Generosity

Sermon Transcript

One of the funnier commercials I saw recently was the Domino’s commercial in which you are asked to add a tip for all kinds of outlandish purchases. Another similar trend I’ve noticed is being asked, pretty much anytime I make a purchase, if I want to round up to contribute to some charity. Our government even allows you to write off your taxable income any money you donated to charity. Most Americans look favorably on Bill and Melinda Gates for how much of their money they have contributed to charitable causes throughout the world. We admire generosity, and most honest historians would recognize that such an admiration is owing at least in part to the significant influence the Bible has exerted on America. I’m not saying America is a Christian nation and certainly am not saying many Americans are or have been Christians, but I am just recognizing that the Bible does in fact extol generosity, and that this seems to have influenced the moral imagination of many Americans. Whether you are here today as a believer in Jesus or not, you probably feel like you should be generous, and you maybe even walk around with some low-key guilt for the times you say no to rounding up, or the times you walk past beggars and don’t give them anything. As we look at proverbs on generosity or kindness today, I won’t pretend they give you the answers to every decision about whether to round up or give to someone who asks. That’s not generally the way the Bible works, and especially not the way Proverbs works. What proverbs typically do is they chart out a path for us, the path of wisdom, that leads to life and blessing, and warn us against the path of folly that leads to death and curse. Accordingly, as we look at these proverbs today, we’ll see that it is more blessed to give than to keep. To understand that we’ll look at the characteristics of a giving life, the blessing of a giving life, and then finally at the Lord, the giver of life.

 

The characteristics of a giving life

 

Proverbs 21:26 says that “all day long the sluggard craves and craves, but the righteous gives and does not hold back.” This isn’t the sermon on work; we did that a few weeks ago, but notice the difference in orientation between the sluggard and the righteous. The sluggard craves and craves, and what is craving? It’s a desire to take and to consume. The sluggard doesn’t work; the sluggard sits, and demands that others give to him or her. But the righteous, the righteous not only works, but the righteous takes what he or she earns from their labors, gives, and does not hold back. The righteous or the wise in Proverbs, then, is the person who lives an outwardly oriented life. It’s their pattern to be a giver. The righteous life is a giving life; the wise life is a giving life.

 

And because that giving life is the heart posture of the righteous, it inclines them to give to even surprising objects. Listen to this from Proverbs 12:10 – “Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.” The righteous have regard even for the life of animals. Proverbs was written in an agrarian context, in which many people either owned farms or worked on farms on which cows, sheep, and goats especially were raised. These animals were regularly slaughtered and sacrificed to God, and God required as much in his law; so Proverbs 12:10 isn’t saying the righteous never kill their animals. But it is saying they have regard for their animals; they care for them, they respect them as creations of God, and even when they kill them, they do so in such a way as to minimize pain to the animal. If you were with us last year when we looked at Leviticus or if you have just read Leviticus yourself, do you remember what the first step was in sacrificing an animal when you brought it to offer it at the tent of meeting? You slit its throat. Why? Because that killed it quickly and relatively painlessly. You didn’t dance around it and taunt it and beat it and then kill it.

 

Jonathan Edwards described the nature of true virtue as benevolence to being in general, and you can see where he got that from. The righteous gives and does not hold back—it doesn’t say he gives only to his family or the people he likes—he has a giving spirit. His kindness extends even to his animal. But, Proverbs 12:10 says, the mercy of the wicked is cruel. In other words, on one extreme you have the righteous, who is kind even to animals, but on the other extreme you have the wicked who are so cruel, that even when they are merciful, it’s still cruel! You can imagine the master who gets a kick out of beating his animal, so on a normal day he beats it 50 times, but one day, he decides to be merciful, and only beats it 20 times. That’s merciful compared to his norm, but still cruel. Or consider times when something appears merciful that is actually cruel. We saw a few weeks ago the importance of impartiality in judgment, but imagine a judge lets a violent criminal go free when they should have been punished under the law. That appears merciful, but what happens when he commits another violent crime? That mercy was actually cruel to both the original victim to whom justice was denied, to the next victim who the state failed to protect, and, ironically, it’s cruel to the criminal who has not been confronted with the gravity of his sin.

 

So Proverbs 24:11 says, “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.” To rescue someone being taken away to death you must oppose whoever it is taking them away to death. That could be a judge who is wrongly sentencing them to death, that could be a false teacher who is leading them on the path that God has said leads to death. Many today associate a giving life or a kind life with an affirming life—so the thinking goes something like this: “You shouldn’t rescue those who are being taken away to death. If they want to follow that false teacher, who are you to tell them they shouldn’t? In fact, it’s arrogant of you to claim that you know their way is the way to death. Have you ever considered that maybe your way is?” The second half of this verse even suggests that we may need to attempt to rescue people from themselves. In it, they are not being taken away to death—rather, they are simply stumbling to it on their own. If you remember back to Proverbs 1:32, there we read that “the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them.” Or in Proverbs 7 we read of how the fool is led astray to the house of the forbidden woman like an ox that goes to the slaughter, and that her house is the way to Sheol.

 

So what was Solomon doing in writing those Proverbs? He was trying to rescue his son from being taken away to death by folly! It might have appeared merciful for him to instead say, “Hey, who am I to say what’s right or wrong? If that’s what you want, I’m here to cheer you on,” but that would have been a cruel mercy indeed. So we who have been given the good news of Jesus Christ’s work to save sinners should not see so many of our neighbors, co-workers, family, and friends stumbling to hell without telling them the way of salvation. And if we even see a Christian brother or sister following false teachers or otherwise heading down the path of sin, the kind thing to do is to warn them and call them to repentance; the cruel thing is to simply let them go on a path to destruction. One characteristic of a giving life is a willingness to give your own safety, your own security, your own pleasure in the feeling that other people like you and aren’t mad at you, to rescue those who are being led to death, and to hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.

 

The righteous gives and does not hold back. She gives kindness even to her animals; she gives her comfort and security to hold back those stumbling to the slaughter, and someone with a giving spirit will have a special concern to give to the poor. Proverbs 14:21 says, “Whoever despises his neighbor is a sinner, but blessed is he who is generous to the poor.” A giving spirit wants to give especially to those who do not have. A taking spirit may give sometimes, but the giving is always with the expectation of return, which will not incline them to give to the poor. But a giving spirit is generous to the poor, without expectation of return. The righteous gives and does not hold back.

 

How can you do this? One obvious way is to give financial assistance directly to the materially poor. Another is to provide other kinds of material assistance—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, for example. I know one brother here who simply got to know a poor man who hung around his neighborhood, and when he’d see the man by his house, he’d offer to bring him a sandwich. I know others who will keep granola bars, socks, water bottles, or other care items in their car or on their person so they have something ready to give when they encounter a materially poor individual. Another way to give to the poor is to give your time. Gareth talked a couple weeks ago about how the poor often lack friendships or social capital—you can give your time to be a friend, have over for a meal, give a ride, or accompany to a doctor’s appointment, someone who lacks others to do such things.

 

Our efforts in this regard are generally strengthened the more we work together on them. As a church, we have a benevolence fund and a deacon of benevolence who oversees the ways we pool our money together to be able to better assist the materially poor among us. The advantage of that, apart from even seeing it patterned in the New Testament, is that it enables us to pool more of our money together, it enables us to get to know the person we are assisting to assess what sort of assistance is actually most helpful in their situation, it enables us to also care for their souls with the gospel alongside helping with their material needs, and it enables that person to develop friendships within the church that don’t have the added dynamic of financial dependence on any individual or family. As a church we also pool our money to support the Hope Pregnancy Center up the street as they seek to care for preborn children and the often-impoverished moms and dads now considering how to care for such children. We pool our money to assist the Spring Garden K-8 school as they seek to care for many of the poor children in the surrounding neighborhood, and we thank God for Kaley and the other members of our church who help us organize that assistance. We’re also thankful in this area especially for the work of Philly House and Helping Hand Rescue Mission to care for the materially poor, and you may find your money, things, and time, are better spent by giving them to these organizations either by donation or volunteer hours which then enables you to work with others to be generous to the poor.

 

Proverbs doesn’t spell out all the details on how we are to be generous to the poor, and we could give another sermon to looking at other guidelines and parameters for our generosity the poor, but what Proverbs does do is clearly depict generosity to the poor as characteristic of a giving spirit, a giving life. And if it is in your heart to give to the poor, you tend to find ways to do it through prayer, the wisdom of others, and trial and error. Let’s look next, then, at the blessings of a giving life.

 

The blessings of a giving life

 

Somewhat surprisingly perhaps, the book of Proverbs presents generosity as a path to greater wealth. “One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want” (Prov 11:24). “Whoever gives to the poor will not want, but he who hides his eyes will get many a curse” (Prov 28:27). Recall that wisdom is the art of perceiving reality and living in accordance with it, and there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death (Prov 14:12). The way that seems right to a man to accumulate wealth is to keep, to hoard even. But these proverbs show us that in reality, it is more blessed to give than to keep. Why? Because as God made everything in wisdom, God created the world in such a way that giving is actually the best path to gaining. Think of it like seeds—what must you do with seeds if you want to gain more? You must let go of them. You must give them to the ground, to God’s creation, and from them you will then reap some harvest of fruit, as much as God’s heavenly wisdom appoints, and that fruit contains in it seed for further fruit. So in the New Testament we read that it is the one who sows sparingly who will also reap sparingly, whereas the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully (2 Cor 9:6).

 

Now, am I saying that if you give 10$ to your church, God will miraculously deposit 10 or even 20$ into your account in the week that follows? No; the Proverbs don’t promise that. Generosity isn’t karma or a tit-for-tat way of putting God in your debt and manipulating him into making you materially wealthy. But generosity is an act of faith; it’s a way of saying, “What seems right to me is to keep this for myself, but I’m going to trust that God is governing this universe in wisdom, and he says the wise path to accumulating real wealth is to give. So I am going to give generously and trust him to provide according to his heavenly wisdom.” What’s one the things that restrains our giving, anyway? Isn’t it fear that we won’t have enough if we give? Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding (Prov 3:5). Whoever gives to the poor will not want.

 

Now again, maybe you think, “I don’t know; I’ve got plenty of neighbors who don’t seem to give any of their money away, and their houses are nicer than mine.” But do they want more? The second half of Proverbs 11:24 says that another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want. If you have a taking spirit, you will always think if you can just get the next thing, the slightly bigger house, the slightly nicer car, the slightly better vacation, then you’ll be content. Then you get it, and what do you find? Your heart still wants more, wants better. So your net worth may be higher than the person living a giving life, but you are less satisfied!

 

When you give, though, and give in such a way that you have to actually say no to the bigger house, the nicer car, and the better vacation, what do you find? You find that there is enough satisfaction to be had in God himself that those things aren’t actually that important. You find, as John Piper once put it, that “copper will do”. He was saying that it is possible to make gold, but live on copper, so that you can be generous, because “copper will do”. Last year you all very generously gave me a 3-month sabbatical, and one thing I did during that sabbatical was present a paper at the John Owen Convention in Belfast, Northern Ireland. At the beginning of the year, I thought I’d take my wife with me to it, and so I started thinking about what I could cut out of my spending to afford to take her. Shortly thereafter we realized it wasn’t going to work to take her, and it dawned on me: “If I was willing to cut so many things out of my life to take my wife to Ireland, why wouldn’t I just cut that stuff anyway and free up more money to give to my church and others?” Because, after all, copper will do. As the apostle Paul said, “godliness with contentment is great gain” (1 Tim 6:6).

 

So one blessing of a giving life is that it does tend to bring greater material prosperity, according to God’s wisdom, and with it a contentment in the level of prosperity God does choose to bring you. Another blessing the proverbs talk about of a giving life is greater social prosperity. “The people curse him who holds back grain, but a blessing is on the head of him who sells it” (Prov 11:26). Here the scene envisaged is a man who has grain that he could sell to feed others, but instead he just keeps it for himself and perhaps his family. The verse doesn’t say he has to give it away for free; to earn income from what you produce is a basic biblical right, but to hoard it and refuse to sell it reveals a keeping spirit, and while it may bring you temporary material prosperity personally, it will not bring social prosperity. The people don’t bless that person, but they do bless the one who sells his grain.

 

“Many seek the favor of a generous man, and everyone is a friend to a man who gives gifts” (Prov 19:6). Now again, I’ll give a similar disclaimer to this one that I gave to material blessing flowing from generosity: Generosity isn’t a get-friends-quick scheme. If your spirit is still a taking spirit, and your heart orientation is to take money and consume it and take friends and consume their affection for you, generosity won’t serve as a means to that end. You won’t really give and not hold back if that’s where your heart is at. Instead, you’ll give, then you’ll wait and see if the people are giving you the affection or admiration you crave, and the moment you sense they aren’t, you’ll go back to keeping, and never become truly generous.

 

So here’s one of these ironies of reality, another one of those surprising features of reality as God made it in his wisdom: Giving, rather than keeping, is the path to gaining. We already saw that when it comes to material prosperity, and so here, it’s when you stop trying to get people to like you and instead just focus on giving generously that you find people start to like you. As C.S. Lewis put it, “You will never start making a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making.” Don’t go try to be generous and then constantly assess whether it’s gaining you friends. Just go try to be generous, and one day, in God’s timing, you will generally wake up and find that you have real friends.

 

I’ve observed something in my own past dating relationships and as I’ve walked with others through theirs. Usually when two people date, they like each other, but sometimes, one partner in the relationship likes the other inordinately, and begins to need the other person—they need constant reassurance that the other still likes them, they need immediate answers to text messages, they need tangible expressions of affection whenever they’re anxious, and so on. What’s happening there? The spirit of the needy person has become a taking spirit, rather than giving spirit, and guess what generally happens in those relationships? The other partner gets burnt out and breaks it off, and it’s reasonable for them to do so: They aren’t God, and if the other partner is demanding they be god, that’s not a recipe for a healthy marriage. The recipe for a healthy marriage, among other things, is when each person going into it is going in to give of themselves for the good of the other. Demand that people give to you, crave their affection, grumble when you feel they aren’t giving it enough, criticize them every time they fall short of it, and you will generally find yourself alone. Forget all that, forget yourself, give and don’t hold back, and you will generally find yourself rich with relationships.

 

These are some of the blessings of the giving life, but again, why is our world like this? Why is giving the path to gaining? One answer to which I’ve already alluded is that’s how God made the world in his wisdom, but let’s push it back one more layer: Why did God make the world this way in his wisdom? Well, one of the things the Bible means when it says God made the world according to his wisdom is that he made it in a way that reflects his wisdom. It’s not arbitrary, in other words. It reflects something of what he is like, because he is the Lord, the giver of life. Giving is the path to gaining because giving images the generosity of the Lord, the giver of life.

 

The Lord, the giver of life

 

Look at Proverbs 14:31 – “Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him.” So why would giving to the poor bring blessing, while oppressing the poor brings curse? Because God is the maker of the poor, and God takes how you treat the poor personally. If you oppress the poor, it’s an insult to the maker of the poor. If you are generous to the poor, God takes it as a way of honoring him. If I ever saw someone trying to oppress one of my kids, it’s hard to explain the kind of anger that would produce in me, whereas when I see one of you loving my kids as I so often do, I feel loved by it. Why? They’re my children. This is even more so the case with God because while you could give me food and help me directly, we cannot help God directly. He is all he needs eternally, and so we cannot add anything to him. But we can add something to our poor neighbor, who he made.

 

Or look at Proverbs 19:17 – “Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the LORD, and he will repay him for his deed.” When you are generous to the poor, you shouldn’t view it as a loan to the poor. We give without expectation of return from them; after all, we are giving to them precisely because they don’t have anything with which to pay us back. Ah, but God does see it as a loan, only he assumes the position of the debtor! He says if you are generous to the poor, it is like you are lending to him, and he never fails to pay back. Whether in this life or the next, the LORD will repay him for his deed. Sometimes you give to the poor and wonder, “Is that really doing any good?” but take comfort in this: When you are generous to the poor, you are lending to the LORD, and he will repay you for it. As the maker, the giver of life to the poor, God takes your generosity to the poor personally.

 

Even before God made all of us, including the poor, God was a giver. The ultimate giving life is the life of God himself, a father eternally begetting a son, united in love by their Spirit. In creation, what did he do? He gave life, as his Spirit hovered over the face of the deep and brought forth light, life, and every good thing. He made man in his image and did what? Breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (Gen 2:7). And why did God do all this? The best answer we can seem to get from scripture is simply that it pleased him to do so. He did it because he likes to give. He had no need to satisfy; the Father, Son, and Spirit were perfect and complete in himself. And yet, he gave. Makoto Fujimara is a Japanese artist and a Christian, and he was once asked to answer the objection of those who say that art is useless. His response was that art is useless, and that’s why we need it. It reminds us that we do not live in a factory built by some divine CEO who uses it to produce products and generate revenue he needs to satisfy some need in him. Instead, to use Calvin’s phrase, we live in a theater, the work of an artist, who out of the generosity within him, made all things.

 

And not only did God make us; he made us in his image. After breathing into the first man’s nostrils the breath of life, what did he do? He put him in a garden, to work and keep it. What happens when you work and keep a garden generally? More life is produced. Then God made the woman from the man and said that a man should leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two should become one flesh, which would then ordinarily do what? Produce more life, life the woman would then have the privilege of carrying and bringing into the world. And God told these humans to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it (Gen 1:28). You see the orientation God created them with? Outward, like himself—a giving spirit.

 

But then a serpent entered the garden; and what did he say? Take. Take from the tree of which God commanded you not to eat. So they did, and then they gave to all their children, including you and me, not only bodily life, but hearts bent on taking, keeping, and consuming. Yet even then, God gave. God gave the first humans animal skins to cover their nakedness, and God gave them a promise, that one day a child would come from the woman who would defeat the serpent. In fact, that child would be God’s own Son, who he gave up for us all, and that Son, Jesus Christ, gave his flesh for the life of the world. One of the images that reoccurs throughout these Proverbs on generosity is the image of our eyes. “Whoever has a bountiful eye will be blessed” Proverbs 22:9 says, whereas “he who hides his eyes will get many a curse” Proverbs 28:27 says. The eyes of a giving spirit are open, eager to see opportunities to give. The eyes of a selfish spirit are closed, oriented entirely inward. But Jesus is the one opened his eyes, who saw us stumbling to the slaughter, trapped in the prison of our selfishness, and came to rescue us. He saw us in our poverty, with no righteousness of our own, and he gave. He gave his very life in our place, to bear the judgment from God that we deserved for all our taking and consuming, and because he gave, God gave him eternal life when he raised him from the dead, and gave him the gift of the Holy Spirit, which he then sent into the world to convict us of our sins, lead us to faith in Christ, and work in us the generous spirit of Jesus himself.

 

If you are here today and you aren’t yet a believer in Jesus, perhaps you were already on board with the concept of generosity before you came. Some today will speak of putting positive energy or positive vibes out into the universe with faith that if they do, positive things will come back to them. But can you really assume that about the universe? Granted that it does often happen that way, but why does it happen that way? What best explains that kind of universe? A universe that is a product merely of matter, motion, time, and chance, or a universe that is created and governed by a generous being? You can’t please an impersonal universe and expect a reward from it, but you can please a personal God and expect a reward from him. The only way to please the generous God who made this universe in which you and I live is to first admit your selfishness, admit your resistance to him, and accept the gift of salvation that he offers you in Christ Jesus. Receive Christ by faith alone, and God will forgive you your sins, and begin to work in you his giving life. If you have Christ, what more do you need? If you have Christ, copper will do. If you have Christ, you can give up your money, you can even give up your whole self, and still find, that you have all you need.