that shape us against being generous .
Today I want to focus on one large reason to become more generous. I want to remind you of our stewardship of all creation and all we have.
In the bible, a steward is someone who is given something on trust to manage for someone else. (Repeat)
A steward is like a trusted employee, but with more authority. They were given authority to deal with the master’s property as though they stood in his shoes and represented him. It is an image that Jesus often uses to describe his disciples. The master has gone away on a long trip and left a steward in charge of his household and his other servants and his business. (Luke 12:42ff, Luke 16:1-15)
Church leaders are also described as stewards. (Titus 1:7) They are managers of God’s household, the church.
And the Apostle Peter describes all Christians as stewards of spiritual gifts given to us to use to serve others (1 Peter 4;10).
But it is not just Christians and church leaders who are stewards. All of humanity are stewards of God’s property.
In Genesis 1 God placed the man and the woman in the garden he had created to work it and to take care of it. We are meant to look after the creation for God. We are God’s trusted managers. He gave humankind authority over the creation he had made as managers who represent him. (Genesis 1:26-28)
Let’s just think about this stewardship for a moment.
We are given things that belong to someone else on trust to manage them for him. This is brought out clearly over and over again in the OT.
In Psalm 24:1 we read, The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it...
In Deuteronomy 8 we read about the people of Israel entering the promised land of wheat, barley, vines and fig trees... where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills. Then comes the warning: when you build fine houses and settle down... and when your flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud, you will forget the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of slavery... you may say to yourself, “my power and the strength of my hands has produced this wealth for me”. But remember the LORD your God for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth...
The message is very simple: We need to remember that our money and our wealth are not ours. They belong to God who has entrusted them to us to see how we will use them as his stewards! We got wealthy because of God’s gifts to us in the first place.
So we need to change our perspective to think of ourselves as stewards. We need to think that everything we own is, in fact, on loan from God. It belongs to him and he’s entrusted it to us to manage for him.
We shouldn’t be asking ourselves the question: have I given away enough to seem generous in the eyes of some other people? But rather, what does God want me to do with the things that he has entrusted me with? What does God want me to do with everything that I have on loan from him ?
Our stewardship is the reason why God can command us to be generous towards the things that he’s passionate about.
Let’s think about this way of seeing things a bit more:
Do you have a financial plan for your life that is based on your stewardship? We make plans to have enough money in retirement and we pay people to help us do that, we make business plans, we make savings plans, but do we talk to others in our church about the most important plan we need which is how to be more generous to God’s purposes?
Take the church building fund for example. It is the equivalent of 2-3 average family size mortgages! Why should we be struggling to pay it off? There are 50+ families in our church who are gradually buying a house with help from the bank. Can we not plan to buy a church together faster?\Or what about our generosity towards God’s mission in the world? How many seminars at church have you ever been to about how much we should give away and how to balance up God’s various priorities to reflect what he cares about in our giving?
I would love to run a seminar like this if anyone would come. I would love us to spend more time talking together about how to plan for generosity. As some of you might know, I am a lawyer and there are even lots of tax effective ways to plan to be generous towards God’s causes.
And finally, What is in your will ? Have you planned to give to God’s causes when you die? Most people only plan to give their wealth to their husband or wife and then to their children? Isn’t this a huge missed opportunity to be generous towards the things that God loves to do in the world? What we need to do is to plan to balance up what our family really needs versus what God wants to do in the world? If we thought about that seriously there’d be more people leaving bequests to his church and to Christian mission work.
What did Paul Ramsay do? He gave his entire fortune to charity. Why did he do that? It may be that he was directed by God to be generous – I don’t know. But its interesting that the article in the newspaper says that he never married and he had no children. Implying that otherwise it may have been very different.
We brought nothing into the world and we can take nothing out of it (1 Tim 6:7). While we are here we are commanded to do good with what God has entrusted to us as stewards and to be rich in good deeds and to be generous. May God himself make our church overflow with generosity!
