Generosity Begins in Worship
Jesus binds a person's money to his heart, so that what he does with his possessions shows what he worships, and a heart that treasures Christ is set free to give.
Where Your Treasure Is
Jesus taught that the heart follows its treasure: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19–21). Preaching that text, Chris called stewardship “a worship issue” and said Jesus' teaching on money and possessions is “intended by Jesus to protect us from worshiping money and all the stuff that money can buy.”[4] The connection runs both ways, because “what our money goes after is an indication of what our heart goes after. There is an undeniable link between our spiritual vitality, between our worship, and how we handle and how we relate to money and possessions.”[4]
Jesus takes for granted that every one of his hearers will pursue treasure, and he presses them only on which kind they will pursue.[1] Chris has put the choice starkly: “You have two treasures to choose from. Earthly treasure or heavenly treasure. And you have two and only two choices.”[4] A life spent mainly piling up the first kind shows a heart aimed somewhere other than God, and Chris described the other kind of life this way: “if you are marked as a person who uses his or her money and resources to store up heavenly treasure, this is an indication that your heart is aimed towards heaven where God is on the throne, the only one worthy of your worship.”[4]
Money Makes a Convincing Liar
Money promises good things, a roof over the children and a margin against the layoff or the diagnosis nobody saw coming, and the desire for that kind of safety belongs to creatures who know they are frail. Chris has said it is “impossible to preach through the Gospels and not touch on the twin topics of money and possessions. Jesus talks about them frequently and for good reason. They are a great temptation and a potential snare for anyone who would follow Jesus.”[5] The rich man in Luke 12 had a harvest too large for his barns, so he planned bigger barns and years of ease, and God said to him, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” (Luke 12:20).[5]
Paul describes where that desire leads when it runs unchecked: “But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs” (1 Timothy 6:9–10).[6] The snare works because the heart that falls into it misreads itself, and Chris warned the church about exactly that: “indwelling sin is rough on us. It really does lie to us. And it'll tell us we love God when we don't. And it'll tell us we don't love money when we do. Just be careful. You're your own con artist.”[6] A person who leans on money for safety has put his weight on the very thing Chris called “in and of itself, if looked at wrongly, a great danger to you.”[6]
What Contentment Guards
Paul's protection against the snare is contentment, since “godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world” (1 Timothy 6:6–7). Chris has defined contentment as “a sense of enoughness”[1] and has shown how it guards a Christian on both sides: “It will keep you from grumbling in hard times, and it'll keep you from grasping in bountiful times.”[6] Paul learned it in prison and in plenty, writing to the Philippians, “I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need” (Philippians 4:12).
The secret had a source, which Chris located in Paul's appetite for heaven: “He had a relative indifference to earthly finances because he had a relative high regard and need and desire for eternal riches… Paul's earthly contentment is downstream of his heavenly hunger.”[6] Paul knew his life was short, and as Chris put it, “He didn't want to spend it accumulating fragile wealth that would not transfer into the next life. He wanted to spend it accumulating eternal wealth. And he got all of this simply by listening to Jesus.”[1] A Christian who is spiritually content and circumstantially restless has Paul's pattern inverted, because his appetite has fastened on things that perish while his hunger for God has gone quiet.[6]
Giving as an Act of Faith
Jesus followed his warning about the rich fool with a promise to his anxious disciples, that “your Father knows that you need them,” and then with a command that only such a Father could make reasonable: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give to the needy” (Luke 12:30, 32–33). Chris drew out the faith that command requires: “Faith that God sees us. Not just that he sees us, but that he knows what we need. That we can be generous because God is going to provide for us in the midst of our generosity.”[7]
People who believe that promise begin to handle money in ways their neighbors find strange. Chris described them as “radically kingdom-centered lives” that “handle money and possessions in radically different ways. Radical generosity, a countercultural approach to how they earn and how they spend.”[7] The kingdom forms them first, so that the checkbook follows a heart already turned toward God.
An Inheritance Kept in Heaven
Peter tells believers they have been born again “to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you” (1 Peter 1:4), and Chris preached the same security from Paul's letters to Timothy: “God has promised to keep our inheritance.”[8] Treasure laid up with God sits beyond the reach of moth and rust and thieves, and Chris applied that to the pursuit of holiness itself: “So if you pursue godliness, you'll get godliness, and that godliness will be yours. Christ will guard it for you.”[8]
C. S. Lewis made the point that heaven-aimed lives receive earth as well, and Chris has carried Lewis's idea straight into Jesus' words about the kingdom: “aim for earth, get nothing. Aim for heaven, get earth thrown in. Seek first the kingdom of God and all these other things will be added to you.”[2] The obedient life and the good life turn out to be one life, and Chris has told the church, “If you will live for the Lord and really live for the Lord, you will find that that path was the best path for you.”[2] Paul, who could have turned his learning and his churches into a comfortable income, finished in a Roman prison asking Timothy to bring the cloak he had left at Troas (2 Timothy 4:13), and from there he wrote, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7). Chris has pointed to saints who reached the end able to say, “I have no regrets. I am so grateful that I lived all in for the Lord Jesus.”[2]
The Poverty That Made Us Rich
Every Christian arrived with nothing and will leave with nothing, and in between he holds whatever God has entrusted to him.[6] The generosity God asks of him flows from the generosity God has already shown, since “you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). The believer who gives freely is spending the currency of a kingdom whose King emptied himself for him, and whose inheritance Christ keeps in heaven where nothing can touch it.[8]