A small boy stunned his parents after church one Sunday when he began to empty his pockets of coins - fives, tens, twenties, fifties, one and two dollar pieces.
Finally his mother asked the obvious question, “Where did you get all that money?”
“At Sunday school,” the boy replied nonchalantly. “They have bowls of it.”
Tags: stewardship, Worship
There were two men shipwrecked on this island. The minute they got on to the island one of them started screaming and yelling, “We’re going to die! We’re going to die! There’s no food! No water! We’re going to die!”
The second man was propped up against a palm tree and acting so calmly it drove the first man crazy. “Don’t you understand?!? We’re going to die!!” The second man replied, “You don’t understand, I make $100,000 a week.”
The first man looked at him quite dumbfounded and asked, “What difference does that make?!? We’re on an island with no food and no water! We’re going to DIE!!!” The second man answered, “You just don’t get it. I make $100,000 a week and I tithe ten percent on that $100,000 a week. My pastor will find me!”
Tags: stewardship, Worship
So here’s my main points for tomorrow morning…
Life is to be shared, not acquired!
Looking at the character of God I am often amazed at God’s generosity. The ways in which God continues to pour his blessings into our lives without conditions. It’s in the nature of God to share. Think about it. Creation. Patient guidance of a wayward people. The servant nature of Jesus’ leadership. The giving of God’s presence in the Holy Spirit. The giving of gifts and the development of God’s character in us. That’s what God’s goodness is about.
As we focus on God we realise that life is to be shared, not acquired.
Winston Churchill once said, “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
Recently I’ve started earning revenue from my television adverts blog. I’ve put in text-related advertisements from Google Adsense on the side of the blog. So every time someone clicks one of those ads my credit goes up. Some people make a living out of doing this, with their sites attracting thousands of people each day. But my site only has about 700 people a day. All the same, I’ve been sharing with my family the excitement of seeing the dollars build up each week. My daughter has given me the challenge of using the income to sponsor a family through World Vision. Wow! I realised as she said this that I could so easily have become obsessed with gaining income - so much that I was overlooking how we could share it with others.
That’s the difficulty we have isn’t it. The culture we live in values acquisition, possession and comfort. We equate happiness with being ‘well off’. What if we followed Jesus’ lead and turned that round so that being happy was associated with how we shared our wealth with others? Instead of conforming to our culture, we’re called to be counter-cultural in a way that transforms our society.
Being generous with what we have to give, now
I was at a workshop on generational change recently. One of the exercises we used was for each generation to come up with questions for the others. The Gen X group asked the Baby Boomers, “Why did you give up on the ideals of social justice that you had when you were younger?” The answer - we bought houses.
Have you ever dreamed about what it would be like to have more money than you have? What would happen if by some chance you won the lottery? Or if you inherited thousands of dollars from some rich aunt. Would you give more and serve more than you do now? Would you be more generous than you are now?
The reality is that our generosity is linked with our inner attitudes and not our bank balance. Living simply so that others may simply live - it’s actually easier to do when we haven’t invested in maintenance-hungry possessions. But if we develop patterns of thinking and serving when we have little, we’re likely to take those through when we’re well off financially.
That’s the lesson Jesus continually taught his disciples. Just a cup of water in my name. Just these two fish. Just these five loaves of bread. Just that penny. Start with what you have.
Being generous works best in community
I’ll talk about some of the Growing Up Generous thoughts from the previous post.
And affirm some of the projects at Logan - such as supporting the Cancer Society Daffodil appeal. And I’ll talk about the churches of Mackay and their working together to rebuild a village destroyed by the tsunami in December last year, on the East coast of India. The village is called Chinamayawani Lanka. Satya Yeramsetti’s project is online at www.sysetti.com
All things are possible with God!
I’ll finish with a reference to the sense of despair experienced by the disciples with Jesus as they saw the potentially generous young man ride away. It’s so difficult. Who could do it? Jesus agrees that it is difficult. But with God, he says, it is possible. With God, our lives can change. Not just for our own sake but for the sake of our communities.
Tags: Bible, preaching, Spirituality, stewardship, Theology
