Hope Church LV Sermons
The Heart of Hope: Generous Living
What if there was one activity, one practice in life that would bring you priceless joy, one activity that would also benefit and bless others, one practice in life that would meet your greatest need, while at the same time meeting the needs of others, one activity that would expand God's kingdom in Las Vegas, the West, and throughout the world. One simple practice that would open the windows of heaven and invite God's blessing into your life while at the same time allowing God's glory to be made known through your life. One activity that would result in eternal rewards for you. What if there was one practice that would protect you from envy, jealousy, greed, materialism, and self-centered living? What if there was one activity that could accomplish all of this in your life? One simple practice directly related to every one of these outcomes. If there was one activity that was related to all of these outcomes in your life, would you want to know what that activity is? I don't think you heard my question. Would you want to know what that activity is? Yeah, right. And here's the reality as you study the Scriptures not only does the Bible God's Word teach us that every activity I just listed for you on the screen is directly related. Every outcome I just listed is directly related to one simple activity, but what I just gave you was not an exhaustive list. There's actually more, more things that the Bible, God's divine truth, relates to this one simple activity. Well, the one simple lifestyle practice is generosity, generosity. As you study the Bible, every outcome that I just listed on the screen, plus many more, are linked in Scripture to the practice of living generously. Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister of England during the Second World War. Winston Churchill understood something about this principle of generosity. Listen to what he said. He said we all make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. Last week and I introduced a statement to you that simply said values drive our decisions and decisions shape our lives. We're going to talk about the significance of what we value and how the things that we value drive every decision that we make, and so as a church family, we have explored the Scriptures, we've examined the Bible, and we've established four values that we really rally around as a church. These four values drive everything that we are as a fellowship, and so as we're taking this significant next step of moving into a new campus, we thought it very appropriate for us to go back and just walk through again these four biblical values that God's given us as a family of faith, and we began last weekend by unpacking the value of God-dependence. I want to put it back up on the screen, and I want you to read the definition of God-dependence out loud with me. You ready? Here we go. One, two, three. Apart from him, we can do nothing. Through him, we can do all things. Last weekend, we introduced the biblical reality of the greatness of God. God is great, and the only response that we can have to the greatness of God is an acknowledgement of our desperate need for God. We need him, and our calling is to live our lives in absolute total dependence on him as a family of faith. We're desperate for God. Now we knew that 11 years ago when we began in my living room with 18 people. We knew then if God's not God, we're sunk. We're in real trouble, right? But if we're not careful, we can become comfortable in our current surroundings with a lot of people and a new facility and a campus and all of those things, but listen to me. Here's what we understand from Scripture. We are still as desperate for God as a people as we've ever been. If God is going to use us to accomplish any aspect of His mission, it will only be out of the overflow of our complete desperation for God, where God depended. It drives us as a family of faith, but I want to this weekend unpack the second of those values, and we simply call it generous living. And here's the way we define it. We live life ready to make a difference in the lives of others. I want you to read that off the screen with me. Here we go. We live life ready to make a difference in the lives of others. That drives who we are as a fellowship. And if you don't understand our values, I wonder if anybody will look at me. If you don't understand our values, you will not understand the decisions that we make. For example, this September will be 11 years old as a church. In the first 11 years of our existence, we've given away $5 or $6 or $7 million as an investment in God's kingdom. We've given it away to mission endeavors and to mission partnerships and to church plants. We've given away several million dollars. Now, somebody might say, "Well, Pastor, wouldn't it have made sense to build this campus number of years ago and take in care of the home base first?" No, why? It's not our value. It's not our value. We value living life ready to make a difference in the lives of other people first. We seek first the kingdom of God. And then we trust that God will take care of us to value. And we believe these values are important because you must understand what drives the way we make our decisions. I want to ask two big questions this weekend. Here's the first one. What is generosity? It's a word that we're all familiar with. We've heard it used in a number of different contexts, but it's actually a biblical word. It's used both in the old and in the New Testament. The word generosity has a lot of word pictures associated with this particular biblical concept. There's a man named Lloyd Shadrach who pastors fellowship Bible Church in Nashville, Tennessee, and the first time I began to really study this principle four or five years ago when we walked through it as a church family, he deeply impacted my life with some of the word pictures that he gave. So I want to give you some of the both old and New Testament word pictures to help us understand this word generosity. First of all, in the Old Testament, the way this word is used, there are two word pictures associated with the word generosity. One of them is the picture of being saturated with water, saturated with water. My youngest daughter Faith is now eight years old, last summer, Faith and some of her little girlfriends were outside playing in the pool, and there's probably four or five little girls, and they were just having a big time in the pool, and out by our pool we have a big basket that is filled with towels, dry towels. There's probably 20, 25 towels in this big basket outside, and I went outside and the girls had been in the pool, we were kind of inside and outside, and I went outside and I looked and I noticed the basket of dry towels was completely empty. I thought that's all right, 20, 25 towels, four or five little girls, that's something to add up here. And I noticed all of the towels were in the pool. Now, if you understand the concept of a towel, it's very important that the towel be dry, right? Once they're in the pool, the towels no longer have any significant value, so we begin to go and we're kind of laughing about it, but we're having to take all these towels out of the pool, and I was still having my clothes and I wasn't in the pool with the kids, they were swimming, and you know, when you grab that towel up out of the pool, immediately there's just water pouring, you're walking like this, trying to keep it off of you, and everywhere you walk, there's this line of water that is following you, because the towel is now saturated with water. I want you to have that picture in your mind. It's the Hebrew picture for the word generosity, saturated. A second biblical picture of the Hebrew word for generosity is a phrase or a description of overflowing or filling to overflow, and it's the picture of taking a glass and a glass sitting on a table, and you take a picture of water and you begin to pour water into the glass, and you watch the water rise up in the glass till it gets to the very top, and instead of doing what you would normally do when it gets to the top, you stop, you just continue to pour until the water begins to spill over the glass, it's all over the table, it's now running off the table, onto the floor, and it looks like a water feature. And now as water is just going everywhere, as you continue to pour the water, it's filled to overflow, generosity. In the New Testament, there are two other word pictures that we find in the Greek usage of the word generosity. One of them is a word, it's used in 1 Timothy chapter 6, and it describes the idea of living with a readiness to distribute. It means I'm living ready, I'm always looking for an opportunity, I'm sitting on go, I'm not waiting to be approached, I'm exploring, I'm living with a readiness, and the fourth word picture is the one that if you were here four and a half years ago and we walked through this, you remember this one, this is one everybody in our church remembers, that the Greek term for generosity has this idea of being on your fingertips, I want you to take your hands and hold them out with me like this, all right? Everybody hold your hands out for just a minute, come on everybody's got to do it, I'll wait on your classroom participation time. Now I want you to wiggle your fingers like this, I want you to keep that in your mind with the word generosity, all right, you can put them down now, you look great doing it. Now put all that together, I'm to live my life with everything I have on my fingertips, I'm to live my life with all of my treasure, all of my time, all of my gifts, all of my abilities, all of my resources, everything I have, I live with it on my fingertips and I'm holding it loosely and I'm looking, I'm ready to saturate, I'm ready to feel to overflow. Generosity, we define it this way, generosity is living life wide open. Always looking for an opportunity to make a difference in somebody else's life. You know the problem, right? In our culture, we don't live like this, we live like this. And if we do see that opportunity and we feel like we just have to give like my kids with the french fries, right, come on, mom and dad, you know that moment, you buy your kids french fries, hey, let me have a french fry. The french fries, I just paid for it. And then they look through the sack to find the smallest burnt french fry, mom and dad, you know what I'm talking about, right? The biblical principle of generosity is that I'm not living like this, but I'm living my life like this, understanding that everything I have has been, listen, everything I have is his french fries. It's all his, it all belongs to him and he simply entrusted it to me and I'm to hold it loosely in my hands looking for an opportunity to make a difference in somebody else's life. That's what generosity is. Now let me ask a second question, what does generosity look like? Why want you to take your Bible, turn over to Philippians chapter two. And Philippians chapter two, without even using the word generosity, Paul gives an incredible description of what it looks like to live generously. I want to make this extremely practical today. Philippians chapter two, if you don't have a Bible, we're going to put these words up on the screen, beginning in verse number three, I want to read verses three, four and five. Do nothing, it means never. Don't let any action in your life be motivated. Do nothing from, what's the next word, selfishness or empty conceit. But with humility of mind, regard one another as more important than yourselves. Do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude. What attitude are you talking about? The one he's just described in verses three and four, where I'm doing nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, where I'm not looking out for my own interests, but the interests of others, where I'm focused on others more than I'm focused on myself. He says, have this attitude in yourselves, which was also in Christ Jesus. Let me be honest with you. There's enough truth in those three verses to radically change every relationship in your life and mind. If that's the only three verses we had in the Bible to speak to relationships with other people, there's enough truth in those three verses to radically transform every interpersonal relationship in our lives. If we didn't worry about anything but those three verses, if we as a church family could just simply live out those three verses, this would be the most radical place on planet Earth. There are three things that Paul teaches us about what generosity looks like. First of all, generosity begins with the heart. We hear the word generosity and immediately in our culture, we start thinking about money, but really generosity is a principle that's so much more than money. Generosity at its core is really not a financial issue. It's not a resource issue, it's not a talent issue, it's not even a time issue. Generosity at its core is a heart issue. You see all those other things, what I do with my money, what I do with my time, what I do with my resources, all that is is just a reflection of my heart. It's really a heart issue. If I've got issues living generously with time or with money or with abilities or resources, that's not a time, money, ability or resource issue, that's a heart issue. That's why when Paul begins to describe what this looks like, he starts by describing two very different heart attitudes, two very different motivations. The first one is what I call the it's all about me attitude. I want you to say that out loud with me, ready one, two, three, it's all about me. Set one more time. It's all about me. I know that feels uncomfortable to say it out loud, right? Obviously in church of all places, Pastor, I can't be saying that in church, it's all about me. That's what Paul begins to describe. He says, "Do nothing from selfishness." The word selfishness here is a verb in the Greek language, it literally means to work for hire and it describes the motivation that simply says, "What is in it for me?" And it's interesting, this word was used in Paul's day. This word right here was used to describe someone campaigning for a political office. Apparently, in Paul's day, politicians would say anything based on what it did to get them elected in Paul's day. Some things never change, huh? But this word that's translated right here, selfishness, it was the word that they used for campaigning. When somebody's soul motivation is, "What's in it for me? What do I have to do to get your vote? What do I have to do to get what I want out of you?" Then the word empty conceit, it's a word that means to be excited about one's own performance. Oh, here's describing an attitude that says, "It's all about me." And notice how he begins, he says, "Do nothing as a Christ follower. I'm the never have that attitude." That self-centered, me-centered, "What's in it for me? What am I getting out of it? What's the impact in my life? How does that affect my family? How does that affect my bottom line? What does that cost me? What is the sacrifice I've got to me?" Paul said, "That should never... There's never a situation. There's never a circumstance that that is an appropriate heart motivation for the follower of Jesus Christ. Do nothing." But then he describes the second heart attitude. This heart attitude I describe as the, "It's not about me." Say that with me. It's not about me. Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind. That phrase "humility of mind" means to esteem oneself small. That's the idea of living my life in response to the greatness of God. It's why we started where we did last weekend when we talked about the greatness of God. You see, this attitude is born in response. When we understand how great God is, when we understand how big God is, when we understand the majesty and the glory and the omnipotence and the omnipresence and the omniscience of God, when we see how big God is and we understand everything in our lives, everything that I have. Listen, even the breath that I have in my body to be alive today, all of it is a gift that has been entrusted to me by this God. And I understand the greatness of God, the only right response is God, everything I have. God, everything I have, everything that I am is because of you. Let me give it to you in a statement. Generosity begins with an attitude that understands everything I have, has been entrusted to me by God, to be used for His glory and the good of others. It all belongs to Him. We sing it, I give myself away so you can use me. Generosity begins with the heart, but the second thing Paul teaches us is generosity focuses on others. You see, when I experience a real heart change, it spills into my action. Christianity is not you trying to change some things on the outside to cover up for what's on the inside. Christianity is so experiencing life change through a relationship with Jesus on the inside that it begins to spill out of my life on the outside. Paul says, "Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mine." Listen, regard one another as more important than yourselves. Do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. You see, when God changes my heart and I begin to have an attitude of humility and response to the greatness of God, understanding that everything that I have belongs to Him, I begin to live my life differently and I begin to see others with a sense of incredible value that God has placed in their lives and I begin to live my life. What He says is on the lookout. Don't look out for your own interests, but for the interests of others, the word look out there is a Greek word scoped...oh, we get an English word from it. It's the word scope. It's the idea of looking through a looking glass or a scope or a pair of binoculars. He's describing a sense of living on the lookout. It's like when my kids were all younger, they're mostly older now. We only have the one who's still eight years old. All the other ones are high school age and college, but when they were all younger, our neighborhood was filled with little kids and when our kids would get home, it was like the party had arrived. It seemed like especially on Sunday afternoons. Our called the sack, they all know we know the Lord, we shared Christ with most of our neighbors and we've invited them all to come many times and so they know who we are, they know our schedules and it was almost like the other kids in the neighborhood on Sundays would be at their windows with their faces pressed against the window watching for the van to come rolling up the cold to say and our garage door would not hit the ground until you would hear the doorbell starting to ring because the party has come home. Those kids in the cold the sack, they were living on the lookout. Here's what Paul is describing. When I've experienced a radical life change on the inside that produces a humility of mind towards God, recognizing everything I have comes from him, Paul says I begin to live my life every moment of every day looking for an opportunity to be a blessing, looking for a way to saturate somebody else's life, looking for a way to spill into somebody else's life, to live on the lookout, generosity focuses on others. Now here's the problem. This is so counter-cultural to our culture. You see, our culture teaches a philosophy that you're to look out for number one. From the moment we come into this world in America and Western individualism, we're taught you get all you can, you can't all you get, you sit on the lid and you poison the rest, right? It's about me. I'm going to get mine. If I don't watch out for me, nobody else is going to, it's the opposite of the life of a Jesus follower. When we begin to live like this, it's a radical expression of the life of Christ. And that's the third reality. I want to give you generosity as simply Christ's life in me. What we're talking about is not a program of the church. We're talking about the very life. That's why Paul closed this little paragraph with this phrase, "Have this attitude," which was also in Christ Jesus. Let me read it to you in Mark chapter 10 verse 45, it says, "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve." What's the next word, give? He didn't come to serve or to be served. He came to serve and to give. He came to serve. He came to give. He came to serve. He came to give. And I just give a little bit. He came to give his life. He sang that song I give myself away. All we're doing is singing a reflection of who Jesus is. You see, Christianity, the goal of the Christian life is not for you and me to try to live the life of Christ. The goal of the Christian life is to allow Jesus Christ to manifest his very life in and through us. Let me tell you what his life looks like, to serve and to give. It's who he is. My mentor, one of them, Johnny Hunt, says it this way, "You're never more like Jesus than when you're giving." So I want to close by giving you three practical examples from the Bible of what it looks like. There's a description. We've defined it, we've described it, but now I want to give you three practical examples right out of the Bible. Turn over to 2 Corinthians chapter 8. In Corinthians chapter 8, let me give you the context. Christianity began in the city of Jerusalem. That's where the church began, after the death and resurrection of Jesus. And there in Jerusalem, by the time we read what's happening in 2 Corinthians, the church in Jerusalem is facing much persecution, they're suffering greatly, those Jewish Christians. So Paul is planting churches among Gentile Christians and he's writing the Gentile churches and asking them to give offerings to bring help to the church in Jerusalem that's suffering. So he's asking the Gentile Christians to live with a spirit of generosity towards the Jewish Christians that are facing great suffering. So Paul is writing to a church that he planted in Corinth and he's encouraging them to give an offering to the church in Jerusalem and he's using another church in Macedonia as an example for the church at Corinth as to how they can give. You got the context? You got to nod your head. All right, let's read it. Second Corinthians chapter 8 verse 1. Paul says, "Now, brethren, we wish to make known to you the grace of God which has been given in the churches of Macedonia." Here's the way Paul opens this to the Corinthian church. He says, "You have got to hear what's happening in Macedonia. You're not going to believe the way the grace of God has been demonstrated in Macedonia. You've got to hear this." Look at verse 2. That in a great ordeal of affliction, now he's describing the church in Macedonia that gave. He says, first of all, they're in a great ordeal of affliction. It's a word that means they're being crushed, meaning that the church in Macedonia was not experiencing great blessing and growth. They were experiencing also great persecution and suffering. They were in the middle of a very difficult situation. He said, "In a great ordeal of affliction, their abundance of joy and their deep poverty overflowed in the wealth of their liberality. For I testify that according to their ability and beyond their ability, they gave of their own accord." Do you hear all those phrases that don't even seem like they go together? Defliction, deep poverty, abundance of joy. The only thing the church in Macedonia had going for, it was a right heart. Their circumstances were terrible, the suffering that they were experiencing was terrible. The only thing they had going was they had a right heart attitude and here's how it spilled out of them. Paul says, "According to their ability and beyond," here's what Paul said, "I don't even know where it came from." Paul said, "When you look at them, you'd have thought there's no way they can give like this." Look at verse 4, "Bagging us with much urging for the favor of participation in the support of the saints." Here's what that implies. Paul had been to the church at Macedonia, they'd heard about the need in Jerusalem and they wanted to give and Paul tried to discourage them. Paul said, "You don't have anything to give. You don't understand your situation's worse than the people in Jerusalem. You don't need to be a part of this." And Paul says they would not take no for an answer. They begged him. Paul, please, God's been so good to us, God in His grace has saved us, God's given us a relationship with Himself. Paul, we're begging you, let us be a part of making a difference in somebody else's life. I saw this happen in the flesh, in the country, in the continent of Africa. I've been for the last 14 years traveling every year to go to Africa to train national leaders and one of the parts of our conference is there's a big soccer match that all the pastors play in and the pastors from Africa, that is. I don't get involved in that, they're way too good. But they play and we sit on the side, we kind of watch and while we're watching the soccer match, all these pastors will come and kind of sit around you and they'll just start asking questions and telling stories. It's an amazing environment. I was sitting there and there was a pastor from Zambia who told me this story. He said there was a man in their church in Zambia that felt God's call to go to the mission field, to the unreached peoples of Tanzania, what He called the uttermost parts of the earth and share the gospel. Now I remind you, this pastor is from Zambia. I've been to Zambia. If there's an uttermost past Zambia, I'm not wired for it. I mean, to me, the remote edges of Zambia up in Imbala and up on Lake Tanganyika where you've flown 25 hours to get to Lusaka, then you have to drive 15 and a half hours north just to get there. And this guy's there saying God's calling me to the uttermost. I don't have the heart to tell him, dude, you live in the uttermost. And he wanted to get in a boat and go across Lake Tanganyika in the regions that are only accessible by boat and reach people that had never had access to the gospel before. So this little church contacts a missionary training organization in Zambia and says we want to send this guy. And the missionary organization says, well, the costs for training and passports and visas is, and I'll give it to you in American dollars, 600 American dollars. Now it doesn't sound like a lot of money to you and me, but this little church, they're weekly offering in American dollars is $2.25. So it meant 300 weeks of their offering to send this guy. Two weeks later, they called the missionary organization and said we got the money. The organization said how? You guys are all subsistence farmers. You don't even live in a cash-based culture. How did you raise $600 in two weeks? And here's what they said. We realized most of us have three shirts and we only need two. So we sold the extra and he said we realized that we eat three meals a day, but we can live on two. So we took all the extra that we had and we saved it and we took it to the market and we sold it and now we're ready to send him. Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard others as more important than yourself. Today there's a young man preaching the gospel among the villages of the Lake Tanganyika to people that have never heard the gospel because one little church like this. You know what's sad? In the American church culture, the national statistics tell us that most people will spend more this week on cups of coffee than they'll give as an investment in the kingdom of God. One of the ways, when I've got a heart of generosity, one of the ways we begin to see that is in our giving. If we in the American church would ever get this, we could turn the world upside down. We also see it in our serving, let me read you another verse. In Philippians, and not Philippians, it's been in 1 Peter, chapter 4, verse 10. Paul says, "As each one of us has received a special gift, employed in serving one another is good stewards of the manifold grace of God." Let me just quickly, for sake of time, tell you what that verse is. The moment you got saved, if you're a follower of Jesus, the moment you got saved, God in His grace gave you a gift. Every one of us have been given spiritual gifts by God to be used in serving other people. It's not just natural talent and ability. I'm talking about a supernatural grace enablement to be used in serving the kingdom of God in our local church and in our city for the glory and honor of God. Every one of us has been given a gift by God to be used in serving. And we have a responsibility to be a steward of this gift. The word steward, every word, every definition of the word steward includes the word manage. The word manage comes from a Latin word which literally means to take into one's hand. Here's the point, God has placed a gift. Has placed gifts into your life and mind, into our hands and we're to use them in serving others, we're to use them in serving the body of Christ, we're to use them in serving in our city to reach people with a gospel, we're to use our gifts in service. Is your Christianity more defined by sitting than it is serving? Jesus said he did not come to be served but to serve. We get it so backwards, we even look for churches based on what's in it for me. We got to find the church that's just right for me. I like the way they sing, I like the way they preach, I like how linked to the service, I like the temperature in the room, I like all these things. Paul says do nothing, do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit. A third example we see in scripture, not only in our giving and our serving but we see the example in our Father. Did you know that the very core of the gospel is the message of generosity? Let me show it to you, John 3 16. For God so loved the world. That he, what, gave. God so loved heart that he gave action. He gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. You see when you and I live generously, you know what we are, we're just a reflection of our Father. The nature of our Dad, our Father, being manifest in our very life, listen. If you're here today and you're not a Christian, the whole message of the gospel is a message of generosity. God loved you so much that even though you'd sinned against him and your sin separated you from him, he gave his son Jesus and on the cross Jesus took all of your sin and my sin on himself and on the cross Jesus Christ died for our sin but he didn't stay dead. He rose again from the dead as a testimony that God had accepted his sacrifice for our sin and now through faith in Jesus Christ when I turn from my sin and trust Jesus Christ, I listen, receive the generous grace of God. We live life ready to make a difference in the lives of others. [BLANK_AUDIO]