This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Hi, this is Pastor Tom, and I want to welcome you to day one of 2 Corinthians
chapter 9. We're going to look at verses 1 to 5 today. 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 are
all about the value of generosity.

We're talking about how do you survive some of the struggles that we face as
God's servants in 2 Corinthians. And in these 2 chapters, they're really about
how do you survive selfishness. Servants can't be selfish.

So how do you come against the selfishness that we all struggle with in our
lives? One of the ways to survive selfishness is to choose to be generous. You
choose the opposite and then you watch what God does in your heart through that.

And so all last week we talked about this. We talked about these principles of
the value of generosity in your life and how to be generous. Number one, you
give regardless of the circumstances.

Number two, you give beyond your abilities. Three, you see giving as a
privilege. You give yourself to the Lord first.

You give excellently. You give gratefully. You finish what you start.

You give according to what you have. You give expectantly. You handle the
offering in a trustworthy way.

These are chapters that are filled with God's wisdom about giving and generosity
in our lives, the heart of generosity. In chapter 9, Paul begins by writing to
them about the dangers of the opposite of generosity, the dangers of giving what
he calls grudgingly, giving with a grudging heart. Listen to what he has to say
in verses 1, 2, verse 5.

"There is no need for me to write to you about this service to the saints, for I
know your eagerness to help and I have been boasting about it to the
Macedonians, telling them that since last year you and Achaia were ready to give
and your enthusiasm has stirred most of them to action. But I'm sending the
brothers in order that are boasting about you in this matter should not prove
hollow, but that you may be ready, as I said you would be. For if any
Macedonians come with me and find you unprepared, we, not to say anything about
you, would be ashamed of having been so confident.

So I thought it necessary to urge the brothers to visit you in advance and
finish the arrangements for the generous gift that you had promised. Then it
will be ready as a generous gift, not as one grudgingly given. " As we're
walking through these principles, if you're keeping count of the principles that
we're walking through about generosity in these two chapters, we looked actually
at ten of them last week.

So there is an eleventh one here and the eleventh principle is never give
grudgingly. You and I, we can choose to give generously or we can give
grudgingly. Now I know we think, it's easy to think, it's better to give
grudgingly than not to give at all.

We're going to hear a couple of times in this chapter that that is not true. The
reason is when God asks us to give, when God wants us to be generous, He's not
after our money. God owns the cattle on the thousand hills.

God could take care of the need Himself. What He's after is what our money
represents, our heart. And so if I give with a grudging heart, it actually is
opposite to what God is trying to do.

A grudging gift hurts your heart, so don't give grudgingly. Paul talks in these
verses about, he's going to say some more about what we need to do to make sure
to not give grudgingly later in this chapter, but in these first verses he talks
about one of the things we need to do in order to be able to give generously.
One of the things we need to do to make sure we don't give grudgingly.

And this is something we sometimes forget. He says in order to make sure you
don't give a grudging gift, you have to get ready to give. You have to prepare
yourself to give.

If all of a sudden you're asked to give and you weren't ready for it, the
emotion of the moment can cause you to feel like, "Well, I'm feeling pushed into
this, or I'm not sure I want to do this. " So get your heart ready and then also
prepare your finances. What does it mean to get ready to give?

Well, it involves you preparing in advance, planning in advance. I know some
people who think the only way to give is on the spur of the moment, the emotion
of the moment. Well, that's nowhere in the New Testament, that's nowhere in the
scriptures.

A generous gift is a gift that you plan in advance. So you plan to give every
month, you make a commitment through online giving and you sign up and you say,
"I'm going to give throughout this year. " That's being generous and that's
keeping your heart from getting a sense of a grudge about giving in it.

So you plan in advance, but you do a second thing. Paul talks about it beginning
in verse 3 when he says, "I'm sending some people to help you in this. " Now, it
almost sounds at first like he's sending enforcers, like somebody has to come in
to make sure they take the offering.

But they're not enforcers, they're encouragers. And we all need those kind of
people in our lives. If you're going to be generous, you need to surround
yourself with generous people.

It's just too easy to be selfish in this world. So you plan to give, but you
also put other people in your life who will encourage your giving by their
giving, but also by encouraging you in your giving. That's one of the ways that
you get generosity in your life.

You got to be ready to be generous. If not, you run the risk of giving
grudgingly instead of generously. And we're going to talk about that more later
in this chapter.

But before that, we get to look at a 12th principle, one of the most powerful
principles about giving anywhere in the next verse. The principle is you've got
to remember God's law of sowing and reaping. Remember this, whoever sows
sparingly will also reap sparingly.

But whoever sows generously will also reap generously. That's God's law of
sowing and reaping, and it's a very simple law. It has to do with many areas of
our lives, but he's applying it here particularly to your finances and how your
finances work.

Let's just walk through the simplicity of this law of sowing and reaping. Just
think this through with me. First part of the law of sowing and reaping is
without sowing, there will be no reaping.

That's part of the law. You can't get what you didn't sow. When God says, "I
want you to be generous," he realizes that that's going to have an impact in
your life and other people's lives.

So that's why we like to say around Saddleback, if you have a need, you sow a
seed. If you see a need in your own life, you sow a seed. You don't try to hoard
things.

You don't try to be selfish in your life. You realize that the answer is to sow.
And sowing here is a picture of giving.

It's a picture of generosity in your life. And without sowing, there will be no
reaping. Second part of this very simple law of sowing and reaping is you get
what you plant.

You're not going to get what you didn't plant. In Galatians 6-7 it says, "Don't
deceive yourselves. No one makes a fool of God.

You will reap exactly what you plant. " You're going to reap what you plant.
It's pretty simple when you come down to it.

What are you planting? That's what you're going to be able to reap. If I plant
corn, I'm not going to get watermelon.

I'm going to get corn. I'm not much of a farmer, but I do understand that one.
If you look at your life and you think, "I don't like what I'm getting out of
life right now," then God's question is this.

What are you planting? Because you're going to reap what you sow. Maybe more
than you expected, maybe less than you expected.

Certainly not exactly when you expected, but you will reap what you sow. That's
God's law. That's how things work in this world.

Not just with corn and watermelon out in the field, but with generosity and your
gifts and your decision to serve and the way you handle your life, whatever
God's put into your life. Now, let me be clear about this. We're all still going
to get weeds.

We're talking about sowing and reaping here. We're all still going to have
problems in our lives. You can't get rid of the weeds in life.

I'm not talking about whether you have problems or don't have problems. I'm
talking about what are you sowing and what are you getting out of life? If you
sow generosity, you're going to reap generosity in your life.

If you sow selfishness, you're going to reap selfishness in your life. If you
look at your life and you're thinking, "I want something different out of life.
I want something more out of life.

" If you're not satisfied with the crop that you're getting out of life right
now, God's law of sowing and reaping says start planting different seeds. God's
encouragement is plant seeds of generosity. Give to others in the way that you
serve.

Give to others in the possessions that you have and the way that you share
because you're going to reap what you sow. You get what you plant. Without
sowing, there'll be no reaping.

Another part of this law of sowing and reaping is you get back more than you
plant. God multiplies what you plant. You plant one corn seed.

You don't get one corn seed back. You get a stalk of corn with many ears of corn
on it and all those ears have many, many, sometimes hundreds of seeds of corn on
each ear. Now, let's be careful on this one because the fact that God multiplies
what you plant, some people let this part of the law take them down a selfish
path.

They make it into the law of getting and getting instead of the law of sowing
and reaping. Listen, if you harvest more, what are you going to do? You're going
to plant more.

If you're generous and out of that God gives you something, even materially out
of that, what are you going to do with that? Just use it for yourself? No.

You're going to be generous in a greater way. You might save some to plant next
year in case there's a bad year. I'm not talking about saving sometimes.

I'm talking about the very heart of the thing and why you do what you do. If the
reason that you're giving, for instance, your money to church or the reason that
you're serving other people in church is so that you can selfishly get something
from God, then what you're sowing is selfishness and how are you going to get
back a selfishness in the end? God multiplies what we plant and that includes
the attitude of our heart as we plant it.

You get what you plant, you get back more than you plant, oh, and there's one
final thing in this law of sowing and reaping. There's always a delay between
the sowing and the reaping, always. You don't go out and plant a seed in the
ground one day and walk out the next day and, wow, there's a watermelon.

Wow, there's a pumpkin. No. First you see a very small sprout come out of the
ground and then all of a sudden it grows into a vine if it's going to become a
watermelon or a pumpkin and then all of a sudden you see it begin to blossom and
then you have to take care of that, make sure that it's cultivated, make sure
that it's fertilized, make sure that it's watered, and eventually the fruit
comes, but there's always a delay.

Now, when it comes to sowing and reaping in our lives, I don't know how long the
delay is going to be. No one does. When you give to God, when you give to
others, there is going to be, no doubt about it, a reaping.

There's going to be a benefit that comes to their life and to your life out of
that, but no one can tell you when because there's always a delay. That's when
faith comes in and that's why the scripture tells us again and again, don't get
discouraged. Don't give up.

Keep sowing good seeds because there's always a delay between the sowing and the
reaping. Sometimes that delay is all the way until we get into heaven. So what?

Whatever we benefit from in heaven, that's going to last forever. I'd rather
reap there than anywhere because that's an eternal benefit that's going to last
forever. God's law of sowing and reaping.

Without sowing, there's no reaping. You get what you plant, you get back more
than you plant, and there's always a delay between sowing and reaping. Let's
pray together.

Father, give us faith. Give us faith to trust in you and follow you. It's so
easy to hold on to our things tightly because we think it's all we have, but we
have you and you hold on to us.

So help us to have a heart of generosity and out of that heart of generosity,
help us to be giving to others with the things you put into our lives and the
gifts you put into our lives and the abilities you put into our lives. And out
of that generosity, Lord, as the sowing and reaping happens, help us to give
praise to you and then to sow even more, to see even more opportunities to serve
you. That's the kind of heart we want to have.

That's the kind of heart we pray for. In Jesus' name, amen. Tomorrow we're going
to talk about how to give with the right attitudes.