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    Nov 10, 2019

    Gain All You Can

    Gain All You Can

    Passage: 1 Timothy 6:6-19

    Speaker: Rev. Vivian McCarthy, Pastor

    “For followers of Christ, giving is not an incidental activity, but an essential spiritual discipline that moves us toward a Christ-centered life.” ~James A. Harnish

    If I said to you that God is generous, can you describe a way in which you see God’s generosity? (Think about it)

    Now take just a moment and doodle an image of our generous God.

    Remember the guy who built the bigger barns because he had a bumper crop?  The word generosity was not in his vocabulary and certainly not in his nature.  How would you draw him?

    Have you ever thought about generosity as a spiritual gift or spiritual discipline?  

    In the last section of his sermon The Use of Money, John Wesley wrote:

    Do not imagine that you have done anything, barely by going thus far, by ‘gaining and saving all you can,’ if you were to stop here.  All this is nothing, if you go not forward, if you do not point all this at a farther end. Nor, indeed, can you properly be said to save anything, if you only lay it up.  You may as well throw your money into the sea, as bury it in the earth…Not to use, is effectually to throw it away. Therefore…add the Third rule to the two preceding. Having First, gained all you can, and, Secondly saved all you can, Then ‘give all you can.’1

    …The urgency behind Wesley’s sermon was his passionate desire to lead people into a healthier, more productive, more positive life by providing practical wisdom on the relationship between their faith and their finances.  Wesley’s rules are not about fund-raising for the church; they are about becoming more like Christ. They are about practicing the spiritual discipline of generosity so that we become generous people whose lives are shaped in the likeness of an extravagantly generous God.2

    Beloved, both the Apostle Paul and John Wesley knew that when our life revolves around accumulation, our souls become just as singularly-focused.  As the scripture said today, we are tempted to hold onto more and more and more.

    Both of them urged those of us who profess Jesus as Lord to focus instead on God and God’s ways.  Paul wrote to Timothy: Tell those rich in this world’s wealth to quit being so full of themselves and so obsessed with money, which is here today and gone tomorrow. Tell them to go after God, who piles on all the riches we could ever manage—to do good, to be rich in helping others, to be extravagantly generous. If they do that, they’ll build a treasury that will last, gaining life that is truly life.

    Life that is truly life.  I think Paul meant that when we are obsessed with money and having more of it, we are enslaved by it and life is about money instead of truly life abundant.

    So, today is the day when we ask you to make a commitment to the ministries of the church.  There is a commitment card in the bulletin, and you all received one personally a couple of weeks ago.  If you’ll remember, I shared with you how both Wesley and Paul also made clear that we first consider what is needful for our own support – they said we need to consider what we truly need for food and clothing – not for extravagant spending but what is needful – before we decide what to give.  

    So I invite you today, as you come to the communion table to bring your commitment card and place it in the offering plate.  

    Friends, generosity requires us to be intentional.  It is impossible to be generous if we aren’t intentional about how we handle money.  But generosity has a benefit that is priceless – worth more than we can possibly pay for.  You see, when we learn to be generous, we find joy. “When Paul said, ‘God loves a cheerful giver,’ he was acknowledging that we experience the joy at the heart of God when we practice generosity.  There is great joy in knowing that by our giving, we share in the way God is blessing others.  There is great joy in seeing the way our generosity touches the life of this world with the love and grace of God.  There is great joy in discovering that through our generosity, we participate in God’s transformation of our world into some small part of the Kingdom of God.  Through our generosity, we discover ‘the life that really is life.’”3

    1John Wesley, The Use of Money, altered for inclusive language.  From James Harnish, Simple Rules for Money, pg. 54-55.

     2James Harnish, Ibid.

     3Harnish, Ibid., pgs 67-68