Be generous by starting giving revolutions

By Richard

Generosity begets generosity (Luke 6: 38)

Most of us have seen the movie Pay it Forward. (Cadena das Favors in Spanish). A boy called Trevor comes up with a great idea to change the world. He would do 3 acts of kindness for people and instead of them paying him back he would ask them to go do 3 acts of kindness for someone else and they in turn would do 3 things for someone else and so on, until the world was changed. A great and inspiring movie! Get hold of a copy if you’ve not already seen it.

There were 2 massive things that Trevor had to do to make it work! Firstly, he had to take the idea that he’d presented, off the blackboard and do the hard work of putting it into practice. Secondly, he had to be willing to sacrifice his own life to make it work.

We cannot wait until the world is generous to us – it rarely happens. God is calling us to be people who make generosity happen, to make sacrifices to make the world a more generous place and to keep on starting generosity revolutions throughout our lives.

The question I want to leave you with is this…

Will we be people who start giving revolutions? Not just one in a life-time! Not just once in a while, but everyday of the week.

Start with your spouse first thing in the morning…Make your wife a cup of tea, bring her breakfast in bed and give her some tenderness. Generosity begets generosity and you’ll thankful by nightfall. Give your kids the generous amounts of time and attention they need to grow up healthy. Give a friend a call and be generous with your encouragement. Take the time to write that important e-mail that starts patching things up with a family member you’ve fallen out with. Give your neighbour a hand with mowing his grass. Make the lady who cleans your home a cup of coffee and for 30 mins sit down and ask her about her family. The list is endless if we will just use our imagination.

Will you help to tip the balance by being generous with good? Will you help God to overcome the darkness that grips our world by generously shining out the light? Will you come back to the God who has given, and given, without expecting anything in return and find the strength that you need to be generous?

Be generous by showing imagination

By Richard

Ask yourself what you want people to do for you; then grab the initiative and do it for them (Luke 6: 31)

There’s a lack of imagination when it comes to being generous! Jesus wants us to imagine what we’d like people to do for us and then go and do it for them. On top of that the church has been guilty of stifling imagination. We narrow down generosity to giving 10% of your income to the church and setting time aside to take your wife on a date once a month and helping old ladies across the road. These are great but we’ve frozen our imaginations. Our generosity is dull and does not shine brightly in a world of darkness.

J. John, a well known evangelist in the UK was approached by a prostitute at Paddington Station. So guess what, he offered her £25 for to have a cup of coffee with him at a local café. He showed her dignity and spoke to her about God’s love and asked her if he could pray for her. She felt God’s Holy Spirit and started crying.

I once heard the Holy Spirit described as the “twinkle in a believer’s eye”. One of His jobs is to be that spark of imagination from God. Let’s ask God to help us be creatively generous! Make a daring commando style raid into your grumpy neighbour’s garden to tidy it up. Drop of people at the airport head down to arrivals and hold up a big sign “free lift to Las Rozas!”

Let’s use our imagination in generosity and then ask God to give us the strength to follow through on our ideas.

Be generous by giving more than you get

By Richard

No more tit-for tat stuff. Live generously (Luke 6: 33)

Help and give without expecting a return (Luke 6: 35)

Do you know the Ying and Yang symbol! It’s supposed to represent the balance between good and evil in the world. Nice pendant, but forgive me for saying this – it’s a bunch of rubbish! Evil is not a counterbalance to good. If it was then the ethnic cleansing in going on in the Sudan is no more than a necessary balancing out of the good things that are taking place at Mountainview. No, God is calling us break out of this ying -yang nonsense, where we swap good deeds and bad deeds with one another, like they are a collection of stamps and generously invest on the good side.

A few months ago I believe God gave me a picture. I was thinking about a passage from the NT that speaks about Jesus seeing and blessing every small deed we do in his name. I remember seeing in my mind a pair of scales. It represented the good and the bad in Madrid. The bad far outweighed the good. But it was as if God was saying to me that every time I did even the smallest good deed I was somehow helping to tip the scales towards the side of goodness.

God wants us to be people who out-give. He wants us to generously change the world one good deed at a time.

Be generous by praying for problem people

By Richard

When someone gives you a hard time respond with the energies of prayer (Luke 6: 28)

You know, when people tick me off I find it hard to pray, period, let alone pray for those who have offended me. If I practiced this verse, every time I drove down the A6 I would be praying without ceasing!

The challenge is not just that we pray for those who’ve offended us, but that we give them the energies of our prayers. In other words at night when we go to bed and do our Miss World prayers, “Lord bless Mummy! Lord bless my goldfish! Lord bless all the starving children in the world!” We add an “Oh by the way God do you have a spare 30 mins because my sister-in-law has really got under my skin this week and I’d like to pray for her.”

Powerful stuff – it could change the world!

Be generous and respond to evil with good

By Richard

We are in Luke 6 and over the next few days I will post some some thoughts on generosity that come from this chapter in Luke.

Love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst! (Luke 6: 26, the Message)

Big one! I used to believe - still do to a certain extent if I’m perfectly honest - that for the best to come out of me I need to be lying on a warm tropical beach, Barcardi and coke in hand, blissfully watching a deep red tropical sunset behind coconut trees, with Riekje back in the shack cooking up curry! Jesus is calling us to the opposite. He’s saying when we’re in the trenches, knee deep in mud, being shelled from all sides, that should be the time when the best comes out of us.

Let’s be generous by responding to evil with good.

Heaven Applauds

By Richard

I find the call by Jesus to count ourselves blessed when trouble comes (Luke 6: 22-23) to personally be of great comfort. Usually when trouble comes my gut instinct is to ask myself what I’ve done wrong. It’s good to remind ourselves that trouble can sometimes mean that we have done everything right! When this is the case we need to stop and listen as, “All heaven applauds.”

Quiet Thanks

by Richard

In Luke 5: 12-16, Jesus heals a man covered in leprosy. Jesus touches the man and instantly, “His skin was smooth, the leprosy gone.” Jesus tells the man to quietly present himself to the priest (the one with the legal right to pronounce a person clean and able to return to the community) and to give God the offering the Moses commanded. Jesus reminds him, “Your cleansed and obedient life, not your words, will bear witness to what I’ve done.” This takes me back to something I read, where the author was saying that our lives should speak so loudly for Jesus that people can’t even here what we’re saying. Let’s be witnesses simply by the way that we live.

Our Work

By Richard

If we ever wonder what on earth I am supposed to do than this is part of the answer. Jesus tells the crowds in Luke 4:42 that he must go to other villages and tell them, “The message of God’s Kingdom” for, and importantly, “This is the work God sent [Jesus] to do!” Jesus’ primary work was to proclaim God’s kingdom and I believe it safe to say that this should be our primary work too.

Behind the Scenes

By Richard

We read in Luke 4 that when Jesus went to the synagogue he was handed the scroll of Isaiah. I guess I’ve put this in here because he I’d always imagined that Jesus choose the Isaiah scroll and looked up the right section (Isaiah 61: 1, 2). But, if we read closely, he’s handed the scroll, there’s a third party involved in the process. Something more profound is going on here! We have the fulfilment of prophecy (as Jesus claims in verse 21). But, we need to see that it’s not completely engineered by Jesus. Behind the scenes there is a God guiding the synagogue rulers to hand Jesus the scroll of Isaiah.

Money, Sex and Power

By Richard

It has rightly been observed that most temptation breaks down into one of the following categories; money, sex or power. I found it interesting that all of Jesus’ temptation revolved around the issue of power – Satan wanting to get Jesus to use his power, to give up his power, or to test God’s power. No mind blowing explanation here, just some seeds of ideas that I thought were worth making public for further pondering.

Talking about Temptation

By Richard

Having read the temptation of Jesus, in Luke 14: 1-13, I think that we can learn several things of help in overcoming temptation:

Firstly, closeness to God does not protect us from temptation; indeed it might even produce temptation. Jesus was full of the Holy Spirit when he was sent into the desert to be tempted. Let’s flee the notion that if we’re close to God we won’t be tempted! Let’s resist worrying about what’s wrong with "us" when we’re tempted – just maybe everything’s right!

Secondly, we’re often tempted at our points of weakness. Jesus had eaten nothing for 40 days and as the Message version puts it, “The Devil, playing on his hunger, gave the first test.” One step to overcoming temptation is to know our own weaknesses and times of greater weakness. Are we tempted when we’re hungry and irritable? Are we tempted when we’re tired? Are we tempted when...? (You fill in the blank).

Thirdly we read, “The Devil retreated temporarily, lying in wait for another opportunity” (the Message). We never fully overcome temptation. The next attack is just round the corner. The New Testament says that we should be alert because the Devil is like a lion, quietly stalking his kill, waiting for the opportune moment to strike.

I've condensed the points into 3 memorable sentences.

Be advised: The closer you are to God the more you’ll be tempted
Be aware: Of areas and times of weakness that the Devil might exploit
Be alert: For the next attack of temptation – at any moment and from any angle

Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil

“First Communion”

By Richard

In Luke 3 we read that when John the Baptist started his earthly ministry he preached a “Baptism of life-change leading to the forgiveness of sins.” We also read that the crowds flocked to John to be baptised, “Because it was the popular thing to do”. Reading on we find that John explodes calling the crowd “snakes” because they were simply acting out a baptism with no intention of personal life-change.

Simply, God does not want deadwood to remain deadwood after baptism. He wants the waters of baptism – the promises of first communion – to bring us to life. He wants the dead wood to come to life, shoot green leaves, produce buds, blossom and go onto produce fruit.

Thankfully John spells out in detail to the crowd what this living, spiritual-life looks like.

- He wants those who have to give to those who don’t have
- He wants the tax collectors to work honestly
- He wants soldiers (and others in authority) to act with kindness and gentleness

In Spain the season of preparation for first communion has begun. Now I don’t want to rock the boat with inflamatory comments about infant baptism, or first communion, except to say this (as John would probably also say). Don’t forget what it’s about. It is not a quick fix to ensuring your salvation. It’s more than an excuse for a party or a rite of passage in the local culture. It’s a sign that we seriously want to live for God. Let’s be serious about life-change.

Running

By Richard

In Luke 2 we read that the angels announced the Good News to the Shepherds. We read that they "left running" saying to themselves, "let's go over to Bethlehem as fast as we can!" The shepherds "ran" to Jesus. Think about it they ran to Jesus as fast as they could. Let's leg it off to Jesus!

One Foot At A Time

By Richard

Zechariah, finally able to speak after a long 9 months of silence, prophecies about the role of his son John to prepare the way for Jesus, “the Master”. Describing Jesus, he says that he will “[show] us the way one foot at a time.” (Luke 1:79 the Message).

I was touched by the expression “one foot at a time”. In sense, if we look up we can see the mountains of heaven, far off in the distance. Christ leads us towards heaven, one foot at a time. We are only given enough information for the moment. Our direction can change in an instant. Sometimes the path is rough and sometimes it is plain sailing (there’s supposed to be a pun there). The mystery is that even though we rarely see the gates of heaven, somehow, Christ is getting us there…one step at a time. And for those brief moments when we do stop and rest – on clear days - if we look to the horizon we’ll see that the mountains of heaven getting closer and we will offer prayers of thanks to the unseen Master who is tirelessly leading us there.

Dirty Hands

By Richard

We read in Mary’s song, following the announcement that she would bear the Messiah (Luke 1: 46-55) these words – God, “Barred his arm”. It reminds me of the expression to strip to the waist. God got involved. He entered the world and got his hands dirty.

The Birth of Jesus

By Richrd

There are many things about the birth of Jesus that seem “impossible”. But that’s exactly the point. We’re not talking “human” here we are talking about the intervention of God, the creator and sustainer of a universe that is 13 billion light years across. In Luke 1: 36 we read that, “Nothing is impossible with God”. So, if we react too strongly against the impossibility we may miss the point that Luke is trying so hard to make. THIS is no ordinary day but the long awaited arrival of God himself!