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“Generosity” - Sermon by Caleb CampbellChurch, I am so glad to be with you today as we are continuing on in a sermon series called Manifold Wisdom. We're looking through this series, specifically at a core text for our church family. For the last seven years I've been honored to serve as your lead pastor, this has been a touchstone, a foundational text for me and for our leadership here, as we think about what our role is as leaders, what our function is in the church, within the church, and what our mission is as a church family. We're looking at Ephesians 3 and 4 today through a variety of different lenses. We're looking through these different lenses at our core values, things that are essential to our church family. And so I want to invite you to join me today as we study together portions of Ephesians 3 and 4.You're going to have that text available in your handouts if you're joining us in person. For those of you all joining us online, if you have a print Bible I encourage you to use that. Or you can just go to bible.com. Again, we're in Ephesians chapters three and four, and we'll be using the Christian Standard translation of the Bible today.The question that we're going to look at today -- or the value we're going to look at today -- is generosity. And the question that I want to encourage you to consider throughout this time together is this question: What does generosity look like in your life? What does generosity look like in your life now?I know what you're thinking. “This preacher. He just wants my money.” And you're absolutely right. I want your money so bad. On my worst days, I think that if I could, if I could just get you people to give me most if not all of your money, and I had it -- if had that in my possession, I would be happier, I would be safer. I would be somebody. OK, so you are correct. On my worst days, I do actually want you to give me all your money now. I am the product of a capitalistic, individualistic, consumeristic culture. I'm being told over and over and over again, “You gotta get more to be happy.” Now, I have a sneaking suspicion as your pastor that you might be hearing these messages, too. My little Spidey sense tells me that you might also feel like I do sometimes. If I could just get more money, then I'd finally be able to …. fill in the blank. OK, so I need this message today, and I think maybe you all do, too.So let's look at it together as a group of people trying to figure out what it means to follow Jesus in real life or trying to figure out who Jesus is. And what we're going to find in today's text as we look through Ephesians 3 and 4, through this lens of generosity, we will discover that generosity and greed, its counterpart or its antithesis, are matters of the heart. Deep within our heart, something is going on that begets either greed or generosity. Greed and generosity are actually just symptoms of something that's going on much deeper. And so when I invite you into this conversation around generosity, I invite you to consider your heart. Generosity is a matter of the heart.By the way, I want to invite you all. We've restructured our formatting on Sundays to help facilitate our church family getting around tables, or at least in smaller group gatherings. I know that the best discipleship comes through dialogue, not monologue. And guess what this is? A monologue. This is just me up here talking -- which I find valuable. Otherwise, I wouldn't do it. I love singing together. I love taking communion together. I love praying together. But that's only half of it, right? So when we gather in smaller settings, we are in a position to be able to connect with one another more deeply, and to connect our faith within real life. We can, like, hash it out. So I'd invite you all to join one of the groups.We've got a bunch of them going on, actually kicking off next week. Some of our Rooted groups are going to be kicking off, as well as a few more. You can check out your bulletin for more information on those groups that are meeting now or coming up. But what I'm hosting at 11:00 o'clock in this room each week is a question and response session. So you can text in questions or arguments or insults, whatever you want, and you can text it in and I will respond to the best of my ability at that time together. We've been doing this for the last three or four weeks. I love it. And I would invite you all. So we'll just meet right in here. When we conclude this time together, you just go on out, grab a coffee, grab a snack, and then come back here at 11 or join one of the other amazing smaller groups and gatherings and studies that are meeting around campus at 11.But if you want to do the sermon Q&R, you can text the questions to the number on the screen. It's also available in your handout, right in the middle. I'd love to respond to your questions, especially on this topic, because there's so much confusion around what religious tradition says and what our consumeristic culture preaches at us all the time, and so I'd love to have that opportunity with you. And so you can just text in those questions and then I'll respond to them at the Q&R.One of the things that we're going to discover is that generosity is a matter of the heart. So in Ephesians chapter 3, the apostle Paul is writing to a church in Ephesus. It's a cosmopolitan city. From what we can tell, it's the third largest city in the Roman Empire at the time. So there's a ton of money. There's a lot of industry, and Paul is writing to this group showcasing them how the manifold wisdom of God is made known through the church. We're going to look through the lens of generosity.“For this reason, I, Paul, prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you ethnon – if indeed you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace which was given to me for you, that by revelation there was made known to me the mystery, as I wrote before in brief. (Ephesians 3:1-3)So just to start, notice this for this reason, Paul says, “I, Paul the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you ethnon …” I've intentionally done this transliteration, which is basically we're just going to keep the Greek word in there because usually that word gets translated as Gentiles. Who uses the word Gentile in their normal everyday life? OK. The reason I've left it there is because this actually sounds like a word that we actually use. The word is ethnicity. These are all forms of the word that we would translate as ethnicity. Or it's put in another way, an identifiable people-group. It's just people-groups, right? So the word that often gets translated as either Gentile or nations is just people. And usually it's people who are different from us. That's how the word will get used. So it's a prisoner of Christ for the sake of all you all. Right, all you, all people groups.“If indeed you have heard …” Notice of the language here. What does he say right here? The stewardship of what? God's grace. OK, so stewardship, that's kind of an interesting word and let me just give it to you really quickly. The idea of stewardship is this idea that God created everything. So the food we eat, the money we make, the clothes we wear -- at the end of the day, it ultimately belongs to God. Instead of ownership where I say, “This is mine,” I say “No, this is God's gift to me, and I will steward it well.” So the idea of stewardship is recognizing that the things I have -- whether, that's my time, my energy, my resources, power, whatever it might be, it's a gift to me from God that ultimately is God’s. Therefore, I'm to steward it.Let's put it another way. How am I using my resources? Am I using my resources according to the values of the owner or according to the values of the steward? Because when the values of the steward disconnect from the values of the owner, we've got a big problem, don't we? God gives us these good gifts and then says, “Ultimately these belong to me, but I'm going to give them to you and I want you to use them according to my values.” And so Paul here is saying that he is going to be the steward of this message of God's grace to all the nations.But I wanted to tease this out, because stewardship is also how we approach any good thing from God. Including, -- you're never going to guess – your money, honey, right? Including our money. At the end of the day, a steward has the mind that ultimately the money is not “mine.” The good gift is ultimately God’s. Right.“By referring to this, when you read you can understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which in other generations was not make known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit, to be specific, ethne are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. I was made a servant of this gospel by the gift of God’s grace that was given to me by the working of his power.” (Ephesians 3:3-7)In brief, he goes on in verse 5 and 6, to be specific, that all the other people groups, all the nations are fellow heirs, fellow members of the body and fellow partakers of the promise of Christ Jesus through the gospel. What he's saying is this is all the people groups are part of God's family, and we're all inheritors of God's good gift.“To me, the very least of the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the ethnesin the unfathomable riches of Christ and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God who created all things, so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be shown through the church to the rulers and authorities in heavenly places.” (Ephesians 3:8-10) “ … this grace was given …” Notice this word. What's that word right there? The gift of God's grace. Do you know? And just what's a gift? You guys ever got one? Who's gotten a gift before? OK, everyone look around and the person who has not? Let's make sure. Get them a gift. OK, so when you receive a gift, right, the gift is given. The gift giver wants it for you, for your delight, for your flourishing, right? It's a good gift, but it's different than a transaction. It's not a purchase, right? It's not a good that I purchased. It's a gift that someone gave to me. And here's this. Here, I just want to tie this all together. Watch this.Now you know that word, grace. You all ever heard that word before? Like we say, like before a meal? Notice, this the word grace can also be translated as gift. It's a gift. Have you ever heard of like, charisma or charismatic? Right. This idea of caring. This idea of gift giving. Right. That grace, that God's grace is, in its very essence, a what? It's a gift. Just notice how frequently the apostle Paul will leverage this language of gift. He's putting it in front of you that God's love – God’s very self, enfleshed in Jesus -- is a gift. So, God's relationship with us through the personal work of Jesus Christ -- is it something we can purchase? Come with me now. Is it something that if we do enough good then God will give it to us? If we thought, “If I just try hard enough, if I'm just generous enough, if I just do enough good things, then God would love me.” Is that a gift? No, that's earning. Right. That's a transaction. But here we see the apostle Paul telling us --like screaming at us- -- God's love for you is freely given.Let's pause on this thought that God's love for you is freely given to you as a what? Gift. So just pause with that thought, OK? If you would please just close your eyes. Yeah, we're not going to do anything weird. I just want to draw our attention to this moment. What does it look like for you to live, day by day, moment by moment, with God showering you with his love? With his peace, with his goodness, with his mercy. As a gift. Might living day by day, moment by moment, knowing that God showers us with these good gifts -- might that have any implication on how we therefore live? I hope so. I hope so.“The gift of God's grace was given …” What does it mean for you to receive freely the unfathomable, the incalculable riches of Christ.? Day by day, moment by moment, to be connected to this deep reality that God loves you, that God delights in you. That God has, out of joy, given himself for you. That he has -- through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus -- conquered over Satan, sin and death. And he delights to call you to be in relationship with him, the unfathomable riches of Christ.He goes on in verse 10. We do all this -- living this out -- so that the manifold or diverse kinds wisdom of God might be made known through the church. So that all the people -- all the ethnons, all the different people groups experiencing the unfathomable riches of Christ -- would be brought together in the church. Then a bunch of misfits who are bound together not by our common affinities, but by the unfathomable riches of Christ, would be bound together through the church.God puts on display his diverse or manifold or multifaceted wisdom. Now check this out. This actually works. I'm here to tell you. All this actually works. I'm going to tell you one story. One year ago tomorrow, this church family made the front page of the New York Times. I bought some copies. We met, and it was for a good thing. Hey, we were in the paper. That's pretty cool. We were in the front-page New York Times. Do you know what caused us to be in the front page? We took an offering.When the US military was pulling out of Afghanistan, we were hearing that there were going to be some Afghani refugees come in, possibly to Phoenix. Because in Phoenix, we place a lot of refugees. And Governor Ducey said we wanted to welcome refugees here, and we knew that there would be a financial need, but we didn't know what that looked like yet. So we just, we just, in faith, took an offering for over the four weeks. I think we mentioned a moment ago that you all raised $25,000 that we were able to invest in caring for refugees as they came. Now, for me and I think for some of us were thinking, “Well, that's just what you do.” For Jesus followers, that's kind of what we do, but to an onlooking world, it was mind-blowing. In fact, I remember talking to the journalist Miriam, who was very kind and she's just a brilliant writer. And she was like, “OK, hold on, what's your vested interest in this?”I said that we were literally just going to give it to a local organization.“No, no, no, but no. What do you have to gain?”And l said, “Could I talk to you about Jesus?”I'm like, “You're talking about the heart of the gospel.”So we made the front page New York Times. And if I sound a little braggadocious, I am. I'm so proud of you all.OK, so Miriam, the journalist, it's blowing her mind. And then here's the shame part. She's like, “Wait, are you guys are evangelical?” And she straight up said, “I thought you all were against stuff like this.”Ooh, right. And I'm like, “Can I talk to you about Jesus?” Because listen, I get it, right? When the church does it wrong, the manifold of wisdom of God is not on display. But when the church does it right? We were in the paper.Then the church got a voicemail. “Hey, this is so and so I want to talk to someone about what I just read in the paper.”I said, “Let me take the call. I'll figure out what it’s about.”So I call the person back and they're like, “Listen, I'm not a church person. I think I've been to one church…
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