10A Worship - A Generous Life

Are you a generous person? What evidence is there of your generosity … or lack of? The larger questions … why should we be generous? What makes one person generous and another not?

Science provides no real answers. Evolutionary theory offers little help. The best both can do is suggest that we are hard-wired for generosity because it benefits us, it helps us survive. Is our generosity self-serving? Is it the result of impersonal amino acids (the building blocks of life) working to promote our survival? One study states that, “Generous behaviour increases happiness, but the neural underpinnings of this link are unknown.” (National Laboratory of Medicine) Is that (our survival and happiness) why we’re generous? 

Maybe … or … possibly, generosity is embedded in how God made us.  He created us for rich, overflowing, relationships: with Him, and with others. He designed us to live generously, freely, to give more than we take in. When a person meets Jesus they re-discover generosity, and it begins to grow in them. One who rejects Jesus and yet is generous is tapping into to Someone deeper than they know.

That explanation is more appealing, and more consistent with how I have experienced this world, and what I’ve seen in my own life. Jesus people are generous people … or more accurately … we are becoming, day by day, more generous BECAUSE we, day by day, are more aware of how generous God has been, and is, with us.