"Grace That Gives" | 2 Corinthians 8:1-15 | Sunday Morning Worship Service

2 Corinthians chapter 8, verses 1 through 5 is our text this morning.

2 Corinthians 8:1–5

Paul writes, 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, as I can testify, and 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.

This is the word of God, and I pray that he would seal it in your hearts.

The elders have asked me if I would pause or study in Matthew's gospel for just a two-week series here in 2 Corinthians 8 and on giving, and something that I'm eager to do.

Giving is a very much important part of discipleship.

And so the next two weeks today and next Sunday we'll be looking at this passage to see what it tells us about giving.

Preaching on giving is always difficult.

It's like preaching on politics or something.

The best sermons on politics probably don't take place around an election because then it seems disingenuous.

And the best sermons on giving probably don't take place around a time of financial crisis because then they likewise could seem disingenuous.

And so I do want you to know before we get into 2 Corinthians 8 that IBC is doing well financially.

Giving last year was 5% higher than the year before.

Giving this year is higher than it was last year.

This is a very generous congregation.

Of course, we have needs still.

We have new staff we would like to hire, we have air conditioners we'd like to fix, new missionaries we'd like to send out.

There are, of course, needs, and so I'm not telling you not to give.

I'm just telling you we're not in like the give where we shoot the youth pastor mode.

More in the give where we don't fix the air conditioning mode.

Does that distinction make sense?

Because it does to me.

I've been in both worlds, and the second world is way better than the first, believe me.

This actually is the perfect time to talk about giving because our church, of course, is growing and there's been lots of new people here and haven't heard me teach on this before.

And so this text is a great entry way into it because it is Paul's direction to the to the Corinthians to give for the church in Jerusalem.

There's a lot of moving parts in 2 Corinthians 1 uh through, well, really through eight, through the whole this whole chapter.

I'm tempted to do like an overview of 1st and 2nd Corinthians together before we get here, but tempted is the right word.

I won't do it.

I resist.

But this is a complicated passage because it is involving three different parties.

There's the church in Jerusalem that is poor.

They are impoverished.

It's a church largely of pilgrims.

They came to faith as they journeyed to Jerusalem, they're away from their homes, they're away from their work, severely persecuted, and so extremely impoverished.

And you see that in the book of Acts with all the widows and the material needs in Jerusalem.

There's the churches in Macedonia that are themselves very, very poor.

They are afflicted, they are persecuted, they are overtaxed.

We'll talk about them in a second.

And there's the church in Corinth, which is more wealthy, it's a more metro area, it has higher resources, of course.

And so Paul is asking the church in Corinth to give to the church in Jerusalem based upon the pattern of the church in Macedonia.

So it's kind of a three-way trade, but you guys are the smart service.

I hope you can keep up.

The main argument Paul makes in the text that we just read is that the way you give towards the Lord's work is often a very clear indicator of how you are doing spiritually.

One of the clearest evidences that the grace of God has a grip on your heart is how strongly you hold on to the things of this world.

Not just financially, athletics for high school students that are playing sports, for career opportunities for college students that are looking forward to their career, for marriage opportunities for people that are thinking what kind of person do they want to marry, for family, you know, for people that are prioritizing family over everything else, for work and career for people that prioritize work and career over everything else.

One of the clearest evidences that the grace of God has a hold on your heart is seen in how you start to loosen your grip on those other things as you hold on tighter to the Lord.

As you grow in maturity, you care less about those things and more about your walk with the Lord.

Or another way of saying it, to speak specifically of finances, as you grow in maturity, you find less and less security in the things of this world and more and more security in the promises of God that come to us through Jesus Christ.

And so when Paul is correcting the Corinthians, and he is most certainly correcting the Corinthians, he does not start in on them even with the budget.

That comes in chapter 8.

He's been correcting them for one and a half letters so far.

Budget is far down the list.

But when he gets to correcting them in their approach to finances, he also doesn't start with church budgeting or youth pastors or air conditioners.

He starts with a picture of the grace of God seen in Jesus Christ coming down to their hearts.

The grace of God changes what you value, the grace of God changes what you trust, the grace of God changes what your heart holds on tightly, and the grace of God changes what you're delighted to give away.

And that's why Paul, again, begins this chapter here on giving, not with budgets or air conditioners, but with a suffering church.

And strangely enough, with an extraordinary, generous suffering church, given among the churches of Macedonia.

The church of Macedonia was an impoverished and persecuted church.

You need a little bit of an overview of the Roman Empire to let this sink in.

Think back to use Bible language, think back to the days of Esther, one of the last books of the Old Testament.

The Persian Empire was ruling the day.

They had defeated the Babylonians.

The Persians were going to fall to Alexander the Great.

That's hinted at in the book of Esther.

It happens in real life time.

Alexander the Great starts the Greek Empire.

It's headquartered in Macedonia.

This was his capital district region.

Hundreds of years later, when the Greek Empire fell, they were basically swallowed by the Romans.

They were defeated by the Romans, amalgamated into Rome.

Rome severely taxed this area because it was the headquarter of their rivals.

Severely taxed them, enslaved many of them, crushed them economically.

That's the situation.

That's why this is an impoverished, difficult part of the church world.

And Paul chooses them as an example.

These poor people, man, overtaxed, overburdened.

One commentator says that high taxes, slavery, low economic status, and persecution reduced the Macedonian believers to abject poverty.

That's their world.

These are the people that Paul uses as an example to the Corinthians for how to be better givers.

If you're not familiar with 2 Corinthians 8, Paul has a complicated relationship with the Corinthians.

Paul has some favorite churches.

The Corinthians are not on that list.

I mean, Paul tells the Corinthians back in 1 Corinthians, he's like, I'm so glad I don't even remember your names.

That's what he tells them.

He's not stoked about them.

He loves them in his heart.

He loves them as a, you know, a brother in the Lord.

Perhaps you know some of those kind of people, right?

I love you in the Lord, man.

Please stop coming to my house.

I mean, Paul tells the Corinthians to be fair, he tells them, My heart stands open to you.

I want a relationship with you, he tells them.

But you're not willing.

They're so mean to him.

They view themselves as having outgrown him.

They're so condescending towards Paul.

They insult him, they call him ugly, a hundred things.

Say he's a bad preacher.

Paul's like, man, the ugliest thing I could deal with is the bad preaching part.

Come on.

They don't like him.

They view that they have outgrown him.

And so for Paul to come back at them with saying, Hey, I have an example of a church that you guys should be more like and calls out the Macedonians.

Are you kidding me?

That'd be like somebody coming up to me and say, Oh, you're from New Mexico.

You know, the best Mexican food I've ever had is in Woodbridge.

How dare you?

That's Paul telling the Corinthians, you guys should really consider the Macedonians as a model of giving.

There's three churches in the New Testament from the Macedonia area: Thessaloniki, which is the letter of Thessalonians, Philippi, the letter of the Philippians, and the Bereans.

Those are the Macedonian churches.

Severely afflicted, extremely impoverished.

And think about what they're known for.

The Bereans, of course, are known for their love for the Word of God.

The Thessalonians are known for their joy in suffering.

The Philippians are known for their joy in everything.

Paul loved these people.

In 1 Thessalonians, he says, You know this, brethren, joy has increased you as your persecution has increased.

To the Philippians, he tells them, joy, joy, joy, over and over and over again.

He esteems them for their joy.

And now he tells the Corinthians, you want a pattern for giving?

Give like the churches in Macedonia.

And so that'll be your outline this morning, how poor Christians can give richly.

How poor Christians can give richly in first by giving grace and not gold.

And this is where you see in verse 1 of 2 Corinthians 8, Paul says, the grace of God that has been given among the churches in Macedonia.

So giving from Christians is really an overflow of grace.

Grace comes to you, to your heart, and now it replicates or multiplies out of your heart towards others.

That's the idea.

And the concept of multiplication, Paul has already used in 2 Corinthians.

He talked about how you magnify the glory of God through evangelism.

He talks about how your persecutions and sufferings will be magnified or multiplied.

And now he's talking about how the grace of God is multiplied, not only through evangelism, not only through persecution, but also through your giving.

The Macedonians were models of God's grace because they had received this supernatural intervention from the Lord.

They were this backwater, desolate kind of place.

The gospel reached them.

They were living for themselves and, you know, clinging to every piece of food for sustenance.

I mean, with no hope in this world.

And the gospel runs into them headlong and changes their hearts.

They come to faith in Christ, they confess their sins, they receive the gospel, and what immediately happens is they are transformed by joy.

That's the model from the book of Philippians.

It hits that over and over and over again, telling these people that when you come to faith in your affliction, in your suffering, the result was joy for them.

So they're filled with joy.

They received the gospel by God's grace.

That's the only way to receive the gospel.

You don't receive the gospel by works, you don't receive it by your own effort, you receive the gospel by grace.

So grace comes into your heart.

But now grace overflows from your heart in many different tributaries.

It comes out of you, it doesn't terminate in you, but it goes beyond you.

This is one of the reasons why God saves poor Christians.

Because he gives them an opportunity to multiply God's grace in their life.

He saves them so that them, even in their poverty, can now not only receive grace, but multiply grace by giving to others.

And it is one of the reasons why God saves wealthy Christians so that we can give to others and multiply the grace of God from our own life.

If you view grace terminating in you, then you're not multiplying grace.

So if you view the gospel as God giving me grace and it ends with me, it ends in my heart, there's no multiplication there.

But if you view God's grace as coming to you through the gospel and coming to your heart and then diffusing from you, pouring out of you, then it multiplies because there can be many different channels that it leaves you in.

This is like the the this week I flew over a part of the Missouri River that has uh a reservoir, and there's one river in, but there's a few different areas the river goes out.

I could see it from outside the airplane.

There were multiple exits from this from this reservoir.

That's the way God's grace is in our heart.

It comes to our heart through the gospel.

But now has lots of ways to multiply as it leaves our heart.

As it leaves our heart, it can multiply through our giving to this person and that person and this church and that saint who's suffering.

And when you view giving like that, you recognize that the subject of giving is grace, not gold.

Gold is just the means you're giving.

When you view it like that, the Macedonians are not the hero, but the grace of God is the hero.

They receive grace from God now that grace is reproduced in themselves.

And like I said, you can tell when a person has been radically changed by the grace of God because they start to let go of their clutch on the things of this world and give generously and sacrificially to those other believers who are in need.

You know, you can be a rich person and give without grace and give without sacrifice.

The story of the guy with a hundred cows who gives one, and the story of the person with two chickens who gives one.

The cow is worth way more than the chickens in terms of finances, but way more of a sacrifice to give the one chicken than the one cow.

The Macedonians gave in the one chicken category.

Their giving was skipping a meal kind of giving.

They gave out of their poverty, not their surplus, and for that reason, God's grace was multiplied in their hearts.

And sometimes you can see a battle in a person's heart.

They want to be generous, but they also want to hold on to what they have now.

They want to be generous, but they feel like they need these things for their survival.

In the battle, that's a in the heart, that's a battle between trusting in God and trusting in yourself.

And it is a battle that God's grace can overcome.

As people who become generous lessen their hold on material provisions like the Macedonians did.

Secondly, poor Christians can give richly by giving grace, not gold, but secondly, giving from abundance and not affluence.

Giving from abundance and not affluence.

They're giving from what they overflow with, in other words, not the treasure of what they have stored.

Verse 2 is filled with amazing words in Greek.

For in a severe test of affliction.

That word affliction is the Greek word uh philipsi, which is uh, we don't really have the word in English.

It's almost PSI, like pounds per square inch.

That's the idea here.

It's a Greek word they have, though, that if something is put under extreme pressure, it is crushed.

What comes out of it reveals what was really in it.

That's the idea.

Greeks have a word for that, philipsis, philipsi here, and that's the word that's that's used here.

They're crushed, and what comes out of their crushing reveals who they are.

And the Greek language, this word is used all over the place, but one of the most common ways it's used is for making wine in a wine press.

That word press philipsis.

It's pressed down.

The grapes are pressed down and crushed.

What comes out is what was truly in the grape.

That's the idea.

You can crush grapes and get juice.

You can crush grapes and make wine.

It's the word for an olive press, which is a stone with an olive press.

It's a stone that's running over the olives, it's crushing the olives, and the the juice comes out, and you crush them again, and the you know, the second passing of the olives produces a different kind of juice.

Finally, you get olive oil out of it.

That's the word.

You press something so hard that it is crushed, and what comes to the top shows you what was in it.

That's the word that's here.

The Philippians and the Thessalonians and the Bereans were crushed by persecution.

They were crushed by high taxes, they were crushed by political pressures.

And what happened to them?

What came out?

It says there in verse 2 joy.

That's what came out.

They were beaten up by the world, not, you know, Christians have to park in the end of the parking lot, kind of persecution.

Crushed.

And what came to the top that could be sifted off and used was their joy.

They were crushed by poverty and became more joyful.

In fact, it says in verse 2, there had an abundance of joy.

That's what I mean by they give from their abundance.

What did they have so much of?

These people were so poor.

What did they have a surplus of?

Joy.

And so they gave out of their joy, not out of their 401k.

Their poverty, notice the language, the wordplay in verse 2, their poverty overflowed, and that word overflowed is one that pairs the philipsis.

You crush something, and what comes out overflows.

Their poverty overflowed in a wealth of generosity.

I mean, that's just good writing.

They're so poor and they were crushed so hard that what overflowed was joyful generosity.

Giving.

Like I said, 1 Thessalonians 1.6.

The Thessalonians received the word with much tribulation.

Paul tells the Philippians, Philippians 1.29, you received not only the gift of trusting in the Lord, but of being persecuted and suffering for him.

The Macedonians received their persecution and they rose above it by giving.

That's the crazy part of this passage.

They rose above their circumstances through joy, and how did that joy actualize itself?

By giving to the suffering Christians in Jerusalem.

The saints in Jerusalem were poor for different reasons.

They were poor because they were pilgrims that had traveled to Jerusalem and got saved and all that, their own reasons.

Different than the saints in Thessaloniki.

And so the saints in Thessaloniki chose to reach and match the occasion of their poverty by joyful, generous giving.

An overflow of joy.

Their experiences contrary to every human expectation, for sure.

And Paul says that in verse 5.

This is not as we expected.

Yeah, no kidding.

Didn't expect to see that, but it makes sense in light of heaven.

When a persecuted person has a confidence in God's goodness to sustain them through their persecution, of course you're going to be joyful, and of course you're going to be generous.

If you have affliction mixed with joy, what comes out is generosity.

If you have eternal joy set in heaven, then you're sending your finances ahead to heaven.

Listen, if you don't like this world, you're going to be less inclined to store up silver and gold in this world, right?

I mean, why store up yourself treasure for this world if you don't like this world?

Better to send it ahead to heaven.

That's the second point.

Give from your abundance and confidence in God and his promises from heaven rather than affluence in this world.

That leads to the third reason.

The third way, poor Christians can give richly.

They give grace, not gold.

They give from abundance, not affluence.

And thirdly, they give willingly more than their wealth.

They give from their willingness and not from their wealth.

Verse 3.

They gave according to their means, I can testify, and beyond their means, of their own accord.

According to their means.

That's the hundred cows, one cow, two chickens, one chicken kind of formula here.

Paul's saying they didn't have a hundred cows.

So of course they only gave their chicken, which is less than a cow, of course, but it's according to their means.

In fact, as I said earlier, the person who gives one of their two chickens is actually giving beyond their means in a way the person who gives one of their hundred cows is not.

Does that make sense?

Imagine that.

That phrase they gave beyond their means.

Let me tell you what that means.

Had they gone to their financial advisor and showed them their plan, their financial advisor would have said, Don't do that.

But they did it anyway.

It's beyond their means.

A reasonable person would look at what the Macedonians were doing and say, Don't do that.

But they did it anyway.

And by the way, you understand this the Lord does not need our money, but he receives our worship.

And a poor person and a rich person can worship equally effectively.

I have heard preachers say, and I have read in commentaries, lines that I think are easier said.

Then our experience matches them.

But things like it's harder for a rich person to have generosity in giving than a poor person.

I've heard people say that.

That hasn't matched my own experience in this life.

My experience in this life, honestly, is that a person's joy in giving is disconnected, entirely disconnected from their bank account.

Because I have seen wealthy people that give so joyfully.

And I have seen wealthy people that hold on so tightly to this world.

And I have seen poor people that give so joyfully.

And you think, of course, because they don't have anything to trust in this world, of course they joyfully give it.

I have also seen poor people who just cling to whatever's in front of them.

And so, over my own pastoral experience, I'm only left to deduce that a person's joy in giving is likely just disconnected from their social economic status.

Rich people can give joyfully, and rich people can give reluctantly, and poor people can give joyfully, and poor people can give reluctantly.

It's almost as if your economic status is a bad indicator of your capacity to worship.

The Macedonians bear this out.

They gave according to their own accord.

According to their own free will.

In fact, at the end of verse 3, it says, by their own accord.

Here's a cool, here's a tangent.

This part's free.

Of their own free will.

The ES visas of their own accord, but most translations render it free will.

This is one of only two places in the New Testament that uses the term free will.

And I mentioned that because there's so many people that cling to this idea of free will.

They build their theology around free will.

Free will, free will is so elevated in their mind as they build their theology.

Do you know the New Testament only uses the term free will two times, and this is one of them, and the other is to Philemon, where Paul tells Philemon, I want this letter read in front of the church, Philemon.

I could command you anything.

I led you to the Lord, you owe me your whole life.

All I'm asking is not your whole life.

I'm just asking you to release your slave Anissimus.

And then he says, I could command you to release him, and you have to obey, but instead I wanted you to have this letter read in front of the church, and then you choose what to do according to your own free will.

I mean, that's funny, right?

When the New Testament talks about free will, that's what it's talking about.

Free from what?

The Macedonians gave of their own free will.

Free from what?

Certainly not from God's sovereignty, certainly not from God's pressure.

They're under such extreme pressure, and what do they have?

It's the joy that God gave them.

So, yes, it's their own will that they gave, but it's given to them by God.

That's the New Testament model for giving.

The New Testament does not command you a dollar amount to give, it doesn't command you a percentage amount to give or anything like that.

It tells you to give as the Lord puts in your heart.

And then gives you in your Bible, 2 Corinthians 8, to press you and see what you give.

That's the idea.

I've been at a church once that they had a few missionaries that wanted to go to South America and they put their financial needs on the screen, and the pastor had the doors closed and said, We're taking an offering, and it's going to be counted up front, and no one's leaving until we meet the right amount of money to send our missionaries to Peru or wherever.

It took three offerings before we got to go to lunch.

That's not quite the New Testament model for giving.

The kind of giving that magnifies the grace of God in your heart is the kind of giving that treasures God above self.

Your wallet is, of course, connected to your heart.

And as your hands move your wallet, you know, to the credit card machine or whatever, the object that you're purchasing reveals what is loved.

Joy is not connected to wealth, it's disconnected, but joy is connected to your heart and what you love in your heart.

This is true in the Old Testament as well.

You know, you know the Old Testament commands tithes under certain circumstances, but it's not that different in the New Testament as we might imagine.

Exodus 25, Yahweh says to Moses, speak to the people of Israel, that they take from me a contribution from every man whose heart moves him, you shall receive the contribution for me.

So even the whole tithe system is in the background of this command.

In the Old Testament, you gave as the Lord put on your heart.

You don't give reluctantly to the church, you give willingly.

You desire to give.

This is Jesus.

Jesus was told that he, you know, the law commands you to pay the temple tax.

And there's fascinating legal debates about if that's even true, given where he was from and all that.

But you know what?

He decided to pay it anyway, and so he summons the fish and gets the coin out of the fish's mouth and says, pay with that.

What a wonderful way to navigate that dilemma.

You can't make me pay the temple tax.

I'm going to willingly to demonstrate that I'm going to have a miracle that gives me the money.

And there, that solves that problem.

He's giving out of his own, not under authority, but out of his own desire.

We don't pay our taxes that way today, do we?

You don't tell the government, listen, I will pay my taxes when I'm good and ready to pay them.

I'll pay them when I am so excited to see my money do the work the government is doing.

When I feel like my money is going to accomplish and expand my own reach, then I'll pay my taxes.

Yeah, then you'd go to prison, is what would happen.

But that is the way you give to the church.

You give to the church because you want to help the poor saints in Rwanda.

You give to the church because you want to help missionaries get to Africa.

You give to the church because you want to fund the ministry of the word.

The Bible does command you to give, of course.

Those that sit under the teaching of the word are supposed to pay the salary of the one who gives them the word.

One of my favorite Bible passages.

Love that text.

I have it tattooed.

No, there's that element of it that's true.

And our missionaries fall under that same heading.

You know, there's certain occupations in life where the occupation itself is the pay.

Farmers, they plant a field, they grow the food, they can sell it and they can eat the food.

Preachers fall under that same category.

They minister the word of God and they receive the offering like the ox that treads out the grain.

They receive the offering from the people that eat the food.

Missionaries fall under that heading.

We send missionaries around the world to preach the gospel.

They should make a living from their preaching, and so it falls to the sending church to pay that.

There's that basic reality.

And that's lived out in their life.

And so the church has a desire.

The Christians say, I want my money to be used for this.

I want air conditioning in the H Rib.

I'm going to give money to the church.

I want the youth pastor.

I want the missionary to Rwanda.

I want this person and that person.

I want those things.

And so I give money.

My money helps accomplish those things.

And notice verse 4, craziness.

They were begging us to do that.

That word begging is a cool Greek word, also.

It's the word for the centurion begging Jesus to heal his servant.

Runs out to Jesus in Matthew 8 and grabs onto him and begs him, come heal my servant.

It's the word the lepers beg Jesus to heal them.

So what are these poor, afflicted, persecuted, overtaxed, war-torn Christians in Macedonia begging God for?

For the opportunity to give to Christians in Jerusalem.

That's insane.

Sometimes you might beg God if a loved one has cancer or your husband has lost his job or you have a wayward son or daughter, you might beg God.

But here they're begging God for the opportunity to give to the saints in Jerusalem.

Notice even the phrase saints there.

The Bible doesn't command you to give to every poor person in the world.

The church is not called to eradicate poverty or fight poverty or fight homelessness.

Those things are not given to the church to do.

But the church is called to eradicate homelessness in the church, to fight poverty in the church.

The poor you all have with you.

And Paul understands that they're not giving to eradicate poverty in Jerusalem, but to the saints in Jerusalem, which leads to the fourth point.

It's connected to worship.

You're giving, ultimately, you're giving God and not gifts.

You're giving God and not gifts.

And you see this in verse 5.

Paul says, I didn't expect this.

Yeah, the poorest people in the empire, and that might be a little hyperbole.

I'm sure there were other poor people as well, but one of the poorest people in the empire is giving money as a model to the Corinthians.

They gave themselves first to the Lord, and then by the will of God to us.

The word first error, it's the Greek word protos.

It doesn't mean first in order, like the English word first means.

It means first in pattern or in type.

The English word we have from it is a prototype.

It's this Greek word.

It means you build everything else off of this thing.

So you, you know, and you can reverse engineer that.

You can figure out what the factory looked like that builds the Ford by looking at the Ford and working backwards.

In other words, your reception of the grace of God is the prototype for your giving.

You don't earn grace with God, it's given to you as a gift.

You give it to others.

So God's grace comes from heaven to your heart.

That's the prototype for how you give to others.

And so that's why it says you give yourself first, prototype to the Lord.

The prototype of your giving finances is you giving yourself to the Lord.

That then becomes the pattern for everything else in your life.

The supreme act of worship is not giving money or going to church or singing hymns, but giving yourself to the Lord.

We'll look more at that next week because that's where Paul's going to follow that for the pattern of Christ.

And we'll see how Paul does reverse engineer it to look at your own spiritual growth through giving.

Giving is not the priority of the Christian life.

Receiving God's grace is, worshiping Christ is, giving is the overflow of that.

And so the greatest gift in this passage isn't the Macedonians' money, it's the Macedonians themselves.

They gave themselves first to the Lord.

But once God had them, their possessions followed quite easily.

God had their hearts, of course, he has all that belongs to them.

And God owns the cattle on a thousand hills.

He doesn't need the Thessalonians' money to reach those in Jerusalem.

He does it just because it gives the rest of the church an opportunity to multiply the grace of God.

So it's worth asking.

Let me close this morning just with a very politically incorrect question.

Somebody asked me this last week and it's stuck in my head.

Why does God save poor people?

Okay?

It sounds politically incorrect, but let me just ask that question.

If the bottom line was important to God and the church is to meet everybody's needs, this is a question in light of my Sermon on Election last week.

If God is a term, he's going to save X number of people, why doesn't he save wealthier people so the church has more money?

Do you follow the question?

Like I said, it's not politically correct, but it is an interesting question to think about.

The answer is he saves lots of poor people, so the grace of God can be magnified and multiplied, not only in their hearts, but in our hearts as well, as we give to meet the needs of the church.

Lord, we're grateful that you are a generous and loving God.

You gave your son.

If you gave us your son, of course, you'll give us everything pertaining to life and godliness.

If you didn't withhold your son, what could you possibly withhold from us?

So, Lord, that's our prototype.

We know the world knows your love for us because they've seen our love for each other.

We know we can work backwards.

The father loved the son, so the son loves the church.

So the church loves each other.

This is the grace of God.

Every year.

We don't take that for granted, Lord.

We do pray that your grace would continue to multiply and abound in our hearts.

We ask this in Christ's name.

Amen.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or you want more information about what it means to follow Christ, please go to our church website, ibc.church.

If you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to see you at one of our own worship services at Emmanuel Bible.

Now may the Lord bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.