Practising The Way Generosity

The podcast discusses the theme of generosity and focuses on a passage from the book of Malachi. The Israelites had strayed from obedience to God's decrees and were withholding tithes and offering defiled sacrifices. They were experiencing droughts and crop failure, which added to their disappointment. Generosity is not just about giving money, but also about giving our time and talents. It requires trust in God as a provider and recognizing that we can't serve both God and money. The story of a grade six boy who loved money more than God serves as a reminder of this contrast. Welcome to the Avenue podcast where we're passionate about unleashing your God-given potential through the life-transforming power of the gospel. I'm Nathan and I'm Ash and today we're going to be continuing our series on practicing the way of Jesus as we look at the theme of generosity. Ash would you like to begin by reading our key text today? I would love to. I am going to be reading from the book of Malachi, bit of a niche one for us, and I'm going to be reading from chapter 3 verses 6 to 12. I am the Lord and I do not change. That is why you descendants of Jacob are not already destroyed. Ever since the days of your ancestors you have scorned my decrees and failed to obey them. Now return to me and I will return to you, says the Lord of Heaven's armies. But you ask, how can we return when we have never gone away? Should people cheat God? Yet you have cheated me. But you ask, what do you mean? When did we ever cheat you? You have cheated me of the tithes and offerings due to me. You are under a curse for your whole nation has been cheating me. Bring all the tithes into the storehouse so there will be enough food in my temple. If you do, says the Lord of Heaven's armies, I will open the windows of heaven for you. I will pour out a blessing so great you won't have enough room to take it in. Try it, put me to the test. Your crops will be abundant for I will guard them from insects and disease. Your grapes will not fall from the vine before they are ripe, says the Lord of Heaven's armies. Then all nations will call you blessed for your land will be such a delight, says the Lord of Heaven's armies. Sorry, a lot of says the Lord of Heaven's armies. Yeah, a lot of repetition there. Yep. Yeah, very interesting. So yeah, thanks for reading. The Book of Malachi, you mentioned that it's a niche one. It is a little. It is a bit. I don't often read the Book of Malachi. Yeah, I admit I hadn't read it from cover to cover. Yeah. Until I was preparing for this podcast. Oh. I mean it's not that long, so cover to cover. Yeah. Isn't a huge undertaking, but I was glad I got a chance to read it. Oh no, for sure. So given the fact that you have been refreshed on this book recently. Yeah. Would you like to provide some insight into what Malachi is all about and the context for it and why does Malachi exist and why is it important? Of course. So Malachi, this is actually the last book of the Old Testament and Malachi is a prophet. The name Malachi means my messenger, which is quite fitting for a prophet and he was speaking to Israelites who had strayed from obedience to the covenant with God. They were doing things such as withholding tithes, which we heard in this passage. They were also offering defiled sacrifices, for example, blind animals rather than the best animals and they were committing adultery and yeah, marrying women or the men were marrying women that were not serving the same God. So it's not Israel's finest moment when Malachi is addressing them and alongside their sinfulness, the Israelites were experiencing droughts and crop failure and this came after prophecies that the Israelites would be experiencing peace, prosperity and the return of God's presence. So I think those prophecies would have felt really mocking to the Israelites who are not seeing them fulfilled in their time. So I think it's the general landscape of disappointment and distance from God for the Israelites. Yeah, for sure. So it definitely sounds like not a great period of time for the Israelites. Yeah. Not a great time for the relationship between God and the Israelites either. Yeah, exactly and I guess the two are interlinked. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah, thanks for providing that. Is there anything from this passage that sort of sticks out to you from the outset? Well, I think a word that perhaps is new to someone that is listening is tithe. So it would be great if you could unpack a bit about what a tithe is. Oh yeah. T-I-T-H-E-S. It's spelt T-I-T-H-E-S, so unfamiliar. I wonder what the etymology of the word is. Sorry, I don't know if you looked into that. Yeah, no, I did actually have a good chance to look into what tithe means and the origins of it stem back early from the Old Testament. So in the Mosaic Laws, in the Torah, in the book of Leviticus chapter 27 verse 30 is sort of giving the first insight into what tithe is all about. It says, one-tenth of the produce of the land, whether the grain from the fields or the fruit from the trees, belongs to the Lord and must be set apart from him to him as holy. If you want to buy back the Lord's tenth of grain or fruit, you must pay its value plus 20%. So that's a bit of an insight to what it sort of meant to people at the time. In a more modern-day context, tithe is also continuously repeated throughout the Bible and we apply it to the idea of giving one-tenth of our income back to God and allowing it to be used for his good. So I think that's sort of mentioned in the book of Malachi when it's talking about the storehouse. So in terms of God being able to pour out blessings from the storehouse once we give our tithe. In this book it sort of is talking about how the Israelites were not giving their tithe and offerings and because of that they were unable to see a lot of blessings and their heart wasn't there as well. So yeah, tithe is often described as almost the standard for what it means to follow God. It's not a ceiling that you're meant to reach, it's actually the floor. So it's actually the standard where we're meant to be and anything on top of that is considered to be your offering as well. So yeah, it's interesting how Malachi touches on it in this book. Yeah, thanks so much for unpacking that for us Nathan and I guess that is how this passage relates to our topic of generosity. So it's an interesting part of being generous. So perhaps we can talk about exactly what generosity means and whether it's not all just tithing. What does generosity mean to you Nathan? Generosity means to be giving of yourself to me. I believe that generosity is all about being self-sacrificing and giving of things that you often seem to struggle to give up. I believe generosity is something that exists because God is generous towards us and we have to be a reflection of God's character in that way. Yeah, I love that. It's important to remember that it's not all about being generous with our money. We have other resources that God has blessed us with that we can be generous with, like our time and our talents. I agree that there is a heart posture that God calls us to when we're being generous. As you said, a heart posture of gratitude for what God has given us and a desire to be more like him and to display his generous character through our actions. I think another aspect of giving our money specifically that makes it important is that it does require us to trust God. I feel like that perhaps is the element in my life that I've struggled the most with when it comes to generosity. It's worrying that I won't have enough left over. I'm a young person in an economy where it's quite tricky to buy a house. I do often feel this tension of wanting to save to buy a house and feeling like I need this money. Will God provide for me while I'm giving the money and taking it away from my goal of a house? So I think that I've found that it's really required me to trust in God as a provider. I think there's also this aspect of not being able to serve two masters, which comes up I think in the New Testament. Jesus talks about how we can't serve both God and money and so by having to give money to the church or choosing to give money to the church, it helps us to recognize that God is our master and money isn't. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, there's definitely something where money is contrasted against God and how we can't serve these two masters. Yeah, and it's really interesting because both actually have a common need. God requires worship, but also money requires worship. And like you were sort of describing in the anxiety of today, I was like, you know, do I have enough money to have a future to buy a house and whatnot? All that money that is required to do all that requires dedication towards reaching financial goals and reaching all these sorts of things and that requires a rhythm of worship in itself. But God actually says yeah, you can't serve two masters because you'll end up hating one of them and loving the other one. So with that being said, if you love money, you actually hate God, which is a really tough contrast to sort of think about. Yeah, I have a story from when I was younger. It's a bit of a funny one. I don't know why this is the case, but pretty much I was in grade six in Woola. We used to get this like class money for like different jobs you do around the classroom. So whether it be like toilet cleaning, packing up toys, doing whatever, we used to get class money. And I had my class money. We were sitting in Chinese class actually. And yeah, one of my friends decided it would be funny to actually just empty out my money from my little envelope and spread it everywhere across the table. So I was like, oh, now I've got to go clean up my money. So yeah, I'm reaching across the table trying to grab the money back. And my Chinese teacher calls me out in that moment and he says, you love money more than you love God. I'm like, oh, what's going on here? I'm just a grade six boy trying to collect my class money. But yeah, and ever since then, I told my family about that. And like, yeah, now they make jokes about me saying that every time like, yeah, I talk about money or something, it's like, oh, you love money and you're obsessed with money and all that. So yeah, but it has been a bit of a reality check. And now that story does stick to mind because it does speak about this idea of, do I love money or do I love God? And how I can't serve both because both require this worship and undivided attention. So yeah. So next time you're picking up your money from the floor, hear the voice of Nathan's Chinese teacher in your mind reminding you to serve God and not money. Glad I learned that one young, yeah? It probably would be helpful for us to dig a bit more deeply into the Malachi passage, specifically this idea of God asking the Israelites to put into the test, to give their full tithe and then watch them be blessed. This perhaps sounds a little bit like dangerous theology. I'm just going to say it. People might have heard of the prosperity gospel, which is a heretical doctrine where, yeah, it's taught that if we give our money to the church, God is going to bless us. And I hope that that concept hasn't come across at all from what we've been saying, because that is not the promise that we see in the Bible. That is not how generosity, how tithing works. But yeah, this verse is an interesting depiction because, yeah, we see God sort of suggesting that there is a transactional nature to the tithing happening here. What's your take on this, Nathan? Yeah, it's difficult because it definitely seems like in the first half of the passage, the prophet Malachi is speaking against the Israelites, saying that you have cheated God. But if you don't cheat God, it seems like God's now going to So if you now give your tithe, you'll be all good. But yeah, I do think it's a bit more nuanced than that. It's not just you give so that you get. I believe that there's a heart behind it, and I think that's the most important thing. Even if you do give that money in expectance of return, and you're giving with the heart that I'm giving because I'm going to get back, God doesn't see that as a genuine heart. And I think God seeks us to have a heart that is raw, that is a heart of flesh and not a heart of stone. And God doesn't want us to use Him as a genie. But yeah, He wants our heart more than anything else. What do you see in it? Yeah, I totally agree with everything you've said there. And the Bible often talks about giving with a cheerful heart, not a heart that is seeking something from God, or a fearful heart that's worried about what will happen if we don't give. But we want to be giving cheerfully and with joy. And another verse that comes to mind is, I don't know the exact wording, but it's more blessed to give than to receive. And I am sure many listeners can relate to the joy of giving a gift to someone and just feeling so happy in being able to bless them. I don't know what your love language is, Nathan, but I do love gift giving, both the giving and receiving. And I have friends that also have that as their love language. So seeing the joy in being able to bless someone is a blessing that is embedded in generosity. And we can also experience that joy when we give to the church and see how that ministry is blessing people. Yeah, definitely. I think generosity and this idea of giving is so much more than just giving so you're getting back. It's actually giving with the expectance of no return. And yeah, I think God calls us to do that. Yeah, absolutely. We could, however, just talk a little bit about blessing and how God does love to bless us, as we do see that in this text. And that testifies to God's generous character, which is part of why we are motivated to, or a big part of why we're motivated to be generous. There's an interesting reference in the Malachi passage to the windows of heaven, which I believe is harking back to a passage in Kings where God really poured out blessings upon, there were some outcasts that had been ostracized from society and they were on the outskirts of the city that was walled in this passage. And they then had the idea to go to a nearby camp of an enemy where they had a lot of goods there. And in a miracle or a display of God's generosity, he frightened all the residents of that enemy camp so that they fled. And then these outcasts were able to, yeah, just be so blessed by what was left behind in the enemy camp. So that is a real big story of God's generosity. And so in the same way God wants to bless the Israelites of Malachi's day, and he does want to bless us. So we shouldn't forget that God is generous and he does want to give us gifts. Yeah, definitely. And I think, yeah, that just speaks to what God is calling in this passage as well, saying that the storehouse is ready just to pour out. And I think, yeah, we're so ready to just experience God's generosity here. I think often we've been thinking about it as, I give so God can give back, but it's actually God gave so now I can give. That's such a picture of the gospel as well. Yeah. And I just want to point back to, yeah, the gospel of Matthew, Matthew 22, verse 15 to 22. I'm not going to read the passage, but it speaks about the idea of Roman taxes and whatnot. And the Jews were asking, should we be paying these taxes? And Jesus said, whose face is on the coin of the Roman money? And they say it's Caesar's. So Jesus actually says, give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and you give back to God what is yours. And I think that speaks to us being made in God's image and giving back to God because God gave to us. And I think that's super important. And yeah, we should definitely see giving as something that's more than just money, but something that is giving of our whole selves to God's glory. Well, that's a great story to finish off this week's podcast. Thank you for sharing, Nathan. Yeah, that brings us to the end of the Practicing the Way series. Thanks so much for tuning in. And next week, we will be commencing a new series. So be excited for that. Very exciting. Thank you, Ash.