Sermon Tone Analysis

“The Colgate-Palmolive Company is one of the oldest in America, going back nearly two hundred years.

It was started by a young man named William Colgate.

“He left home at sixteen years of age to seek his fortune, and everything that he owned in this world was tied in a bundle that he carried in his hand.

“But as he walked along on his way to the city, he met an old neighbor, the captain of a canal boat, and the words the old man spoke to him on that day stayed with him his entire life.

“‘Well, William, where are you going?’ asked the canal-boat captain.

“‘I don’t know.

Father is too poor to keep me at home any longer, and says I must make a living for myself now.’

William went on to say that he had no skills, that he didn’t know how to do anything except make soap and candles.

“‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘let me pray with you and give you a little advice.’

“There in the pathway, the two of them—a teenager and an old man—knelt down, and the man prayed earnestly for William.

“Then, rising up, the boat captain said this: ‘Someone will soon be the leading soapmaker in New York.

It can be you as well as anyone.

I hope it may.

Be a good man; give your heart to Christ; give the Lord all that belongs to Him of every dollar you earn; make an honest soap; give a full pound; and I am certain you will yet be a prosperous and rich man.’

“When William arrived in New York, he had trouble finding a job, but he followed the old man’s advice.

He dedicated himself to Christ, joined a church, and began worshiping there.

“The first thing he did with the first dollar he earned was to give 10 percent of it to the Lord’s work.

From that point on, he considered ten cents of every dollar as sacred to the Lord.

“In fact, he soon began giving 20 percent of his income to the Lord, then he raised it to 30 percent, then to 40 percent, then to 50 percent.

And late in his life, he had become so successful that he devoted the whole of his yearly income—100 percent of it—to the Lord.

“And even today, this very morning, nearly two hundred years later, some of you brushed your teeth or washed your faces with products from that young man’s factory.”

[Robert J. Morgan, Nelson’s Complete Book of Stories, Illustrations, and Quotes, electronic ed.

(Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000), 344.]

William Colgate was clearly a man who understood one of the great biblical principle of giving — that God blesses people in proportion to the degree to which they bless others.

In fact, I think we could probably conclude that William Colgate was a hilarious giver.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he was the funniest guy in the soap business.

Maybe he was, and maybe he wasn’t.

Hilarious giving is about something else, and we’ll see what it means as we study through chapters 8 and 9 of the book of 2 Corinthians this morning.

Now, as you turn to this passage, let me warn you that this will be something of a whirlwind tour.

Normally, I take time to walk you, verse by verse, through a passage, and maybe we will do that sometime in the future during a study of 2 Corinthians.

But today, as part of this short series on thanksgiving and stewardship, I want simply to hit the high points of the Apostle Paul’s longest lesson on stewardship, so we’re going to bounce through this passage, rather than taking it step by step.

So, let me set things up for you.

Paul spent about five years during his ministry collecting money from the churches in Asia for the support of the mother church in Jerusalem.

Things were hard for everybody, but they were especially hard for the believers in Jerusalem.

Christians there were ostracized by the Jews, and that meant that it was especially hard for them to earn a living.

Additionally, a famine had come upon Palestine around 46 A.D., and Jewish Christians in Jerusalem had to pay a double tax — one to Rome and another to the Jewish authorities.

And finally, as the first Christian church, the one in Jerusalem likely had a large number of teachers, missionaries, and visitors to support.

[Constable, Tom.

Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible.

Galaxie Software, 2003.]

So, from a social and an economic perspective, things were very hard for Christians in Jerusalem, and Paul had spent time at each of the churches he planted or visited talking about the needs in Jerusalem and the opportunity the churches in Asia had to return the blessing they had received when they heard the gospel by sending support back to Jerusalem.

Remember, we are blessed so that we can bless others.

Now, this wasn’t the first time Paul had written to the church in Corinth about the needs in Jerusalem.

He mentioned it in passing in 1 Cor 16, which suggests he probably had talked about it with them personally when he had been in Corinth.

And it seems that they had begun their collection at some time previous to his writing this letter that we know as 2 Corinthians.

But for some reason, they had stopped this collection, and word had gotten back to Paul that this was but one of many problems within the church there.

So, he devoted the whole of chapters 8 and 9 to explaining for them the reasons that Christians are called to be generous — and not just generous, but hilariously generous.

Instead of simply bearing down on them with his apostolic authority, though, he started this teaching by giving two examples of great generosity.

The first example was that of the church in Macedonia.

Look at verse 1 of chapter 8.

2 Corinthians 8:1–5 (NASB95)

Now, brethren, we wish to make known to you the grace of God which has been given in the churches of Macedonia, that in a great ordeal of affliction their abundance of joy and their deep poverty overflowed in the wealth of their liberality.

For I testify that according to their ability, and beyond their ability, they gave of their own accord, begging us with much urging for the favor of participation in the support of the saints, and this, not as we had expected, but they first gave themselves to the Lord and to us by the will of God.

Now, what I want you to notice is that there were three characteristics that marked the giving of this church in Macedonia.

First, they gave sacrificially.

Look how Paul describes the situation at that church.

They were experiencing a “great ordeal of affliction.”

They were in “deep poverty.”

This wasn’t a wealthy church, and it wasn’t a church that was sitting on a big rainy-day fund.

This was a church that had little to give, and so they might have been expected to GIVE little to the much larger church in Jerusalem.

But HOW did they give?

Look at what Paul says.

They gave “not as we expected,” or literally “not as we had hoped.”

They didn’t even give “according to their ability.”

No, they gave “beyond their ability.”

Now, this kind of giving flies in the face of sound financial management.

Instead of relying on the advice of their financial planners, this church chose, instead to rely on the advice of Jesus, who said:

This kind of giving requires faith — faith that God will provide for your needs.

This is the faith that remembers what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, when He reminded His disciples that the same Father who ensures that the lilies of the field are clothed in beauty will provide for those who love Him and pursue His righteous Kingdom.

So, the first characteristic of giving by the Macedonian church was that they gave sacrificially in faith that God would provide bountifully.

And the second characteristic was that their giving was not under compulsion — indeed, it was by their own initiative.

Look what Paul says in verse 4. The Macedonians “gave of their own accord.”

They were “begging us with much urging for the favor” of participating in this collection for the church in Jerusalem.

Now, that phrase, “favor of participation” can also be translated as “gracious fellowship.”

So, the church in Macedonia saw their giving as an opportunity to extend gracious fellowship to their brothers and sisters in Jersualem.

Having experienced the grace of God in salvation, they now wanted to extend grace to the suffering believers in Jerusalem by sending them money to help them meet their needs.

And their generosity seems to have surprised Paul, who wrote in verse 5 that it wasn’t as he and the others with him had expected.

Probably, they well knew the poverty of the Macedonian church, and because of it, they did not expect or press for a large contribution.

But that church understood that they had been blessed so that they could bless others, and the way they could bless those who had blessed them by sending Paul to them with the good news of salvation was by giving back to them “beyond their ability.”

So, this church gave sacrificially, and it gave without being compelled to do so.

And that leads us to the third characteristic of its giving.

This church was willing to give sacrificially because it had first given itself to God.

We see that in verse 5. Do you see it there?

They had dedicated themselves to the Lord, and they had dedicated themselves to the teaching of Paul, and they had done so by the will of God.

In other words, they understood that their generosity was in keeping with God’s will, that in being generous they were being obedient to God and to Paul’s teaching.

“When people give themselves totally to the Lord and to His servants, their hearts are already open toward others in need.

Meeting the needs of others is really service for Christ.”

[Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), 2 Co 8:3.]

When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, what did He say?

But what did He say next?

Jesus could have stopped with “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

But He didn’t, and I believe the reason He didn’t stop there is because it isn’t possible to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind if you do not love your neighbor as yourself.

We are called to love those whom God loves.

And whom does God love?

God so loved the WORLD, right?

So, if you are a follower of the Christ who gave His life so that WHOSOEVER believes in Him will have eternal life, then you should have a heart that is tender for those who are hurting, and especially for those within His church who are hurting.

The church in Macedonia clearly had such tender hearts for their brothers and sisters in Jerusalem, so they were the first example of hilarious giving that Paul gave in this passage.

But there’s an even greater example, and we see that in verse 9.

So, first we had the example of the Macedonian church, which had given sacrificially out of its poverty.

But now we have the example of Jesus who gave up the riches of His glory in heaven to become a man and then die on a cross so that those who believe in Him could share in His glory.