CHRISTIAN GIVING | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 1, 1897

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 23, No. 13.

CHRISTIAN GIVING.

Text: “God loveth a cheerful giver.” 2 Cor. 9:7.

I AM going to speak to you this morning on the subject of giving. I want you to see this subject wholly on its spiritual side. I am satisfied that unless you do, you will not become a truly bountiful, gracious giver. I know well that some men have the power when gifts are called for of setting out the needs of the occasion in such telling light that the emotions are excited, and the tears begin to flow, and the dollars flow in exact proportion to the tears. I do not decry the power of such men. It is well for us if we can not be worked by the highest motives to be worked by lower motives. This is sometimes the only way of reaching the highest. “First . . . that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual.” But I have observed this, that after giving under emotional excitement induced by some thrilling or harrowing tale, there always comes a reaction, a sense of flatness, sometimes even of chagrin, that the judgment should thus be taken unawares. The gift promised in tears is often paid in cold and hard self-accusation. “I was a fool to be so carried away.” True giving is always followed by exhilaration of soul. It is more blessed to give than to receive.

So I do not envy men the power of extracting dollars. It is not in me to so deal with you, my people. I believe there is a more excellent way.

The pastor ought not to feel that each contribution depends upon the fervor or picturesqueness of his appeal just before the collection. This is a pumping process. The amount gained is in exact proportion to the vigor of the man at the handle. The gift of the church is thus no loving offering to God, but indirectly a reward to the pastor for his skill and ingenuity in playing upon the emotions. The heavenly Father takes no pleasure in such gifts. He loves principled, cheerful giving, spiritual giving. Listen to the rest of the verse from which our lesson is taken, “Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give.” Here is principled giving. But the apostle seemed to fear that this principled giving might be cold and hard, the result of some slavish principle, so he adds, “Not grudgingly, or of necessity; for God loveth a cheerful giver.” He will have both, the deep, steadfast principle and the grace and bloom of the gift. A gift, my friends, is a most delicate, ethereal thing. You know that electricity may be diffused in the air as ozone and bathe your whole body in a most grateful and enkindling inspiration; or it may be focused in the deadly bolt of lightning. Have you never received a gift which felled your spirit to the earth? Your sensibilities were scorched and withered. You say within yourself, I know now how a tree feels when it is struck by lightning.

The impression which I wish to leave upon your minds this morning is this: our heavenly Father expects the same delicacy and refinement in our gifts to him as we expect in gifts from our friends.

Consider what a wonderful thing it is that it is possible for us to make him gifts at all. This wonder grows upon me more as my experience deepens; the subtle refinement, the delicacy, the spiritual beauty of the relations in which God holds us to himself. He might have assumed the character of master, calling us servants; all that we could render him then would be the regular tale of daily duties. All that we could expect in return would be our daily wages. He might have assumed the character of king, calling us subjects. Our relations to him then would have been purely political. A certain patriotism toward the government; due respect to the reigning king; a strict payment of taxes; obedience to the laws of the realm—all these relations are outward, coarse, tangible. They can all be numbered and written down in a book. But he has not called us servants, but friends. He has not called himself master or king, but father, brother, lover, companion, friend.

He has caught together all the sweetest, holiest names on earth, father, mother, husband, wife, sister, brother, and woven them into a crown; so that whenever we turn toward God, there we behold supreme human affection in all its pureness, its depths, its manifoldness, its unsearchableness. Will you tabulate and write down in a book the love of a household? Will you tell me what are the wages of a mother’s heart? Will you compute the taxes due a father’s devotion? By what legal skill will you codify the loving thoughts of a brother’s or a sister’s heart? You see, friends, the heavenly Father has stooped down to the earth and caught us up out of the realm of labor and wages, state sovereignty, and taxes, statutes, and obedience. We are no more under law but under grace. I love to carry that word “grace” back to its root meaning, beauty. We are caught up into the realm of God’s beauty.

If I enter the woods as a lumberman or real-estate agent, I deal with the woods on a few simple and definite principles. I compute the acreage or stumpage. I make note of the various kinds of wood. I take in at a glance the size and character of the trees. But if I enter the woods in a spirit of grace and beauty, I am enfolded and penetrated by ten thousand influences that are no more to be numbered and valued than are the gusts of fragrance from hidden banks of flowers, or the mysterious whisperings of ten million leaves. I am in a temple. And the sense of worship, adoration, and blessing that wells up within me can not be uttered in prayer, ritual, or hymn. Silence and the unspeakable joy of tears is the only offering possible.

So when I say that our God has caught us up into the realm of grace and beauty, you will understand that henceforth forever he seeks in us the delicacy and refinement which are the bloom of the Spirit. He hopes to receive from us those unnumbered and unnamed offerings of loving thought and feeling which exhale toward him as the fragrance and beauty of the flower breathe themselves out to the sun. Why think holy names which have been chosen to body forth our relations to the heavenly Father,—prayer, communion, faith, hope, love, confidence, rest, peace?

To abide in these relations is to enter into the eternal blessings of the divine life. It is to be one with God. Now let no one fail of the argument here. These high and holy relations exist between us and the heavenly Father; you may be sure he will always be loyal to these relations. He will not call us children and then straightway treat us as servants. On the other hand, he will not suffer us to call him Father, and then straightway treat him as tho he were a master or a king. No, no, no.

Spiritual relations are eternal and unalterable. They are written in the nature of God and in the nature of the soul. They are the spiritual order and constitution of the universe. We need not look for any suspension or inversion here, any more than in the laws of nature. The one law reigns here, as everywhere, loyalty

to God’s order is health, joy, peace, and beauty to us; disloyalty is pain and breakage and loss and deformity to us. So then when we come to the matter of gifts to God, we may be sure that he will abide by the spiritual law of giving. If your offering bears the bloom of the Spirit upon it, cheerfulness and love, it is accepted joyfully by the Father. If it comes “grudgingly or of necessity,” your offering has fallen from grace. It is no more a gift, but a tax, or a debt. It is rejected, because God is your Father, and not a tax-gatherer or a master. Should he accept such an offering, he himself would fall from grace, and we would fall with him from sonship to slavery.

Take this matter home to ourselves. What do we say of a man who is willing to receive a gift when the giver says: “I have no pleasure in this gift. I consider myself as simply paying a debt, or meeting a necessity.” We say indignantly among ourselves, “How can a man be so base as to accept such a gift?” Why do we not fling the gift back, saying, “Thy gift perish with thee”? And what a detestable spirit is the giver in! He must say within himself, “I want to buy this man’s favor;” or, “I must get even with him;” or, “I must hold him for future use.” Do you not see, friends, that if you carry this transaction up to God, it becomes positively blasphemous? We must remember that when we approach God with our offerings, he reads our thoughts; what we think in his presence, is equivalent to what we say to our fellow-men. For you then to offer to him a forced or grudging gift, and for him to accept it, would be a transaction in heavenly things, and by God himself as the principal person, quite as vulgar and detestable as in our sham giving on earth. Here then we come to the divine standard for weighing or testing our gifts.

In the English banks there is an ingenious contrivance for testing gold coin. Every night the sovereigns are poured into a long tube, from which they descend one by one upon a plate, or very delicate scale, which tells to a feather the weight of a true sovereign. If a coin falls short, it is slid off into a compartment by itself. The coins that can stand the test are likewise slid off on the other side. It is a certain day-of-judgment contrivance, you see. So this heavenly standard deals with our gifts. Our dollars are not counted, but weighed. This spiritual scale is exceedingly sensitive. If only the bloom is worn off, the scale detects it. “God loveth a cheerful giver.” He loves not the gift, but the spirit of the giver. It is the good cheer that is weighed. If there is lack there, the gift by itself is only a sordid lump. The heavenly scale casts it off as mere dross and refuse. By holding us to this spiritual test, God makes our giving a constant means of grace. We must be in a gracious mood to truly give. If we were not held to this high and holy standard, we would make our giving precisely the same as men file in to pay their taxes. I certainly have never been able to discover any very delicate or spiritual graces in that process.

You will observe this likewise. By holding steadfastly to the spirit of giving, our gifts are generous in fact, are just as large as we can possibly make them. There is no such thing as separating between the gift and the spirit of the giver. A man can not deceive himself, saying, “I will give little and make up for the meanness of the gift in pious feeling.” There are such givers among men. They bring you some mean, paltry little thing, then palaver over you with such butter and honey of fine words that you are almost persuaded that some very generous thing has been done. But we can not so deal with God. We can not slip a crisp one dollar bill into the foreign or home mission plate, then roll our eyes to heaven, saying, “Also the poor heathen, the dear heathen, Lord, help them.” O, no, friends! I rejoice that when you and I get in here, in this house, our Father’s house, before this altar, we are compelled to leave outside all the masks and devices of market and society. We are penetrated here by the keen and piercing questions: Do you really love your God and Father? Do you in your inmost soul desire to be at one with him, loving what he loves? Do you entertain his purposes? Do you count it your honor and joy to be reckoned a colaborer with him in the redemption of the world? If you find in your heart an honest amen to such questions, then the whole problem of giving is solved. You have first given yourself. All the other gifts are the instructive and joyful utterances of these profound principles and affections.

I need only suggest that what we have said is but an echo of our Saviour’s teaching. Remember the widow and her two mites. Here the Saviour discloses very clearly the day-of-judgment principle by which our gifts are to be tried. He expressly institutes a comparison between large gifts and small gifts. The rich cast in large sums, the widow her two little brass mites, worth about two-thirds of a cent. Here are the large gifts and small gifts in sharp contrast. But Jesus reverses all human standards and calls the small great, the great small. It must be that he presses in back of all outward values and numbers, and places these gifts upon some spiritual scale which is so delicate as to detect the thoughts and feelings of the giver. By that test he announces his decision: “This poor widow hath cast in more than they all; . . . but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had.” Ah, yes, there must have been in her heart that deep and loving desire to utter herself to God, her Father! Hers was that pure, spontaneous, fountain-like springing of the heart toward God, which after all is the only lovely and valuable thing in this universe. Can you remember the words of Jesus, “When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth; that thine alms may be in secret”? Let it be in secret and prayerfully unto God, thus making all giving not a transaction between man and man, not between us and a board or corporation, but always a delicate transaction with our heavenly Father. He will always and everywhere insist upon the spiritual qualifications of the gift. If your offering has not the bloom and delicacy of the Spirit, cheerfulness, love, beautifulness, it is not a gift at all. You may call it gold or silver or a check. It is really nothing but a lump of clay, devoid of all beauty and value. It can only symbolize the heavy, lumpish, earthy state of your soul. As I have before said, it is deliverance from just this state which our heavenly Father seeks. Accordingly, he has caught us up to himself in all high and holy and graceful relations. He makes us co-laborers with himself. He puts into our hands his own work. He invites us to join him in self-denials (remember he has given his only-begotten Son) and in labors. And in all this high and blessed life, he insists upon true spiritual oneness with himself. He insists that we are in a kingdom of heaven. The motives which carry us, the hopes and purposes which lead us, the inspirations which lift us and enlarge us, must be precisely the same as reign within his own Spirit and constitute the crown of his eternal beauty and goodness.

CHRISTIAN GIVING.*

CHRISTIAN GIVING.