Christian Generosity

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But we’ll be in 3rd John this morning. I almost said 3rd John chapter 1, but there’s only one chapter. So we’ll be starting in verse 1 this morning.

And what 3rd John, we’ll probably be done with this series next week. We’ve been going through 1st John, 2nd John, and 3rd John, looking at these letters from the last of Christ’s remaining apostles on earth as he looked at the end of his life and looked at the generations of Christians who were about to come after him and thought, what were the things that they most needed to know and address some of the problems that were coming up before that last link to Jesus’ earthly ministry was gone. And these are the things that he wrote down.

These are the things that he left with us. And third John really provides a counterpoint to what we looked at last week. If you’ll recall last week, I know some of you have slept since then, but if you recall when we studied second John, really the one point we focused on, because a lot of 2 John was a repeat of the things we’d studied for weeks in 1 John.

So the one thing we focused on really was the one new aspect of 2 John, where he says, by the way, you’ve got these false teachers. Don’t take them into your house. And I shared with you, I explained to you the context, what was going on in their history at that time, why he would say that it wasn’t, you know, shame on you.

You’re going to hell because you gave the Mormon guys and the ties and the bicycles a bottle of water on your front porch. That’s not what he’s talking about. He’s talking about these people who were supporting anybody who claimed to preach in the name of Jesus.

And really they were preaching false doctrines that were leading people astray and leading people into hell. And Christians, without realizing it, were taking them into their homes, giving them food, giving them a place to stay, giving them supplies that they needed in order to do that. So it would be like us financing the missionary program of the Mormon church or us financing the missionary program of some of the Islamist groups that are now recruiting in the United States.

You take somebody who’s teaching against the gospel and you start financing their missionary program. That’s what he was talking about. John knew, though, and as we’ll see next week, he was right.

there were going to be some people who were going to look at that and take it to an extreme and say, hey, I don’t like you, so therefore I’m going to call you a false teacher, and we’re not going to help you out at all. And so we can take this to an extreme, when it was being applied to other Christians that they just didn’t like. And so John wrote some things down in the book of 3 John, to sort of swing that pendulum back to the middle and say, but generosity is still important.

And we’re going to look at that this morning, the importance of generosity. And some of you may be worried already, oh great, he’s going to talk about money. Some of you may be here for the first time and maybe you’ve thought that in the past. Every time I go to church, they talk about money.

I hear that from time to time. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve preached on money over the years. And probably that’s not enough times because Jesus talked about money so much.

But let me just clarify something. As I talk about generosity and as the Bible talks about generosity, it’s not just talking about money. And it’s not just talking about putting money in the offering plate.

And I’ll go you a step further. I was watching some videos over the weekend. Everything’s on YouTube now.

And I was watching some videos this weekend of preachers browbeating their congregations for not giving enough. And people talking about, you know, you can’t claim to be a Christian if you don’t tithe and this and that. And folks, I’m not talking about the buy my 99.

95 prayer cloth and be healed heretics on TBN. I’m talking about respected and otherwise, I would think, biblical Baptist, even Southern Baptist preachers who are preaching the tithe as law and who are preaching that if you’re not a good Christian, if you’re not giving enough, and put your money in my coffers, and it just made me sick. You will not hear me browbeat the congregation for not giving enough.

You can ask Kathy when it comes time for the financial report, I tell her, give me the bottom line and talk to me like I’m four. Just tell me if we’re okay. That’s really all I want to know.

Tell me if we can meet our obligations and still be able to do ministry. That’s all I want to know. I don’t know anything about who gives or who gives how much.

Some of you all probably know more about the finances than I do. And maybe that’s wrong on my part. but I just trust that y’all are going to give as you’re led by God, and he’s going to take care of it, and he’s going to enable us to do what he’s called us to do.

I just trust that that’s going to be the case. And I’ve had preachers get mad at me, retired preachers who’ve been members of my church before, tell me I was wrong. The only time I’ve ever had one tell me, you were wrong about this is when I said, I don’t believe the tithe is binding today.

By the way, it wouldn’t be 10% anyway. It was about 23 and a third percent, almost a quarter of your income in the Old Testament. But what I see the New Testament standard for giving being is to give voluntarily, to give cheerfully, and to give sacrificially.

I don’t recall it saying a percentage in the New Testament. Give as you’re able and God leads. Okay?

Can I just clarify that right now so nobody walks out of here thinking, oh, the preacher just wanted my money. I don’t get a commission on what comes in on the offering plate. Okay?

It doesn’t work that way. It might in some places it doesn’t work that way here. And as I’m telling you to be generous, better said, as God’s word is telling you to be generous, it’s not just about money.

And I will say generosity doesn’t just mean giving to this church. Yes, you should as a member of this church give to support the ministry of this church, give to support the work that we try to do, give to support the missionaries we support. But I fully admit and have told you before, there are ministries outside of this church that are deserving of your generosity as well.

There are causes outside of this church that are deserving of your generosity as well. My wife and I, and I’m not telling you amounts because I’m not bragging, but my wife and I support missionaries, not as much as I’d like to if I was able to, but we support missionaries outside of this church. We give, again, not as much as I would like to, not as much as I mean I would dream to but we support a group that rescues children from sex trafficking that has no connection to this church whatsoever.

So I just I’m telling you that again not to brag but just to clarify so nobody walks out of here thinking well he’s just talking he’s just trying to fill the coffers of the church. Now I’m really not. I’m going through the books of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John and we just happen to land on the subject of generosity this morning.

But he starts out in verse 1, he says, the elder unto the well-beloved Gaius, whom I love in the truth. So unlike 2 John, he does address somebody by name. It’s an elder of one of the churches named Gaius, and we think this is probably somewhere in the area of Ephesus or Pergamon in the western part of what’s now Turkey.

He says, whom I love in the truth. Gaius was somebody he knew and who he loved because they were sort of kindred spirits in following Jesus Christ. And he said, beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health even as thy soul prospereth. So he looks at this church that is led by Gaius, and he sees their spiritual condition.

And in contrast to some of the letters that are written in the New Testament, where the apostles are straightening out these churches that had some serious problems going on, John writes to Gaius’ church and says, spiritually, y’all are in great condition. Spiritually, your hearts are just right where they need to be. Now, he’s not calling them perfect, but he’s looking at them saying, this is a church that loves Jesus.

This is a church that is trying to grow closer to Jesus, is trying to help others grow closer to Jesus. This is a church whose heart’s in the right place. And even when our hearts are in the right place, it doesn’t mean that we’re going to be perfect.

But he gives us a goal to shoot for. That we would be that kind of church where he says, man, I wish my bank account was doing as well as you are spiritually. Because that’s what he’s telling them here.

Your spiritual account is doing great. And he says, I wish for you to prosper in other things. I wish for you the kind of physical health that you have spiritually.

I wish for you the kind of physical prosperity that you have spiritually. Now, that’s not a name it or claim it thing. That is an acknowledgment.

That’s praising the amount of faith that they have and where they stand with Jesus. He says, I wish every aspect of your life was going as well as you’re going spiritually. He says, for I rejoiced greatly when the brethren came and testified of the truth that is in thee, even as thou walkest in the truth.

These were people that John knew, and apparently in his absence, other people had gone and visited them, and just like today, word gets around. And word came back to John, and people came back and said, these guys are walking in the truth. These guys are the real deal. These aren’t people who just had a conversion experience that they claimed while you were there, and then drifted away sometime later.

He says, these guys came back and told John, these are the real deal. And he says, I rejoice greatly. He says in verse four, and this has become one of my favorite verses in scripture, because this is my heart not only as a father, but as a pastor as well. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in the truth.

For me, pastoring, success in pastoring has never been about having the biggest church or the richest church. What excites my heart is the ability to minister to people for years or a few years or, you know, however long God may leave me there. And then when I’ve gone on to another place, and I don’t mean heaven, I mean Seminole, when I’ve gone on to another place, and they’re not the same, when I’ve gone on to another place to hear stories about how they are still continuing in the things that we worked on together, that they’re still continuing in the truth that I taught them.

And I don’t ascribe that to my influence. I ascribe that to me being the blunt instrument, the hammer in the hand of the Holy Spirit, or the screwdriver in the hand of the hand. I’m just the tool that God uses.

And any of us that are in ministry, and if you’re a believer this morning, you are in ministry. You’ve been called into ministry. And we’re just the tools that God uses, but to look at the work that he continues, they are still walking in the things that they were taught.

It’s sort of like the joy of realizing your children are not just obeying when you’re right there on them, but even in your absence, your children are still doing what they know is right. And if someday I experience that, that my children are doing what they’re supposed to do, when I’m not there, I will let you know, and I will be glad in that. I look forward to that day happening one of these days.

But he says, I have no greater joy than the knowledge, than to hear that my children walk in the truth. That’s really what it’s about. And so he, I can’t think of a better word than praising.

I don’t want to indicate that he’s somehow worshiping them, but he’s commending them. Maybe that’s a better word. For their spiritual walk, for their adherence to the truth, for their love, for their closeness to the Lord.

And then he says in verse 5, Beloved, thou doest faithfully whatsoever thou doest to the brethren and to strangers. He sort of switches gears, but the thoughts are connected. Part of what he’s heard is their faithfulness to take care of other people.

He says, you are faithful. You do faithfully whatever you do to the brethren and to strangers. That there were people who would pass through their town and come across their church, which wasn’t necessarily a building at that time, but would come across them and they would support them.

That these people were being generous. that this church was being generous in its support of people who needed their support. Now this included brethren.

It included traveling missionaries. It included traveling preachers. It included people that they knew.

It also included people that they didn’t know. And that’s a hard line sometimes for us. Because we’re sometimes willing to help people that we do know, not necessarily people that we don’t know.

Or vice versa. I don’t know how true this is, but I heard somebody say on the radio, sociologists say, one of the big differences between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives are interested in helping people they do know and don’t care so much about the people they don’t, and that liberals care about helping people they don’t know but care less about the people they do. I don’t know if that’s true or not.

It’s an indictment of both sides, both of us. But many of us, you know, sometimes we can be so concerned about the stranger countries away, and we see that with our own missions, don’t we? We can be concerned with reaching and helping the lost and the poor in China, but forget about people here in Seminole.

And then other times we can care about my family. These are the people closest to me, and then I see the homeless guy on the side of the road, and I couldn’t care less. And John says, you’ve got it with both.

You’ve got it down with both. You’re being generous to both. You’re taking care of brethren and strangers.

And if you’re conservative or liberal, and you don’t like that characterization, I didn’t say I agreed with it. I just said I thought it was interesting. So don’t be mad at me when you leave here for that.

But the truth is we all fall into those categories at various times. It’s hard to care about everything, isn’t it? It’s exhausting to try to care about everyone’s problems. And yet that’s what they were doing.

These people really got it. They really had it down. They understood it.

He said, you’re doing right by the brethren and by strangers. You’re taking care of them, which have borne witness of thy charity before the church. That word charity.

When you see that word charity used in the New Testament, a lot of times it’s being used for some reason as a substitute for the word love. And if you’ve been in church any length of time, you’ve probably heard that there are three or four. There are four Greek words for love, three that are used in scripture.

The one used here that’s often replaced by the word charity is the word agape, God’s kind of love. This self-sacrificial love that only comes from God, that we’re really only capable of doing loving people with the right motive when God enables us to do it. And so he says, these people, these brethren and these strangers have borne witness.

They’ve come back with a testimony before the church of your agape love. Word is getting around, he says, about the way you love people, whom if thou bring forward on their journey after a godly sort, thou shalt do well. And he’s saying, and there are some after a godly sword.

In other words, there are some that are doing God’s work, and you’re bringing them forward on their journey. And he says, you’re doing well by doing that. You’re doing well by doing that.

You’re taking care of people who are preaching the word. He says, because that for his name’s sake, they went forth taking nothing of the Gentiles. As I told you last week when he’s talking about not showing hospitality to false teachers, there was no Best Western in town at that time.

There was no McDonald’s for somebody to go get a meal. If you were coming through a town, you were preaching, you were ministering, that your only hope was that some brothers and sisters in Christ would take you into their home, give you a place to stay, give you food, and provide you with supplies for the next leg of your journey until you got to the next place. Because it was important to Paul, and it was important to John, and it was important to a lot of the early apostles that they not take, Not that they not take support, but that they not take support from the Gentiles. If we were going to send you as a missionary to China, let’s say we were going to send Brother Greg as a missionary.

Or how about Japan? You want to go back to Japan? I don’t think he cared for the food so much.

If we were going to send Brother Greg as a missionary to Japan, we would try to, with our church and with other churches contributing, we would try for the Christians here to supply his needs and pay his way to go to Japan and preach the gospel. Right? That’s what we would do.

We wouldn’t send him to Japan and say, go beg from the non-Christians that you’re supposed to be ministering to. That’s not the best witness. Or even a poorer country.

If you were going to send me to Cambodia, you’d send me with funds to live off of and to carry out the work. You wouldn’t ask me to go and beg from people I was preaching to who have nothing themselves. And add an extra burden on them.

So that’s what he’s saying. You know, they were receiving nothing from the Gentiles. They were going to these pagan lands and they were preaching to these people who not only didn’t know Jesus Christ, but didn’t know God either.

And you enabled them to go and not have to take anything from the Gentiles because that presents one more obstacle. That presents one more obstacle to the gospel. He says, we therefore ought to receive such that we might be fellow helpers with the truth.

And he says, as you see these missionaries, as you see these people coming through, he said, you ought to receive them. Receive them into your church, into your home, that we might be fellow helpers with the truth. So in contrast to what we talked about last week where he says you’ve got the false teachers, he says don’t take them into your home.

Don’t give them room and board and food and supplies for the next leg of the journey because what you’re doing is paying their way to go and preach to people a false gospel that says there’s another way to heaven besides Jesus Christ. He said don’t do that because you’re making it possible and you’re sharing in their sins. What he does here is gives us the counterpoint and says, but don’t use that as an excuse to hoard your money and hoard your time and your supplies and say, I’m not helping anybody. See, the gospel at its very nature, at its very essence, is about generosity.

We didn’t deserve the kindness of God in Jesus Christ that he would come and suffer and die to pay for our sins. God did that because he’s gracious, because he’s loving. He didn’t do it because I was lovable.

He did it because he’s loving. and God gave me more than I deserved. When God gives us good things we don’t deserve, it’s called grace.

When God lavishes on us far more than we could ever deserve in abundance, that’s generosity. And God is generous with his grace. God’s generous with his blessings.

And folks, you’ve been blessed today. You may be thinking, but I’m poor, I’m broke. You are still in the richest 10% of the world’s population.

Have you got a refrigerator? Have you got a car? and you got access to a car.

Let’s put it that way. If Benjamin was in the room, he’d be saying, no, I don’t have a car. Stop.

And you won’t have a car if you keep up. Do you have air conditioning? Folks, we’re better off than most people in the world.

And I don’t say that to say, oh, we’re better than them. I say that for us to realize that even when we’re broke, how blessed we are. I was thinking this week about early in my ministry, There was a time when the church couldn’t meet its financial obligations.

It wasn’t here. And my wife had been laid off from her job. I was looking for a job and hadn’t found one yet.

And we were living on about $800, maybe $900 a month, which is just about enough to pay the bills. And I remember that there was one day I went in there and we hadn’t had money to buy groceries. And I went and I found two things on the shelf in the garage.

a bag of macaroni, not macaroni and cheese, a bag of macaroni, and a can of carrots. And I had all sorts of seasonings in my drawer. And we had macaroni and carrots for dinner, which is disgusting, but it was food.

You know what? But the next day, I got paid. We went and bought groceries.

The bills were paid. It was a tough existence, and some of you are there or have been there. And so I don’t tell you that to minimize where you are, But to tell you if you have anything, it’s because of the generosity of God.

Because when we realize that we’ve rebelled against him, that he created us to live in paradise and to live in perfect harmony with him, and we shook our fists in his face and said, no, I’m going to live my own way and do what I want. I don’t care what you say. God doesn’t owe us a thing.

I tell you, he owes me death and hell and separation from him in hell. The fact that God has given me anything good is testament to his generosity. And we as believers should be the first to reflect that generosity.

Here are some of the things that he points out in this passage that we can accomplish, that they were accomplishing with their generous spirit and that we can accomplish as well. First of all, we care for our brothers and sisters. And this is what the early church was built on.

This was their pattern for ministry. I shouldn’t say built on because that makes it, you know, we say all the time that it was built on the gospel, and I don’t mean to minimize that. The church is absolutely about preaching the fact that Jesus Christ died to pay for our sins and that there’s one way to heaven.

And it’s about reaching people with the gospel so that they can have a relationship with God as well. But as far as their pattern of ministry, it’s probably a better way to say that. This was it.

Meeting needs. Taking care of one another. And the book of Acts says the believers lived together and had all things common.

Not in common. And by the way, this was not socialism. I don’t care what the talking heads on TV say.

the difference between this and socialism is the apostles didn’t go at the point of a gun and say give us everything you’ve got. People voluntarily, people voluntarily, because they loved Jesus and because they loved others, they gave all that they could and they made sure needs were met. And when not all the needs were being met, they took steps to address it.

They took steps to meet the needs. They took care of one another. And I think that’s something that’s lost in churches today, that we don’t take care of each other.

And I’m not just talking about financially, but a lot Our goal is to slip in and out unnoticed. Don’t want anybody to know I’m here. Don’t want anybody to know the struggles I’m going through this week.

And we come in and we put on this happy face facade. And we act like everything’s perfect and we’ve got life all figured out. Because we think everybody else has got life all figured out because they’re all smiling too.

And meanwhile, we’ve all got difficulties. We’re all struggling with something. Now some of our struggles may be big.

Some of our struggles may be small. Thank the Lord my struggles were small this week, but there have been times they’ve been big too. Generosity isn’t just about money, although in this case that’s, I don’t know that they were necessarily giving these people money.

They were taking them in because they needed a place to stay. They needed food. They needed supplies.

They were taking care of them. That might mean us writing a check to deal with somebody’s need. That might mean opening the food pantry.

And I’m thankful for everybody who has contributed money and supplies to that. Because it’s enabling us to help some people here in the community who need it. You know, as well as I do, sometimes taking care of one another is not about the material things.

Madeline runs into stuff all the time. This is not a surprise to those of y’all who’ve watched her. You know what?

When she runs into something, most of the time she doesn’t break the skin. She doesn’t bleed. You know, there’s not even a bruise there most of the time.

But she needs to be taken care of. And you know what she always wants? Either myself or Charla, to give her a hug.

Sometimes taking care of somebody is just about investing a little bit of time and letting them know you care. And I’ll be honest, generosity with time is sometimes a whole lot harder than generosity with money. Can I just write the check and be done?

Do I have to give up my whole day for whatever we have and whatever the need is? We need to learn to be generous with what God’s given us. Whether it be time, whether it be resources, whether it be money, to meet the needs that he put in front of us, to take care of our brothers and sisters, to take care of each other.

That’s our job. Not to come in and look like we’ve got everything figured out and we’re the experts, but to lean on each other. As Paul wrote, where one member suffers, all of us should suffer.

Where one is exalted, we should all rejoice together. He made us to be the body. Jesus made us as the church to be the body of Christ. A few weeks ago when I burned my thumb, I mean burned it, and Chuck asked me, how’d you burn it?

And I said, with stupidity. I reached down and tried to pull out a drill bit that got stuck in a piece of wood when I knew better. You know what?

When I reached down and I grabbed that, it didn’t just hurt my thumb. Oh, no, no, it hurt up into my sinuses. I felt a chill run down my leg.

And after the initial, none of y’all ever experienced that, maybe I need to go to the doctor. Every time I burn myself or run into something, I feel it in my sinuses, and that may not be a good thing. Maybe I need to talk to my doctor about that next week.

Anyway, the whole body felt it. And after that initial shock wore off and that thumb hurt, my whole body didn’t feel like things were right. You know what?

Because they’re part of the same body. And if your hand’s in excruciating pain, you know, the whole rest of your body isn’t going, oh, la-di-da, we feel so wonderful. Things are great here.

Oh, the whole body suffers. That’s how it’s supposed to be. We’re supposed to suffer together.

We’re supposed to rejoice together. We’re supposed to take care of each other, to be generous with each other, with our money, with our resources, with our time, with our affection, with our interest, with all the things that God gives us. A generous spirit enables us to take care of our brothers and sisters.

Second of all, it enables us to reflect the love of God. He said they’ve borne witness of thy charity before the church. So because of their actions, they’ve gotten a reputation, and they’ve gotten a reputation for demonstrating God’s kind of love.

And as I already said, demonstrating God’s kind of love is something we can’t do without God empowering us to do it. I don’t have that kind of love on my own. You’ve all heard about my stories in the school parking lots.

Some of you have heard about my stories inside the school offices. It’s difficult for me always to react the way Jesus would. I’ll put it that way.

It’s something I still struggle with and work on and apologize for. Those times that I’m able to do it, it’s because I’ve prayed and asked God. You know what?

If I realize I’m going into a situation where I’m really going to need it, if I think about it, I will stop and pray and ask God to help me love the other person, or better yet, for him to love the other person through me. And you know what? It’s not such a struggle in those occasions.

You know what? When we’re generous with one another, when we’re generous, not just with each other. He talks about doing for the brethren and to strangers.

When we do that, we demonstrate the love of God. We reflect the love of God. Because as I said a minute ago, God is generous.

In providing salvation, he was generous. In providing the blessings that we have, he’s generous. God is abundant with these things, whether we realize it or not.

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in what we don’t have that we forget what we do have and forget how generous that God has actually been to us. But because they showed generosity, it said it was reflected, and others had borne witness of their charity, their agape before the church. so a generous spirit isn’t just about hey fill up our offering plates so we can have more money and you know do more things it’s about being generous again with the things not just money that God has given us inside these walls and outside these walls to show the love of Jesus Christ to a world that needs to see it we talked about this some on Wednesday nights on Wednesday night this last week about trying to discern what some of the physical needs are in our community because that gives us an open door to be able to meet the spiritual needs in our community.

To be able to demonstrate that God, the love that God has for people by showing them, not just telling them. And when people see that they are loved in an unusual way, well, the Bible says it’s God’s kindness that draws men to repentance. I believe that he can use us as instruments of that kindness when we reflect his love and his generosity to others.

And finally this morning, we support the growth of the kingdom. With a generous spirit, we support the growth of the kingdom. He says, whom if thou bring forward on their journey after a godly sort, thou shalt do well, because that for his name’s sake they went forth taking nothing of the Gentiles, we therefore ought to receive such that we might be fellow helpers to the truth.

He said, you take this godly sort of, this servant of God, you take them in, you’re doing well. He said, these people have gone out for Jesus’ name’s sake. They’ve gone out for the sake of the gospel, for the sake of spreading the name of Jesus Christ and his truth, And they haven’t been reliant on the lost that they’re preaching to.

The churches have enabled this to happen. He said, an