Generosity, Part 2: Love leads to generosity

Love leads to generosity. That makes sense, doesn’t it? It certainly does to me. Imagine your kids or your spouse or anyone else you love. Don’t you just want to give them good stuff? To put it more biblically, if your son asks for bread, would you give him a stone instead? I don’t think it’s just me, I think that almost all of us tend to be generous with those we love. Generous with our time, our money, our everything. Why would we do that? Because Love makes us want to be generous. 

But let’s just take a step back and ask: what does it mean to be generous with our money? To answer that we can jump back to the Old Testament days and see what was required, because generosity would obviously be doing more than what is required. 

God (through Moses) commands the Israelites give a tenth (a tithe) to the Levites (Num 18:24). The Levites were tasked with acting as the priests as well as maintaining the temple and some additional civic duties. Essentially, they were the clergy (the church) of the time.

He also periodically commanded them to give more (offerings). These offerings were for additional purposes, for example in order to build up the temple (His dwelling place). Or sometimes to repair His temple (Haggai 1).  

And it didn’t stop there either.  He also instructed them to help the poor (sometimes referred to as alms). This seems to be done by various means. There is reference to a tithe to be paid every three years to look after those in need (Deut. 14:28-29). Also, by leaving some grain in fields for the poor and foreigners (Lev. 23:22). 

When the above didn’t happen, to put it bluntly, God got annoyed! I’ll spare you the details, but just read through Haggai or Malachi to get a sense of His disappointment when the Israelites didn’t follow through. These were not gentle suggestions. These were clear expectations from God.

The Old Testament rule was “10 percent – plus – plus”.  The 10 percent is well defined; the “plus – plus”; not quite so clearly defined. I kind of look at it like when I go to a restaurant.

• The bill is very clearly defined, to the penny. Sort of like our tithe. The bill is owed. No question.   
• The tip is over and above the bill; it’s not optional, but it’s not quite as well defined as the bill.  Sounds a lot like an offering to me.
• The alms are like that Unicef box on the counter (remember those?) They would tug at our heart strings, and we would leave a bit of change in the box if we were feeling magnanimous that day. To be fair, I think that the expectation was/is to do more than that, but hopefully by now you get my drift.

If that was the expectation (again we’re talking Old Testament here), then generosity would start after that, wouldn’t it?

But we’re under a new deal (a new covenant) today. So, what does that mean? When Christ said that He didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfil it, He may as well have added “… and I didn’t come to lower the bar, I came to raise it.”  You don’t have to read far through the gospels to see that.  He made it abundantly clear that that was the case when He said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”  Bar raised – big time.  Or when He said if a soldier compels you to walk a mile, walk two.  Again – bar raised.

When the believers in Corinth were told that “you should give what you have decided in your heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion”, it was in the above context.  The context of a raising of the bar relative to Old Testament teaching.  

Let’s imagine for a moment that it’s the year 29AD and we’ve grown up as Corinthians. 

We’ve been taught all our life that we should give:

• 10 percent of our income to the priests, 
• plus we should give periodic additional offerings for the temple building, 
• plus we should also help out the poor.  

We start to follow Jesus and He teaches us that the bar has been raised on everything we’ve been taught; that we should be more compassionate, more generous, more responsible. And then we are told to “decide in your heart” what to give. If that were the case, would we be giving more or less than the “10 percent – plus – plus” that we’ve been taught to give? 

Now it’s worth asking ourselves, are we truly being generous? Love leads to generosity, so if we’re not being generous in an area of our life, it’s worth asking the follow up question: why?

“If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

• I Corinthians 13:3 (NIV)

Generosity Part 1: Love love