Sermon Tone Analysis

Recap

What I want to do is take a moment up front and pull back a little bit and remind us of where we are in the narrative, where we are in the story.

At this point, what we’re looking at is that God has saved Israel out of slavery.

He has pulled his people out of slavery, and he hasn’t just saved them out of slavery for nothing, but he says he’s going to make them a distinct people that the nations might know.

God is going to not only pull his people out of slavery, oppression, sin, and death, but then he’s going to form them in such a way that the nations will look upon them and know that he is God.

What God is up to is shaping, forming, making a people for himself.

Presence and Power of God

Really, all spring this is what we’ve been talking about, that the presence and power of God in our lives marks us distinctly among people who are far from God.

I love the way Jesus talks about those who aren’t Christians.

He uses the word lost.

That word lost is really a beautiful thing.

It’s like they lost their way, and Christ has come to save them from that lostness.

What God is doing in the household of faith, in a covenant community of faith, is he’s distinctively marking a people that reveal to the world his goodness, his grace, his compassion, his mercy, and that’s what we’ve been looking at through the winter into the spring:

God doing this among us.

Generosity

We’re going to look again at another distinctive mark around what it means to be the people of God in our gathering today.

We’re going to talk about the motive of generosity.

That’s one of the things that makes us distinct among worldly generosity.

It’s not just Christians who are generous.

You know that.

You don’t have to be a Christian to be generous.

There are some full-on pagan fools who are really generous with their money, with their resources.

What makes us a distinct people is the motive of our generosity and then the metric of our generosity and then, ultimately, the method of our generosity.

Let’s look at this.

Exodus

You get this epic giving campaign that just breaks out around the mountain.

Here’s what I want to point out to you.

This is happening at an interesting moment in the narrative.

What have we just finished studying?

The rebellion of God’s people against God and God responding to that with grace, with mercy, with kindness.

They have broken their pledge against God.

In the last few weeks, what we pointed out is that God’s people’s rebellion against him was the equivalent (and in our lives is the equivalent) of entering into the marriage vows and then immediately cheating on your spouse on the honeymoon.

It was this blatant disregard for God’s holiness, his might, how he had delivered them up.

How does God respond to that?

He responds to that with grace.

He responds with mercy.

He moves toward them, not from them.

There’s discipline, but there’s a lot of kindness, mercy, grace, and forgiveness, and then there’s this contribution.

“All that we’ve talked about… It’s time to start building.

Bring what we need to build.”

We’ll see here they bring it and they bring it and they bring it.

Day after day after day, for an extended period of time, they keep bringing it.

We begin to see that one of the things that makes the people of God distinct is their generosity.

Motive

Let’s dive into these three Ms.

The first is the motive of generosity.

As we’ve already established, you don’t have to love Jesus, you don’t have to be a Christian to be generous.

In fact, you can be far from God and be generous.

I know people who want nothing to do with Jesus Christ, have no plan to submit, and, in fact, their lives are marked with outright rebellion against him, who are extremely generous people.

In fact, I find them sometimes more generous than some stingy Christians I know.

What, then, makes us distinct as a generous people?

Well, the motive of our generosity.

The motive of the generosity of the people of God finds its root in the generosity of God toward his people.

What motivates us is not a guilty conscience.

It’s not that we’re trying to validate ourselves as good people by being generous.

Rather we have received generosity in such lavish ways that we become overwhelmed by God’s generosity to us, so then it flows out of us.

We talked last week about the fact that God is abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, but the Bible also tells us in …

Here’s what says.

“Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more…”

You can’t out-sin the cross of Christ.

Do you know where I get that?

Exodus and .

You have never in your life committed the type of sin that the people of Israel have just committed against God Almighty, and God’s response is grace.

“Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.”

You’ll never out-sin the grace of God.

That’s not the only motive.

The other motive of our generosity is the Christian who knows the Bible understands not only are we recipients of the generosity of God but, on top of that, everything we own is his already.

We’re simply stewards of what God has entrusted to us.

I love this in the book of Exodus.

They’ve come out of slavery.

Where did they get all this stuff?

God delivered it over to them.

Nobody is like, “I worked really hard.”

No, no, no.

You plundered Egypt because of the power of God.

Metrics

Now let’s talk about the metrics of generosity.

If you’re church folk, you’ll appreciate this.

If you’re a guest with us and don’t have a background in church, you might be like, “Okay, what?”

The conversation that starts happening around generosity is, “Now, Pastor, are you talking about the tithe or are you talking about the offering?

Are you talking about 10 percent?

And is that 10 percent gross?

Is that before tax or is that after tax?”

You start playing these games.

“Are you saying that I have to give 10 percent to the church and then anything else is an offering above that?”

We start to muddy up the waters, but that is not God’s metric.

That is not how God measures generosity in his people.

In fact, here’s how God measures it.

Here’s how God measures generosity.

: “Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”

If you have a little app or something that plays with the Greek, that word cheerful in the Greek is the root that we get the word hilarious from.

God loves a hilarious giver.

So do you want to know God’s metric on generosity?

If you want to dive in and study the difference between tithes and offerings, and whether the Old Testament tithe holds over into the New Testament, that’s a worthwhile study.

Dig in.

But I’m telling you what God looks at around the metrics of generosity is your heart.

That’s what he’s after.

Over and over again, what God is after is your heart.

Oftentimes, people who aren’t really church people say, “All the church wants is my money.”

No, no.