Cheat Sheet on Financial Giving

The topic of "how much am I supposed to give" has come up on more than one occasion in the past week. It got me thinking about how I respond in a variety of situations. The bottom line is that there is a lot of confusion out there around the type of generosity a Christian is called to. Some of it stems from poor theology, some of it stems from a bad experience with a church, some of it stems from hard hearts that want to believe that our money is our money and you better keep your hands off of it.

I'm not sure what it was for the guy sitting behind my wife while she waited for jury duty. "The church is just a business!" he expressed, apparently to whoever was listening. "They said that I had to give 10% of my gross income! All they wanted was my money." There wasn't any arguing with him, so Christi didn't intervene. Unfortunately, he's not alone in his confusion. Even seasoned Christians argue about whether we're supposed to give 10% of our gross or our net income. The problem is, we're arguing about the wrong thing.

What I'm going to do in this post is highlight some New Testament principles on giving. It's not a theological treatise (which you wouldn't read) or a proof-text of why I'm right and you're wrong (which would be ridiculous). It's just principles that can help us understand what God calls us to give, how he calls us to give it, and perhaps most important of all, the context in which we are called to give.

First, 10% is not mentioned as a giving standard in the New Testament.

On top of that, it's a bit of a misleading statement to say that 10% was the Old Testament norm. But before you start putting down your checkbooks and unregistering for your online giving in your unbridled enthusiasm, let me explain. A "tithe" means "10%", but in the Old Testament, but God's people were required to give two tithes and a third one every third year. So yes, 10% chunks. For a total of about 23% a year averaged over three years. In the New Testament, the old manner of supporting the temple and governance structure of the Kingdom-Temple paradigm was done away with, and giving in the New Testament was replaced with the language of "generosity". The principle all along, Old Testament included, was one of generosity. The law of 10% revealed that even God's people were incredibly stingy, and not very generous at all. The good news of Jesus, in which God himself leaves all the wealth of heaven to become a pauper and ultimately to die a cursed death on a cross for the gain of his people, should, in the end, break down our stinginess and burst forth into generosity.

Fast forward a few thousand years to the man's comment about "the church wanting 10% of my gross salary!" Why are we asking about whether or not God wants 10% of the net or the gross? It's rarely because we want to give away more. Usually it's because we want to make sure that we're meeting the bare minimum requirement, and how foolish would we be if we found out that we'd been giving based on our gross income when all God really required was 10% of our net. All that money, wasted!

(For the record, if you are GOING to use a percentage based giving system, you would use your gross salary, especially if you are going on an Old Testament-like principle. Your salary is what you earn pre-tax. The government bases your tax percentage on that salary. If you are basing your giving off some number, it's that one. Not after the government gets theres.)

Second, all that God's people have is given for the good of the kingdom of God. 

Period. This is true in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. God always operates through individuals for the good of communities. If you have been blessed with wealth, God did not bless you so that you alone would be blessed. He blessed you so that you would be a blessing to his community of people. Put another way, if God allows you to make one million dollars next year, the proper perspective is that God has given his church and his community of people one million dollars, and he has made you the steward.

Now plug in your salary.

Next year you are going to earn 65,000. The proper perspective, biblically speaking, is that God, through you, has given his community of people (his church) 65,000, and he has called you to manage that 65,000 dollars well.

Third, you give what you have, not what you do not have. 

When Paul appeals for money in the New Testament, he doesn't use percentages and he doesn't use dollar figures. He uses capacity as the measurement of generosity. What is your capacity for giving? Or, to ask it another way, how much has God given you to manage? All other things being equal, if you have a family of five and you make 65,000 a year, your capacity for giving is probably going to be significantly less than a family of five who makes 250,000.

If you took that scenario and judged based on percentages, say, 10% of gross income, you end up with one family looking somewhat generous and the other not looking that generous. Family one, making 65,000 dollars a year, would "only" have given 6,500. Family two, making 250,000 a year, would have given 25,000! How generous! Except that it's really not very generous at all, since they still have significantly more money leftover to spend on themselves. Neither the dollar value nor the percentage are an accurate reflection of true generosity. (Remember Jesus story of the woman who gave her last two coins? That was more generous than someone who gave 100 coins our of their wealth.)

GENEROSITY

So let's assume that we understand the Gospel, that Jesus literally gives up everything for the sake of his people, the church. Jesus does what the law could never do. He actually frees us from condemnation so that, instead of attempting (and failing) to follow the law to the letter, we are free to live in the spirit of the law. It's not just that the Christian doesn't murder; in the kingdom of God we don't even have hate in our hearts. It's not just that the Christian doesn't commit adultery; in the Kingdom of God we don't even look at a woman lustfully. At least, this is the ideal. It's not the letter of the law, it's the spirit of the law that was the most important thing. What the law, in it's letter, revealed to us, was how far we fall short of the spirit of the law and how much we need Jesus. (We couldn't even give 10%, let alone actually have glad and generous hearts!) And now that Jesus has come, and has transformed our hearts, so our hearts, more and more, daily and progressively, are in tune with the spirit of the law which is the spirit of God.

So here's what generosity requires.

First, it requires that we understand the Gospel. You can't just ecide to be generous. Maybe by the world's standards you can, but not by God's. Generosity is a heart issue. It's giving with gladness. And that only happens when we understand the transforming power of the Gospel.

Second, it requires that we understand what God requires. Answer: everything. It's not yours to begin with. It's his. You are called to be a steward of it for the good of his Kingdom.

Third, it requires that we understand our capacity. Not everyone can give the same amount, but I know from experience that most people assume they are on the lower end of the scale rather than the higher end, and they are almost always wrong. My guess (and a fairly educated one) is that most of us could give substantially more than we are currently giving. The only way to know, however, is to have a realistic perspective on our capacity.

Here's the thing: it requires money to live. That's reality. We have a job and earn money for two reasons: first, to provide for ourselves and our family, and second, so that we can give money away. God ants you to provide for your family, and he does not want you to go into debt so you can give. You must take a realistic assessment of what it requires for you to provide for your family, and recognize that you will only have a certain capacity for giving. 

In the example above, one family of five found out that they could live on 57,500/year, because that's what they had after giving to the church. The other family was living on 225,000/year. Why the discrepancy?

Let me be clear: Jesus was not a socialist and the New Testament church was not a socialist utopia. Anyone who argues that has an agenda and they are being ridiculous. There were wealthy people in the church and poor people in the church and some of them owned mansions and others were servants in someone else's home. Yet each of them was called to give what they could, according to their capacity. The system worked because the Holy Spirit had moved in people's hearts to such a degree that everyone wanted to give whatever it was that they had to give. Some gave more and some gave less. But all gave according to the same spirit. That is generosity.

We don't all have to drive white Honda accords and wear one-piece silver v-neck jumpsuits. We don't all have to have the same size house on the same kind of street with the same length driveway. The lower-income person can rob themselves of their capacity for giving by buying the most expensive cell-phone, and the higher-income person can rob themselves of their capacity by buying the biggest house on the block. It's okay to have differing levels of income, it's not okay to fool yourselves into thinking that you don't have more capacity for giving.

(And for the record, lower income people in the American church give a substantially higher percentage of their income than higher income people. The statistics for actual dollar amount given per household look a little better, mostly because there are some people who give massive dollar amounts that bump up the average.)

Here is how you will know that you are striking the right balance between what you need and what you are giving: when you look at your bills, and think, "I genuinely wish I could give more", you've probably got a good balance, and quite frankly, it will motivate you towards good financial stewardship. If you think, "thank God I don't have to give more" or "there's no way I could give more" or "I'm giving plenty as it is", you've got some heart work to do.

None of us are perfect, and we're not going to get there tomorrow. I'm just saying that if we're more concerned about what we have to give away than we are with what we get to keep for ourselves, we've probably got the wrong perspective. Whatever you have is given to you to steward for the good of the community around you. It doesn't always feel good, but that's when we need the Holy Spirit to change our hearts. Overtime, slowly but surely, he'll turn us into a generous people after all.

Freedom from Condemnation & Parenting

This is part one of a four part series on freedom from condemnation. The four parts ended up being Freedom from Condemnation, Repentance, Parenting, and Drivenness.

I was sitting next to a friend last week in a seminar on age-graded ministry. He currently works in youth ministry; I used to. The seminar/discussion was related to ministry in the church for specific age groups, and striking the balance between offering age-focused ministry and honoring the fact that it was the parents who were called to lead their children spiritually. A few of the pastors in the group seemed to tread pretty close to the, "I tell people how to raise their kids" line, and my friend leaned over to me and asked, "so I'm supposed to watch you parent and then parent my kids the same way?" It was a tongue in cheek question. His kids are older than mine, and he's older than me. He has five kids. I have five kids. We can learn from each other, but it would be foolish to suggest that somehow I've got the one-up when it comes to parenting.

I had been thinking about this idea of freedom from condemnation and how it relates to our parenting. For one thing, there are a lot of parents who feel condemned in their parenting. We live in a day and age when everyone and there mother wants to post on social media about their parenting best practices. We never stop to consider context, economic status, or whatever. It's easy to buy all organic food when you have one kid and are in the top financial tier of society. It's not easy to do that when you have five kids and are surviving on an average salary (or nearly any salary, for that matter.) That's not to suggest that eating organic food is wrong or bad in some way; it's not, and it's commendable if you can do it. You can't hold it up as a parenting law, however, and make others feel bad if they can't attain that standard. That's the condemnation we're supposed to be freed from.

The other related idea, though, is not just how we as parents feel condemned, but how we raise our children without making them feel condemned. How do we teach our children to obey the law, something we are commanded to do, teaching them to essentially live out their lives according to God's ideals, without making them feel guilty and shamed when they inevitably fail?

Here's why this relates to my story about telling parents how they should parent. My role as a pastor is to help people see how the Gospel relates to their parenting; not to tell them how to parent. That fine line is important. If I fell too heavily on the telling people how to parent, I will inadvertently create a law that may or not be in line with God's expectations. I will lead parents into condemnation rather than Grace. On the other hand, if the Gospel relates to our parenting, so that we live in the beauty of God's call on our lives and yet our total freedom from condemnation, perhaps we will find joy in our parenting rather than guilt, both for us and our children.

(For the record, I think the other people in the discussion I was a part of believe that too, but it didn't come across that way. Hence my friend's somewhat snarky comment.)

So how does the Gospel relate to our parenting? I'll address the two that I already mentioned, starting with our own sense of failure as parents.

FREEDOM FROM OUR OWN CONDEMNATION

It takes very little to feel condemned as a parent. We don't call it condemnation. We call it "feeling judged", but it's the same thing. Every time you get "the look" from the patron in the restaurant, you immediately feel it. It's that feeling of failure; it's the knowledge that that person believes they would raise their children better than you would. "The look" conveys what they are thinking. Their kid would never act like that in a restaurant.

And then, of course, the next time you are in a restaurant and your kid is eating their french fries, and someone else's kid is acting up, you can't help but glance over, wondering, "what's wrong with those parents? Why don't they stop him?"

Even worse, some of you just read that last paragraph and thought, "I can't believe he feeds his kids french fries."

You get this condemnation from strangers, from friends, from parents, and from siblings. Every younger sibling who has no children believes that they will raise their children better than their siblings. "My kids will never act that way; I'll never let them get away with _______________". 

Every child feels it from their parent on at least one occasion. Grandma or Grandpa tries to enforce their will on your children, whether you are around or not. "We didn't raise our kids to act like that."

There are two parts to this problem. The first part is that we, as people, are incredibly self-righteous, and we believe that whatever it is we think we will do, we are doing, or we have done, is the right way to do it. That's what "righteousness" is. It's the "right way". And we think we nailed it.

The second part is that we, as people, have all these little areas that we haven't really embraced the freedom of the Gospel, and our parenting is one of those little (or not so little) areas. We want to be free from condemnation, but every time we feel that look there's a part of us that thinks they are right, and we really are a failure.

The Gospel re-focuses our parenting so that we can keep first things first. In my initial post on freedom from condemnation, I said that one of the things that this freedom allows is that we can evaluate expectations that we our others place on us and decide whether they are really relevant and worthwhile. Most of them aren't. Freedom from condemnation gives us a filter to judge what is really important in our parenting, since we are now free to examine what God desires of us, without the need to feel like the people around us will think we are a failure if we disagree with what they desire of us.

Surely, there are expectations of the Christian parent. We are called to raise our children to love Jesus. We are called to teach them the ideals of God. We should desire that our children understand God's word and grow to love God's word. We should be concerned with our children's  "heart, soul, mind, and strength". We should ensure that they are healthy in their mind, their spirits, and their body. They have been assigned to us, by God, so that we can show them the good news of Jesus and the greatness of their Father God, to the best of our ability.

In spite of all of that, or perhaps because of all of that, we are free to live without condemnation, even when we mess up or don't live up to the expectations. The Gospel is the reminder to us that we can't save ourselves, and we can't save our kids. That's God's work. So even when we mess up, we can have the confidence that we couldn't do any of it without God anyway.

As for other's expectations on us, it requires a two-way grace. First, the grace to apply to yourself to remind you of your freedom, and then the grace to apply to them, to realize that they are still a self-righteous work in progress as well.

FREEDOM FROM CONDEMNING OUR CHILDREN

This is the freedom with which we raise our children. The unfortunate reality is that many, many people have grown up under the pressure of "obedience" without the pressure-release of "freedom from condemnation". Such was the case for much of my childhood. The attitude I experienced wasn't, "we want you to learn to live according to God's ideals because of God's love for you"; the attitude was, "we want you to live according to our ideals because otherwise we'll be embarrassed." One of those is obedience based on freedom; the other is obedience based on guilt and shame.

I could recount moments of "shaming" disguised as discipline, but it's not worth it. Must more important for us is understanding how we can raise our own children to be disciplined without being shamed. I've mentioned the "pendulum" of culture before. In a lot of cases, if parents grew up in a shaming household, they go the total opposite way and try to raise their kids boundary free. The wrong-headed belief is thinking that the opposite of shame-brought-on-by-law is absence of law. In other words, get rid of the law, and we'll get rid of the shame. Boundary-free, no limit parenting is the wave of the future. Even gender remains up for debate. It's "whatever you decide", and as a result, we think, there will be no guilt and shame.

Of course, it never works, in part because the law is a deeper reality than some external restrictions. We can remove external boundaries all we want, but we can't remove the internal ones. And if we could, we wouldn't want to. If we truly lived our lives as if rules and boundaries didn't matter, it would obviously be chaos. Shame doesn't get removed because we remove the law.

The Gospel actually handles it exactly the opposite of culture. If culture says, "get rid of law, and we'll be rid of shame", the message of the Gospel is, "get rid of the shame, and enjoy the law." It isn't absence of law that brings freedom, it's absence of shame. When the shame is gone, we are not only free to obey without the fear of condemnation, we are also free to receive loving discipline that keeps us on the path when we don't obey.

When my son misbehaves, therefore, what I want him to understand is that whatever consequence he may face as a result has zero impact on how I view him as my son. I don't love him less when he misbehaves, and I don't love him more when he behaves. (And just to be clear: I'm a sinner, so yes, when he misbehaves I'm annoyed with him and when he behaves I'm grateful. I feel the need to say that so that you don't think that I have this down, like the Heavenly Father loves us. If there is loving discipline in our lives from God our Father, it has zero impact in God's view of us, because he actually is perfect and loves us with a perfect love. But I digress.) When I discipline my son, I want to make sure that he knows that the reason I'm disciplining him is because I love him. When he is disrespectful to me or my wife, there are consequences. And the reason there are consequences is because I honestly believe that it is better for him to be respectful than it would be to allow him to continue in his disrespect. It's love that leads to discipline, not lack of love. It's for his good, not mine. I love him no matter what.

Furthermore, I'm not shocked when he misbehaves. I don't think less of him when he misbehaves. I already knew he was going to misbehave, and I knew it from before we got into this parent/child relationship. 

I know he's going to misbehave.

I don't love him any less because he misbehaves.

I correct him because I love him.

That's the Gospel. If there is loving correction from God, it has nothing to do with whether or not he needs me to behave. He doesn't. In his eyes, I'm already perfect. If there is correction, it is for my good and ultimate joy.

As a result of this, we are free to discipline our children without leading them into shame and guilt. We can at the same time teach them that there is a way to behave, and not shame them when they fall short.

I fail at this all the time, but I'm trying, and by God's grace, I'm okay, and so are my kids.

Freedom from Condemnation & Repentance

This is part of a four part series on freedom from condemnation. The four parts ended up being Freedom from Condemnation, Repentance, Parenting, and Drivenness.

After writing last week about our freedom from condemnation, I began to think about all the ways that this freedom actually plays itself out in real life. The idea that I've really been wrestling with is this view that what we is ultimately destroyed by the cross is our condemnation, but not the law, even though the law is a shadow. So as the author of Hebrews states, the sacrifices are done away with because Jesus in his perfection is the final sacrifice; there is no necessity for further sacrifices, not because the law is destroyed, and not because we will perfectly fulfill the law, but rather, because Jesus has perfectly paid the just due for all those who would be imperfect and break the law. Again, the condemnation is gone. We are freed. We are viewed as perfect in the eyes of God, because he sees us through Jesus.

The interaction of this freedom with the rest of life came out in at least three ways that I started considering. One was the idea of "drivenness". Some folk are just driven people; often, that drive is fueled by internal or external expectations, and while that might be a good thing, the challenge is to maintain the drive while losing the fear of condemnation. Another area was that of "parenting". Obviously we teach our children to "obey"; that's our parental duty. Additionally, we punish our children when they don't obey. How do we square that with the idea that we are no longer condemned? And finally, a third area was that of repentance. What does repentance look like in the Christian life? It is this third one, repentance, that I decided to cover first.

Freedom from Condemnation & Repentance

I was sitting at a luncheon with some friends when one member of the group said that they felt the need to repent of something that had happened the night before. Honestly, most of us probably didn't even know it happened, and the way that it was addressed made it even more awkward than if he had never addressed it in the first place. I wasn't sure whether it was awkward because I wasn't used to people repenting, or because I just didn't think that's what repentance meant. In other words, was repentance something that was done verbally, almost in an AA-like manner, where you have to confess to the people you feel you may have offended? Or was repentance something that was less about the verbal confession and more about the change of heart? To state it differently, was repentance about identifying what happened yesterday, or about what you were going to do tomorrow?

Answering those questions in depth would take a different post. The short answer is that it's a little bit of both. On the one hand, it's clear that confession is part of repentance. (1 John 1). On the other hand, it's also fairly obvious that confession without some sort of change in behavior or outlook would be fairly empty. I might say that confession indicates recognition of the need; the change in behavior or outlook is the evidence.

In any event, this week I've been thinking about repentance in relation to our freedom from condemnation. How is it that repentance is still required of Christians, and should mark our lifestyle, while condemnation is not? The question can only be answered if we understand that the law is still valid and good, even if it is only a shadow of the true reality which will ultimately be the kingdom of God, where there is no need for a law because we would all live perfectly according to God's ideals.

The fact is that repentance is only possible when we understand that while the law still exists, condemnation does not. Ultimately this is the reason that anything we do as Christians matters. God's ideals are not destroyed because Jesus was perfect; quite the contrary. Instead, we are finally able to live in freedom, without the guilt and shame of our own imperfection, because Jesus has a) already identified the problem and provided the solution and b) already dealt with any lingering doubts that we might have by giving us his perfection for free.

What that means practically is that we can live under the goodness of the law of the Spirit that is constantly transforming us and aligning us with God's ideals, and we can live under the freedom from condemnation which means that we can freely admit when we fall short. If there was no law, there would be no need for repentance, because it would be impossible to be a rule-breaker when there are no rules. There would be nothing to turn from. Since there is a law, and God's ideals actually exist, there is not only something to turn from (inability to meet the ideal whether willingly or unwillingly) but there is also something to turn towards. Furthermore, since the condemnation has been removed when we do fall short, we can repent without implicating ourselves in our own crime. We can actually admit, without guilt, and without shame, that we have fallen short; we don't do it out of fear or out of embarrassment but out of freedom, with the full knowledge that the very foundation and need for the good news of Jesus is the reality that we can't save ourselves, and that we are always constantly destined to fall short. 

We are free, then, to unload the burden of our failures through repentance, without the fear that if we do so, "whatever we say can be used against us in a court of law." It can't, and won't, be used against us. Repentance is the true mark of freedom, because when we repent we are again reminding ourselves and those around us that we can't save ourselves, but that Jesus has saved us by his cross. In a sense we are staring down the face of punishment and turning aside, relieved. The punishment can't touch us anymore. We're free.

If we are in a context that makes us feel like repenting will mean guilt, shame, embarrassment, or defeat, then we are not in a gospel context. Repentance is freedom, because only a person who is free from condemnation can truly repent. If condemnation still exists, then repentance is done out of fear. But if it doesn't exist, then repentance is done out of freedom, and if it's done out of freedom, it leads to life.

That's the joy of the Gospel.

The Trouble with Religion

“But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.”

— The Horse & His Boy, C.S. Lewis

Religion is a wicked taskmaster. It is a tyrant that tells you how you can be "good", how you can be "better", that your ultimate righteousness is just one step further ahead–and at the same time, your destruction only a step behind.

The worst part about religion, at least in the sense that the New Testament most often describes it, is that it teaches you how to be good and do good things. The religious leaders in Jesus day and the plethora of other religious teachers throughout early church history had a similar theme to their message: Yes, God loves you...but only if you obey. Consequently the adherents of the religious teaching would look good, do good things, help others, and serve God, but it was always out of fear. Fear that others would find them out, fear that they may not be as good as they had hoped, and ultimately, fear that God would stop loving them. The truth is that religion is a never-ending ladder that you just can't climb.

The Gospel frees us from the tyrant of the law, and it's taskmaster, religion. It turns the old teaching in it's head: God does not love us because we obey. We obey, because God already and always loves us. The Gospel story is the story of God's one-way love towards us, even when we didn't deserve it, couldn't obey, were running in the opposite direction, trying to displace God with our own "gods"...God loves us anyway. When we begin to really understand that reality, our obedience has nothing to do with fear that God might somehow stop loving us–why would he stop loving us now? He has always known who we really are–but rather is driven by the fact that he will never stop loving us! God loves us. The more we understand that love, the more we will obey.

Unfortunately, when people are set free from the driving whips of religion, they often find that they do not exactly know how to have the discipline of obedience. Their obedience in the past was driven so hard by external forces and people and perceptions and law that it never really took root in their heart of hearts; they never really learned how to obey. They just learned how to avoid getting the whip–and these are different things.

For some it happens when they go to college and find that once the taskmaster is no longer around, they no longer have to obey. This is not because of the Gospel; it is simply evidence of what we already know to be true: if our obedience was only the result of a fear of a negative consequence, then once the fear is removed, so is the obedience. 

But for others, the same phenomena is seen when they finally discover the Gospel. Sometimes, the freedom they begin to experience as they hear the truth leads them not to more obedience, but for a time, to what appears to be less obedience. Perhaps this is why the apostle Paul had to remind the early church not to take license with Grace. Just because you are saved totally, freely, and forever, does not mean that you go on sinning. Actually it will lead to the opposite. But for many people freed from the shackles of religion, there is a time when they realize that they don't actually know how to obey. They have to relearn, because they have to be retrained. Obedience is no longer the result of the whip; it's the result of a heart softened by love.

Religion is a wicked taskmaster because the law can never produce what it promises. In fact, it always results in the opposite. Press a person with religion, and for a time, they will appear to have improved. Stop pressing, and you'll find that they haven't gotten better, they've gotten worse. As soon as there is no one to force them to do something, they find they don't have the power to force themselves.

Only the Gospel ultimately leads to obedience, because the Gospel starts with the heart and transforms our very desires. We can't force ourselves to be better, but when our heart changes, we find that we don't have to force ourselves at all. It starts slow, eventually seems to come naturally, and one day, it will come perfectly.