Giving

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Welcome to week number five in the Red Letter Challenge. A number of our home huddles have been doing this for the last four-ish weeks. We're on day 27 in the Red Letter Challenge. We have 40 full days of this. We are getting close to the end. In week five, we're going to cover giving. Before we do that, we have been covering... Basically, what we've been saying is you take the red letters of Jesus, that is, the words in the New Testament that Jesus personally spoke, and we are trying to put them into practice. We're actually going to, instead of studying them and talking about them, the illustration in the study guide book that's available, the pastor who wrote that talked about his son. He said, you know, go clean your room, and his son goes, okay, I'm going to study about cleaning and what that looks like, and my friends and I are going to discuss and imagine what a clean room would look like. Now, that's my job as the father, right? I can imagine what your room will look like once you clean it. But it's amazing how, with Jesus' words, we talk about them, we can study them, we can look at them, we can speculate on them. But putting them into practice, that's what we're trying to do, because that will make the difference, because people will then start seeing Jesus more and more through us. So we talked about the five different practices that come up as a result. If you study all of his words, you can kind of categorize many of them in these, into being, that is, being in Christ, being with Christ, abiding in him, resting in him, receiving from him, forgiving. And as we have been forgiven, we are able to forgive others. In serving, that as he has served us, we can serve others. As he has sent us, we can be sent into this world as servants. We don't lord it over each other, we actually serve each other. And today, the fourth practice we're looking at is giving. And of all the practices, this is the one that Jesus talks about the most. I don't know if you realize that, about one-third of all the red letters in the New Testament all are about giving, about property, about treasures, about money, about stuff. And yet, I think of all the practices, this is the one that we struggle with the most. Maybe that's why he spoke about it the most. Maybe. You know, there is one red letter, one red letter sentence, outside of the four Gospels. It's in the Gospel, or in the book of Acts, which is kind of Luke part two. And we don't see this word anywhere else, but it's Paul who quotes it in Acts 20, verse 35, when he's talking to the church at Ephesus, and he says this, And all things I have shown you, that by working hard in this way, we must help the weak, and remember the words of our Lord Jesus, how he himself said, It is more blessed to give than to receive. Okay? That's the one word. And notice what it's about. It's about giving. The one word outside of the four Gospels is also about giving. And the early church were givers. And they understood what it meant to be more blessed to give than to receive. But I have a feeling, we often challenge these words ourselves. I don't know, about all the words, the giving words are the ones where we go like, Now wait a minute, is it really more blessed to give than to receive? When I was a child, I really liked to receive gifts. I don't mind getting a gift almost every day, but giving, sharing is even tough. It is even today, right? And we can rationalize it. Well, if I am giving to the people, am I not just making them more codependent? Am I just not? I have earned everything I have worked for, and I've worked hard. If I give to others, maybe I'm just taking away their opportunity to try to figure out how to make, you know, you can almost see how people rationalize today about giving. But Jesus doesn't hold back on the subject. And today, when we're going to read his words from the Gospel of Luke, we're going to find they push the boundaries farther than I would push the boundaries. In Luke chapter 6, you might not think these are words that talk about giving, but they really do at the heart of it. So we're going to read from what is called the shortened version of the Sermon on the Mount in Luke chapter 6. The long version is in Matthew. Here's the shorter version, Luke 6, 27 to 36. But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also. And from one who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you. And from one who takes away your goods, do not demand them back. And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them. If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who...