Allen Jackson - Live Generously - Part 1
This is the second part in a series of talks I have done. We started in the previous session last night, I wanna continue. The title for this one is "Live Generously". I'm gonna talk about money, but we've already had the offering so you're okay, I'm not gonna ask you for anything. I mean, I'm not above that, but I'm not doing it today, okay, so you're good. Part of what has caused this, we just finished the second of our political conventions for this election cycle, hallelujah. We can go back to reruns now, that's an improvement. You know, it was a little uncomfortable for me this week that we have a major American political party that thinks they can drive an abortion bus all the way to the White House.
That's not about the party, folks, that's a political calculation. They look at the polls and the evaluations of the hearts of the American people and they think the best way to secure power is by promising us that you could abort a child all the way to the point of birth. If that's an accurate reflection of our hearts, we are in a desperate, desperate place. That's the truth. You know, politics at the end of the day is about power. That's the point. In a secondary way, it's about money but it really is driven by that desire to accumulate and have the power. In our nation, not every political system is the same, in our nation our political leaders are a reflection of our hearts. It's the form of government we have. We will have different leadership choices when we have a heart change.
So if you don't like the choices, rather than be mad at the parties and the professional politicians, I would submit to you the beginning point is to recognize our hearts have strayed a long way from what God has asked us to be, and because of that the people think they can accumulate power by reflecting the majority of the population. We need a heart change. The other thing that's been so clear to me through this election cycle, and partially because of some of the people I've been talking to lately, is that financially we are in a very, very desperate place. If you'll allow me, just good old middle Tennessee English, we're in a mess, and I don't mean like a small mess or an awkward mess, I don't mean you overshot your budget or you're overdrawn at the bank a buck and a half, we are $35 trillion in debt.
I won't take the time to try to explain what a trillion is, it's a bunch, it's a heap, it's a whole mess, and we are $35 trillion in debt. And truthfully, the people who are really smart and live in that world tell me that's a fraction of the true debt we have. Did you know that 75% of our personal income tax, 75% of that income tax goes to pay the interest on our debt? Not reduce the principal, just to pay the interest. See, the government doesn't have money, they just have our money and we are in a mess. The possible scenarios are unsettling. I listen to these people talk about it, I ask them questions, and they say, well, one logical option would be hyper inflation. Not the kind of inflation we've known, where, you know, it goes up 8% or 9% a year.
You know, they tell us inflation has slowed these days, we should be happy because inflation has slowed. Well, prices haven't been reduced to where they were before it went nuts. You're still buying potato chips individually, and with my habit, that's a desperate place. But hyper inflation is when it goes up exponentially, triple digits. It means the resources you have become almost worthless. It's happened repeatedly through history, occasionally in our own national history. I've seen pictures of different places, different countries and cultures in those times of hyper inflation, photographs of people with wheelbarrows filled with the local currency trying to trade it for a loaf of bread or some essential need in their lives. That would be one way to deal with this debt.
Another way would be default, simply to say we can't pay, we won't pay. That would change our status in the world. That would change the future for our children and our grandchildren. I interviewed one economic guru this week and he was talking about a soft default. Fancy language, but the only thing that sounded soft to it was if you weren't the one involved in it. Another historical solution is war on a massive scale where the scales get recalibrated and debts are eliminated in the hatred and the murder of war.
Another option that's a bit newer and doesn't have as much of a historical precedent is the removal of currency and your financial assets become digital and the government becomes the arbiter of all of those things. The only thing that might induce you to accept such a bargain is there's enough debt that they offer to eliminate. I don't know what the future holds, I can tell you we are in a desperate financial place and I'm not a gloom and doom person, I'm not chicken little, I'm an optimist. I think there's more reasons for hope than despair. You've probably heard me say that. I believe it, but I believe it will become because of the faith of God's people not because of the integrity of those who have authority over us. Because there's a broad enough sample set now to know that they're not leading with integrity or we wouldn't be $35 trillion in debt.
And I know we don't like to talk about it and it's church and why are you talking about that? Can't we talk about the Gospel of Luke? I will in a moment, but if your faith does not impact the world in which you live, you have a theoretical faith and it's not useful. Our faith has to be understood in the context of the culture in which we live. It's not about parties or politicians, it's about the impact of the people of God in our world. We are living through a season of unprecedented deception and we need some basic biblical ideas regarding money and resources and assets and the handling of them. We generally avoid the conversation when we're at church because we're concerned that someone wants our money. I get it, it's not my favorite topic either to be real candid with you.
As a young man in ministry, I was exposed to some pretty inappropriate behaviors, not in this place, around people of faith. And I was so traumatized by it, for a decade I just wouldn't talk about it. I wouldn't talk to the church about giving and the Lord convicted me. My assignment as a shepherd is to tell the truth that I practice, and that had been a part of my practice since I was a boy. And when I realized I was gonna be held accountable if I didn't tell the truth, I decided I would tell the truth. And what you do with your resources is as much a part of your spiritual life as your sexual boundaries that you accept. You can't compartmentalize your life and say when I sit in church for a few minutes on the weekend I'm a Christian, but when I go to work there's a different set of rules.
We are Christ followers across the breadth of our lives or we're not Christ followers at all, and we need a biblical perspective. That's my target today. We won't finish it, but we're gonna jump into it. I'll start in Genesis 8 and verse 22. I've told you often that the opening chapters of Genesis introduce us to the big rock ideas of the Bible, the principles that we will see unfolding throughout the remainder of the book. And in Genesis 8 there's one of those foundational principles. It says, "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease". It's not just talking about the seasonal changes, God's introducing us to a principle that what you sow you will reap. You don't plant tomatoes and harvest corn. And in the same way, our lives, we are sowing seeds every day. Jesus used a great deal of agricultural images as he taught us about the kingdom of God.
So, living in an age of great deception, where the truth is manipulated and greed and covetous and envy are cultivated as means of dividing us in order to garner votes and to forge relationships that people can use to garner power, it's more important than ever to be aware of what you're planting with your life so that you're actually building a legacy of faith. There is an enormous amount of messaging that cascades over us on a daily basis. The overwhelming majority of it has very little to do with godliness. Most of it is not derived from the Word of God. Most of it does not reflect a biblical or a Judeo-Christian world view any longer. That's a relatively new occurrence in our culture. For many years, most of the messaging or much of the messaging that came to us publicly, even through our entertainment venues, exposed us to biblical values. That's not true any longer.
So, that old image, it's a worn out metaphor, but it's still true of the frog and the kettle describes our experiences. We don't understand the degree to which we're pushed off center, how much our attention is turned away from godliness and integrity and what God has to say. When God said as long as the earth exists, something will happen, he has my attention. He's the design engineer. You're not gonna break that pattern. So, a beginning question is what are you sowing with regard to your resources, the things you're seeking to accumulate, the attitudes you're giving to your children, what are you sowing? There's a harvest coming.
Some of us spend our lives praying for crop failures. It's a template and a pattern for understanding our lives. Planting, I grew up, my father was a vet, so we grew up in kind of a rural, Murfreesboro used to be rural, not so much anymore. I mean, I know if you live in New York all of Tennessee is rural. Spoiler alert, we know milk does not come in plastic. I won't tell you how we get it, you may not know. But planting a seed, whether it's a garden or a flower or an attitude, is an expression of hope. It's an expression of confidence that God will deliver what he said. That from that seed will come a harvest. It's your motivation for purposely planting the harvest you want. I hope you're leading a life of faithfulness in the Lord.
I'll take a moment, I just want to touch this idea, the force of giving, because I think of it in that way. I think it has a physical force to it, something tangible, something that has a physical impact. You know, we tend to separate our lives into the physical and the spiritual. I think it's a false dichotomy. Spiritual things influence us physically. I hear some people say, you know, well, I'm rational, I'm not emotion. Folks, your emotions affect your rationality. I mean, those of you that watch some sports contest, it's as much about the emotion of it as the physical gifts of it. If you can disrupt the emotions, you can win physically. I was never, like, a freakishly gifted athlete, but I like to compete, so I learned that if you were better than I was physically, I could just mess with your head.
Now, that'll get you hurt from time to time, you gotta know when to fold 'em and you gotta know when to run, but if that's the only gift you got, you better play the cards. Your emotions, your spiritual life, infects the totality of your existence, and the force of giving is real. The act of giving pushes something away. When you give forgiveness, you push away resentment and hatred. You're not welcome here, I'm not gonna tolerate you. I'm releasing you, I'm choosing to release the force of forgiveness. When you give attention, you push away rejection and ignorance. You make a bridge for a whole host of really good things. When you give time, you push away selfishness and that sense of inadequacy.
It isn't about me, I'm gonna focus my attention on someone else or something else. I'll make space in my thoughts and my attitudes. When you give money, you push away greed and your obsession with what you think you need. In Luke 6 Jesus talks about this. The larger context of this passage, Jesus is talking about giving money, but in these particular verses, he's not talking exclusively about that. He said, "Do not judge, and you won't be judged. Do not condemn, and you won't be condemned. Forgive, and you'll be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you". Now, he's talked about multiple things, judgment, condemnation, forgiveness, and giving, and then he puts this little summary bundle right here at the end. He said, "Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, it will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you".
There's a biblical principle there. If you're a person who is generous with forgiveness, you'll be forgiven much. If you're a person who is generous with your attention, God said he'll see to it that attention is given to you. If you're generous with time, God said you've planted that I'll give you a harvest, and it's true with your resources. You see, giving is not punitive, it's empowering. The Bible says it's more blessed to give than to receive. That reminds me of the line parents use, my parents used it. No, you're being disciplined. I won't describe the discipline because the rules have changed. Boards with nails in them are no longer appropriate. I'm kidding, but how many of you had a parent that said this hurts me more than it hurts you?
Now, I never quite had the courage to say it, but I promise you I was thinking it. Well, if that's the case, give me the instrument of discipline, make me suffer, because it felt like I was on the short end of that equation. And I always thought it, but when I read it in the Bible it's more blessed to give than to receive, I thought, I don't know, I pretty much like receiving until I was put in the place where a part of my assignment, my responsibility, my duty, was to ask others, which put me on the receiving end of that. And I can promise you it's better to be in a place where you can give than to be in the place where you're asking for help, amen? That is absolutely the truth.
One of the most corrosive, wicked, I think it's evil thing that is being done in our nation these days, is to convince us we're victims and that we're entitled to something. They are robbing us of the blessing. In order to convince us of that, they have to sow seeds of discontent and disunity and division, and to do that they're robbing us of the blessing that God said there's a blessing in giving. It isn't punitive. You see, I measure what I give, how much time I've given, how much attention I've given, how much money I've given, God measures what I'm holding on to. I'll show it to you in scripture, I promise, I'm not just making it up. Jesus was watching offerings being given and when a widow gave a little bit, he called his disciples and said she's given more than all the rest. And they said, oh, no, sir, I'm sorry, let us help you, she made a small donation.
And he said, no, she gave all she had. It's a different, it's an empowering notion. Your resources do not determine the size of God's response to you. This is such good news, folks. We may not have the ability to give great amounts and be celebrated philanthropically, but if we give in a way that God recognizes, he responds to us with the resources of heaven. Your life may be really busy these days, lots of little people, many demands, great call upon your effort and your focus, so the freedom you have to give time and attention to others will be very limited, but if you make some of that available to someone else, God responds recognizing the sacrifice of that. There is a force in giving. Don't feel guilty and ashamed. The devil is an accuser.
The point of introducing this idea is to not bring shame and guilt, it's to bring freedom. It's to bring a change of behavior. We can't buy favor from God, what nonsense. What do we have that he needs? I mean, for real, do you think God got the archangels together and said, listen, Allen is joining the team, it's gonna get better. No, no, I appreciate the laughter, but you know, what I understand, I'm far more of a liability than I am an asset. It's gonna take some serious horsepower to get him cleaned up. It'll take some remarkable discipline to keep him between the lines. It will take the blood of my Son to get this thing across the finish line. So, I don't have anything and neither do you. It's the enemy that tries to convince me otherwise, and he brings all sorts of hurdles and puts things in front of us and he'll remind us of all sorts of bad behaviors and people who've been inappropriate.
Folks, don't be robbed of God's best for you by the hypocrisy of other people. I'm quite certain there's some restaurants in our community that serve bad food, I've visited a couple, but it's not gonna stop me from having lunch today, I'm just not going to those restaurants. And we allow sometimes the poor behavior of other people to give ourselves license for ungodliness. In many respects, if someone mistreats us we think it gives us license to go be ungodly. And on this particular topic in the season that we have entered into, we will need to know that God is our source, our supplier, our sustainer, our provider, and our protector, and to do that we can't afford to be sloppy.
So, I wanna make some suggestions. Give God your best. It's not just my idea, this is a biblical principle. God will not accept your leftovers. I very much dislike the attitude that was cultivated. When I was a young person in church nobody told me this, it was an observation, and I may have just been in place and it may have been only what I could observe, but my observation was the things we didn't want we gave the church. We gave our leftover appliances, we gave our clothing that we didn't want. I participated in some of that stuff regretfully. Somebody someplace else in the world needs coats, so if you have a coat you don't want, bring it.
Folks, God doesn't want my leftovers. Now, I understand helping the less fortunate, and if we have an abundance I get that, but I very much want to displace the idea that God will be thrilled when we give him what we don't want. For instance, you know me relatively well, suppose I told you I have decided to make the great sacrifice of giving God my lifetime allotment of mushrooms. I'm just that kind of a generous human being. He can have all the fungus that was designated to me. Yeah, not much sacrifice. It's biblical, look at Exodus 12. It says, "Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household. The animals you choose must be year-old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats".
Let me ask you a question. Why do you think the instruction said you have to choose a year-old animal that is without blemish? Why do you suppose that's in there? I can tell you, it's a principle of biblical interpretation. If the Bible tells you what to do when your ox gores your neighbor, it's because somebody's ox kept goring their neighbor. And if the Bible says when you bring the sacrifice it has to be without blemish, it's because somebody was bringing for a sacrifice the animal they didn't want to include in the breeding stock. We don't want any more of this, you can have it. And God said, no, I won't accept it.
I can give you another example, it's in the Book of Genesis chapter 4 back there in the early part where we're learning these big rock ideas. Two brothers, Cain and Abel, "Abel kept flocks and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time, Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering and Abel brought fat portions from some of the first born of his flock. And the Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering, and on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor.
So Cain was angry and his face was downcast. And the Lord said, 'Why are you angry?'" Why is your face like that? "If you do what is right, won't you be accepted"? If you do what's wrong, "Sin is crouching at your door, it desires to have you, you must master it". I'm impressed God came to provide some coaching, some counsel to Cain, he didn't take it. He ultimately killed his brother. Let me ask you a question based on what we read, is giving arbitrary? You just get to give what you want when you want in the way you want, or does God have an opinion? No, if pleasing God is the objective, God has given us some direction. Can I just give what I want what I want in whatever way I want? Apparently not, God has provided some insight for effectiveness.