Bible Guys Classics: 2 Corinthians 8

Hey, everybody, we're the Bibble guys, and if you're just tuning in recently, just know that we are showing a little bit of reruns for a few months and then we'll be back bigger and better than ever on August thirty first, because behind the scenes we're taking a hiatus to do some very important things. Yeah, we're building building out a new studio and we've got some new structure. Super excited about it. So August thirty first, brand new content. But in the meantime, enjoy some of our greatest hits. Well, today we're talking about the difference between being generous and being stingy. Yeah. Man, this whole book, Paul is thrown out some big challenges and I think for many of us this is the toughest one. Well them anyways. So he's Chris and I'm Jeff, and we're the Bible guys. Okay, Chris, So I have a segment that's right in your wheelhouse. Yes, So I'm going to give you quotes from movies and you have to tell me what movie it's from. Just the movie, nothing, not the players. Well, you can do whatever you want, but the movie is the big part of it. Ok Just what movie it's from. I'm not going I'm not gonna give you much time. So have you read these through just now? Yeah? Yeah, I think you're going to know a few of them, and then a couple of them that might be more of a challenge. Oh, here we go, very very quick. I'm actually excited. As fast as you can. This is a speed thing. As fast as you can. Hear good. I will make him an offer he can't refuse, no, godfather, Yes, I knew that one. And by the way, it's the horse's head, right. That's right. That's that's great. Here's to looking at you, kid. It's the black and white movie with the airplane Casablanco. Okay, I've been to Casa Blanca. Sneak. We we ate in his cafe. That's right. That's right. You guys, give up or you're thirsty for more. Oh, I just saw this home alone, because I literally just saw it like two days ago. This one is easy. I think. Hello, my name is a Ningolatoya. My father prepared to die the Prince's pride, of course, Hello, my name. Is an It's such a funny character. That's so great. We just stopped saying that. That's right. I don't think that word means what you think it means. That's great. There's no crying in baseball. Oh jeez. Uh, tom anks in a league of their own. And after all, tomorrow is another day. After all, tomorrow is I know this. After all, after all, tomorrow is another day. I know this. It's an old movie. It's Clark Gable. Gone with the Wind. There you go, you nailed it. Job. Yes, a couple of those were layups for you, but that one was. I thought that would be the challenge for you. Yeah. Nice, nice, Yeah, it's how fun. Movie quotes are fun. Although I will say you either love or hate the Princess Bride, right, there's no neutravel neutral opinions about the Pride. Anybody who doesn't like it? Oh, man, my daughter hates it. Oh if we want to turn on? So we made. My daughter's boyfriend was over and he'd never seen it, and so Bonnie and I were like, oh, that's what we're watching tonight. And you know, so he's sitting there laughing at it. But bydie, I probably through the movie. We quoted, you know, oh sure the line, sure, yeah, but people either love it or hate it. It's so quotable. You know what I found that's also true with Avatar. Oh really Yeah. People either absolutely love it and think it's the best thing in the world, or they just absolutely can't stand it. And I've really run into a lot of people who just can't stand it. Wow, and I love it. I thought that the second movie, by the way, was really good. Well, I didn't even finish the first one. O. Yeah, well there is. I don't hate it. I just there's a difference between you and me. Yeah, I think so again amusement versus entertainment. Well, I was totally engrossed in the whole thing. Yeah, I thought it was fascinating. So amusement for me has turned my brain off. I don't have to think about it. Although pretty much the first movie was just Pocahontas and dances with wolves. Dances with wolves pretty much rolled up into alien sci fire. That's what it was. But it's okay. It was still good, well good anyways, very interesting us getting just a little glimpse into your vast treasury of a library. Yeah, movie quotes. Yeah, so we're going to read in second Grint is eight and this is I think very useful passage for Christians, as you're trying to think about balance in how you manage your resources and how do you live out a generous life, And this is one It's not the only passage where Paul talks about wealth and setting aside caring for others, but it's one of them and one of the key passages. And there's a couple of key phrases that most Christians have heard at one point or another. So sure, here we go. In sec Critias, chapter eight, we'll just start in verse one. It says, now I want you to know, dear brothers and sisters, what God in his kindness has done through the churches in Macedonia. They're being tested by many troubles, and they're very poor, but they are also filled with abundant joy, which has overflowed in rich generosity. For I can testify that they gave not only what they could afford, but far more than they did it of their own free will. They begged us again and again for the privilege of sharing in the gift for the believers in Jerusalem. They even did more than we had hoped for, For their first action was to give themselves to the Lord and to us, just as God wanted them to do. So, we have urged Titus, who encouraged your giving in the first place, to return to you and encourage you to finish this ministry at giving. Since you excel in so many ways in your faith, your gifted speakers, your knowledge, your enthusiasm, and your love from us, I want you to excel also in this gracious act of giving. I'm not commanding you to do this, but I am testing how genuine your love is by comparing it with the eagerness of the other churches. You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became so that by his poverty he could make you rich. Here's my advice. It would be good for you to finish what you started a year ago. Last year, you were the first who wanted to give, and you were the first to begin doing it. Now you should finish what you started. Let the eagerness you showed in the beginning be matched now by your giving. Give in proportion to what you have. Whatever you give is acceptable if you give it eagerly and give according to what you have, not what you don't have. Of course, I don't mean your giving should make life easy for others and hard for yourselves. I only mean that there should be some equality. Right Now, you have plenty and can help those who are in need. Later they will have plenty and can share with you when you need it. In this way things will be equal. As the scriptures say, those who gathered a lot had nothing left over, and those who gathered only little had enough. But thank God He's given Titus the same enthusiasm for you that I have. Titus welcomed our request that he visit you again. In fact, he himself was very eager to go and see you. We are also sending another brother with Titus. All the churches praise him as a preacher of the good news, appointed by the churches to company us as we take the offering to Jerusalem, a service that glorifies the Lord and shows our eagerness to help. We are traveling together to guard against any criticism for the way we're handling this generous gift. We're careful to be honorable before the Lord, but we also want everyone else to see that we are honorable. We're also sending with them another of our brothers, who has proven himself many times and has shown on many occasions, how eager he is, He's now even more enthusiastic because of his great confidence in you. If anyone asks about Titus, say that he's my partner who works with me to help you. And the brothers with him have been sent by the churches, and they bring honor to Christ. So show them your love and prove to all the churches that are boasting about you is justified. Yeah, well there you go. So he's sending Titus. I love. Let's cover this back end first. I love the fact that he's being very, very he's choosing to be accountable. I mean, he's Apostle Paul. He can do whatever he wants to do. Sure, but he chooses to say, Hey, we're traveling together so that nobody has any questions how we're using these resources. We're traveling together so that we're treating this gift from the people as a gift from God, and we're going to be as transparent and open and as protective of it as possible. And I think that there's something to be said for Christians to go above board. So you know, people's opinions of us don't matter, but they do matter, right they shouldn't We shouldn't do everything based on other people's opinions, but we should work hard to make sure that our good name and our reputation is good. A Book of Proverbs says that a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and so protecting your name is important. Yeah, that's awesome. And I think that all of these you know, tidbits, these little nuggets about about giving is pretty awesome. And you know, the thing that actually stands out to me, I mean, there's obviously a lot that stands up, but is that said that they begged us again and again for the privilege of sharing in the gift for all the believers in Jerusalem. They just said, please let us be a part of this. This blame. You know, when somebody goes out of their way and they just they want to give. It reminds me, honestly every time of my wife, because she is the gift of giving. It's when you take a spiritual test, you know, her gift of giving is up there, and man, she just absolutely loves it. And so I'll give you a quick little example. So Christmas just ended right, and and we ended up, you know, opening up everything under the tree and to be honest with you, it wasn't There wasn't a ton I mean, like we had enough obviously. It wasn't like you know, I remember Christmas is in the past where it was a lot, a lot bigger. When kids a little, their boxes tend to be bigger. Yes, yes, okay. Well, Liz had actually spent money sending gifts like to Ohio to all of our relatives, you know, just buying for people and doing for people. And and she came over to me at the end of the evening one night and she gave me a big kiss and she said thank you, And I said what she said, thank you, thank you for letting me buy for everyone, And she just got so much joy. And the fact that she was like, oh, it's like the best gift I could have given her was to let her spend all my money to give it away for everybody else, right, And it reminds me of It's like at least. Somebody enjoys it, right, right, right, It's like let me, I'm begging you, let us be a blessing. And you know, it's just great. You know. We I'm a part of an organization, the Timothy Initiative. I'm on the board and we plant churches all around the world. There's tens of thousands of church planters and in thirty something countries, and we needed to have a gathering of the top leaders in the world. We needed to get them all together. And for the last several years we've set a goal not just to fundraise from the US, but also the fundraise from the field, to invite all these new churches that were starting to also participate in this wonderful act of giving, to teach them to be generous. And so we set a goal and all that well, one of the poorest countries on the planet, maybe one of the bottom two or three in the world, is Nepal per household, one of the poorest countries in the world. And it was the Napali church leaders who stepped up and said, we want to fund this event in Dubai where we are a blessing to all the other nations in the world that are also trying to start churches. And so they raised a couple hundred thousand dollars among the Nepali people, which in America would be millions upon millions of dollars, right, and these people delighted in the fact that they could serve all these other church leaders and church planters around the world for the purpose of the whole purpose behind that meeting was to strategize on how to get a church in every for every people in every place. And they knew what it was and they knew the importance of it, and they said we and they kept pushing. So we kept saying no, well you these resources in other ways, and they were like, no, we want to help fund this event, and they delighted in it, and they kept pushing until finally they got their way and they were able to fund this. And so it was really neat because I sat right behind the Nepali delegation in this meeting, and there's people in all of their native dress all over, the Africans and the Asians, and so colorful, and the worship the worship band was like five or six different nations languages, and so they'd lead worship in different languages, and everybody's praying, everybody's celebrating in different ways. But the Nepalis were sitting right in front of me, and they were celebrating on a level that nobody else was even close to. It was a delight to watch. Well, it was because they were so invested. Oh yeah, and so they were delighted in it. And so he says, it's a privilege. I think sometimes we set the bar low for other Christians where we don't ask for a lot from them as far as volunteering or giving or whatever. And he's saying, it's a great privilege. And when these Macedonians were so poor realized we get to be a part of that. It's a privilege, then they jumped in and they got to be a part of what God was doing by set making some sacrifices. You know, I'm sure it was a difficult thing for you and the other leaders to you know, we we have more resources than they do. It would have been easier for us to you know, to write the check, write the check, gather resources ourselves and say, oh, we'll just take care of it, because obviously we have more than they do, and you know, much more than they do. But in order to say, listen, whether it's the widow with two mites, right, you know in the scripture that just you know, gives in the offering play, or whether it's the rich man who gives up his wealth, that isn't the point Jesus never talked about equal giving. He talked about equal sacrifice. He talked about equal you know, you know, just the attitude of giving of what you had. And you know, there's a note in here in my Life Application Study Bible that actually talks about it. Says, the topic of. Fun raising is not one to be avoided and one that should embarrass us. But fundraising efforts should be planned and conducted responsibly. Like Paul, we should be guided in these practices when it comes to raising money. And this is really what you guys were providing for the people to experience. So he says, as leaders, we need number one, be persistent, trusting God to provide, and then it lists all the different verses that we just covered. Provide information, show the definite purpose of the goal. Be dedicated to God, Be enthusiastic, be generous yourself. As leaders, have someone to keep things moving. Act with honesty and integrity before God and others. Be accountable, and then let people give willingly. Believe it or not. Every single principle that I just read through is in you can find in the passages that we just read, and then bleeding in the chapter number nine, which is really cool, because again Paul is modeling for us not only to give, but also what it means to inspire others to give as well. You know, there were traveling with us on that trip. There were ten men and women business people who could have funded that whole thing. Among them, probably from this month's extra money, right, some very wealthy business people that were with us on this trip. And one of the men came and said, I think I'm going to write a check back to the Nepalis and refund their money. And I said, look at how they're celebrating and their joy. Don't steal their joy. Instead, let's let us make sure that this is not a waste of their money, right, because what they were doing is they were investing. This was not just a vacation. This was not just a nice little get together where we're going to have some nice food in a beautiful environment. This was we are strategizing to move the Kingdom of God forward. And it's worth that investment. Our extreme sacrifice is worth it. And so I told the rest of these people, let's just make sure we don't waste their investment. Let's instead take this investment and multiply it twentyfold. One hundredfold and then it'll be worth it. Then we'll all celebrate. And so those businessmen quickly changed their opinion in their mind, and they did. They stepped up, and you know, we're partnering to plant tens of thousands churches together as a result of this. So it wasn't just a sacrifice for the sake of sacrificing. It was a sacrificial investment so that they would see a greater return. And then in that there's the joy of it, there's the privilege of it. There's the expectation that God's people would make sacrifices to move his kingdom forward. That's an expectation of Paul's writings. I think of the church in general, is that we would sacrifice in order to move God's kingdom forward. And when we talk about moving is king forward, that means so that everybody everywhere can hear the Gospel and experience the love of Jesus. That's incredible. Hey, let's talk about this verse and verse number nine. It says, you know, the generous grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and it talks about Jesus himself and he says though he was rich, yet he for your sakes became poor so that by his poverty he could make you rich. Yeah, that's an interesting passage. Yeah, because you would think it faced value that he's talking about money. Yeah, right, you know, Jesus being rich and. Poor and everything else. But the life application study about But I'm just want to read the first couple of sentences on that notation. It says, the Gospels don't indicate that Jesus was any poorer than most first century Palestinians. Rather, Jesus became poor by giving up his rights as God and becoming human, and the incarnation God voluntarily became man and holy human person of Jesus of Nazareth. So the interpretation that of this verse about being rich and becoming poor isn't necessarily dollars or cents. Yeah, I think that traditionally within the Church, there's always been this passage and then the one where Jesus says, the son of Man doesn't have anywhere to lay his head, right right, those two passages, people have kind of taken it out of context and said, oh, Jesus was poor, and so his followers, his leaders, should also be poor. And I don't know that there's any evidence that Jesus was poor, he just wasn't a homeowner, right, there's a difference between those two things. And so he didn't at least during those three years of his ministry. So you know, we don't know. Prior to that, he would have probably inherited Joseph's family, you know, situation, whatever that would be. But as far as him traveling during the three years of his ministry, he didn't have a home. And by the way, he had a job. He was a carpenter. Yeah, that's right, right, that's right, so he can provide for himself if he needed to. All of those things in the first thirty years, it doesn't there's no demonstration that they were overly poor or any more poor than the first century of Palestinians. And then you know, Jesus had some friends that had significant resources. Peter was a business owner. We know where his home was. His home was fairly substantial. It wasn't a mansion, but he was okay, well, his. Home in Capernaum was larger than the homes around it. So if you visit which we're going to we're going to Israel in May, yeah, so you'll see it. Yeah. But when I when I. Was there they had built a church directly above Peter's home because well, you know, just just because and and anyway, But the point is is that you know, the thatched rus. They're all gone. So really what you see in the city of Capernaum is you see sort of the walls. So they excavated this, you know, little tiny village really is what it is. And you see the walls of these homes and they're. Not very big at all. I mean, they're probably. The whole home is like a master's suite in a bedroom right compared to today. But Peter's home was bigger, which means that and this is where they believe that Jesus healed Peter's mother in law, sure when he came over. But anyway, all that to say, Peter was a business owner. Yeah, he probably had more wealth than you know, probably anybody in Capernaum. Well it mentions his boats plural, the other fishermen that were with him. Then you've got James and John and their dad with the other boats that mentioned. So these guys were at least business type people. Matthew was a tax collector. He had a bunch of money, and tax collectors were wealthy people, right, usually. Now we don't know how deep into his career he was, but you used to have to buy the right to be a tax collector, which means you had to have resources even get started. Yes, zach Chius came and was generous. You had the women that you know come to visit him in the in the garden. We do know that there's multiple women that helped fund jesus ministry very generously. Uh. Jesus was when he when he was put to death, he was wearing a robe that was valuable enough that the Roman soldiers gambled over it. It doesn't say that they were gambling over the thieves clothes, but they were gambling over Jesus clothes. So the fact that he didn't own a home during those three years or have a specific place that he was traveling to and from all the time doesn't mean that he necessarily was poor. This is talking about he was unlimited in heaven, right he was, and instead he limited himself to time and place. He limited himself into a human body during that time, and then he had to deal with then all the things that the human body deals with, hunger and pain and sadness and all these things, and so he was in the riches and the glory of heaven down to the poverty of Earth, and you know, this should kind of inspire us just a little bit. The reverse of this is we are currently in the poverty of this planet, even on the best days. You know, We've had some great days in my life, and I think back, Oh, man, I was watching the movie the other night and I saw a landscape of a place I've been, and it just kind of made my heart leap and I went, Man, that place is beautiful, and I loved that day. It was incredible. Okay, that's great. This is the poverty of earth even on our best days, and the glory and the riches of eternity far exceed anything that we could achieve here. So he was in those riches and he came to this poor planet. Someday he made it possible for us now to leave the poverty of this planet and go to the riches of eternity. You know. It is not unlike where Paul talks about in the Church the Philippi Philippians too, where he basically uses the idea that Jesus was equal with God and he was born, you know, and then became you know, a servant to human humanity and things like this, became obedient to death. And what he's doing is he's using the birth of Jesus, of him leaving Heaven coming to earth. And then, if you remember, he says, in your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus in verse five. And here's what he's saying. He's saying, like Jesus is leaving Heaven, sets an example as an example visual aid of your relationships to submit. And have that mindset. Well, this is what he's saying here too. He's saying, listen, sometimes you need to give in your wealth for the benefit of others so that they may give back to you and you need it. And then he says, hey, Jesus had everything and then he gave up everything were you so that you might have everything. So use this idea as as a pattern to give to others. That wonderful. That's wonderful. So I think that's probably a great place to end, and we will catch you next time on the Bible. Guys,