Is God a Giver or Taker?
How we view God shapes how we view everything else. How do you view the God of the Bible? Is he severe and strict or gracious and gentle? Another way to help us think about God’s nature is to ask whether he’s a giver or a taker? Do you see God as someone who wants to take or to give?
One reason many people don’t give their lives to God is because they think that God is a taker, not a giver. They assume that God is only interested in taking away their fun, their joy, their freedoms, their lives. One of the things that has to happen for someone to truly give their lives to God is that they need to understand that God is most fundamentally a giver, not a taker.
What do I mean? I mean that, at his core, God is generous, not stingy. God is liberal, meaning lavish, abundant, profuse, and plentiful. He’s open-handed, not close-handed. God is not a miser. God is not a scrooge. God is the most generous Person in the universe.
How do we know that he’s this way? Because the Bible tells us that God made and therefore owns everything. “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Ps. 24:1). God is the “Possessor of heaven and earth” (Gen. 14:19). So everything that is is God’s.
This means that everything we have is Gods. Everything we think we own actually belongs to God. Every molecule of every possession we have is on loan to us from God. Our family, friends, job, money, food, water, house, apartment, car, insurance, children, grandchildren, retirement, blood in our veins and breath in our lungs all belong to God.
God has shared the riches of his creation with us. Paul says that God “richly provides us with everything to enjoy” (1 Tim. 6:17). And James says, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (1:17). God loves to share his stuff. He even wants us to enjoy his stuff.
The even more amazing thing is that God gives his stuff to billions of people who could care less about him. Jesus says that the Father “makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust” (Matt. 5:45). God gives light and water and food and laughter to people who don’t love him (Acts 14:17). God is a giver at heart, not a taker, even toward his enemies.
This is best illustrated in what he gave for people who’ve turned their backs on him. Instead of giving them judgment, he gave them his only Son. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son” (Jn. 3:16). Jesus gave his life for people who by nature don’t want to give their lives to him. “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). God is a giver, not a taker.
Why Preach on Giving?
If God is most fundamentally a giver and not a taker, then one of the most God-like things we can do is give. One person said, “We’re most like God when we’re giving.” For the next two weeks, we’ll be discussing the subject of giving, or generosity.
Most pastors feel very uncomfortable preaching about giving, and I am among their number! There’s the fear of being misunderstood and the fear of people thinking that all the church cares about is money.
Let me be clear about why I want to preach these messages. First, coming off of three weeks of discussion about the church’s mission, I want to make the connection between God’s work in the world and our money. God doesn’t need us, but his design is to use people like us to advance his work. Ministry and missions always takes money. Getting the gospel to the unreached places of the world will require sacrificial giving.
Randy Alcorn, in his book The Treasure Principle, says that people say to him that they want more of a heart for missions. He says to them, “Jesus tells you exactly how to get it. Put your money in missions – and in your church and the poor – and your heart will follow.” He’s referring to what Jesus says in Matthew 6, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (6:21). Our hearts follow our treasure. We put our money in things we love, and we love the things we put our money in. Jesus wants us to love the things he loves, and he loves the nations. So as we put our dollars toward missions, our love for the nations will, Lord willing, increase.
Second, radical generosity marks God’s people off from the world. In other words, generosity is one way that the church is seen as the church in the world. Self-sacrifice defined Jesus and must also define his followers. Many Christians fail to see generosity as a necessary, not optional, part of their Christian discipleship. Generous financial giving reveals that we belong to Jesus.
Third, many Christians haven’t been taught basic biblical principles about giving or have misguided notions as to the what and why of giving.
And fourth, I want to preach on generosity in order to encourage you to keep doing what you’re already doing. One of my great delights as your pastor has been to see your faithfulness in generous giving. I don’t know who gives what. What I do know is that our church’s giving went from $75,000 to $190,000 in five years. And this wasn’t because we grew numerically in any massive way. It’s because God gave our members and new members grace to give generously and consistently. Yes, we had to cut our budget this year for the first time since I came. But this was because we anticipate that our giving will go down this year because around fifteen of our members have moved over the last year. But, amazingly, if the trend of the first quarter continues this year, we’ll give $30,000 more than we anticipated.
Some will hear these messages and be encouraged to keep doing what they’re doing; some will hear them and be challenged to start being more faithful in their giving. Our Church Covenant says, “We covenant to contribute cheerfully and regularly to the support of the ministry, the expenses of the church, the relief of the poor, and the spread of the gospel through all nations.” These messages aren’t given because our church is in financial trouble. These messages are given because generosity is our calling and so I want to encourage us to keep up the good work.
The Collection for the Saints in Jerusalem
I take great comfort in the fact that I’m not the first pastor who’s had the awkward assignment of talking about giving. The apostle Paul talked about giving to the churches he planted. In the early days of the church, a famine hit Jerusalem. Paul and Barnabas were given the task of collecting an offering for the church in Jerusalem (Acts 11:27-30). Paul was eager to do this work (Gal. 6:10). He told the Corinthians how to collect this offering so that it’d be ready when he arrived (1 Cor. 16:1-4). Several years later, we learn that Paul is still involved in this fundraising work (Rom. 15:25-28).
Paul was committed to the work of raising money. He didn’t see it as worldly or unspiritual. Paul loved rallying the troops to help those who were in need. He didn’t mind talking frankly about giving because he understood that real needs required real money to meet them.
In 2 Corinthians 8-9, we find Paul’s most specific and detailed instructions about giving. This is the primary text in the New Testament on giving. We won’t consider all that is here, but I do want us to see several aspects of giving in the New Testament. Paul says that giving should be grace-motivated, joy-filled, and worship-producing.
Grace-Driven Giving
Notice first that giving starts with grace (8:1-7). Paul begins this section by telling the Corinthians about how God’s grace has been at work in the “churches of Macedonia.” These are the churches in northern Greece, the churches of Thessalonica, Philippi, and Berea. Corinth is in southern Greece, near Athens. Paul’s intent is to encourage the Corinthians in their giving by telling them about the grace that God is pouring out on other churches.
It’s likely that when Paul first devised the plan to collect money for the Jerusalem church, he didn’t plan to include the churches of Macedonia because they already faced hardships of their own. But through Paul’s gospel ministry among them, “the grace of God had been given to them” (v. 1). As a result, they gave themselves first to the Lord and then to Paul (v. 5). They “begged” Paul to allow them to participate in the collection for the needy Christians in Jerusalem.
Notice the flow of events in these Macedonian churches. Paul comes with the gospel, God gives them grace to believe, they give themselves to God, they give themselves to Paul, and then they want to give money to Christians they don’t even know.
This is what gospel grace does. In the gospel, grace from God comes to rebels who hate God, canceling our sin and making us holy, and then creates in us desires to do to others what God has done to us.
In the churches of Macedonia, the grace of God created new desires to be generous. Verse 2 says they were happy to help despite their own affliction and poverty. God’s grace to these churches produced “a wealth of generosity.” And they were poor and struggling! Lack of money and affliction didn’t keep them from being generous. God’s grace overcame these obstacles toward giving and compelled them to give when it didn’t appear that they could or should.
Verse 3 says that grace moved these Christians to give voluntarily and sacrificially. They gave “of their own accord.” Paul didn’t have to beg and plead and cajole and manipulate and guilt them into giving. They were the ones begging him to give (v. 4)! It was their idea. They heard of a need and the grace of God in their hearts made them to want to help.
The verse says that they each “gave according to their means…and beyond their means.” Each Christian gave what they could. Paul says that he witnessed with his own eyes (“as I can testify”) that they even gave “beyond their means.” God’s grace gave them power to do things they didn’t think they could do, things like give amounts of money they never dreamed they could give.
This is instructive for us. The Macedonian churches weren’t giving from their surplus. They didn’t have disposable income and decide that helping the Jerusalem church would be a good way to spend it. No, Paul says that they joyfully gave out of their poverty, giving more than Paul expected or may have even thought wise. Again, this was all “of their own accord.” Their generosity wasn’t the result of a flashy TV preacher who whipped up a crowd with promises of health and wealth if they gave to his ministry. Their generosity was the result of God’s grace (v. 1).
Stingy Giving among American Christians
Paul mentions this in order to challenge the Corinthians to excel in their giving, just as they excel in other things (v. 7). Paul used the example of the Macedonian churches to encourage and exhort the Corinthian church to do likewise.
And the Holy Spirit inspired this text so that they might do the same for us. The Macedonian churches stand as an indictment to churches in our culture. They gave generously out of their poverty; we give stingily out of our wealth.
I want to spend the next several minutes backing up this claim. Sociologists Christian Smith and Michael Emerson wrote a book with Oxford University Press several years ago titled Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don’t Give Away More Money. They summarize the state of American Christian giving on the first page of their book:
“Contemporary American Christians are among the wealthiest of their faith in the world today and probably the most affluent single group of Christians in two thousand years of church history…Nearly all American Christians also belong to churches that teach believers, as stewards of the belongings with which God has blessed them, to give money generously for the work of God’s kingdom…Most American Christians also profess to want to see the gospel preached in the world, the hungry fed, the church strengthened, and the poor raised to enjoy lives of dignity and hope – all tasks that normally require money. And yet, despite all of this, American Christians give away relatively little money to religious and other purposes. A sizeable number of Christians give no money, literally nothing. Most of the rest of American Christians give little sums of money…All of the evidence…points to the same conclusion: when it comes to sharing their money, most contemporary American Christians are remarkably ungenerous.”
They go on to say, “The goal of this book is not to morally chide or condemn American Christians for their tightfistedness. We do not need to. The numbers speak for themselves.” Smith and Emerson are saying that the giving of American Christians, compared to our wealth, is embarrassing.
According to their research, one out of five American Christians give literally nothing to churches or other charities. They found that American Christians give 2.9% of their household income to church or other charities. They point out that Jews and Mormons outgive Christians, saying, “If financial giving were a competition among different types of religious believers in the United States, American Christians would be among the definite losers of the contest.”
Another finding of their research is that a small number of generous givers contribute most of the total dollars given. They say that this may lead us to think that the most generous givers are the wealthiest people, when in fact that’s not the case. According to their research, higher income earning American Christians give little to no more money as a percentage of household income than lower income earning Christians. Meaning that those, for example, who make over $100k per year on average give the same percentage as those making $40k per year. The amount may be more, but the percentages are the same. Emerson and Smith conclude, “Differences in generosity of giving are evidently driven by factors other than the capacity to give generously.” In other words, just because someone makes a lot of money doesn’t mean they’re more generous with it.
Consumerism Hinders Generosity
Why is this the case? Why are American Christians less generous than we could be? In their conclusion, Emerson and Smith give six reasons but I’ll just mention the first one because it’s the most important and pervasive. Here’s how they put it, “Every Christian impulse to generously give money away inevitably runs up against potent counter-impulses driven by mass consumerism to instead perpetually spend, borrow, acquire, consume, discard, and then spend more on oneself and family…the dominance of mass consumerism works powerfully and in many ways against American Christians freely and liberally giving away significant proportions of their incomes to people, ministries, needs, and good causes, as most of their religious traditions call them to do.”
They’re saying that the main reason we don’t give more money away is because we’ve been trained by our culture to spend most of our money on ourselves. Undoubtedly, we’ll need to spend a lot of our money to provide for our basic needs. But their point is that we’ve bought the lie of consumerism, namely, that we need things that we actually don’t need. For example, we need housing but we often want a house or apartment that goes beyond our need. We need transportation, but we often want a vehicle that goes beyond our need.
Emerson and Smith’s argument is that consumerism is the number one hindrance to our generosity. What else best explains why, on average, we give away 3% of our wealth and keep 97%?
Radical Simplicity
Emerson and Smith are saying that if we put consumerism to death, we’d be able to give away a lot more money. Practically, this means seeking to live lives of radical simplicity in a culture of consumption.
What could this look like? It could start with rethinking the way we approach our standard of living as it relates to our income. For example, why do we assume that our standard of living has to increase as our income increases? What if, instead, we decided how much we need to live on and consider giving away the rest?
Over in chapter 9, verse 11, Paul tells us why God gives us so much, “You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way.” God tells us why he gives us more than we need. It’s not so that we can increase our standard of living. He gives us more than we need so that we can give generously. Alcorn puts it this way, “God prospers (us) not to raise (our) standard of living, but to raise (our) standard of giving.” When there are so many needs in the world, why do we think that a raise in our income means a raise in our standard of living?
Other things we can do to kill consumerism and promote generosity are limiting our intake of social media and other marketing mediums which can foster in us a sense of need for things we don’t need and promote covetousness. We can follow the Voice of the Martyrs and read up on how other Christians in the world are living. We can talk to other believers about big purchases we plan on making to gain wisdom and insight about their necessity. We can take a family trip to a junk yard to give ourselves a powerful object lesson about the final resting place of every single thing we own.
The apostle Paul says, “If we have food and clothing, with these we will be content” (1 Tim. 6:8). He doesn’t even mention housing! Paul is radical about the difference between want and need. We need far less than our culture tells us we need. But because we’ve believed the hundreds of thousands of commercials and marketing ploys out there, we end up spending money on stuff we don’t need and therefore have little left over to give away.
The thing about possessions is that we think we own them, but they end up owning us. Everything we buy, every investment we make, is one more thing to think about, talk about, take care of, repair, worry about, and replace when it breaks. Ecclesiastes 5:12, “Sweet is the sleep of the laborer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep.” The more stuff you have, the more stuff you have to worry about. This is the tyranny of consumerism.
Alcorn says that giving is the best antidote to our consumerism. Why? Because Jesus says that our hearts will follow our treasure. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:21). Paul puts it like this in 1 Timothy 6:17-18, “As for the rich in the present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share.”
If consumerism is the sickness, giving is the cure. If our hope is set on the accumulation of stuff or the appearance of success, then we’ll continue throwing breadcrumbs toward the needs of the world. But if our hope is set on God, then our hands will open and we’ll be “generous and ready to share.”
Giving Follows Grace
Back in 2 Corinthians 8:1-7, Paul said that the Macedonians gave generously to Christians they didn’t even know as a result of God’s grace working in their lives. The gracious giving of God motivated the gracious giving of God’s people.
What motivates your giving? Is it mere philanthropy, or “paying it forward,” or giving back to the community, or to ease your guilt for having more than others, or to feel good about yourself, or to receive the rewards of health, wealth, and prosperity. Or is your giving motivated by the grace of God?
The action of God’s grace in our hearts creates the reaction of giving. As Alcorn says, “As thunder follows lightning, giving follows grace.” If there’s not a profound understanding and experiencing of the grace of God in our lives, generous giving won’t follow.