giving

As the heat of the sun melts the glacier ice, so our hearts are finally melted by the warmth of God's love in Christ. Giving best flows from gratitude, not guilt.

We've been working at this for a while, the issue of our giving. Not just giving in financial terms, of course, though that as often as not is a good and helpful guide to the state of our hearts.

We want to cultivate a culture of giving, a pattern of living where generous, costly giving is very much the essence of our way of life.

We want to preach Jesus, in other words. We want him to to be seen and honoured and known.

But how does that cutlure of giving come about?

Certainly not through guilt. Guilt is to giving what duty is to doing. As a motivating factor, it only ever gets you just a little way along the road at best.

I saw someone tonight who exemplified that pretty well. You're making me feel guilty! he said, when I asked him, a member elsewhere of Christ's church, where he'd worshipped since coming here four or five years ago.

It wasn't a loaded question at all. But it felt to the man like the question was laden with guilt. Such guilt can make a person pitch up at our worship, I suppose. But I'm not under any illusions that such feelings of guilt will really effect major change. Guilt may get him to worship: but it won't ever keep him there.

Guilt like that may chip little bits of the glacier ice away. But it won't ever melt the whole mass. Something more is needed. The warmth of the love of the Lord. A profound and overwhleming sense of gratitude.

Grace is a pre-requisite for a culture of giving.

The grace of God being preached. The grace of God being lived. The grace of God being felt and known. The grace of God pervading all our life. Our words, our conversations. Our friendships, our relationships. Our actions, our reactions. Our outlook and our attitudes.

Grace in every single fibre of our corporate life.

A group of us here have been meeting together a few times now to think this whole thing through. We were meeting again this evening. And, again, I think we made some progress.

It's not just giving as such which we want to promote - though there are good practical reasons at present for needing to do just that ('balancing the books' is the phrase which springs to mind)! It's a culture of giving which we're wanting to foster and grow.

And that always starts with grace.

The most extended treatment of this theme which Scripture gives is found in Paul's second surviving letter to the church at Corinth. For two whole chapters the guy goes on at length about the principles of giving. He starts with grace.

"We want you to know about the grace that God has given the Macedonian churches."

It's a work of God, a work of God's grace in the hearts of these glacier men.

"Out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity."

Not the most auspicious set of circumstances, you'd have thought - severe trial and extreme poverty. But it's joy which prompts their giving. Gratitude and sheer delight in God: not guilt or any sense of duty.

Grace.

"For you know the grace of our (note that possessive pronoun!) Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich."

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It's where he begins, and it's where he ends as well.

"Because of the service by which you have proved yourselves, men will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity in sharing with them and with everyone else. And in their prayers for you their hearts will go out to you, because of the surpassing grace God has given you. Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!"

Grace and gratitude.

A potent combination!