Live Generously

I had a strange thought this week as I was studying — what if you could ask dead people what their biggest financial regrets are?

It’s very interesting. If you Google search the word retirement, the financial services industry, now valued at $33 trillion, provides countless calculators so you can figure out how much money you have to have before you retire.

People’s biggest fear in our day is that they’re going to outlive their financial resources.

Everyone wants to know, “What’s the number I have to hit financially?”

I can actually help you with that one — make sure you die before your money runs out.

Otherwise, God might bless you with a long, long, long life. That would be terrible, wouldn’t it?

Conventional wisdom says, “Make sure you have a financial plan that lasts until the day you die.”

Kingdom wisdom, Jesus’ wisdom, says, “Make sure you plan for the day after the day you die.”

In other words, when my earthly life is over and I enter into eternity, how will I — more importantly, how will God — evaluate my financial life then?

I think when people stand before God, most of them don’t say, “I sure wish I had piled up more stuff.”

I think most people on the other side of death would say, “I wish I could have experienced less financial worry and strain and anxiety. I wish I would have expressed more financial generosity. I wish I would have trusted God more. I wish I would have been more generous with what I have the way God is generous with all that he has.”

Blue Oaks, I want to tell you, now is the time. In my experience, very few people drift into a life of generosity.

That’s why giving is considered a spiritual practice. It takes practice to become a generous person.

In the last chapter of Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, he writes about this. He writes what to a lot of people look like just a couple of throwaway sentences on collecting some money for some people who are poor in Jerusalem.

Here’s what he says:

Now about the collection for the Lord’s people: Do what I told the Galatian churches to do.

On the first day of every week, each one of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with your income, saving it up, so that when I come no collections will have to be made.

Then, when I arrive, I will give letters of introduction to the men you approve and send them with your gift to Jerusalem. (1 Corinthians 16:1-3)

This passage is actually quite remarkable. It reflects an explosive new financial reality in the world in Paul’s day.

And for anyone who is genuinely interested in how to practice becoming a generous person, you’re going to find out today.

I’m going to walk though this passage and give several observations about generous people.

1. Generous people believe giving is life’s greatest investment strategy.

Paul calls this a “collection for the Lord’s people.”

We read about this collection in several places in the New Testament. He’s collecting money for some of the poor who live in Jerusalem.

You might think, “Well, it’s a nice little project but nothing earth-shattering.”

Actually, there’s something going on here that the financial community in the world did not understand but was momentous.

Jewish people and Gentile people had been enemies for ages, but there were ancient prophecies that said one day that would change.

The prophet Isaiah, for example, had said centuries before Paul…

In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple [ Jerusalem ] will be established as the highest [the greatest, the most glorious] of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations [all people, all cultures] will stream to it.

Many peoples will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.” (Isaiah 2:2-3)

Now Paul had come to believe that the ancient prophecies were coming true, that the Gentiles were coming to love Israel’s God, that a new family was being knit together.

Now, how could this ever be communicated? What would be a concrete sign?

Paul had an idea. He could get Gentiles, most of whom, by the way, did not have much money. Most of them were dirt poor, peasants and slaves, but he could get them to give money to needy Jewish Christians in Jerusalem and get those Jewish Christians in Jerusalem to receive it gratefully, and that would change everything.

This was a crazy financial idea.

Gentiles would not give to the Jewish poor. It would be like going to Uber and doing a fund-raiser for Lyft; going to Stanford and doing a fund-raiser for Cal.

No one would do this… except it happened. It was like an economic miracle. It was an explosion of love-powered generosity that created a new financial reality.

When Paul wrote to Corinth, this project did not look like much — a couple of scattered communities.

He mentions Galatia. They were still in the start up phase. All the smart money was being bet on Rome.

All the smart money was going into the Colosseum.

Two thousand years later, the Colosseum is a wreck, if you’ve seen it.

No one is running for Caesar anymore, but the church… oh man… the church cannot be stopped.

See, when you’re generous with God, you are, in fact, investing in the only sure and certain
project in history.

And generous people understand this.

2. Generous people believe in God’s faithfulness.

They’ve come to know that God is faithful.

When Paul is giving instructions about the practice of giving, he says that in Corinth they’re to do it on the first day of every week.

Interestingly, he doesn’t simply say, “Do it every week.” He doesn’t say, “Do it on the second day or the third day” or “Wait until the seventh day and see if you have any money leftover.”

He says, “Do it on the first day.”

That phrase, the first day of the week, would strike an immediate chord in everyone listening.

We would tend to miss this, but it matters.

In all four of the Gospels (Matthew 28:1, Mark 16:1, Luke 24:1, John 20:1), that precise phrase gets used in this way:

On the first day of the week, the tomb was empty.
On the first day of the week, the angel said, “He is not here.”
On the first day of the week, death lost its victory and the grave lost its sting.

You might know that in Israel it was the seventh day, the Sabbath day, that was reserved for rest and worship.

In the Jesus community, that special day got shifted to the first day of the week, and the reason was the first day was Resurrection Day.

This passage, 1 Corinthians 16, is the first New Testament mention of the special significance of Sunday, the first day, Resurrection Day.

The idea here is to put resurrection reality into your financial practice.

You’ve heard of capitalism and socialism, trickle-down economics. This is resurrection economics.

Jesus said a long time ago it works like this:

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. (John 12:24)

Jesus gives his life away, but he gets it back far better in the resurrection.

The same power, the same dynamic is at work financially — if you try to hoard what you have, greed will wreck your soul and death will take your money.

Paul wrote to Timothy:

For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. (1 Timothy 6:7)

This is kind of a morbid story, but I like it for some reason.

A dying man smells the aroma of chocolate chip cookies, his very favorite food, coming from the downstairs kitchen.

He thinks to himself, “I’ve got to have the taste of just one more chocolate chip cookie before I die.”

So, quite painfully, he rolls out of bed. Laboriously, he crawls down the stairs.

He reaches a trembling hand up for one final taste when he feels a spatula whack his hand, and his wife says, “Put it back! They’re for the funeral.”

Ask not for whom the spatula whacks; it whacks for thee.

See, if I clutch my money, death and the IRS will always get it. The spatula is coming.

But if I sow it like a seed, just give it away, it seems like I’m losing it, but actually, it will bear fruit in many, many different ways.

In fact, Paul says:

Whoever sows generously will also reap generously.

Now he [ God ] who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness.

You will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion. (2 Corinthians 9:6-11)

In other words, you cannot out-give God. You just can’t, because God loves to give.

Give, and it will be given to you. (Luke 6:38)

Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the LORD, and he will reward them for what they have done. (Proverbs 19:17)

A little boy gives to Jesus his lunch of five loaves and two fish, and Jesus fed a crowd of 5,000 people and had 12 baskets of food leftover.

I wonder if they sent that food home with the boy.

Do you realize how much food 12 baskets of food is?

If his mom asked him, “Son, we don’t have a lot of food. Did you have any leftovers from lunch today?”

“Yes, Mom. But we’re going to need a new fridge to hold them all.”

But this is not just something taught in Scripture. You can learn this in your life.

People experience this every day.

We could probably go around the room hearing story after story of how people who understand or know or who have walked through financial pressure or challenges know the blessing it is to trust God with their money.

I know there are so many generous people in this church. And you all ought to know, all the ministry we do is all because of your generosity. It’s all because you give to Blue Oaks.

All the caring for students.
All the love our children receive.
All the service to seniors in our community.
All the homeless support.
The paying of our staff.
This facility.

We don’t have an endowment. We don’t get grants for this stuff. Your generosity makes all of this possible.

3. Generous people live within their means.

The Apostle Paul in his letter to the church at Philippi said:

I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

What a secret that is.

Paul says, “I have learned to live within the means God has provided for me and to do it with contentment.”

In fact, Paul actually instructs people in 1 Corinthians 16 about how they ought to set aside money, they ought to save, and part of why they ought to save is so they would be able to give.

So there actually ought to be margin between what resources have come my way and what I actually spend, my lifestyle.

For a lot of us, we have so many financial resources there ought to be some serious margin.

Where that’s present, where there is margin… plus contentment, it equals financial peace.

margin + contentment = financial peace

That’s what everyone is dying for — financial peace.

At the root of debt is wanting more than God’s provision for my life, wanting more than has come my way, and finding an alternative way of forcing it.

That’s where debt comes in.

At the root of debt very often is a way of saying:

“Hey God, I think you messed up on the provision level for my life. I think it actually needs to be a lot higher than it is.

“What would make me happy is more — more house, more lifestyle, more possessions, more affluence, so I’m going to find a way of doing that.

“God, I think you got your wires crossed. I don’t trust the level of provision coming into my life that you’re sending me is the right one, so I’m going to go into debt to create a new provision line for my life.”

This is what we’ll do. We’ll just say, “I know God wants me to be happy, and if I’m going to be happy, I have to have a higher provision level, and that’s not what’s coming right now, so I’ll find a way to do that.”

We live in a world where it’s very easy to do that.

Credit card companies send out four billion solicitations every year. That’s the equivalent of 16 letters to every man, woman, and child in the US.

You hear from them more than you hear from relatives in your own family.

It may be the primary problem that keeps a lot of people from living generously — the debt problem.

Debt makes people live with a constant sense of financial pressure and bondage.

The writers of Scripture teach this throughout the Bible.

This is from the book of Proverbs:

The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.

It’s a form of slavery.

I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard from people who get in over their heads financially… and what comes next is shame.

People who have wanted to be honest their whole life long find themselves telling lies.
People who have always paid their bills on time and been straightforward in business dealings start to break commitments and betray trust.

They didn’t want to do that.

People who would otherwise be quite courageous end up living in a fear of getting found out and start evading, hyping, and spinning.

Relational trust gets broken. Things start going downhill.

Somewhere in the house there’s a drawer of unpaid bills… or unopened notices from the IRS… or unopened letters from collection agencies. There’s a drawer of shame somewhere.

I just want to say… Because there’s so much financial pressure in the Bay Area. So many people live with that, and it’s just killing them.

There’s no shame here. There’s no guilt here.

At the cross, Jesus died to free us from shame and guilt and sin, and that includes the financial area of life.

He will do that for you.

You can, if you want to, put a stake in the ground on this one and declare:

I’m getting out of debt.
I’m going to cut up my credit cards if I need to.
I will get counsel from a wise financial adviser.
I will join a financial class at Blue Oaks.
I will live within my means.
I will get on a plan.
I’m not going to live in financial bondage anymore.
I will learn to live gratefully within the provision God has given for my life.

Generous people live within their financial means. That’s one of the things they’ve learned to do.

4. Generous people don’t wait until they feel moved to give.

Paul said something very interesting when he wrote to Timothy about financial realities.

Paul said to Timothy:

Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant…

Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous… (1 Timothy 6:17-18)

“Command those who are rich in this present world…”

Who is that?

Well, not me, for sure. But I will be pretty soon. This is kind of exciting.

I just got a phone call (true story) that contained the greatest financial offer of my life.

It was a recording. I didn’t know the person on the other end, but they knew me. In fact, they told me it was their final attempt to reach me. Who knows how many times they tried?

They let me know I have been preapproved for a refinancing arrangement. Not just approved; I have been preapproved. They don’t even know me and they approve of me.

They told me this arrangement will allow me to pay off my student loans. This was amazing, because I got those more than 30 years ago and thought they were all gone.

But I have to respond in 48 hours. Otherwise, my preapproved status will be revoked.

We get bombarded with so many offers.

“Borrow this. Spend this. Buy this. Consume that.” We are so hungry to spend.

Bloomberg reported that at the end of third quarter of 2024, the total credit card debt in the United States hit what is now an all-time high of $1.1 trillion.

Overall debt in the US is $27 trillion. And that doesn’t even include the government debt.

We’re not rich, though.

“Command those who are rich in this present world.” Not me, of course.

It’s kind of strange. I was grumbling the other morning because I had to move a car.

Someone in my family, who I will not name, left their car in front of mine, blocking my car, and early in the morning I had to move their car out and then get my car out and then put their car back and then get back in my car. It was terrible.

Do you know why I was grumbling?

Because I didn’t have with me someone from a developing country who has no car. I didn’t have with me someone in the Bay Area who doesn’t have enough money for a bus ride. That’s why I was grumbling.

We give through Compassion International to a little girl in Ethiopia.

My family visited her one year and we got to be in the tiny little room where her family lives.

I promise you, if she and her mom had been with me, looking at a family with multiple cars and a home like ours — I promise you, if I had been with them, I would not have been complaining about having to move an extra car.

Sometimes we see a picture of someone in need or someone in suffering. We might feel compassion and might think, “Well, I’m a generous person because I feel bad about poverty,” or maybe I even give if I feel bad enough.

This is really interesting.

Andy Stanley, pastor at North Point Church in Atlanta, talked about the power of deception in our financial lives.

Denial makes me think I’m not rich even when I am, and denial makes me think I’m generous even when I’m not.

Paul says:

On the first day of every week,

Resurrection Day now. I’m trusting God.

each one of you

This is about everyone, not just about a few people with a lot of money.

should set aside a sum of money in keeping with your income. (1 Corinthians 16:2)

He doesn’t say, “Wait until someone or something really moves you.”

In fact, notice, Paul wants all this done before he gets there so people don’t depend on some emotional appeal from Paul in order to be generous.

Benjamin Franklin, a couple of centuries ago, was going to hear a famous preacher in his day, George Whitefield.

Benjamin Franklin said he had a few copper coins in his pocket with three or four silver dollars and five gold pieces.

He had decided ahead of time that he wasn’t going to give anything, but Whitefield described this orphanage he was raising money for in such a heartbreaking way that Franklin decided to put in his copper coins, and then he decided to give the silver too, and finally he just emptied his pockets.

He wrote that a friend had come with him, and as a precaution, because his friend knew how persuasive Whitefield was, he had emptied his pockets before he came so he wouldn’t be tempted to give.

But Whitefield was so good that this guy turned to the person next to him and asked him to lend him money so he could put it in the offering.

The man next to him was a Quaker, who replied, “At any other time, Friend Hopkinson, I would lend to thee freely, but not now, for thee seems to be out of thy senses.”

Paul doesn’t say, “Give when you feel moved.” He doesn’t say, “Give when you’re out of your senses.”

He says, “On the first day of the week, set it aside.”

Build this practice into the rhythm of your life.

You can use auto pay in our day. You can make it the first payment on the list.

If you still use a checkbook, you can make it the first check you write.

If you practice giving regularly now, you will grow to feel more generous. If you wait until you feel generous to give, you will likely never grow into a truly generous person.

5. Generous people don’t wait until they have excess cash.

Paul includes another remarkably subversive instruction here.

He says:

On the first day of every week, each one of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with your income. (1 Corinthians 16:2)

He doesn’t say, “Let the wealthy few among you give because you are the philanthropists upon whom our financial strategy depends.”

Here’s why the “each one give” teaching was so revolutionary. Again, we would tend not to catch this in our day.

In the ancient Roman world, of which Corinth was a part, the giving of gifts was practiced regularly by the wealthy and the powerful.

There was a technical term for this. They were called patrons.

They would give money or food, and those who received it were called clients.

Their clients would incur a debt of obligation to the patron.

The client would be in a permanently low status position. They would owe honor and service and loyalty to their patrons.

They would literally (I’m not making this up) walk before their patrons on the streets of Rome or in Corinth and blow trumpets to honor their patrons’ magnificence.

So, giving happened in the ancient world. People saw it in Corinth, but it was always done to enhance the honor and status of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of their clients.

Now, for the first time, giving is a community deal. The poor are no longer obligated to flatter and bow down and blow trumpets for their patrons.

Now everyone gives. Everyone’s generosity matters. Everyone’s generosity counts.

Giving is an act of strength and dignity.

In fact, Jesus once looked at people giving and said it was an impoverished widow who actually demonstrated the greatest generosity of anyone there.

The idea here is not just that everyone’s giving is needed; it’s that everyone needs to give.

The practice of generosity puts us into the jet stream of kingdom reality.

In fact, in the Old Testament, the prophet Malachi is talking about the practice of tithing, giving God the first 10 percent of resources that come to you. God says something extraordinary, unprecedented.

Test me in this and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it. (Malachi 3:10)

This is the only time, as far as I know, in all of the Bible, with all of the commands God gives, where God actually invites people, “Test me. I dare you. Try this. See if I’m not being truthful here.”

This is why we do what’s called the Tithe Challenge.

The idea is if you’ve never been a tither before, do it for 90 days.

Test God and tithe, and if at the end of those 90 days tithing is not clearly a sustainable capacity for you, God is not clearly involved in your finances, then we’ll return that money to you, no questions asked.

We’ve had lots of people do this and enter into a whole new spiritual experience with God.

Generosity is the road to human flourishing. This is just wisdom.

You can even test this even if you don’t believe in God.

The non-generous person thinks, “I can’t afford to give now because I don’t have enough. When I have enough, then I’ll be generous.”

Of course, the question is — How much is enough?

Paul says, “Let each one set it aside.”

I was thinking about this. A lot of churches will say something along these lines before collecting the offering, “If you’re just visiting today, you don’t have to observe the Bible’s commands to be generous. Just let the offering plate go by.”

It’s kind of interesting. We don’t say that about other wisdom in the Bible.

We don’t say, for example, “The writers of Scripture say, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,’ but if you’re just visiting today, don’t worry about that one.”

This is something for everyone, even if you don’t believe in God.

God says, “Test me on this.” So take the generosity challenge. See if it’s not true that when you become generous God enhances your life in every regard.

You cannot out-give God.

Alright, let me pray for you.