Devoted to Giving

Pastor Robarge’s Sermon

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

I came across a sign, I think it was found on one of these places outside of the church, that says, “When it comes to giving, some people stop at nothing.” Alright, it wasn’t that funny, I know, but I was hoping to get a little bit more of a laugh. But isn’t it the truth?

Today, as we continue this series of messages on devoted followers of Jesus Christ, we find out that today, a devoted follower of Jesus Christ is one who gives. Now like I said before, sometimes we have this feeling in the bottom of our stomachs that all of a sudden, the church is going to talk about money again. Oh, no. We tighten up. We get tense. “What are they going to say now?” “What is it going to be about?” “How are they going to take it this time?”

And yet today, if we are only thinking about money, we miss the point completely. It’s hard to miss it, though. We read our Acts passage, Chapter 2, Verse 44, “And all who believed were together and had all things in common. They were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing all the proceeds to any as they had need.” It’s obvious that they’re talking about money here. It’s obvious they’re talking about possessions. We can’t get away from that.

But if that’s all we see here, then we miss the point. You see, it’s something greater here that these people in the early church are getting at. But see, we have this mental block, at least I do when I come across the text. In the past, I figure out a way to explain it away. “Oh, communal living, that’s nice for those people there, right?” They’re not living in the United State of America. We are king on capitalism, individualism, becoming my own boss. And it doesn’t sit well because these people are taking their possessions. They’re selling them, they’re pooling all of their resources and it just doesn’t make sense to me sometimes.

But then we see today that it’s not just about money. We look in connection with what’s happening here. We look to Luke, as he is the writer of Acts and he’s talking about what Jesus had said and this is in Verse 23 of Chapter 9, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me, for whoever would save his life will lose it but whoever loses his life for my sake, will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?”

This is the point we’re trying to make today that there’s a difference between these two people. You see, there’s a man who’s going to give up everything for something. Now what is it, though, he’s going to give up everything for? The one man, he gives up everything for the sake of the world. But what does he gain? Nothing. He actually loses his own soul. He loses himself.

But we see this other man in this picture who gives up everything for Christ and it says when you lose yourself, you’re actually saved, not by what you’re doing but by losing yourself in Christ and finding true identity there. You see, by giving it all up, you’re going to give it all up one way or another. But now what does a man profit here and what does a man profit there? And that’s what we’re looking at today. We’re going to say if you’ve come across these passages before and you’ve been caught up by this reaction to giving with money and possessions, then you’ve missed the point. Because one way or another, we’re going to give it up to something. What are you going to gain? The world that will pass away? Or Christ who is eternal and forever?

But today if you’ve built up those barriers and those walls, then I invite you to at least look beyond it. Look past it just for a moment to see beyond what it is we can gain. Life itself. So I invite you to give up this morning, give up on your desires. Often times, we have a hard time with this idea of giving up, this idea of surrender. Why? Because that shows weakness. We don’t want to be weak. But we see in this kingdom where everything is turned around. We see that the weak have become strong. We see that the poor have become rich. We see that the master has become the servant. You see, everything is turned around so when we see our weakness is found in giving up, we give up our desires. Desire is the thing that you will give up everything to get.

So I ask you this morning what is it you desire the most? What is the one thing that you can look at and say, “I will give up anything for that.” Over time, we have looked at what it is and we say that some people have given up everything to find that perfect spouse. And most of us know that’s impossible. But we give up this whole idea and we say, “I’m willing to give up anything for the sake of encouraging of being the wife or the husband of,” and you find this ideal in finding a perfect spouse. Is that the one thing you’d give up everything for?

We see more and more that it’s placed in our children. Sometimes we have this ideal or we have this desire for our children to become the greatest. And our desire is then placed in this child and we want them to be the best. Maybe our desire is found in a position, a job and we say, “My desire, I’m going to put everything, I give up everything to have this one position.” You see, this is part of the reason we get into this whole desire. We’d give up everything in order to gain this ideal.

That’s why God also identifies this as the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods. You shall not desire anything but me first.” God says that He’s a jealous God. He doesn’t want us to desire anything above Him. We see what happens, 1 Timothy, Paul’s letter to him. We look at desire and the direction that it can go poorly. It says, “But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation into a snare and to many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.” Do you see what happens when our desire is outside of God?

It says that there are possibilities for ruin and destruction. When our desire is not on God Himself and upon that first commandment, “You shall have no other gods,” there can be ruin and destruction. When our desire, when we give up anything to have a perfect spouse, we find out that they will also disappoint at some point in time. And then what happens? When your desire was on that one thing, it’s devastating.

When your one desire and the thing you’d give up everything for goes away, what happens now? It’s gone. Your world is crushed. When your child makes that decision and it doesn’t go in the right way, the way that you had planned and purposed for, then everything comes crashing in. Well, now you question yourself.

When you place all these things in the place of God, it comes to ruin and destruction. That’s why today when we’re looking at this whole idea of giving, we give up those desires. We give up those earthly desires because they lead to ruin and destruction. But today we also say we give up our plans.

I was at a conference recently where we started the devotion process while talking about the wind of God and they had this illustration. They had this boat out on the water. It’s a sailboat. But it was just sitting there because, all of a sudden, the wind had died. There was no wind and they didn’t see it. So this boat, as you can see, a sailboat needs wind to move, but it just sits on the water. Finally, somebody is looking. “Where is the wind? Where is the wind trying to push us?” So somebody spots the wind off on the side. “Turn the boat. Catch the wind.”

But now what does this have to do when we look at our plans. Sometimes what we’d like to do instead of catching the wind, of finding the place where God wants us to be, we’d say, “Let’s put a power boat on this thing. Let’s put an engine on it and let’s get to where we need to go.”

I have to tell you that’s the way I like to do things sometimes. I have this vision about what it is I want to go to. I have plans in place and now all I need to do is to just get there quickly. But that’s what we do sometimes when we fail to listen and fail to see where the wind of God is pushing.

As most of you know, I always had plans early on to become a police officer. I was a young child and this one goal I had, the vision I had for my future, I was going to be a police officer in some way shape or form. And I did everything in my power in order to go in that direction. I went to school, I went to college, I got my degree in criminal justice. And I said, “That’s the direction I’m going. There’s my future. I see it. I grab it.” But then, all of a sudden, the way that I saw it, doors started closing and I believed the wind of God was pushing those doors closed and I started to say, “Why is it that I can’t go in this direction?” I see the future. This is my future that I’ve had all along. What happened? But then I see the doors opened and the wind of God pushing and pulling in a new direction, in a new way.

Sometimes we fail to see the wind of God. So where is it in your life that you start to see the doors closing and you start to say, “I don’t really know what that means.” “Why isn’t God pushing me in this direction because that’s the plan I have? Let’s get the power boat and just push on through.”

You see, the plans we have are not always the plans God has. But when we see the doors closing, we’re always going to see a door opening. Sometimes, that’s always difficult to figure out which doors are opening. But where is it? Where do we find the doors opening? Where do we hear the wind and the wind pushing us in what direction?

This is the difficult part, to not power forward but to really hear the wind of God blowing and in which direction is He taking us? We give up our plans and we gain a greater understanding of which direction God is trying to take us. But we also, today we also say we give up our very lives. In this one, we look toward 2 Corinthians, Chapter 8 starting with Verse 1, it says, “We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia, for in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part, for they gave according to their means and, as I can testify, beyond their means of their own accord, begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints. And this is not as we expected but they gave themselves first to the Lord and then by the will of God to us.”

You see, again at surface level in this reading in 2 Corinthians, we’d say, “Oh, it’s about giving again.” But you see, the second part of this says, “But they gave of themselves first to God.” That’s not money. That’s not possessions. That’s themselves. They gave of themselves first to God and then to the apostles and the work that was going on. You see, this goes back to that Luke passage. “A man is going to give himself up for something but what is he going to gain.”

We see today, this morning, that when we give up our life, when we give of our very selves, it’s greater than money, possessions, things. It means the very giving within ourselves. I want you to do this little thing with me this morning. I want you to take a deep breath and hold it. Now inhale again, hold it. Inhale again, hold it. Alright, breathe. Did you feel your body wanting to exhale? We spend so much of our lives intake and intake and it’s about us. And even in our spiritual life, we talk about bible reading and prayer and meditation. You see, that’s intake and it’s intake and it’s intake.

But you see, our bodies are ready to exhale, to give out. It’s a perfect illustration of our lives with God because we can take in and it’s great. We have to take in. Our bodies need that oxygen to bring into our lungs so we can breathe and live. But if we never exhale, all we’re left with is a blue face. Our life is then lived in exhale, in service to others and that’s what happens when we give of our very lives to God and His service.

So today, we talked about giving up. We’ve seen how the kingdom is reversed, that our weakness is our strength. And that, I pray, goes beyond possessions and money, that today you see that it’s a giving of our very selves. Amen.

Copyright 2010 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church