Sermon Tone Analysis

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! We give because he gives first
I don’t know when I got the bug.
Maybe it was when I was flatting with a very good friend of mine who loved gardening but I really felt that I wanted a garden as well.
I really wanted to grow tomatoes – even though I don’t like them.
But also potatoes – there’s nothing like new potatoes for Christmas dinner.
But also lettuces, cabbages, corn – aaah corn!
But one of the things for me was that – I come from Scottish descent - so I don’t like spending more than I have to.
We were on a tight budget so I wanted the seeds and plants that I bought to go the farthest they could.
I figured it was a waste to plant more seed than you had room for plants – so I’d plant one seed at each spot that I wanted a plant.
If the packet said the plants should be 10 cm apart as they grew that’s where I planted the seed.
Can anyone guess what happened?
It didn’t always work.
I didn’t always get 1 plant for each seed I planted.
Although it seemed to be different depending on what I planted though.
Lettuce was the worst – Anyone who’s planted lettuce seeds knows they are pretty small (show).
I’d plant one seed where each should come up.
I don’t know if you know lettuces particularly I mean I got hardly any strike – it was just huge areas of bare ground.
What was I doing wrong?
Well the problem was I was being stingy in my planting … and of course I was getting a stingy harvest – there was lots of bare ground – there was lots of area where I wasn’t actually growing much except weeds.
You see there’s a relationship between planting – what we plant and what we get back.
You know I learnt that I had to – if I wanted a good harvest of my potatoes, and my tomatoes and lettuces and things I had to actually  - to scatter the seeds – to put a lot more in there and then prune them back.
If I was lucky and I got a lot more coming up I had to just take some out and allow others to grow.
In other words to reap a generous harvest I had to sow generously!
That’s what Paul talks about in our passage today – in 2 Cor 9:6-8.
Let’s turn to that in our Bibles now.
*READ THE TEXT*
So why is Paul talking about sowing and reaping?
Well – just a bit of context.
Paul is writing to the Christians in Corinth and 1 of the things he has asked them to do is to give to their fellow Christian brothers and sisters in Jerusalem.
We’re talking here about Corinth, which is just outside Athens.
He’s asking them to give to people who they have never ever met.
To people who they will probably never ever will meet.
He’s talking to a group in Macedonia who it appears were at the very bottom of the poverty scale.
I mean if they had schools they’d be decile 1a!
At the bottom – they were absolutely rock bottom poverty.
But what God was doing was - he was providing for them and he was actually giving them enough to be able to give to others.
– To others who they didn’t even know.
I think what Paul’s trying to say here is - there is a link, a consequence, an action a reaction between sowing and reaping or harvesting.
That if you sow little you’re going to get back little.
If you sow a lot you’re going to get back a lot.
And there seems to be a link here that the person who sows is also the person who gets it back.
That they’re the one who will reap the harvest of what they sow.
But just like when I planted those seeds – what I got was not necessarily what I planted.
By that I mean that when I planted a seed I didn’t get more seeds.
I got lettuces eventually - or corn or tomatoes or whatever.
Some of you have had the advantage of eating feijoas from the tree I’ve got in my property at Cambridge Terrace.
Let’s just think about that for a minute.
You see that tree was planted I don’t know when – some time in the last 60 years.
And no doubt the person who planted it got some feijoa’s from it.
In the first few years there probably weren’t many but as the tree got older and got bigger more and more became available.
I would think that they started to share them out – just as I did and like I know others have since.
But the thing is the person who first planted that tree - no longer gets the advantage of those feijoa’s – they’ve moved on  – but others do – because of what they planted - others can reap.
So when we sow – we sometimes get what we expect – well we do always get what we expect because we get what we planted – we get the fruit of what we planted – we get potatoes or whatever but we don’t necessarily get exactly the same thing we planted – we don’t get the seed back for instance.
And sometimes what we plant we don’t actually get the harvest of.
At the risk of some of you nodding off on me (like I know I do sometimes) I want you to close your eyes and I want you to try and picture this for me as I try and describe it.
We’re on our way to Thames.
We stop because we see a farmer planting seed.
They’ve got a tractor and its just planting – its just bare ground – planting seeds.
Fast-forward and we see these tiny shoots appearing out of the ground.
Things are starting to grow.
And as we watch the stuff is getting taller and taller until eventually what we see is these stalks of corn swaying in the wind.
As far as the eye can see - you can’t see any gaps anywhere.
You smell the fresh air – that beautiful smell of earth and the countryside.
As you walk over and you touch the ears of corn, your mouth starts to water at the thought of being able to take that corn and cook it and eat it fresh.
So now imagine that as you look you see some corn – but you also see some rows where there is nothing there.
It’s just bare ground and in that ground as you look more closely you see that there is something growing – lots of bare ground but lot’s of weeds too
 
Ok open you can open your eyes now.
Has anyone got any reaction to that – what’s the difference, how does it make you feel?
The thing is that the farmer has planted but if they don’t plant properly they aren’t going to reap properly.
They are going to have huge patches of ground, areas where they aren’t going get the return back that they need to and if they don’t plant properly they aren’t going to get the return on their investment.
In order to reap bountifully they must sow bountifully.
Verse 7 - One, which many of us know well.
If we don’t know the exact wording we know the words that we should give as a cheerful giver – that God loves a cheerful giver - don’t give under compulsion or pressure.
The more I look at this the more I think that sometimes we actually abuse what this is saying – that in fact we use it for our own ends.
But let’s go back a bit before we even get to that cheerful giver bit.
Let’s go back a little bit to the start of this verse.
You see I think that what Paul is describing is a process for discerning how much we should give and when.
We read – “You must each make up your own mind as to how much you should give.”
The NRSV says –“ each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give.
 
Giving from the mind – implies a logical decision.
Giving from the heart – implies an emotional decision
 
I think it’s both.
It’s a logical and it’s an emotional decision.
What’s being said here is that we need to decide *before* the issue arises.
It means thinking about and praying about how much we should give in whatever situation is coming up.
Now ok there are times when we get to church and we find there’s a new or another offering or something – that in lots of ways is sprung us – like we’re going to take up an offering for a missionary or whatever.
How can we make a decision about how much we are going to give and think about and pray about it and make up our mind beforehand?
Well this is where I think there is a responsibility on the church leadership - on the elders – to actually make sure people are aware of these things beforehand so they do have time to think about and pray about them.
Our responsibility as individuals is to pray, to make up our minds beforehand what we are going to give so we don’t give under pressure and I’ll come to that later.
But as elders, as church leaders we have to give people the opportunity to be able to do that.
And that means thinking about it beforehand and planning for it.
Now some of you may say well what about spontaneous giving – what about the leading of the Holy Spirit.
Well yeah obviously there is a place for that - but – we have to make sure it is the leading of the Holy Spirit.
Its not like the old Telethons that some of us can remember where there was millions pledged but my understanding is a lot of those never came in because people got caught up in the emotion of the moment and said this is what they’ll give – but then in the cold hard light of day decided they didn’t want to give that much – or didn’t want to give at all.
Now that doesn’t quite happen when you’re actually in the church building – give emotionally -> regrets – but I also believe that the Holy Spirit - and God is a God of order and He knows when these things are coming up, he can and does enable us to say to you, any church to say to you – hey this is going to happen next week – we want you to go away and pray about it so that next week when you come back here then you know how much you are going to give – for these special offerings.
You see I don’t think there is anything that is absolutely so urgent that it has to happen there and then on the spot in terms of our giving.
There is always time.
You know if we think about the Tsunami or the hurricanes in the US – yea its on our minds straightaway because its in the papers & on TV but – if we put it out there and say we’re going to think about our giving and we’re going to give something next week then does it not actually mean it stays on our mind rather than being forgotten because we’ve done our bit very quickly on the day.
*BRIDGE*
Don’t give reluctantly or under compulsion - or under pressure or in response to pressure - says Paul.
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