The example of Christian giving

Blessings my friends of steemit.

"Likewise, brothers, we make you know the grace of God that has been given to the churches of Macedonia"

Here Paul calls it "the grace of God." That is, something that has been given to the church. In verse 4, it is indicated that the believers of Macedonia asked to be granted the privilege of participating in this service for the saints. Another more literal translation translates this phrase as follows: let us grant you the grace to have part in this service for the saints. The word grace appears again in verse 6 in the following text; so that we exhort Titus, so that as he began before, so may this work of grace also end between you.

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And that is another wonderful word that Paul used and that has great meaning for us. He was calling to give, a "grace." It is a grace of God. It is a disposition created by the Spirit of God. The apostle was writing to the believers in Corinth, telling them that the Macedonians had had that kind of grace, and telling them that he expected the Corinthians to have that same grace as well.

The theologians define grace as the unmerited gift from God, and we agree with that definition, and yet it does not adequately describe this word. It could make you lose the great meaning you have. In classical Greek, one finds that the Greek word "karis" means an external grace such as beauty, beauty, charm, kindness, good will, gratitude, delight, or pleasure. For the Greeks three graces that we could describe with the words good, beautiful and noble. The Greeks had a missionary mentality in their culture and wanted to impart it to others.

The Holy Spirit chose this word and gave it a new brightness, a new glory; and the Christian writers adopted it. Paul used it again and again. Now, let's look carefully at this definition. The grace of God is God's passion to share all His goodness with others. Grace means that God wants to give you the good things, all His goodness. He wants to make you a beautiful, noble person. And he wants that the similarity, the similarity with His Son, becomes reality in you. This is the grace of which Paul wrote in Ephesians 2: 8, "By grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves, it is a gift of God, not by works so that no one can boast." We were lost sinners; we had nothing to offer God for our salvation. So He saved us by grace. He had a passion for wanting to save us. He loved us, but He could not forgive us in an arbitrary way, because He is a holy God. So he had to provide a means, and that means was to send His Son Jesus Christ to die for us. In John 3:16 we were told that "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son." God is engaged in the activity of giving and not of receiving. And we believe that we should make that clear.

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Sometimes we give the impression that God is poor and that he needs our financial help; Well, He does not need it. God is not poor. He said to His people in Psalm 50: 10-12, "For mine is every animal of the forest, and cattle on a thousand hills, every bird of the mountains I know, and mine is all that moves in the field. I was hungry, I would not tell you, because the world is mine and everything in it. " That is, God does not need anything from us.

The early church considered giving as a grace; It was a passion, an overwhelming desire to share the things of God with others.

The apostle Paul was writing specifically for a particular local situation, and we must recognize that. The Jerusalem church had been the first to share the gospel. The gospel had begun there in that city. The Lord had told the disciples that they should be His witnesses beginning in Jerusalem. The apostles loved the city of Jerusalem and stayed there until the persecution forced them to leave the city and then they were scattered everywhere. They had to go out on the roads to Judea and Samaria and, finally, to the ends of the earth. Now, the Jerusalem church was weakened because of this persecution. Actually there was a lot of hunger at that time and there were many who lived in extreme poverty.

During the course of his third missionary journey, Paul was collecting funds to help the believers in Jerusalem. This was something revolutionary. Here we have the churches of the mission field sending an offering to help the mother church, that is, the church that had begun the work in the mission field. The opposite happens today. We send the missionaries and support them in the mission field. But in the days of the apostle Paul, the mission field was supporting, helping the church where the missionaries had come from.

Paul could not go to Corinth at that time, and that is why in this letter he sent his instructions on how they should deliver their financial contribution. As he intended to go to Corinth, he told them that he did not want a promotion to be made for the believers to contribute, when he was there. Once I was in Corinth, I did not want to spend time collecting money. He wanted to spend his time teaching them the Word of God.

Now, I have exposed the nuances of the local situation in Corinth and the background of the instructions found in this part of the letter. The facts of the local situation have already become history, but the principles that Paul established remain. We believe that they are as clear and clear today as when Paul explained them at the beginning.

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Paul quoted the believers in Macedonia as an example of Christian giving. By doing so he was referring to the church of Philippi. And then proceeded to expose the motives of those believers and their methods to deliver their financial contributions.