This wonderful section of the epistle deals with the issue of Christian giving, how we are to give, how we are to invest our financial resources for eternal benefit. And we’re going to be looking at a biblical model for Christian giving all the way through chapter 8 and chapter 9 as Paul instructs the Corinthian church in the matter of their own giving.

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At the beginning of chapter 8, Paul commends the churches of Macedonia. And he commends them because in verse 2 in a great ordeal of affliction they demonstrated an abundance of joy and their deep poverty overflowed in the wealth of their liberality. All of that to say they were afflicted and they were profoundly poor, but they were generous in their giving. In fact, verse 3 says, “They gave according to their ability and beyond their ability and they gave of their own volition.” They gave freely of their own choice, beyond their ability. Out of their deep poverty they overflowed with liberality, and in the midst of their real affliction their abundant giving brought them great joy.
 

Verse 4, an interesting thing, “They were begging us with much entreaty for the favor of participation in the support of the saints.” In other words, they were pleading for an opportunity to give. They had found that giving was so rewarding, so blessed, so joyous, so enriching, so beneficial that they were begging for an opportunity to give. Now we would like to get all of you to that place where you will be pleading for somewhere to give your resources because you understand what benefit in time and eternity there is in such generosity.

 

Over in chapter 9, we would just draw your attention to another statement…and we’ll be looking at these in the future. Verse 6, Paul lays down a principle, “He who sows sparingly shall also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully shall also real bountifully.” A simple principle there. You’re not going to get a crop on anything more than the seed you sow. So whatever you sow determines your crop. That’s all. If you sow a few seeds, you’ll get a little crop. If you sow many seeds, you’ll get a larger crop. That’s the principle.

 

So verse 7 says, “You need to make a decision, purpose in your heart without being grudging or under coercion. You just decide in your heart what you’re going to do based upon what kind of dividend you want to receive.” And remember this. Regarding whatever you sow, verse 8, “God is able to make all grace abound to you, that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed.”

 

Now there’s the…there’s the harvest on your sowing. Verse 7, you purpose what you’re going to sow and you do it. Verse 8, God can make all grace abound so that you will always have all sufficiency for all things. In other words, God’s going to give you an unlimited return. His capacity knows no limits. God who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You know what happens when you sow seed? You get a crop. And out of that crop comes multiplied seed which you take and sow again and it keeps expanding. That’s the principle.

 

Verse 11, “You will be enriched in everything.” The principle of giving then is simply this. You sow and you reap, and whatever you sow God multiplies and gives you back. The question is, how much do you want. How much do you want to sow with God? How much blessing do you want? How much do you want to invest in the greatest investment there is, and that is to invest with the living God who always gets a full return on every investment? That’s the heart of this study, to get to the place where you line up pleading for an opportunity to give, because you understand that this is going to bring in a harvest in time and eternity which will make you spiritually and even materially wealthy.
 

Now most of us are aware that there’s sort of a difficulty today in our giving. And it really comes from two fronts. The world, first of all, sucks up so much of our money that we don’t have the amount to give we should. It’s the first time we’ve ever had advertising. And advertising is a scheme to separate you from your money. Do you think television is for programs? Television isn’t, it’s for commercials.

 

Programs are simply to get you there to watch the commercial. The commercials aren’t there to get you to watch the program. You certainly can figure that out. The programs are there which are forgettable so you’ll watch the commercials which are not forgettable, like, “I love you, man.” But you understand that the the world is coming after you. And it comes after you to separate you from your money; it comes after you to get you to indulge yourself in every conceivable kind of thing. And that puts people in a very difficult position.

 

The world not only adds to advertising the tremendous power of media to capture you, but then they provide credit so you can buy things when you don’t even have money and put yourself in a deeper and deeper hole, sinking more and more into debt and which puts you in a position that limits your giving as well. In fact, it becomes so difficult for people in the world to even make their normal sort of budget because of the way they have overspent, that somebody said, “You can easily figure the cost of your cost of living by just taking all your income and adding twenty percent.” That’s how most people live.

 

Financial problems are a major cause of divorce in 80 percent of couples who are divorced before the age of 30. Before they can even start to get a life together, it’s torn apart by financial problems. Now, we have far more money than our fathers did, far more money than our grandfathers did, who, of course, were not the victims of this advertising barrage and the massive materialism of our contemporary time. One father expressed his deep concern about this when he said, “Look, I don’t mind that my son is earning more than I did on my first job. What distresses me is that he’s six and that’s his allowance.”

 

Fifty percent of your waking time, you’re thinking about money. How to get it, how to spend it, how to save it, how to earn it, how to invest it, how to borrow it, how to find it. Fifty percent of your waking time you’re thinking about money. We are living in an indulgent, materialistic culture and that takes a toll on our giving. But it’s not just the external culture telling us to spend our money stupidly and foolishly, but we’re even bombarded in the Christian world by other people who want to separate us from our money to build their empires.

 

Many years ago Voltaire criticized Protestantism. He was a French atheist, and he criticized Protestantism, he said, “Protestantism has simply grown up to offer people a less expensive substitute for Catholicism,” because the Catholic Church was sucking money out of its people in huge amounts, and he felt that Protestantism was just a cheap shortcut. I don’t think that if he were living today he would say that. Protestantism seems to me today to be much more expensive than Catholicism. And most Christian people, probably most of you, are literally hammered from side to side in terms of things that you need to be giving to. Exploitation even gets into local churches. Not only is it extra church or parachurch, but even gets into local churches. Streams of literature come into the church telling us how we can hire fundraisers and hire various organizations. Guys who are very slick at this will come in and go to you and hit you up this way and that way and raise money to get to you so that we can support the things that we want to do.

 

Others come along and say, “Well the real trick to this deal is to make everybody get on a tithing bandwagon. If we can just get everybody to give ten percent, we can use the Old Testament tithe. If everybody gives ten percent, we’ll have plenty. And the truth is that’s probably accurate. Somebody figured out if the church in the United States, if everybody in the church, churches of America, was reduced to Welfare level income and gave ten percent, the church would suffer a three hundred percent increase in giving.
People don’t give what they ought to give. A lot of times they don’t give what they ought to give because they don’t love the Lord’s Kingdom enough; sometimes because they’re too deeply in debt, or they’re spending it on themselves or they don’t even understand what they are to give. We need to know some basic foundational truths from the Scripture about how we are to give. It is tithing? What is it?

 

And then the church also gets confused because sometimes the church sort of plays up to the wealthy people, you know. When the man comes in who has the gold ring on his finger, they say, “Sit over here. Sit over here in the nice comfortable seat.” And when the poor guy comes in, they say, “Get under my footstool, you don’t smell very good.” And James says that God doesn’t tolerate that. God is no respecter of persons, we know. And we can’t show partiality to the rich. You know, you can’t let the rich dictate your theology. You can’t let the rich dictate your policy.

 

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