Heart of a Giver: Generous Living or Sacrificial Giving?
Through all of these studies we’ve talked a lot about what it means to live generously. We live in the United States and, therefore, even with our middle-class status, we’re rich! On a global scale, it takes an income of less than $50,000 to make it into the top one percent of the world’s richest people. The top 1%!
“Which is more messed up—that we have so much compared to everyone else, or that we don’t think we’re rich? That on any given day we might flippantly call ourselves ‘broke’ or ‘poor’? We are neither of those things. We are rich. Filthy rich.” (Crazy Love, page 89).
So why did God put us in this land of blessing, and what does he expect us to do with all of these blessings? Is his purpose for us to be as comfortable as possible here on earth, and then go home to an even more comfortable life in heaven when we die—all the while people in other parts of the world are living in desperate poverty, dying from starvation, drinking contaminated water, and living on the streets? Did God bless us for our own comfort? Seeing those questions written plainly in black and white might help us to see how ridiculous that notion is.
But how much does God expect us to give? How generous does he want us to be? That’s the discussion we in our group have been having. In Crazy Love, Francis Chan said, “Jesus asks us for everything, but we try to give him less.” John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, wrote in 1 John 3:17—“If someone has enough money to live well and sees a brother or sister in need but shows no compassion—how can God’s love be in that person?” Convicting.
One million children under the age of five die each year from severe malnutrition. Am I okay with that? One and a half million children die each year from lack of clean drinking water. Am I okay with that? (Statistics from ActionAgainstHunger.org.) GlobalIssues.org cites these statistics:
Some 21,000 children die every day around the world. That is equivalent to:
- 1 child dying every 4 seconds
- 14 children dying every minute
- A 2011 Libya conflict-scale death toll every day
- A 2010 Haiti earthquake occurring every 10 days
- A 2004 Asian Tsunami occurring every 11 days
- An Iraq-scale death toll every 19–46 days
- Just under 7.6 million children dying every year
- Some 92 million children dying between 2000 and 2010
The silent killers are poverty, hunger, easily preventable diseases and illnesses, and other related causes.
Am I okay with that?
In one of our recent conversations, our group again talked about living generously. We kicked around the idea of how it’s sometimes easy to throw money at a cause or a problem and feel like we’ve given all God expects us to give. And we tithe, what more could God want of us? The conversation made me think about the difference between living generously and giving sacrificially. Most of us are open to living generously. Even the term itself—living generously—conjures, at least for me, the image of giving, but giving out of my surplus, ensuring I’m adequately taken care of first. But sacrificial giving is giving beyond my comfort. That’s what I said during that group conversation:
“Doesn’t God want us to give sacrificially? How could giving out of my surplus mean anything?”
One of the gents in the group asked me, “Where does God say we have to give sacrificially?”
What immediately came to mind was the story about the widow’s offering in the gospel of Mark. Jesus watched a lot of rich people put large amounts of money in the collection box in the Temple. Then a widow came by and dropped in two small coins. Mark finishes the story in 12:43–44:
Jesus called his disciples to him and said, “I tell you the truth, this poor widow has given more than all the others who are making contributions. For they gave a tiny part of their surplus, but she, poor as she is, has given everything she had to live on.”
I answered the question that night with that story, but since then I’ve thought more about it. Doesn’t God expect us to be like Jesus? Isn’t he our perfect example? The “good work within you” Paul speaks about in his letter to the Philippians, is the work of sanctification—becoming more and more like Jesus. If I’m to be like Jesus, I need to remember this: there is no better example of sacrificial giving than Jesus. He gave everything. Something to think about.
