This is God's word. The point is this, whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. God is able to make all grace abound to you so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, it may abound in every good work. As it is written, he has distributed freely. He has given to the poor. His righteousness endures forever. He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way. which through us will produce thanksgiving to God. For the ministry of this service is not only supplying the needs of the saints, but is also overflowing in many thanksgivings to God. By their approval of this service, they will glorify God because of your submission that comes from your confession of the gospel of Christ and the generosity of your contribution for them and for all others while they long for you and pray for you because of the surpassing grace of God upon you. Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift. Read that far in God's word. We live in God's world, and so we live in certain unchangeable realities. For example, gravity. If you drop your pen right now, it'll make its way down to the floor or your Bible. If we jump into the air, we will always come back right down in a moment. There are unchangeable realities like that regarding money. There's a right way to use money that always leads to good results, and there's a wrong way to use money that always leads to bad results. What a blessing that the Lord has revealed money principles for us to inform giving. We'll see our outline then with these three unchangeable realities informing our giving. Proportional harvesting, personal decisions, and the reality that the giver rewards givers. First is proportional or proportional harvesting from verse 6. Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly. Whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Right away we notice what Paul is doing. He's writing about these unchangeable realities using a gardening analogy, or farming, you could say. These seeds are the gifts that we give. The harvest is the result of our giving. Whatever we plant grows, whatever we give grows. So scanty planting of our seeds results in a meager harvest, while plentiful planting of our seeds produces a bountiful harvest. underlying realities, these unchangeable truths are already being expounded by Paul and illustrated with the farming or gardening analogy. What God has established for gardening, God himself has also established for the realm of financial stewardship for his children, for believers. So there's two ways to plant seeds in a garden if you follow the analogy and what he's talking about here is the amount of sowing, the amount of planting of seeds. So there's two ways to plant seeds in your garden. You can, number one, carefully take one seed and place each seed into its place as if you're placing a diamond into a vault. Put it in there, cover it with dirt, and maybe a little pat on the dirt on top of it, and then go on to the next seed. That's one way of planting seeds. The other way to plant seeds is to stride quickly through the garden with very long steps, reaching into your supply of seeds and coming out with a cup hand that's leaking all over the place seeds and spread your arm as far and wide and huge as possible with a giant swing and do it again and again to the left and to the right. So there's two ways to plant seeds in a garden. The ground will sprout according to how the seeds are planted. That's the principle. That's this unchanging reality. The picture that Paul paints for us with this gardening analogy is very clear with regard to our giving. Scatter only a few seeds, you can expect only a few plants, a small harvest. Scatter a lot of seeds and we can expect a lot of plants and a big harvest. That's an unchangeable reality of proportional harvesting resulting from our giving. That was point number one. Second unchangeable reality we see in our second point, personal, or personal decisions. We see this in verse seven. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. So verse seven brings up an important question with regard to giving. The question is why? Why do we give? Why do you give? What is our reason for giving? How much we give, where we give it, and with what attitude? See, the answer is, it is our own mind and heart that decides why we give. That's the extent of it. God the Father delights not just in the generous amounts that we give, but in our generous attitude as we give. Verse seven is about our attitude. We're to give cheerfully. You could call it premeditated giving, and that is that it's not during the service when you're feeling the pinch from the person up front saying that this is the need and pressing it home harder and more forcefully. and then deciding, wow, based on that, I really ought to, none of that. What he has in mind here is before you come, at home, when you're thinking through your finances, when you're thinking through the needs that you know about, you sit down and pray about it, take a look at the needs and your finances and decide. or yourself. Why do we give? It's a personal decision to give. Now it sounds obvious, but he's leading up to some ways that giving ought not to be done. See, each person sets out to do what he or she has decided, and then he or she accomplishes that goal. So the person decided what they'll do, and they went and did it. They should be glad about that, right? His or her giving should be just a wonderful, glad action. The word here, cheerful, is an attitude of being joyful, a quality of genuine benevolence, and being glad about the action and the privilege of giving. Whatever decisions are made, each person should end up glad about it. Since there can be a right attitude in giving, described there, there can also be a wrong attitude in our giving, described also in verse 7. As Christians give with a personal decision in our hearts, that's true generosity. And true giving is not familiar with regret. But he brings up two different ways when we can do it wrong. First is reluctantly. See it in verse seven. We are to give, but not reluctantly. God told us not to give in a certain manner. And that is this word for an attitude of sorrow. a state of sadness marked by regret, wish I hadn't done that, should have never let go of that money. As a result of what has been done, what has been done is giving, and then there's reluctance, or beforehand, I'm not sure I want to do this. So if we're feeling reluctant to give before the giving happens, that's not a good frame of mind for giving, says Paul, says God. Our Lord is showing us our frame of mind, forgiving, that God would encourage us in that instance to wait. Don't give if you're reluctant about it. Wait, think it through, pray over it, until you can reach a point of cheerfully giving what you've decided to give. When Paul wrote that our giving is not giving reluctantly, it underlines the fact that each person's decision is a private decision. The amount that we give is a personal matter, make our decision before the Lord, and of course, if you're married, decisions with your spouse. But then the second caution he gives, not only reluctantly, but then also this other word, compulsion or under compulsion. This is a necessity, kind of a force, a constraining or a compelling obligation. If you're feeling compelled to give, it's not good, says the Bible. God loves the attitude of cheerfulness rather than compulsion. They're different. One's right, one's wrong. I'm gonna try to illustrate this. So you think of a child offering you something. Let's say it's a drawing they made with crayons or a treat that they baked with their mother, a note that they wrote to you. Maybe it's a piece of a sweet dessert or a piece of candy. A child is giving something to you. It's spontaneous. It's self-generated by the child. You can tell it's coming out of the sweetness of the child and in a generous way. We love that. Don't we all love that? It's one of the sweetest things, to be able to receive a spontaneous gift from a child, and they meant it. That's how God our Father looks at our efforts in giving. He's a cheerful giver. Our efforts are as his children, we're cheerful givers. He loves that as much as we might love receiving a candy or a scoop out of the M&M bowl when they're walking around from couch to couch. How much more awkward when you're visiting someone and the parent keeps saying to the child, come on now, come on Johnny, you got a whole bowl of candy. You can give one piece to Uncle Greg. Now go ahead. And Johnny does not want to. It's clear and obvious that Johnny wants every piece of candy in that bowl. Go on, do it now. Johnny, if you don't give a piece of candy to Uncle Greg, you have to go to your room right now. Oh, all the joy is gone. We completely dislike all things about that social setting, don't we? That's my effort to try to illustrate Well, Paul's writing here about God our Father looking down at us as his children in our actions of giving. God does not want us to give under compulsion, because somebody somewhere convinced you that you ought to. Christian churches and groups go too far to express their authority. They end up compelling God's children how much to give, and it breaks this unchangeable reality principle we're studying here, an underlying principle about right and wrong giving. That is that we each decide what to do with our own money. The money that God has entrusted to us that of course still belongs to God, we'll get to that, but God expects each person to maintain personal control over his or her own funds and therefore his or her own giving. But there's another unchangeable reality as a counterbalance to what I just said, as a counterbalance to what we're studying here in this one verse, verse seven, That's from verses 1 to 5, we studied last time. The promises of giving that were made, and then the apostle helped the church in Corinth to keep their promise for the giving that they promised to do. That sort of promise making can be done in churches and Christian organizations because it's right here in scripture, that Christian leaders can ask for pledges. They can ask for promises to be made in order to, as a group, make bigger financial decisions based on potential future donations that have been pledged. Biblically, we can do that. We can make promises or pledges. It can be done while keeping the other principle of making up our own minds and doing it cheerfully, not reluctantly and not under compulsion. We would be the ones deciding how much to give or pledge. Some churches do this if, for example, they need... for planning purposes to buy a piece of property or build a church building. Our church doesn't ask for pledges, and we're not warming up to do that now. This is not a sermon to introduce that sort of thing. I'm just working my way through 2 Corinthians and expounding the truth that we are already standing on. I'm simply presenting the Bible's principles that pledges or commitments are acceptable as long as they do not overstep these principles either. When God looks at churches and the leaders, we all have heard these horror stories, haven't we, that leaders say, well, there wasn't enough collected this morning, so we're gonna pass the trays around again because we're looking for this number, and everybody stay in your seat, and everybody stay in the building until we pass the plate and reach this number. It's terrible. Of course, that's why it's a horror story. There's no cheerful givers in that room, and it grieves the spirit of God. We do things the way we do things because we've absorbed biblical truth in all these ways. Giving that is truly generous giving doesn't take action because it's surrendering to pressure. We may have given the generous amount, but our heart was not ready to be quite that generous. We've not made our own decision then. We let someone else do the deciding for us. God says, you're the steward of the money I entrusted to you, and no one else. We're each responsible for our own money, our possessions, everything that God has entrusted to us. For that much, we each give answer to God. It's not just money, it includes your time, it includes your talents, all of your skills, your spiritual resources, your time, all are under the same idea that we give to God out of a decision we make. How every minute is spent, how every dollar, Every dime is something for which we answer God, to God, and we ought to do it cheerfully. We're each responsible for and capable of deciding and being cheerful about our donations. Brings us to our third point. The giver rewards givers. Verses 8 to 15 now expound on the ideas we've already uncovered. The idea of reaping bountifully. He takes all these remaining verses to expound. on the idea of reaping bountifully. If you sow generously, you reap generously. So here Paul, again, uses the gardening analogy, but he uses it from a different analogy. Make sure you catch up with how he's changing his use of the gardening angle here. Instead of us being the gardeners scattering seed, now, this time, starting in verse eight, we consider God as the gardener scattering seed, and we're the garden. So God has planted bountifully in us, in our hearts. God gave us his son, God's son died for us and rose again, giving us everlasting life. The gospel news is things that he's expounded before in our book and he's referencing it here. After God sowed his seeds, okay, What does God reap? God reaps generosity inside of us, inside of our hearts. Our hearts have become the garden, and the fruitfulness that grows inside of us is generous giving that God himself has caused to grow inside of us. When we live lives of righteousness, one part of that idea is our learning more and more to delight in giving. Our hearts become more and more like God, the Father, and like Jesus, our Savior. Our hearts change, our hearts grow, we learn to love the idea of giving and the practice of giving. So now what does God do when he grows such fruitfulness in our hearts? Like verse eight says, I read from verse eight, God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work. The word all is used five times. It's complete, it's abounding, it's fruitfulness. After God grows fruitfulness giving within us, He then rewards it. Where God has already given the grace of conversion, We went from death to life, from darkness to light, through the work of His Son, the Lord Jesus. On top of that, on top of salvation, on top of becoming children of God, He then works generosity in us, and then on top of that, He rewards the generosity as that's taking place. Where God has already grown the grace of generosity in our hearts, He gives a superabundance of grace. We abound in giving, and then He rewards the giving. We abound in every good action of serving our Lord. How could he say it more completely than he said it in verse eight? One of the most amazing and incalculable aspects of giving, one of those unchangeable realities of living our lives within our Father's world, is that whenever we encounter an end or a limit to our own generosity, it's then that we discover an even higher level of God's generosity to us. He's super generous. And God's bountiful provision makes it possible for us to be still more generous in actions on our part. We're well supplied for generosity of every sort. When God provides, he does so lavishly, and this is well beyond the financial realm now. You can't out-give God, as you've probably heard people say. It's true. That's what's being expounded. It's not just in the New Testament. In fact, Paul is picking up on an idea of Isaiah 55, which I'll read now, Isaiah 55, 10. As the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth. It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. The way that God provides for us is as uniformly effective as the rain that he sends. It's as uniformly effective as the snow that he sends because they slowly and silently, the snow and the rain, water the ground, and transform the ground into growth of seeds into plants that provide bread for his people. It produces a yield. After the precipitation falls, the earth buds, the plants flourish, and they produce a yield. The same is true for God's giving grace to us in his kingdom. He converts us. Then he grows generosity in our hearts, the garden of our hearts. That's why he could write then in verse nine, quoting from a psalm, he has distributed freely, he has given to the poor, his righteousness endures forever. And continuing into verse 10, he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food, those are the quotes from Isaiah. will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. Since Paul knew that the God of nature, who's over the rain and the snow and the seeds and the growing, the God of creation, is the same God who's the God of redemption, the God of salvation, his thoughts move as he progresses through the paragraph from the physical harvest to the spiritual harvest, and the ideas are the same. The idea is that the abundant resources of God were given for the Corinthians to plant, not for the Corinthians to hoard. Remember the idea I had been talking about in the last chapter and a half? that the Corinthians had made a promise to give to the poor in the church in Jerusalem, God had given them the resources so that they would supply for the poor in the other church, not for them to hoard. He had been talking about that, and now he's illustrating that here. They had received in order to give. God's supply of resources would have tended to bring about equality through the sharing of burdens and the sharing of resources. Remember how we saw in chapter eight, verses 13 and 14, Your abundance supplies their need, their abundance supplies your need. There's different chapters of life. Sometimes we receive, sometimes we give. It's all in God's plan. In other words, God gave the Corinthians so much because God was equipping them to be more and more involved in giving it away. He gave more rain, more snow, more seeds, so there was more of a harvest. And he's doing that in the church in Corinth. And Paul quotes from Isaiah, he quotes from the Psalms, and then he applies that not just to the physical seeds, but to the spiritual kingdom seeds in Corinth. He who supplies seed to the sower, verse 10, and bread for food, will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest Now he builds on that in verse 11. You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God. Remember, their hearts become the garden, so they're enriched in every way. They're caused to have lots of seed, lots of rain, and the increase of the harvest spiritually in their hearts. So they're generous in every way, verse 11. That's now beyond just financial. The way that God enriched the Corinthians is not always financial. Some financial blessings are not even the most important. The Corinthians were often surprised to see the generous provisions of God for them in their church. The surprising surplus is on purpose. for them to become a distribution center. Jerusalem has a need, so I'll download stuff to Corinth, and then you transfer it over there. To us, it seems inefficient. Why not just dump it on Jerusalem? Because it's His kingdom, and He wants the church in Corinth to have the joy of giving, and the joy of being generous in their giving. They become a distribution center. That's God's design. He builds on that now in verse 12. How did God supply for the needs of the Christians? But the ministry of this service is not only supplying the needs of the saints, but is also overflowing in many thanksgivings to God. The more people involved, the more thanksgiving to God. What overflowed? Thanksgiving to God. It's like the harvest. The spiritual harvest is praise to God, thanks to God, glory to God, which is what we're all about. In fact, that was God's goal all along, is to cause people to give Him glory. Verses 13 and 14 inform us that the service of Christians to Christians is what gives God glory. Read those two verses once more. Verse 13, by their approval of this service, They will glorify God because of your submission that comes from your confession of the gospel of Christ and the generosity of your contributions for them and for all others while they long for you and pray for you because of the surpassing grace of God upon you. So everyone says, isn't this great? What a great God we have. He's causing us to have enough so that we can supply for the needs of others, that we have a heart that wants to give and we give and it's a true, cheerful, joyful thing for us. Praise be to God for what he's done in our hearts and your hearts. Praise be to God for supplying for the needs financially, for building his kingdom. Sometimes we're the giver, sometimes we're the receivers, and on both ends we say, praise be to God, that's the right use of money. And it's to God's glory, and we give him thanks. What have we seen in our study of this passage? We've seen three unchangeable realities that inform the privilege of giving. Proportional harvesting, personal decisions, and the reality that the giver rewards The Lord's revealed these money principles to inform one aspect of our Christian walk, and that is giving. So I have three concluding applications for us to consider. Number one, we give knowing that God already owns all of our money. God already owns all of our stuff, not just the dollars in the bank account, your car, your equipment, your home, your clothes. So when we give, The question is actually very different than we start off thinking it is. The question is not, how much of my money am I going to give to God's use? It's actually the direct opposite. How much of God's money that's in my possession am I going to keep for my use? Romans 11, 36 says, from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever, amen. So the first application point is we give knowing that God already owns all of our money. Important principle to consider and keep in mind. Number two, we give as the junior partner of the distribution team of God and us, whatever our possessions, whatever our money, whatever our resources. It's God and us. He owns it and he has entrusted it to us, so we're the junior member of a distribution team. God is our senior partner in the distribution center. He promotes ongoing giving and increased generosity in our partnership and our distribution team. And so we implement God's giving principles and see what happens. When we jump in the air, we always come right back down. It's an unchanging reality about gravity. What happens in giving uniformly under God's direction? we'll come back down in gravity. Uniformly, under God's direction, our generous giving brings its own reward. Proverbs 11, 24, one gives freely, yet grows all the richer. The one who waters will himself be watered. We operate in a cheerful way according to God's principles because we're the junior partner in the distribution team of both God and us. Third and last, we thank God We thank God if there's one thing that arises out of this passage, it's thankfulness, thanksgiving, giving thanks to God, multiplying thankfulness to God. We thank God. And it's all built on what was a core verse in the previous chapter. I'll read it again, 2 Corinthians 8-9, For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor. so that you by his poverty might become rich. We thank God for making us rich spiritually, for washing our sins away, for making us children of God, for the Lord Jesus coming and giving up what he had in heaven to become a man and then even unto death and burial for us. It was necessary for us to go from poverty to riches. We're rich in the grace of God. We're rich in grace, super abundant grace. We know that lives are more important than the stuff, right? The money, human life more important than money, we all know that. God the Father gave his Son for us, gave up his life. What could be more valuable than God the Father giving God the Son for us? In terms of finances, if you wanna put a financial expression to the gospel, God the Father gave it all when he gave his Son. Jesus gave his own self. There's nothing more valuable than that. So the best thing we can do is give our thanks back to God, to realize that he's worthy of our praise. We thank him for what Paul ends our passage with, the inexpressible gift, or another translation says the indescribable gift, the biggest gift, the best gift, the most important gift, the permanent gift. Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift. The best thing we can give in response to that is thanks, praise. It's not about good works. So often we start to talk about money and instantly we're in the earning thing, where I need to earn by doing the right steps financially. It's not about earning anything. It's not about works. It's about grace, grace, grace. What's the purchase price of that grace? The Son of God was given for us. So in all of our giving, and it's an important aspect of the Christian walk, in all of our financial giving, giving of time and talent, in all of our giving, we have to focus on our Savior. Superlative grace is there. Superlative giving is there. And superlative thankfulness is our reply. Since Christ gave himself for us, We give ourselves to him. We love because he first loved us, is the way John wrote it in 1 John 4, 19. All that remains is for us to give him our thanks, or again, as the passage ends in verse 15, thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for this indescribable gift of your son,