Good morning, Veritas. How is everybody this morning? Great. Love it. Warming up, hopefully. I know I am in second service. We get to jump into 2 Corinthians 8. So if you have a Bible, would love for you to go ahead, open up to 2nd Corinthians 8. As you find your way there, I'm just going to tell you. I was reminded this week of a book that my boys have in the midst of studying for this message, reminded of a book they have called the Little Boy who Lost His Name. And I full disclosure, I don't even know if this is like a normal childhood book. It's just one that landed at our house somehow, some way. But the premise of the story is there's a little boy, he wakes up one morning and he looks at his bedroom door and his name is no longer on it. And he goes searching for the letters of his name, can't find them in his closet, he can't find them in his drawers. So he looks underneath his bed and. And underneath his bed is this rainbow trail that leads him, like, on this mysterious journey through the wilderness. And there's one page that says this as he speaks to an animal called an okapi. And if you don't know what an okapi is, you can look it up later. But he says to the okapi, can you help me? Ask the boy. I'm kind of in a jam. I've lost my name and, well, I'm really not sure who I am. He's forgotten his name and therefore has forgotten who he is. And these animals or creatures along the way help him letter by letter, right? Like the ocapi gives him an O to remember that that's part of his name. And the reason I tell that story is we can all agree in some way, shape or form that we're forgetful, aren't we? Some of us more than others. I won't tell you who you are, you know who you are. But we're forgetful, right? I mean, even last week we sang these words that we're prone to wander. Lord, I feel it prone to leave the God I love. Like, we're so forgetful. Maybe this morning you forgot your phone or your wallet on your way out the door. So you're like, oh, gotta turn around, make sure I grab that. Maybe you ran into someone this morning and you've already forgotten their name, that you met them during meet and greet last week. Hopefully you haven't forgotten your own name. Maybe you've forgotten a schedule commitment. You've Made like someone's like, hey, look forward to connecting with you this week. And you're like, right, we did make that appointment, didn't we? And beyond. But the reality is it's one thing to forget something as simple or playful as a song lyric or an artist or a movie or an actor. And it's another thing altogether to feel like you've forgotten who you are. To forget like core things that are deep to you, like man, forgetting who you are, forgetting who God is, forgetting purpose, value. Those things really matter. It's not playful anymore. And as we jump back into 2 Corinthians 8, we're going to figure out that we have some remembering to do because we're a forgetful people. And Paul is writing to believers in Corinth because they've been forgetful people too. So maybe you remember from last week or maybe you've forgotten, which is why we do this whole recap thing, that the Corinthian church had a problem of forgotten generosity. And Taylor kind of kicked off as we continue in our second Corinthians series, really a six week miniseries on giving. Everybody's excited for that, right? Not a lot of amens. Okay, we'll work on it. Forgotten generosity. Paul is writing to this church in Corinth because believers in Jerusalem were struggling big time. Famine had taken over the land. These believers were struggling to make ends meet and survive. And so what Paul has done, he's spoken to his churches and he's like, hey, I want to pull together this special collection, this relief offering so that we can take care of believers in Jerusalem. We want to help them survive. We want to take care of these people. So he's called together this special collection. We know from the context of second Corinthians that Paul is really writing to remind the Corinthian church that they've already been told about this. They've in fact already committed to giving to the special relief offering. And then last week, Paul kind of unpacks this example of the Macedonians. He's like, look at the Macedonians in their poverty. They have been eager to give. They are like asking for more and more opportunities to give. And he's calling them church in Corinth to do the same. He kind of ended last week's text like, excel in this act of grace also. And so what I want to do for us this morning as we look at Second Corinthians 8, we're going to look at verses 8 through 15 together, is really look at what Paul is calling the Corinthians to He's calling to remembrance three events. And underneath each of those events is a reality for us to remember. Remember. And I say remember because it's like, these are things we ought to know, but if you don't know them, it's a truth for us to cling onto. And so we're going to pick up in verse eight, we're going to read the entirety of the text. You guys ready for that? All right, here we go. The Word of God says this, Second Corinthians 8, beginning in verse 8. I say this not as a command, but to prove by the earnestness of others that your love also is genuine. 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. It's a good spot for an amen. So in this matter, I give my judgment. This benefits you who a year ago started not only to do this work, but also to desire to do it. So now finish doing it as well, so that your readiness in desiring it may be matched by your completing it out of what you have. For if the readiness is there, it is acceptable according to what a person has, not according to what he does not have. For I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of fairness, your abundance at the present time should supply their need so that their abundance may supply your need, that there may be fairness. As it is written, whoever gathered much had nothing left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack. So like I said, I want to look at three different events that Paul is telling the Corinthians. Like, look back at this. And underneath each of those events is a reality for us to cling to. So we're going to start with what I would argue and most commentators and theologians would agree is the center of 2 Corinthians 8, 9, which is verse 9. I'll read it again for us. 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're looking back at the cross, right? The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Paul is helping the Corinthians. Like, look back, say, don't you remember this very grace, that you received the perfect life of Jesus, that you couldn't live his substitutionary death on the cross in your place and his victorious resurrection? And he uses this rich and poor language. He's using it in Christ to talk about the reality of the Incarnation, that God would put on flesh, right? We think about that every Christmas, that God would put on flesh, that he would dwell among us. Immanuel. That he would be born as a baby in a manger to a virgin teenager who is poor and helpless, right? But he would not just be born as a baby in a manger. That he would live a life marked by suffering. And as Philippians 2 tells us, that he wouldn't just suffer, but he would suffer to the point of death, even death on a cross. And that he wouldn't stay dead. Amen. But that he would rise victorious, that he is now seated at the right hand of the Father. He's gonna come back. And one day every knee will bow, every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, Lord, Paul is helping the Corinthians. He's helping us. Look at the good news of the Gospel. And his point is really to say, hey, if you have been saved by this grace, if you really understand the gospel, here's the reality. You should know giving is rooted in the Gospel. Giving is rooted in the Gospel. Another way you could say that is generosity is to be a mark of a Christian. When you think about, like, man, what are things we should expect out of Christian people? Oftentimes it's like, oh, they should be loving and patient and forgiving. And I would say generous generosity should overflow out of us. That's the point Paul is trying to make. But what gets confusing is when we start to talk rich and poor language when it comes to us. How many of you guys have heard of the prosperity gospel before? Okay? This idea that, hey, if your life is hard, if you're suffering, here's what you need to do. You need to give your life to Jesus. And what will come of it is health and wealth and prosperity. How's that working for you guys, by the way? Yeah. Read your New Testament, and I would argue that's actually not biblically supported. Right. Jesus himself was a man who said, hey, I have no place to lay my head. His call to his disciples was to pick up your cross and follow me. It's an instrument of death. And as you just even read through the book of the Acts of the Apostles, what you understand is that as most people follow Jesus, they're actually not called into extreme wealth and prosperity, but much suffering. So what does he mean when he's like, you who were poor might become rich? Well, it's a perspective issue, right? He. He sees things differently. And I told it was maybe more pointed in the first service. Because Drew Wiley was in here. How many of you guys know Drew? Okay? He played football at K State. Big dude, right? On Friday, my son Leo, who's 4 years old, said to me, hey, dad, when you're 15, will you be able to touch the ceiling? I said, number one, I'm already older than 15. And number two, no, I will never be able to touch the ceiling. And he said, it's okay, dad. You're still really tall. And I'm like, that is something Drew Wiley will never say to me, ever. Right? Cause Drew is much bigger than Leo. He understands. He sees differently. And I would argue when we start talking rich and poor, God sees differently than we do. He sees beyond just this, like, horizontal material world. He begins to see spiritually, right? That he would look at riches and wealth, and he'd say there's something more going on than just a money issue. One way we know this is we look at the book of Revelation, Revelation 2 and 3. Jesus addresses two different churches. The first in Revelation 2 that I'd like to highlight is his letter to the church in Smyrna. And what he tells the church in Smyrna is, hey, I see you. You have much tribulation and poverty, but yet I say you are rich. And then you flip like one page of your Bible, you're in Revelation 3. And he writes to the church in Laodicea, and he says, hey, you say that you're rich, but here's what I tell you, you're poor. And he goes on to say a lot more than that, actually. He says, you're wretched, pitiable poor, blind and naked. AKA not good. Right? But what he's trying to help Smyrna and Laodicea understand is there's something going on beyond your, like, net worth, right? Laodicea, though they had all the money in the world. He was like, you're self sufficient. You're poor. When it comes to what it looks like to lean on and experience and encounter God. Oh, but you, Smyrna, though, you might not have all the money that you want, you know what you've learned? Dependence on God. You've encountered God in real ways. You are rich in a way that really matters. And so what we know in the Gospel from Ephesians one is that we have been blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing. We have everything we need in Jesus. We have true riches in Jesus. So we don't have to be a church that is marked by all of this physical, material wealth. Oftentimes, money is an idol. How Many of you guys are familiar with idol worship, have heard of idol worship before. Okay. We tend to reduce that down into, like, I don't have a totem pole in my closet. I worship and it's like, good for you. I hope you don't. But idol worship is oftentimes just taking a good thing and making it a God thing. Taking something created and treating it as, in essence, creator. And money has done this for us. If we're honest with ourselves. Money has taken the place of God in so many ways. I want to just highlight a few. And if it resonates with you, you can act like I gave you, like a good grace punch to the stomach. Okay? It's good for us. Here are just a few ways that we look to money instead of God. The first is for our security. We have listened to the lie that money in our bank account is the security we need. Rather than looking at Psalm 18:2, the words of David where he says, the Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer, right? Like God in his riches has given us true security in Christ, so we don't have to settle for the lie that our security is in money. Secondly, status, right? We look to money as our form of worth or value. Maybe a form of like, keeping up with the Joneses, right? What will people think of us if they find out? Xyz, right? Or man, we're going to have people over the summer. We need to finish this house project so that we look put together to look to money for your worth instead of looking to the words of Peter in First Peter 1, where he tells you, hey, if you are in Christ, here's what's true. You were not bought with something like silver or gold. You were bought with the precious blood of Christ. First Peter 1:19. That is where your worth is found. That's where true riches are found. When it comes to your status, how about pleasure? Maybe you guys have heard this quote. I say it kind of tongue in cheek, but it's also funny. Money can't buy happiness. You guys heard that one. But I've never seen someone cry on a jet Ski. I don't know. That's one that I've heard said before where it's like, money can't buy happiness. And there's, you know, something about it where it's like, maybe it can for a moment, right? Till the jet ski stops working or your kid falls off of it. Then you're not, you know, having a ton of fun anymore. It's like, can the new iPhone provide happiness Maybe for a moment, just like my Game Boy color when they first came out, and then they came out with a Game Boy advance. And I was instantly discontent, right? Money can't buy true and lasting happiness. You know where that's found? In God. Only in God. Psalm 16, verse 11. In his presence is fullness of joy, and at his right hand are pleasures forevermore. It's a type of pleasure that is unending. It never grows old, it doesn't get tired. And lastly, we look to money for freedom, most often in the form of retirement. And I'm not saying retirement is inherently bad. I just, personally, I struggle to find it in the Bible. That's one thing. But there's ways that we can leverage our retirement, right? Oftentimes we look at retirement as, hey, this is my freedom from a 9 to 5. I don't have to answer to anybody anymore. I can do my own thing. So I'm going to store up my money as long as I can so I can retire as early as I can and I can have freedom. And it's like, freedom from what? Right? Because here's the freedom that God has come to offer you. Romans 8:2. The law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. That's real freedom. You don't just need set free from an employer, you need set free from sin and death. Oh, and by the way, Jesus has already done that for you if you're in Christ, right? Like I. Are we running to God for a sense of true richness? Like our wealth is found in the spiritual realities that God has come to offer us in Christ. My fear is that if we're honest, we resonate more with Laodicea than we do with Smyrna, where it's like we're marked by like this materialism. Like, if we're often honest with ourselves, like, we don't struggle with, you know, this abundance of encountering God. We actually struggle with having an abundance of money, an abundance of possessions. And we're offered to exchange that to be like, hey, what if you actually understood how rich you are in Christ, right? This is what we have in the Gospel, that God who was rich, became poor. So that for your sake, you who were poor, dead in your trespasses and sins, might become rich in Him. Giving is rooted in the Gospel. And when you remember who you are and what you have in Christ, money becomes not a God to bow down to, but a gift to steward. Which kind of leads into this second point, a second event for us to look at. And I want to direct your attention to verses 12 through 15, where what Paul is doing to the believers in Corinth is. He's looking back at the Exodus, or the wilderness, right? What God has done for Israel, he has set them free from slavery in Egypt. He's led them through the Red Sea miraculously. And now where Israel's at, they're in the wilderness. And by the time you get to Exodus 16, what are they doing? They're complaining. That sounds familiar. They're complaining, and they're like, man, if we could only go back to Egypt, at least we had food there. We had meat and bread. That would be nice. And God's like, okay, say less. I'll give you food. And he rains down manna from heaven. How many of you guys have heard of manna? Okay, if you were to go back and look at Exodus 16 kind of earlier in the passage, I'm going to pull it up for us. But earlier in the passage, the people look at the manna on the ground, and they say, what is it? In Hebrew, it's man, who. Which is where they get the word manna. And one commentator said, can you imagine eating something called, what is it? For 40 years? I thought that was pretty funny. I'm like, we don't have it that bad. But for the next 40 years, your only meal was, what is it? You might get tired of it. But here's what the word of God says in Exodus 16. This is what the Lord has commanded. He's talking about the manna. Gather of it, each one of you as much as he can eat. You shall each take an omer, which is a form of measurement according to the number of persons that each of you has in his tent. And the people of Israel did so. They gathered some more, some less. But when they measured it with an omer, whoever gathered much had nothing left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack. That's the reference in our text. This morning, each of them gathered as much as he could eat. And Moses said to them, let no one leave any of it over till the morning. But they did not listen to Moses. Some left part of it till the morning, and it bred worms and stank. And Moses was angry with them. Morning by morning, they gathered to each as much as he could eat. But when the sun grew hot, it melted. Here's. Here's the second reality that we need to see from the Book of Exodus is that giving protects us from wasting blessing. Giving protects us from wasting blessing. What Israel had A problem with was hoarding. They were hoarding the manna. Now we have to understand there's a difference between saving and hoarding. Okay, saving, if I'm gonna explain to you, saving is intentional investing driven by wisdom and purpose, and it has a target. That target oftentimes has somebody else or something else in mind. I think of like, man, is it wrong to have an emergency fund? No. Right. Like, man, there's probably some wisdom to say, do we have any money in savings in case our furnace goes out? When it's negative 15 this week, it's probably wise. Is it necessarily wrong to say, man, I want to save for my family's future? No, I wouldn't say it is. Proverbs 13:22 actually encourages us to leave an inheritance to our children's children. So there's wisdom principles to apply when it comes to saving. But the difference between saving and hoarding is that hoarding is excessive accumulation driven by anxiety or fear. And that was the problem with Israel. Right as they were gathering up bread, though, they were told, hey, it's coming each day you're going to have what you need. There's a sense of like, hey, depend on me. Trust in the Lord. He's going to provide. He's going to take care of your needs. Something. And some of the Israelites said, but what if it doesn't happen? We got to keep a little bit just in case. The what if made them driven not by wisdom and intentionality and purpose and selflessness, but driven by fear and anxiety. It was self focused and self protecting and doubted God. And when it comes to our excess, I would argue that I think most of us actually don't have a saving problem. We have a hoarding problem. We've taken this excess and we haven't said, man, how can I be intentional to be pass this on to the next generation? How can I be intentional to bless other people? We've taken any excess and said, I wonder what I can do with it. Excess instantly becomes something that we can use for ourselves, if nothing else, for something to provide a false sense of security. And when you think about hoarding, it's oftentimes driven from a poverty mindset. This like fear of man. I don't know if the next paycheck is going to come. I don't know if the next meal is going to come. Like, that's where like this excessive accumulation driven by fear, anxiety comes. It's this background or this undercurrent of what if, what if God doesn't provide? But if you would just undercut that with what we just talked about in being rich in the Gospel. You're set free from this need of I have to hold hoard, right? It's no longer, what if God doesn't provide for me? No, we know he's going to provide for us. Look no further than the cross of Jesus Christ. He's already provided everything we need in him. But I think one of our other issues when it comes to excess and hoarding is two words that need, defined from verse 14, which are abundance and need. How many of you guys struggle with the word need? Okay, you all do. I'm just going to be honest with you. If I were to preach for another hour, which I might. No, you would probably say, man, I need lunch. I'd say, really? How long has it been since you ate? Like six hours, maybe, right? There are people on the other side of the world that haven't eaten for days, let alone weeks. Like, need. Hmm. Want to eat? Are you hungry? Probably, but I'm going to keep preaching, right? We abuse need. And I think sometimes it's easy when, like, oftentimes we poke fun at the kids, right? Where kids say, but I need that. I think of, like, toys, Like, I need that toy. It's like, no, you don't. But where did our kids learn it from? They learned it from us, right? They learned it from the adults who are using need improperly. What's sweet is we have maybe a better definition of need from First Timothy 6, because Paul writes to his young protege Timothy in ministry, and he says, hey, godliness with contentment is great gain. And then he goes on to say, hey, this is what it looks like. If we have food and clothing with these, we will be content, Right? His bar of need is food and clothing. Is that our bar or have we raised the bar? I think we've raised the bar if we're honest with ourselves to say, man, my need is also, you know, a heated garage would be nice, wouldn't mind it. Or I need a freezer in my garage so that I can store more deer meat also. Would it be nice? Sure. Right? Want or need? And when you think about US, America 2025, one of the hardest parts of kind of crossing the contextual bridge from the church in Jerusalem and the church in Corinth and the church in America today is most of us don't have a need problem. We have an abundance problem, right? Like, man, we start using the word need in terms of like, I need name brand clothing or name brand toilet paper. Anybody can say amen to that. Okay. Or I need a streaming service so I can watch this game. Or I need to eat this restaurant this week to satisfy a craving. Like, we are so marked by luxury that we have just missed that our excess actually is not meant for us. And if we're so confused on that, what we're doing is we're missing the opportunity to bless other people. Maybe you guys have heard this before, but there's this framework within the church that says, here's how you should structure your budget. Give first, save second, live off of what you have left. You guys heard that before. Give, save, live. We've flipped that. And what we've done is we've lived luxuriously, we've saved a little bit. And if we're giving anything, we're giving leftovers. And we're missing the opportunity that we have to be the hands and feet of Christ and truly bless. Bless other people to show that, like, hey, money is not our God. Money is now a tool. It's a gift for us to steward so that you can be blessed. And when you remember this great reality, we're invited into the beautiful gift of caring for others and experience the blessing of giving. That's where Taylor talked about, like, man, it's more blessed to give than to receive. So what would it look like if our excess, we didn't first and foremost say, what does this mean for me? But who could this go to? Who could I bless? With this? We'd begin to see our last reality, which I'll give you the reality first, and then I'll tell you what we're looking back at the reality that giving is for our good, Giving is for our good. What Paul is doing, this third event that he's looking back at with the church in Corinth is he's looking back at their previous commitment they've previously committed. Hey, we're going to step up. We're going to help meet the needs of Jerusalem. And then they've forgotten about it, right? Maybe it's in the midst of all this quarreling with Paul. And is he our leader? Is he not our leader? They forgot to give the way they were supposed to. But now Paul comes to them and he says, hey, no, don't forget the commitment you made. And in verse 10, he says this. In this matter, I give my judgment. This benefits you, who a year ago started not only to do this work, but also to desire to do it. It's like, wait, this giving is not just of benefit to the believers in Jerusalem. It's of benefit to the believers in Corinth. How. How is it a blessing to them? Now, I'm going to give an analogy. I'll unpack it for you a little bit. But as a kid, I would go to Target with my mom quite a bit. Any Target moms out there? Come on, It's a great store. Sign me up. I'd love to still go to Target more. It's just far away. I went to Target quite a bit with my mom, and near the checkout lines, there was this mirror that I'm sure I did a lot of really silly and perhaps at times inappropriate things to the mirror because I was a kid and a little boy, and I thought it was hilarious. And then my mom, I think, was both embarrassed and wanted to embarrass me, said, you know, that's not just a mirror, right? I was like, what? And she's like, it's a window. People are behind that. They can see everything you're doing. And I'm like, no, it's not. And then I go. And what I did is I pushed my face up against this mirror, and sure enough, there were people in there. It was the Loss prevention office, right? Where they actually have employees hired to make sure people aren't stealing things from the checkout. They have monitors to be able to track the store. And so it was both a mirror and a window. And I think what Paul is trying to help the believers in Corinth understand is your giving is both a mirror and a window. It's both a mirror and a window. There's both some reflecting happening, and there's a greater opportunity for you to maybe press your face up against the mirror and take a deeper look into your own heart and figure out what's going on. And so giving is of benefit to believers in Corinth because, number one, they're granted the opportunity to bless other people to show, as our text says, to prove the earnestness of others, that they get to show that they genuinely love other people and that other people can actually receive benefit from their giving. That's a benefit, right? But one of the greater benefits is not just to have this horizontal feedback of like, wow, I got to see God really bless somebody else by my act of loving them. You get to press your face up against the mirror and take a harder look into your own heart and say, is giving an opportunity to grow in my Godliness? Because the same thing with rich and poor. It's like, man, every opportunity to give is an opportunity to grow in your Godliness. For you to actually be able to ask God, like, is money my God? Do I trust you? Are you my greatest prize? Or what am I clinging to so tightly? Giving is an opportunity to grow in gospel devotion and gospel reflection. We get to give and we get to grow in our love for God and others. So we looked at Matthew 6:21 just briefly last week. I'm going to just read it out loud to you and then I'm going to give you a quiz. Can you guys handle one quiz today? All right, one quiz. Matthew 6:21, Jesus says this in the Sermon on the Mount, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. And here's the quiz question. Is Jesus saying what you love, you'll spend your money on, or is Jesus saying what you spend your money on, you'll love? Yes. The answer is yes. What's beautiful about Jesus words in Matthew 6:21 is it's this like strange like cycle where it's like, you want to know what you love, look what you spend your money on. But also, if you want to grow in loving something, put your money there, right? Put your money there and see what God starts to do in your heart. And I would just argue like, man, if we say I love, I'll take a simple, I'm not going to pick on coffee drinkers all the time. Give me grace, I love Starbucks or I love jams. And you were to say, man, what if I took that money and said instead of saying I love that I gave my money to a different cause or family or person or church, Fill in the blank. But like, I helped meet another need. And you did that over time. What you may come to find out is that you start loving the thing where you put your money more, right? You start loving the family that you started to take this money and funnel it towards. You love this church more as you give more to it. You love God more as you set money aside and say, man, I want to invest in heaven. You look at like missionaries and say, man, I'd love to. Man, I don't have a heart for the gospel going to the ends of the earth, but I want to, okay, start giving to support a long term missionary. And what you may find out, maybe weeks, months or years from now is you will look back and you'll be like, wow, I really love that. Now. It's like, yes, because where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. And every opportunity we have to give is a unique opportunity to steer and direct our worship. And it should make us welcome Giving, like, welcome every opportunity we have to give that we should be like, this is great because this is for my good. So I want to get practical here and say, okay, how do we apply these realities to our lives so that we can be a church that is marked by generosity? The first is we have to remember what it means to be really rich in Jesus, right? Like, maybe we need help remembering what it really means to be rich so that we would stop settling for this false form of earthly treasure. To, like, rehearse truths of the gospel. Like, where your security is really found, where pleasure is really found, that your inheritance is not just a 401k, but is heaven with God forever. And it's secured not by the market, it's secured by the spirit of God who has sealed you for the day of redemption, right? Like, maybe we need help just rehearsing what it means to be rich in the gospel. Secondly, we need to remember that our excess is meant to bless and stop hoarding. If we're rich in Christ, we don't have to live with a poverty mindset that says, what if God doesn't take care of me? What if he doesn't provide? I need this extra little bit over here because I'm a no. We can be set free from that fear and we can say, man, if the Lord has given me extra, whether that's a pay raise or a refund or fill in the blank. Like, Ellie and I got a random check in the mail this week, and I was like, this is hilarious. Great opportunity for us to practice what we're preaching, right? But like a medical bill that somehow we got reimbursement from. And it's like, man, it'd be so easy to take that and be like, hey, now we can finish a house project. And by the grace of God, he gave me this text the same week that I'm receiving this check so that I'd be like, wait a second. What if that money isn't first and foremost for us? And I don't say that to brag. I actually say that to confess. That wouldn't be normal for me. But by the grace of God, he gave me this text to be like, man, I think it'd be really easy to keep excess, build it in, make it all about us. Rather than be like, man, what if God gave me this refund so that I could be a blessing to someone else? What's a real need that I could help meet? Lastly, that we would remember that giving is for our good. And I have a background in personal Training, you probably can tell, but no, I'm kidding. I'm a string bean. I get it. But within personal training and exercise, there is this reality that when a client comes to you day one, and you put them through a workout, they're not initially saying, like, that felt great. They're typically like, that was miserable, right? But I signed up for this many sessions for this long of duration, and it's like, man, the first month is hard. It's like soreness, and you're working muscles you maybe haven't used for years. But by the time you're, like, halfway through the program or maybe three fourths through the program, you're like, oh, my goodness, this feels good. I'm seeing real change. I'm starting to actually feel better. Or I like the way that I look in the mirror. Like, fill in the blank. You're starting to reap the benefits. But it's through time and time again of exercise or discipline or flexing a muscle that you need flexed. And I would just invite all of us in to say, hey, giving is for our good. It might not feel good. Day one. That doesn't mean it's not good for you. It just means it's a muscle you need to flex and you need to keep flexing and keep flexing so that one day soon enough, you will wake up and you will be a person and we will be a church that says, man, generosity is fun. It is a gift to get to give. Like, money no longer has me. I have money. It is a great privilege to get to bless other people. Oh, I no longer feel like I have to be driven by fear or anxiety. I can be set free by the good news of the gospel. And I'm reminded of a dear friend of mine in Cedar Rapids who I got connected with while I was fundraising on staff for Salt Company. And I'm weird in the fact that I loved fundraising, but I reached out to this friend of mine, and there's always that awkward first interaction where it's like, I'm about to ask you for your money to support me in ministry. And how's this going to go? Because you're my friend. And I got maybe five sentences into my fundraising sales pitch. And he said, thank you so much for thinking of me. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to join in on what God is doing on college campuses in Cedar Rapids. And I was like, this feels backwards, right? Like, I feel like I'm supposed to be saying thank you to you, but he was the one saying thank you to me. And it was because he understood the reality of this text. And time and time again, as college students were fundraising money to go overseas for mission work over the summer, they would hit a dead end in their fundraising goal. And I'd be like, I've got a guy for you, right? And I'd send them to my friend. And what I wouldn't hear back from him is, why do you keep giving my phone number out? Like, leave me alone. No. He would text me or call me and he'd say, thank you so much for giving me another opportunity to join in on what God's doing. I'm like, man, wouldn't that be great if that was the heart posture of every person in this room, you would love it. We would love it. We would be the church that God designed us to be, right? A city on a hill, a light that would not be hidden in a dark world that is engulfed in consumerism. That we would be set free and that people would look at us and be like, if money isn't their God, who is? And that we'd be able to answer Jesus Christ, right? Who was rich yet became poor for our sake, so that we who were poor might become rich in him and that we'd give him all the glory for. Amen. Let's pray to that end together. God, we thank you for 2 Corinthians 8, verses 8 through 15. God, what a beautiful text. What a challenging text. If we're honest to look at this mark of generosity as something that is to be anticipated of us, and yet if we're honest, God, as we take a hard look at our lives, we're not as generous as we want to be. But I pray that we would not, first and foremost try and pull up our bootstraps and work harder or try and just muscle our way through, but that we would first and foremost stop and look back at the cross of Christ. That we would remember and rehearse the truth of the gospel. That we would remember and rehearse what it means to truly be rich in Jesus. And that we would be set free from this hoarding mindset, that taking that excess and just serving ourselves, but that we would consider others more significant. That we would be quick to give away that money would not be a God to bow down to, but a gift to steward. But we need your help. So, Spirit, help us see money differently and to see giving as an opportunity to grow in our godliness and ultimately give you the glory you deserve. We pray this in Jesus name, Amen.