Biblical Giving

*****

Prosperity teaching

Giving is motivated by a greedy pastor and a greedy and naive congregation who want God to serve their cravings for material prosperity. The pastor says, the Lord blesses materially and I’m a living witness but truth is the congregation is the one who has blessed the pastor thanks to their money. What a shame!

Legalism

You have to give, you must tithe, the Bible says so or your will be cursed. Do so and you will be blessed. Bring every penny so says the pastor. And the congregation does this because like the pastor they don’t understand the whole scripture and who wants to be cursed. And of course we could do with a blessing. How miserable!

Biblical teaching

We live in a world under God’s judgement that is headed toward worse eternal judgement but in Jesus we have a great loving Saviour who saves us from this judgement and gives us assurance of eternal judgement. We rejoice in this amazing Gospel, we are grateful of this Saviour and believe this to be the true Gospel.

And the great news is that Jesus is not just a Saviour of a few but the whole world, all those who would believe in him. As our Lord and Saviour we delight in his will that many may be saved and this is our mission. So we give our lives, we give our resources, our strength and ability, skills and gifts to serve our Lord before the glorious future that he brings in the new creation.

And if this Gospel is such good news and we believe it to be so and we want people to be saved then it only follows we would do everything we can to serve Jesus and reach the world with his Gospel.

We don’t give to manipulate God and force is hand. We don’t give out of ignorance and scary warnings of naive preachers. We give because we love Jesus. We give because Jesus is our Lord. We give because we would love the world to be saved through the preaching of the Gospel. We give what we can, if possible we would give more because we believe the Gospel and in God’s plan for the world.

References

Study the Gospels.

Read the Old Testament in light of the New.

Read the Epistles.

Well, study the whole Bible.

*****