On Sunday, our church hosted an Easter Egg hunt before our service. We had invited hundreds of families from all over East Oahu, and a ton of them showed up. To me, it seemed like a pretty simple thing to offer (some candy in some plastic eggs, some bounce houses, games, and crafts), so I was surprised by the number of people I met who enthusiastically said, “Thank you so much for doing this. What a blessing to the community!”
Music to my ears. One of our core values is to be a church family that’s marked by generosity. Most people only hear a church talk about generosity when an offering plate is coming down the row. Hoping to reverse that perception, we’re so intent on displaying Christ’s love through radical unselfishness that we’ve even gone so far as to politely turn down freebies from local businesses.
That’s why it’s incredibly gratifying to hear that we’re actually succeeding at being as generous as we hoped. And one day we hope to have the same kind of extreme generosity as the churches of Macedonia (what’s now northern Greece) that begged to give money to the struggling people in Jerusalem. Paul gave these churches a shout-out in 2 Corinthians 8:
We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia, for in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of their own accord.
Paul says their generosity flowed out of their joy in the Lord. Seems like the opposite of the way it should be, right? Usually we give things away so then we can feel good about ourselves, and then we have joy. But these Macedonians didn’t need to juice up their joy level any more by being charitable… they already had overflowing joy through the grace of God in their lives, and that motivated them to give. Even to give beyond their means.
There were plenty of other pressing things they could have used the money for. The people in the Macedonian churches were living meal to meal themselves, so I’m sure there were fears for their own survival tapping on their hearts. But the joy of the Lord motivated them to give away more than they even had. And I can’t wait until God gives us the grace to do the same.