Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Is Generosity Dead? | New Testament | 1 Corinthians 16

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

What standard should Christians have for generosity? Spoiler alert: this isn't just about the rich giving to the poor. In today's episode, Keith discusses 1 Corinthians 16 and shares motivation to give generously. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in one year. Get your FREE reading plan here. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: 1 Corinthians 16

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. Why did God destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? You might think you know the answer, and maybe you do, but my guess is you don't know the whole answer the Bible gives to that question. We'll come back to it before we're finished together. But first, let me tell you about a guy named Anhelle Torres.

He was a retired forklift driver, and he was walking across the street in Hartford, Connecticut when he was hit by a car. There was a video of what transpired. When on Hell Torres was struck by the car, he lay there on the street. People walked by. People drove their car around him, but it took a long time for someone to get out of their car and do anything to help him. Once the video of that incident became public, there was an outcry. People asked, did Hartford lose its heart. Everyone agrees that something went wrong. A person was visibly in need, and it took a long time for anyone to help him.

We'd like to think that we'd never do that. If we saw someone in need, surely we would do something. But I'm not sure that's true. I wonder if we need to ask ourselves some hard questions. Have we done in some ways what the people in that video did, the people who passed by? My guess is that most of the people on the street that day were not bad people, but for some reason they excused themselves from helping someone in need. Maybe they thought someone else would help. Maybe they thought the guy deserved it because he hadn't been careful when he was walking across the street.

Maybe they thought that helping him might lead to them getting run over. I'm not sure why they didn't help, but I think it's easy to get to a point where you don't see people's needs or you don't want to see people's needs or you don't want to see people's needs or you don't. don't care enough about those in need to do something, to get personally involved. The gospel calls every Christian to get off the sidelines, or in this case, to get off the sidewalk, or to get out of the car, and be personally and sacrificially involved in helping people in need, whether we know them personally or not. We're in the last chapter of 1st Corinthians. Here's how verse 1 reads of chapter 16. Now about the collection for the Lord's people, Do what I told the Galatian churches to do.

On the first day of every week, each one of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with your income, saving it up so that when I come, no collections will have to be made. What's this collection that Paul is talking about? Well, a little background might help. Jesus was crucified and resurrected in Jerusalem, so it's no surprise that Jerusalem was the center of the early church. In a short period of time, that church grew to well over 5,000 people. Many of those travelers who'd become Christ followers decided not to return to their homeland,

but instead to stay on to Jerusalem so they could be taught by the apostles. I suspect that many of them were subsequently rejected by their families and found it difficult to get a job, and so they were relegated to a life of poverty. At first, the apostles and the small Christian community took care of all these new believers and provided for them. But as persecution increased and as a famine hit Palestine, the very existence of the Christian Christian community in Jerusalem was threatened. As the church grew outside of Jerusalem, the leaders asked Paul to take up a collection among Gentile churches to help the poor in Jerusalem.

Here's Galatians 210. Paul says, all they asked is that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do. So Paul went around to the Gentile churches and said something to the effect of, you owe so much to these Jewish Christians in Palestine. Your faith originated with him. they are starving and if you don't come to their aid they will not survive so paul took up a collection from gentile christians including christians in corinth and he sent that money back to jerusalem so that's what we're reading about in first grinthian sixteen and one of the things that we see is that generosity toward those in need is not just for the rich let me read verse two again on the first day of the week each of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with your income. Paul doesn't think of

generosity toward those in need as only the responsibility of the wealthy. Here Paul tells us that our giving should be in line with how much money we make, and that means that he thinks everyone should give. Those who make more are in a position to give more, and of course those who make less are in a position to give less. But Paul isn't saying if you make less, then you don't need to be generous. In fact, back in chapter 8, he talks about a different group of churches and says this, out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity. So this isn't a case of rich people giving to poor people, rather it's the poor people giving to those who are even poorer than them. The Christians in Jerusalem were in dire straits,

but so were many of the Gentile Christians. In addition to extreme poverty, they were going through a severe trial. What was the nature of that trial? Well, we don't know, but more than likely they themselves were experiencing persecution. Possibly natural disasters, maybe it was a health crisis. But when we are hurting or unsure of what the future holds, we don't naturally think about giving to meet other people's needs. But Paul commends the Corinthians because in extreme poverty, they displayed rich generosity. How does extreme poverty end up in rich generosity? Well, God doesn't subscribe to our accounting methods. Human accounting judges generosity on the basis of the amount given. Divine accounting judges it on the basis of the sacrifice. Paul writes, for I testify that they gave as

much as they were able and even beyond their ability. One reason we think that the rich should give, that the rich should be generous, is because we tend to think that would mean that others help, but not us. Because really, no one thinks they are rich. And yet, if you look at income based on world population, what you find out is that you don't have to make that much money to be one of the richest people in the world. Let's start with a big amount of money. Let's say you or your family earns $100,000 a year. That puts you in the top 0.66% of the richest people in the world. Well, maybe you say, I don't even come close to making $100,000 a year.

Okay, great. If you make $40,000 a year, that puts you in a lot. the top 3% of the richest people in the world. $10,000 a year means you're in the top 12% of the richest people in the world. Even if you make $2,000 a year, that means you're in the top 20% of the richest people in the world. There are a lot of people around the world who live in extreme poverty. Now, that doesn't mean that Paul is yelling at you because you have money. He's not trying to make you feel guilty. He's just putting things in perspective. He's trying to help you see yourself in the broader context of what God sees.

In 2005, when Thomas Cannon died of colon cancer in a hospital in Richmond, Virginia, he was 79 years old. Thomas Cannon described himself as a poor man's philanthropist. When he was three years old, his father died. Once Thomas's mother remarried, the family of six lived in a three-bedroom wooden shack without running water or electricity. As an adult, Thomas went to work with the postal service. He never made more than 25,000.

$15,000 a year. When he retired, he and his wife lived in poverty. Yet over the course of 33 years, Thomas gave away more than $156,000. His gifts were mainly in the form of $1,000 checks given to people he read about in the newspaper who were going through hard times or who especially exemplified courage or kindness, a youth worker in a low-income apartment complex, a volunteer faithfully serving at an elementary school, a Vietnamese couple wanting to return home to visit, and a teenager abandoned as an infant were some of the recipients of Thomas's giving. Thomas' motivation came from an incident that happened to him as a young man while he was away at Naval Signal School. When an explosion at Chicago's port took the lives of many of his shipmates,

Thomas concluded that he had been spared to help others and that he needed to be a role model. That led to his passion for giving. Thomas Cannon's biographer, a woman named Sandra Wagman, says this. Not many people would consider living in a house in a poor neighborhood without central heat, air conditioning, or a telephone, and working overtime so that they could save money to give away. Where do we as Christians get the motivation to live generously? In 2 Corinthians 8 it says, For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich. In that verse, we learn a lot about the generosity of Jesus. First, we learned that Jesus was rich. I mean, was he ever? He was the creator, the ruler,

the sustainer of the entire universe. He lived in glorious splendor with his father. He enjoyed the worship of the angels. And then his father asked him to take on an assignment, an assignment that would make the richest person in the universe, the absolute poorest. And Jesus said yes. Second, we saw that he became poor, that he chose to be poor. He chose to be born to a poverty-stricken couple. He was forced into exile when he was just a baby. He grew up in the backwater town of Nazareth with little formal education and even less societal recognition.

Jesus never owned a home. He never had any savings. He never had a wife or kids of his own. He didn't leave an estate. And why did he agree to this? well, so that we might become rich. Jesus had one primary objective in going from incredible riches to abject poverty, and that was to provide for our eternal welfare to give his spiritual children and inheritance.

So why can't Christians just stand by and watch as there are people in need around us? Why can't we just remain in the car or act like we don't see? Well, because when we were hurting, when we were helpless, when we were in poverty, God didn't stand by and watch. God intervened in a way that cost him dearly. It cost him his one and only son. That means that caring for others, serving others, generosity is a gospel issue. Those who truly understand the gospel are generous toward others.

And if you're not generous toward others, that might be an indication you don't really get the gospel. because no heart that loves Jesus can be cold to the vulnerable and the needy. Let's go back to the question that we started with. Why were Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed? Maybe you think that's because of sexual immorality. And you know what? If that's your answer, that's a right answer. That's what the book of Genesis clearly says.

But listen to what the prophet Ezekiel says in chapter 16, verse 49. Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom. She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned. They did not help the poor and needy. It looks like Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because of several sins. Sexual immorality was one of them. But another one is they did not help the poor and needy. Let's learn from the example of the Corinthians and be people who give according to our income.

Amen. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk. newsletter. You'll get a short email once a week. It'll challenge you to grow in your faith, give you interesting background on today's passage, and a lot, lot more. Just click the link in the show notes to sign up. It'll help you deepen your journey with Jesus.