Cheerful Giving

benefit of the people watching. 2 Corinthians 9 Verse 6 Paul writes, The point is this, whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion. For God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.

So, when I read this passage, I have to tell you that it's about giving to the church. So this is about donating, really, your resources, your money, your time, to your church, to the general invisible church as well. So there's two things we call the church. There's the visible church, that's us, like you guys here right now, are the visible church, the baptized believers who are in fact members of a local body of the visible church.

The invisible church is all of the elect who are going to be saved by Jesus Christ or are saved, and it's something you can't see. So I can't look at one of the children in here who have not yet professed Christ and say they're part of the church because I don't know that yet. But God knows. But so we're to actually give to the church financially. And what that means is that if you are a person who makes some money, you go to work and you make money.

One of your roles in life is to help your church to be able to do things. So I'll just give you an example. I was just talking to Jeremy and Kristen about this and this might be a reminder for Brother Roberts I told Jason to go and buy 10 more hymn books or whatever a good you know whatever the discount it comes at or you know whatever And well we need money to buy hymn books right We need money to pay rent It sounds easy to say, well, churches shouldn't be about money.

And I agree, we shouldn't be about money. but we have to pay a place to let us meet there unless we're going to meet in houses in which case it still costs money to do things and so God loves a cheerful giver because when we give cheerfully it shows that we're giving for the right reasons. Have you ever had somebody do something for you and you could tell they did it begrudgingly? That they didn't really want to do it but they did it anyway?

Or how about you kids? Is any of you listening? Have you ever had your brother or sister do something to you and your parent made them tell you they're sorry? We try not to do that too much. But have you ever had somebody say, I'm sorry, and you knew they weren't really sorry? You knew they were just saying it because they knew that's what they were supposed to say so they could get to the next thing, right?

Right, Hanley? You've got to pay attention. And the pastor might call your name, right? Right, Jack? Jack knows that. But so, God loves a cheerful giver.

And what that means is that in your heart, you're actually to decide that you want to give to God. And there's a lot of passages in Scripture about what we give to God. But here it says, each one must give as he has decided in his heart. And so the New Testament prescription for giving has to do with purposing in your heart what you ought to give. And there's no law in the New Testament that tells you give this much.

Right? And a lot of people want to do that. A lot of people want to say you should tithe. So they use an Old Testament word called tithe. And they want to say, well, you get a paycheck. You should give 10% to the church.

They make it a real simple thing. And if you don't do it, you're a bad Christian. And if you do do it, then you're doing what you're supposed to do. And anytime we try to obey a law that is made by men and not necessarily by God, what we do is we actually are feeding our own self-righteousness. And the New Testament allows us to use our heart and our wisdom in our heart to make that decision A family that has I just going to use an example I not picking any example but the number six came to mind A family with six children and another family with two children may have different needs Well, those two families may not give the same amount of money to the church, even if those families make the same amount of money, we'll say, because they have more expenses, right? at any time you may have a need to do something that would change how much you would want to give to the church let's say you give to the church every week and you give the same amount you've been doing it for a while and you feel good about that and then your job changes and you don't make the same amount of money I think it would be wrong for a person to accuse you of wrongdoing because you had to reduce your giving in that case but I also think if you make more money that should increase your giving so our goal should always be to give to help the church of God and the church has a lot of different needs you know that one of the goals of this church is that we want to be able to pay elders to be able to work full time or even if they could work part time so that men who lead the church can actually spend their time focused on preparing to preach, praying for you, visiting you and doing all the other work that has to happen in order to lead a church well.

That's one of our goals as well. And here we are getting kicked out of our building, right? For lack of a better phrase, probably the best phrase. And now we need the money. We need money to pay rent. But if we had money saved, we maybe could have bought something, right?

And had a more permanent thing. So this is how we give. But what I want you to think about when we come to communion, though, is that Jesus Christ gave Himself for us. God loves a cheerful giver, and I have to believe that even though this passage is about giving your money, I have to believe that Jesus Christ is a cheerful giver. That when Jesus Christ gave His body and His blood for your sins, that He did it not reluctantly or under compulsion, but has he had decided in his heart?

So I think sometimes we have this vision, and hopefully you don have too many visions particularly with God but we have this idea of God I don even want to conjure images in your mind But we have this idea of God the Father saying oh we need to save all these people Who's going to do it? And Jesus kind of being like not wanting to say anything. And then the Father's like, well, hey, why don't we just sacrifice you?

And Jesus being like, I don't really want to, but I guess I'll do it. And that's not Jesus. That's not the Jesus that saves his people. the Jesus who saves his people is the one who from all eternity through the counsel of the will of God decreed that he would save his people and he sings over them with joy and he rejoices over every sinner that he saves not because of how good you are because of what he's done for you but he doesn't do it reluctantly or grudgingly he does it cheerfully Jesus more cheerfully went to the cross to die for you than we go to him for forgiveness and so when you think about communion when you think about what we're going to do I want you to remember that Jesus cheerfully gave of himself he took on flesh as Burke just read in the Athanasian Creed he took on flesh suffered and died in the place of sinners and he did it out of love and so when you come to communion I want you to remember Jesus Christ today I want you to remember that he cheerfully loves you that his love for you manifested itself in the giving of himself for you we read this yesterday right and no greater love does anyone have than this, that someone laid down his life for his friends.

And keep in mind, you weren't Jesus' friend when he died for you. You were his enemy. It's great love, but great joy and cheerfulness. He's not a God that's sad that you got saved. He's not a God that's sad that he had to die for you. He's a God that joyfully gave of himself.

And so, when you come to the table, meditate today on the fact that Jesus Christ died for you. And that He did it with great joy in His heart. So I'll come down and we'll get our elements and then we'll have a time of meditation once you have them in your hand.