Wow, what an honor.
I uh Russ, you make it really hard for me to talk after all those kind words.
Um thank you very much.
It really is an honor to be here with you, and it is an honor to get to talk about our great God and uh Jesus, and I I do look forward to the time that we have together in God's Word.
We're gonna look at a few different scriptures, some of which will be pretty familiar to you, and some of which will be like maybe like I probably haven't read that for a while.
But here's the thing: I want you to know that my goal today is to encourage you and to challenge you.
It's to encourage you and challenge you.
Because God is a good God, and actually the thing I want to talk to you about is how generous He is.
You guys have been so generous to us.
Many of you pray for us when I send out those emails.
Uh, you guys support us.
You are part of the work of seeing hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of people having intentional gospel-focused conversations about what Jesus has done in their heart and in their life.
And it's just a real joy to be able to share some of that with you today.
I've been mulling over God's generosity for a long time.
You look at me and you go, yeah, Jim, you've been mulling over a lot of things for a long time.
You're getting older.
Um, and the good thing about it is that it never really gets old.
Um so I want to encourage you with this thought that God is generous.
And we're gonna start at the beginning of the Bible.
I'm pretty excited for you guys to find out how the story ends.
A spoiler alert, Jesus wins and we win, and it's all great at the end of Revelation.
But we're gonna start at the very beginning in Genesis chapter one to talk about God's generosity.
So if you have a Bible and you want to open it up or an app on your phone, it's on the screen.
Let me read this verse here from uh Genesis chapter one.
Theologians call it the creation mandate, which is a great, uh, a great title for it.
It says this so God created man in his own image.
In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them.
And God blessed them, and he said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, excuse me, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
And God said, Behold, I have given you.
I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of the earth, and every tree with seed and its fruit, you shall have them for food.
Look at that phrase.
I have given you.
God created us, God created all of mankind, he created this world, it is his idea, and I want to put before you the notion that it is a very generous idea for him to create us.
And to give us this mandate, look at all these things that it says.
It says, um, God bless them, verse 28.
He makes us fruitful, enables us to multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it, have dominion over everything.
And in that mandate, he gives us everything that we need to fulfill it.
The entire cosmos is created by God.
Everything in your life is created by God ultimately.
And everything in your life, all of your possessions, all of your money, your health, your body, your family, your identity, your passions, your vocational calling, all of it is a gift of God given by God for you to fulfill the creation mandate that he gave all of us together.
It's his idea.
God is generous.
Now, that is not what you hear in the dominant culture.
You hear several different competing ideas that we have to really analyze as you're sitting here listening to God's word.
I want you to think about what is it that you hear?
Here are some of the things that I hear and that you probably hear.
You can do and be whatever you want to be.
That's what our dominant culture tells us.
That's what it tells everyone.
God's not even really a part of a picture.
You are, in essence, a God.
You can be whatever you want to be.
Now, I don't know about you, but that's a little problematic for me.
When I'm really honest about myself, and I if I were to think that it's all up to me to become everything that I want to be and everything that I should be, that's an anxiety-producing thought.
It's pretty depressing because I'm not really all that great.
Honestly, it's probably one of the reasons that so many people struggle with anxiety and with depression, with this sense of being overwhelmed, because we are struck with the reality that all is not well, all is not as it should be.
Other ways that we're told, or at least my generation was told, that we should view the world is that you're only as good as what you produce.
You're not really even a human being, you're a human doing.
And it's all up to you to go out and do what you should, to get what you can.
And some of us are familiar with kind of a Christianized version of that.
We have Sunday for God, and then Monday through Saturday, uh, you're in charge.
All of those competing thoughts and ideas rumble around in our head, and we buy into them and we believe them and we feel them and we think them, when in reality, what does God say?
He says, I'm gonna bless you, be fruitful, multiply, have dominion.
I have given you everything.
At the foundation, at the core of our historic Christianity is the very commitment that God owns it all, and everything that he gives us is a gift.
Is that good news to you?
It's good news to me.
I hope that it's good news to you.
The second thing, well, before we do that, this is gonna be a little weird because we don't typically do it in the middle of sermons, but I'm I'm being convinced in my old age of the importance of prayer.
So I'm gonna stop talking and I'm gonna give you 10 or 15 seconds to talk to God and to thank him for creating you.
Thank him for giving you all that he's giving you.
So just take 10 or 15 seconds.
I'm gonna pray and give thanks.
You do it as well, okay?
Let's pray.
Amen.
The second encouragement that I have for you is a bit of a challenge, and it's in a in a section of scripture that um that you don't read a lot.
It's in Deuteronomy chapter 15, and I would encourage you to read the whole chapter, but let me make sure you understand the context.
When God rescued his people out of Egypt, he uh he had to change their mentality, he had to teach them who they really were, because they had been enslaved for 400 years.
And so he started, started with Genesis, told them how they were created, and then later on in the story, after they've been in the desert for 40 years, he is preparing to send them in to the promised land where they wouldn't eat just manna and wear the same clothes all the time, but where they would actually be able to flourish.
So in Deuteronomy 15, he tells them, Every seven years you let everybody out of their debts.
Well, that's a crazy thought.
But it says here in verse 10, 11, let's read it.
This is what theologians call the poverty mandate, which is a terrible term for it, but I'll get to that in a second.
It says, You shall give to him, this is your brother, you shall give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging when you give to him, because for this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake.
For there will never cease to be poor in the land.
Therefore I command you, you shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy, and to the poor in your land.
I would argue that this is not a poverty mandate, but it's a local, generous living mandate.
It is a command of God that we would give freely, that we would give without being grudging, that we would open our hand to our brother, to the needy, and to the poor.
Now, why is it essential that God would have a command like this, one that, if I'm honest, makes me very uncomfortable because I do not live up to it.
But why is it essential that it's in the scripture?
Well, God gave his law, as most of you probably know, to show us where we do not live according to the way that Jesus calls us to live.
Sin is a problem, and God is so generous, this is the second point, that he commands us to generously overcome our unjust stinginess.
Stinginess comes from the fall.
It is one of an individual sin, but it's also a corporate sin.
It is out of the inherent consequences of our sinfulness, both as individuals and as communities.
And we as God's people, in this mandate, are given a responsibility to overcome systemic injustice in a broken world, one that is unjust.
And we do that by being generous locally with people who live near us, those who are materially poor, our brothers, people in your land.
And we are to give freely, we're to not do it grudgingly, and we're to do it open-handedly.
God gives us this command, and as I've already mentioned, um I don't live up to it.
And maybe you don't either.
And maybe you're sitting here thinking and feeling today a sense of defensiveness, like, Jim, who who are you to come in here and point this out to us?
That's what God's word does.
He his law shows us the high, high, high moral standing that we have to have to live the life that he's called us to live.
And we fight it.
We have these enemies of generosity.
We have the internal sense of stinginess that says, I think or feel that it's up to me.
I have to go out there and get it.
I have to manage it, keep it, or I'll lose it.
And if if I don't, um God will be mad at me, uh, my spouse will be mad at me.
Probably more significantly, I'll be mad at me.
And so I have to keep my sovereignty in check.
I have to keep it.
Or maybe you've got it and you think you have to keep it and you have to fight it, and you've developed a sense of it's mine, and I'm proud of it, and it's your identity.
This internal stinginess is unjust in the way that God calls us to live locally.
It's bad news.
We are.
Now it doesn't discount the wisdom of Scripture, but it's a posture of our heart that we have to recognize in order for us to really fully understand and experience the lavish generosity of God Himself.
The law is given to us to break us so that God can remake us.
So here's the key question.
What does God do for sinful people?
Broken people, proud people, stingy people?
There's a story in those 40 years in the wilderness with God's people.
There was a moment in that story where there are, again, millions of former slaves, they've been, they've been redeemed, they're in the desert, and serpents begin to attack them.
And they have no hospital, they have no urgent care, they have no vaccine, they have nothing.
People are dying because they're being attacked.
And what does God tell Moses to do?
He says, make a bronze serpent and put it on a pole, and everyone who looks to the bronze serpent will be saved.
And Jesus, we see recorded in John chapter 3, was having a conversation with a very wealthy individual who was living his life according to a very stingy rule, a Pharisaic rule.
And Jesus said to this rich and educated man, As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
For God so loved the world that he Say it.
He gave.
And it reminds us of our need for someone who was responsible for poor people.
We need to be reminded that there was someone who took the opportunity to be generous for others' sake and not their own.
Someone who covered the shame of poverty, someone who had it all, lost it all, sacrificed it all so that we could receive it all.
Do you believe that?
Do you want to believe that?
If you do not believe in this generosity that Jesus has given us through his perfect life, his death, his resurrection, and his current intercession for us, then I plead with you, receive it.
I'm not bright enough to have figured this out on my own.
It's been revealed to me.
None of us are bright enough, none of us are generous enough, none of us are good enough, but God has revealed and illumined our hearts so that we might believe.
And so I urge you, believe on the one who is generous in your place.
The one who is generous for you.
The one who the Father gave because he so loved the world that he considered it worthy to give his son.
And how many of you guys in here have a truck?
Handful of us.
All of us that have a truck.
Everybody that knows us knows that if they need a truck, they can ask us to borrow a truck, right?
That's the way it works.
My truck is nothing special, but I'll lend it out for an hour, a couple hours, a day, week, a month.
Somebody needs it.
Yeah, just borrow my truck.
And a friend of mine named Sean borrowed my truck for a month.
And I knew he was gonna borrow it for a month.
It wasn't that he was keeping it.
But what if Sean had come back to me and when he handed the keys over, he said, Jim, I'd like to give you my truck.
What would you think about Sean?
What would you think he was thinking?
It's not his truck, it's my truck.
All of the things, all of the gifts, all of the talents, your calling, your body, your family, everything that God has given you is not your truck.
It's God's.
And you have the opportunity to live out of this lavish love that God has given you through Jesus Christ, a generous love, an open-handed love, a not begrudging love, a free love.
Because it's not your truck.
Let's pray.
Father, I thank you that you have given us everything.
Everything.
You've done it freely, with an open hand, when we were poor, when we needed you, and we are so grateful.
Would you impress and reshape our hearts as we consider your generosity?
We pray this in your name, in your strong name, Jesus.
Amen.