We'll turn now to our Old Testament reading, the book of Exodus, chapter 16. We'll look at verses 1 through 21. It's on page 73. If you're using one of our Pew Bibles, page 73, Exodus 16. You'll find this is a passage the Apostle Paul references in what we'll look at in 2 Corinthians 8 this morning for our sermon passage and New Testament lesson. Exodus 16. Verses 1 through 21, page 73 of the Pew Bible. First, let's pray that our God would bless the reading of His Word. Our Father in heaven, we thank You that in Your generosity You have sent us Your Son, Jesus Christ, that He is Your very Word, Your eternal Word, O Father, and that in Him the Word has become flesh. that you have drawn near to us in Emmanuel, who is God with us, and we thank you that he is the one who gives power to your scriptures, that in them we meet Christ, Christ who comes to us clothed with your gospel, the very God-man who gives to us your mercy and your grace. And so we pray this hour that you, O Holy Spirit, will you would come and you would open our ears, you would open our eyes, We would see and we would hear Jesus. We ask these things in His name. Amen. Exodus 16. They set out from Elim, and all the congregation of the people of Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai on the fifteenth day of the second month, after they had departed from the land of Egypt. And the whole congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. And the people of Israel said to them, would that we have died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full. For you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. And the Lord said to Moses, behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you. And the people shall go out and gather a day's portion every day that I may test them. whether they will walk in my law or not. On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather daily. So Moses and Aaron said to all the people of Israel, at evening you shall know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, and in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your grumbling against the Lord. For what are we that you grumble against us? And Moses said, when the Lord gives you in the evening meat to eat and in the morning bread to the full, because the Lord has heard your grumbling, that you grumble against him. What are we? Your grumbling is not against us, but against the Lord. And Moses said to Aaron, say to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, come near before the Lord, for he has heard your grumbling. And as soon as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud. The Lord said to Moses, I have heard the grumbling of the people of Israel. Say to them, at twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall be filled with bread. Then you shall know that I am the Lord your God. In the evening, quail came up and covered the camp. And in the morning, dew lay around the camp. And when the dew had gone up, there was on the face of the wilderness a fine flake-like thing, fine as frost on the ground. When the people of Israel saw it, they said to one another, what is it? for they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, it is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat. This is what the Lord has commanded, gather of it each one of you as much as he can eat. You shall take an omer according to the number of the persons that each of you has in his tent. And the people of Israel did so. They gathered some more, some less. When they measured it with an omer, whoever gathered much had nothing left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack. Each of them gathered as much as he could eat. And Moses said to them, let no one leave any of it over till the morning. But they did not listen to Moses. Some left part of it till the morning and it bred worms and stank. And Moses was angry with them. Morning by morning, they gathered it, each as much as he could eat. But when the sun grew hot, it melted. I return now to the book of 2 Corinthians, to continue our sermon series through this great book of the New Testament, 2 Corinthians 8, verses 1 through 15, is what we'll read for our New Testament lesson, as well as our sermon passage this morning. 2 Corinthians 8, 1 through 15. If you're using a pew Bible, you can find that at page 1,230. Page 1,230, 2 Corinthians 8, beginning in verse 1. Hear now our God's word. We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia. For in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means of their own accord, begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints. And this, not as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord, and then by the will of God to us. Accordingly, we urge Titus, that as he started, so he should complete among you this act of grace. But as you excel in everything, in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in all earnestness, and in our love for you, see that you excel in this act of grace also. I say this not as a command, but to prove by the earnestness of others that your love also is genuine. For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake, he became poor, so that you, by his poverty, might become rich. And in this matter, I give my judgment. This benefits you. who a year ago started not only to do this work, but also to desire to do it. So now finish doing it as well, so that your readiness and desiring it may be matched by your completing it out of what you have. For if the readiness is there, it is acceptable according to what a person has, not according to what he does not have. For I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of fairness, your abundance at the present time should supply their need. so that their abundance may supply your need, that there may be fairness. As it is written, whoever gathered much had nothing left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack. Sanctify them in the truth. Oh, but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge. a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner, hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire, secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster. So goes Charles Dickens' description of Ebenezer Scrooge at the opening of his novella, A Christmas Carol. I think it is safe to assume that not a single man, woman, or child out there in our pews is not familiar with the story somehow, either through Mickey Mouse, the Muppets, Jim Carrey, George C. Scott, Alistair Sim, or perish the thought because you've read the book. You know the story. Scrooge is greeted by his old business partner, Jacob Marley. Marley comes to him wearing these chains that drag about cash boxes and ledgers and deeds, and it's a chain that he has forged himself and been condemned to wear in his afterlife because of his earthly greed. And as he tells Scrooge, I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, yard by yard. The ghost of Marley tells Scrooge that he's been building for himself an even longer chain, but there's yet hope for him. Scrooge's hope comes after the three spirits of Christmas past, present, and future visit him that night and persuade him to look around and see the suffering of poverty that exists in the world and to change his manner of life. And we all know how it turns out from there. Now, as we consider the story of Scrooge in Dickens' portrait, certainly the way that Dickens characterized the misery that greed causes in the world and the way that generosity is virtuous, those are things that we can embrace as Christians. However, there's a problem with the Christmas carol. I hate to ruin this story for you. No, I don't. I love ruining this story for you. A Christmas carol has a problem. It is essentially Pelagian. For those of you who do not speak theological ease, let me translate that for you. It is a story of salvation by works. Think about it. Scrooge's hope for redemption comes as he sees the consequences of his greed and his indifference towards the suffering of others, and then he brings about his own moral reformation. and redeems himself. He saves himself by the fate of actually listening to Marley, charging him against his evil deeds, and he changes his evil deeds into good deeds. In essence, Scrooge becomes justified by his works. It is a story of self-salvation. Now, that kind of motivation It lies around us in our present culture as well, as we think about how generosity and desire for justice is clamored after in an attempt to prove to the world that you are really someone who possesses the virtues of justice and generosity. You can run yourself into exhaustion. That's why we sometimes hear about compassion fatigue. There's no end to the causes that you can support, no end to the sea of humanity that is suffering in injustice and poverty to which you can bring some kind of help maybe. And if you attempt to make yourself the Messiah of such people, you will crush yourself. You will fall in the end into this heap of disillusionment as you recognize your inability to even make a dent in all of it. And what's worse, if you attempt to be your own messiah through that kind of generosity, if you implicitly think that you can somehow redeem your own life by doing what Scrooge does, by imitating him and engaging in generosity in a way to redeem yourself, you will certainly be crushed as well under the burden of something you are far too weak to bear. But the gospel gives us something different, a much more liberating principle that animates your generosity. The gospel does not root our call to practice the virtue of charity in a quest to save either the world or ourselves. The gospel relieves you of that crushing weight of trying to be your own Messiah and be the Messiah of others, and in so doing, it orients you to the kind of generosity that doesn't amount to this sort of soul-crushing quest for self-justification. That's what we find here in 2 Corinthians chapter 8, this call to generosity that is animated by God's grace to you in Christ. So the truth I want you to see is this. It's there in your bulletin insert along with the three points. Be generous, for God the Son impoverished Himself to enrich you by His grace. Be generous, for God the Son impoverished Himself to enrich you by His grace. Three points we will consider out of this text. First, the grace of giving. Second, the grace of the God-man. And third, the grace of stewardship. The grace of giving, the grace of the God-man, the grace of stewardship. Let's look at our first point, the grace of giving. As a background to what Paul is saying here, one of the things you should understand about his apostolic mission throughout the Mediterranean world is that not only was he bringing the gospel to the Gentiles and to the Jewish synagogues and planting churches, but alongside of this, Paul was also seeing to the collection of this kind of relief fund for the poverty of the saints in Jerusalem. We read about this collection in Romans chapter 15, for instance. We also read about it in Paul's earlier epistle to this same church in 1 Corinthians chapter 16. There he gave instructions, which are background for what he says here, about how they should begin to take up this collection in their own church. And it's for the saints of Jerusalem. And Paul opens the subject now here in 2 Corinthians for the first time in chapter 8. And he does it by commending another group of churches, the churches in Macedonia. He attests to their generosity to the Corinthians. And there's no doubt that he's doing this to spur on the Corinthians to imitate their example. However, the way that he describes the generosity of the Macedonian churches in verses one through five is critical for Paul's purposes, because what we need to understand is that Paul's not deploying a sort of crass fundraising technique here, a sort of let's see who can give the most kind of strategy. That's not what Paul's doing. Rather, the apostle's description of the Macedonians' altruism, it highlights something very important that cuts against that kind of competitiveness. It highlights the gospel-centered character of their generosity. That's what's most important for the Corinthians to grasp in the Macedonians' example. Notice how he begins to describe the generosity of the Macedonians in verse 1. He writes, we want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia. Paul's language seems to almost purposely encompass two distinct things that are related On the one hand, what has been given through the Macedonian Christians was actually God working in His grace. That is to say, the Macedonians, as they acted in generosity, served as vehicles for God's own generosity. God uses His people to accomplish His purposes in this world. And just as much as Paul as an apostle is a instrument in the hand of the Lord to bring the proclamation of the gospel to the world, so too God has used the Macedonians as these instruments through whom he expresses his own generosity to the saints in Jerusalem. And this is something that's crucial for you to remember about your own generosity as a Christian. Just like the Macedonians, when you are generous, you get to be this. You get this privilege of being a vehicle through whom God expresses his own generosity to others. So never lose sight of that crucial aspect of what it means to be a generous person. And there's also something else at play here. On the other hand, another aspect of what Paul means in verse one is that the generosity of the Macedonian churches was the result of God's grace at work in their lives, changing them. We do not change and grow as Christians and become more holy, become more virtuous by sheer dint of our own moral effort. The benevolent giving of the Macedonian churches was a manifestation of the transformative work of Christ in their lives, the grace of God bestowed upon them. And this is something you need to remember as well, that when you are open-handed in your life, when you are virtuous and generous, that this is an exhibition to others of the efficacy of the grace of the gospel in your life. The gospel is transformative, and among the many changes that it affects in you is in transforming you from a stingy miser into one who lives with an open hand and an open heart. Paul goes on to speak about the rather startling circumstances of the Macedonians giving. He says in verses 2 through 3 that they did not give because they were populated by Christians who had exceptional financial means. The Macedonians are not sitting on fat bank accounts. Paul says in verse 2 that their extreme poverty abounded in a wealth of generosity. He goes on to say in verse three that not only did they give according to their means, these economically underprivileged Christians gave beyond their own ability, and they did that freely, by their own initiative. Verse four, Paul says that the Macedonians implored him and his apostolic companions that they would be able to take part in the relief of the saints in Jerusalem. And this illustrates something that's very important. Generosity is not just the privilege of the rich. Generosity is not just the privilege of the rich. I remember having a conversation with someone at my previous church who was telling me about someone else they knew who said to them something that's rather common. They said to this person that they were really hoping they could win the lottery because then they could really help other people. And I responded, what makes them think that they have to wait until they're rich to be able to help other people? Let me assure you that if you are not generous with what little you have now, you will not be generous if you have more. Generosity is not the privilege of the rich, it is the privilege of every Christian. It is not when you have abundance, but when you have lack that the true metal of your charity is tested. The Macedonian Christians are exemplary in this. They give out of their deep poverty. And as Paul puts it in verse two, they do this from the reservoir of what they do have in abundance. What they have a wealth of is joy. They may be strapped for cash, but they are loaded with joyfulness. And that's the real difference maker in the end between miserliness and generosity. They're not squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching covetous old sinners. They do not give resentfully through gritted teeth saying, here, have this. There are those who are overflowing with the delight of what it means to have themselves experienced God's saving grace, God's saving generosity to them, and because of that, in the middle of their financial hardship, they can give to others and they can do so with great joy. And above and beyond their means. This is no small feature of their giving. Giving is to be driven by love. It's to be driven by an overwhelming sense of joyful affection towards others, and most importantly, joyful affection towards our gracious and giving God. That's why Paul goes on to say to the Corinthians in verse eight that what he's doing is he's testing the sincerity of their love. Notice what Paul goes on to say about the Macedonians giving in verse five. He says, they gave themselves first to the Lord. First to the Lord and then to Paul. See, the Macedonians understand something crucial, something that's highlighted by all of Paul's verbiage in chapters eight through nine, as he talks about the grace of giving. Throughout these two chapters, as we'll see, he will call generous giving a grace, he will call it a priestly service, he will call it a blessing, a fellowship, and a ministry, and all of that vocabulary is borrowed from the realm of liturgy, sacred worship. And the point is this, that generosity is one more way that you express your worshipful gratitude to God Himself. You give to Him, even when you're giving to others. As Paul puts it in verse 5, you give yourself to Him. Giving is liturgical. It is an act of worship. That's what Paul makes a turn in verse six to say that this surprising generosity from the Macedonians inspired them to send Titus to the Corinthians so that this collection they started there, the collection we read about its inception in 1 Corinthians 16, that this collection might be brought to its completion. And if we have not yet been clued into the fact that giving is a manifestation of the work of God's grace, Paul says in verse 7, he says, but as you abound in everything, in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in all diligence, and in your love for us, abound in this grace, in this grace also. The Corinthians abound in the graces of God, the charismata. Paul spoke much about those in 1 Corinthians to these very Christians. And just as all of those things are manifestations of the gracious work of God by His Spirit in the lives of His church, so too generosity is a grace, a charis, a charismata. It is this outflow of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So in verse nine, then, Paul really gets down to the most fundamental grounds of all of this. What is it upon which Christian generosity ultimately rests? Brings us to our second point, the grace of the God-man. The grace of the God-man. In verse nine, Paul says, for you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, Yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich. What does Paul mean? Paul's referring to the incarnation. He means the same thing that he means in Philippians chapter 2, when there he says that Jesus, even though he was in the form of God, he didn't count his equality with God something to be grasped, but he humbled himself, taking the form of a man, and was obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Paul has in mind here that same thing. He's speaking about the preexistence of Jesus, that Jesus existed prior to His conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Christ is wealthy. Not only is He wealthy, there's no possible way that anyone else could be any wealthier. The riches about which the Apostle speaks are the riches that Jesus has in His glory as He is God the Son. And in that way, Jesus is not just a little wealthy. He doesn't own just a lot of things. He is the Creator and the Sustainer of all things. As Paul puts it in another one of his letters in Colossians 1 verse 16, he says that all things were made by Him and for Him. They were made for Him. That is to say, not only is it the case that everything in creation has come into being through the agency of Jesus, they were also made for His sake. We could tour the entire universe with Christ, pointing to all the things that we see, and Christ could say, that's mine, that's mine too, mine, mine, also mine, it's all mine, I own it. All things were created for him. However, his wealth, it's also about more than this. It is about more than just the creatures he possesses as he is the maker of all things. It is even more fundamentally about who he is, eternally, essentially. The wealth of Christ is the wealth of the one who is the creator of all things, and yet is all-sufficient unto himself apart from anything he has made. The wealth of his very being is without qualification or measure. It's the unbounded abundance of the eternal life of the Godhead. And yet, for your sake, He became poor. Paul's talking about the incarnation, about how Christ assumes to himself our humanity. Even though Jesus possessed the riches of what it meant to be God the Son in all of His infinite dignity and glory, He took to Himself a finite and frail human nature, a human nature that was dependent upon food and water and oxygen and all the things that you are dependent upon. It was subject to sickness and betrayal, all the miseries of this life, and eventually death in its most cursed form. And furthermore, Jesus' earthly life itself was not one filled with luxury. He wasn't born into the palace of a king or an emperor. He was born into the lowly estate of Mary and Joseph, her carpenter fiance. In his birth, he's laid at a stall, a smelly, fly-ridden shed where they kept the animals. He grows up to live the life of a vagrant. Jesus says about himself, foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. But as Paul speaks about the impoverishment of Jesus, he surely has in mind the whole scope of Jesus' humiliation, not just what he assumes in his humanity and the human life that he lives in an impoverished sort of way, but the way that his impoverishment encompasses even the things that Paul talks about in this very letter earlier in 2 Corinthians 5, verse 21. The impoverishment that Jesus experiences when he who knew no sin became sin for us so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. Christ's impoverishment encompasses the cursed abandonment of the cross and the horrors of the wrath of God. His voluntary deprivation was from cradle to grave, from the manger to the cross. We Americans, we love to hear a great rags to riches story. We love those kinds of stories. Hearing about guys like Howard Schultz, who was the father of a truck driver and himself the first person in his whole family to receive a college education and yet rose to become the CEO of Starbucks and is a multi-billionaire. Or the story of a woman who was born into poverty to a single teenage mother in rural Mississippi and now the whole world knows her simply as Oprah. We love these kinds of stories about upward mobility. We're obsessed with this. We're obsessed with upward mobility. But the story of Jesus is a story of downward social mobility, not of rags to riches, but riches to rags. He voluntarily embraced the most impoverished depths of human misery in the most extreme act of generosity that history has ever witnessed. And notice what Paul says is the result of this unparalleled altruism. Verse 9, so that you, by his poverty, might become rich. If you've been united to Christ by faith, then you have become rich indeed. And Paul is not talking about the prosperity gospel. He's not saying that the purpose of Jesus' incarnation and humiliation was so that we could be rolling in the dough. If that were the case, what he says about the Macedonians doesn't make a bit of sense. Because they clearly struggled with financial hardship. This has nothing to do with the nonsense of the prosperity gospel. Paul is speaking about the ultimate wealth that we have in Christ, a wealth that is most fundamentally immaterial, a wealth that consists of what it means to be made right with God, your Maker, to be adopted into His household, to be given a place at His table in His family. And through the poverty of Christ, we have gained the wealth of what it means to have been set free from sin's power. the wealth of what it means to have Jesus renovate you by His grace. And that brings us really back to Paul's central thesis here, that the grace of God, which transforms us into generous people, is a grace that comes to us only because of what Christ has done. Paul certainly is pointing to the example of Jesus here, and we need to imitate Christ. He is the superlative model of what it means to be generous for the sake of others. But what Paul is saying here is about more than that. None of you could ever repeat the generosity of Jesus. No matter how wealthy you may become or are, none of you could ever become poor for the sake of others in the way that Jesus did. You can't repeat that. Christ is our life's pattern. He is the image to which God is conforming us. But before Christ is our example, first He is our Savior. Paul cannot be speaking of Jesus only as an example in this verse because of that little preposition you read in verse 9, the preposition by or through. In Greek, there's no preposition, it's just simply a dative of means, but the point is the same. It's only through or by Christ's poverty that you can become rich in the way that Paul is thinking of. The enrichment Paul has in mind only comes about by means of the work of Christ. And that is, of course, what's missing from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It's all well and good for the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future to take Scrooge and to open his eyes to human suffering and the foolishness of greed, but the gospel in the end is not about you attempting to dismantle the change you've made for yourself in this life. It is not about salvation by your works. The true Christmas carol The true song of the incarnation is a song that reminds us that we were laying in sin and error pining until Christ came to liberate us, to set us free from our chains by His work, not by ours. God the Son embraced the ragged humiliation of His incarnation and the rugged wood of His cross to save you from sin, to save you from yourself. And it is the wellspring of Christ's blood and its power that transforms you, that enables you to be generous in a way that actually aligns with the logic of the gospel. Through his poverty, you become rich. Through it, you know the wealth of this transformation that is yours in Christ. And Paul moves in the following verses to state some things which really cut against this tendency of consumerism in our own world. It brings us to our third point, the grace of stewardship, the grace of stewardship. In verses 10 through 11, Paul continues to encourage the Corinthians to bring to completion this work of this collection that they began already a year ago. He encourages them in verse 12 with this thought that God does not assess our generosity by what we do not have, but by what we do have. What the apostle is expressing here is essentially the same thing that Jesus observes when in Mark 12, he witnesses the widow enter the temple and put her penny into the offering. Jesus says there in the presence of everyone that she outgave everyone else. She contributed more than everyone else because everyone else contributed out of their abundance, but the widow in her poverty gave everything she had. And that's what Paul is driving at here. God does not assess your generosity by what you have. by what you don't have, by what you have. That's how he assesses it. And so, on the one hand, what this means is what we've already said. We've already observed that just because you're a person of humble financial means, that doesn't mean you're shut out from this joyful privilege of the Christian life and what it means to be generous in Christ. You may be thinking, Pastor Schrock, I don't earn very much money. I don't have very much wealth. I'm a college student. I'm not going to move heaven and earth with my barista tips. What's the point? I don't have much at all. I couldn't even begin to make a dent in the poverty of the world. I couldn't even begin to make a dent in the budgetary needs of this church. But hear this, our ability to make this year's budget is entirely beside the point. That's not why I'm preaching this sermon right now. Our ability to solve the world's poverty is entirely beyond the point. The point is not that in our giving we solve the church's problems or the world's problems. It does not matter if your capacity to give is small. That's not the point. The point is that in Christ we discover this joy of what it means to worship God with our giving, that in Christ we trust God for our daily bread, that we are obedient to God and caring for His church and in caring for the poor, and that in Christ we come to delight in what it means to reflect the image of our Father who is in heaven and His own generosity. Even if you have little, you should not think that you cannot participate in this great privilege, in this joy of what it means to be generous as a Christian. The widow outgave everyone with a penny. On the other hand, what Paul is saying in these verses also means that if you do have a lot, the end sum of your generosity should be amplified accordingly. To whom much is given, much is required. It's a matter of stewardship. Now I do not think that Paul is saying here that literally we all have to become financially poor as a result of our charitable giving, that if you're a Christian you need to give away everything you possess and take up vows of poverty in a monastery. Paul's not arguing against wise financial planning or the acquisition of wealth or savings. What he's arguing against is greedily hoarding in a way that ignores the needs of others and constipates your own generosity. He brings all of this down to an issue of fairness in verses 13 through 14. He says, for I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of fairness, your abundance at the present time should supply their needs so that their abundance may supply your need that there may be fairness. Now, I don't think that Paul is saying that the Corinthians need to contribute to the relief of poverty in Jerusalem. in the hope that maybe one day if the Corinthians are poor, the Jerusalem Christians would reciprocate. I don't think that's actually what Paul is saying here, why? Because Paul says something about this very collection and other of his letters that colors how we should read what he's saying. He says in Romans 15, 27, for if the Gentiles had been partakers of their spiritual things, their duty is also to minister to them in material things. Underneath the logic of what Paul is saying here, and for 2 Corinthians 8, is that the abundance of the Jerusalem church supplies the Corinthians' lack in a different kind of way. Their abundance is a spiritual abundance. That is because through Israel, God gave the world the Christ, Jesus, who has come not only as the Savior of the Jews, but the Savior of Gentiles. And as Gentiles, then the Corinthian Christians have become partakers of the spiritual riches that have flowed out of Jerusalem. the Jews, Israel, they become partakers of Israel's spiritual wealth, which is abounded to fill the spiritual poverty of the Gentiles. And thus as a matter of fairness, Paul is asking them then that the material abundance of this church helps supply the material poverty of the saints in Jerusalem. And so in all of this, there's this call to steward one's resources in a way that looks to be generous in meeting the needs of others. And Paul reinforces all of this with this interesting quotation from the Old Testament, verse 15. He says, as it is written, whoever gathered much had nothing left over, whoever gathered little had no lack. That's a quote from Exodus 16, verse 18. We heard this section of Exodus read this morning for Old Testament reading. And it's this account of God providing manna in the wilderness. Manna's not actually used there in the English, but that's because the Hebrew word manna means what is it? And that's what they say, what is it? God provides manna in the wilderness, and Paul brings this up as this way to indicate that fair distribution of things among God's people has been a principle embedded in redemptive history since the exodus in the days of Moses. Each family in Israel gathers only as much as they have need, and there's no lack. And yet Israel's experience of enjoying the manna in the wilderness, there's something else afoot here that connects with what Paul is speaking about in these verses. It surely colors the reception of what he's saying. What happened to those, what happened to those who in the wilderness decided to try to gather more manna than they could for one day and keep it to the next? What happened? It rotted. They literally could not hoard. more than they needed for one day. And the reason for that is God wanted to instill in them this deep sense of the truth that we pray for in the Lord's Prayer, give us this day our daily bread. Israel lived with this profound sense of how they were dependent upon the Lord day by day, moment by moment, for His provision. Hoarders only ended up with some putrid garbage. And one commentator very skillfully connects these things with what Paul's talking about here. He writes, anxiety over possessing and keeping such things throttles any generosity as we worry that we may not have enough for ourselves. But our selfishness and covetousness is in turn stifled by the divine principle of equality that turns our excess spoil into spoilage reeking to heaven. That commentator's observations are apt. The gospel, it completely transforms your perspective on what your wealth really is as it calls to you to say, lay up your treasure in heaven. That's where real wealth is to be found. Lay up your treasure in heaven where moth and rust cannot destroy, where thieves cannot break in and steal. All other forms of treasure on this earth are perishable and will rot. You're not called to hoard them up then for yourself because all of that eventually turns into a maggot-infested pile of garbage. This is the folly of the hoarder. This is an attempt to possess what ultimately cannot be possessed forever. Our wealth is not a thing to be hoarded, but a thing to be stewarded generously to the purposes of our God. And so the glory of the gospel is that God has given back to you the privilege of looking like him. God creates and He redeems, but He does not create and redeem to supply some sort of lack in Himself. You need to burst your bubble. God doesn't need you. It's not why He creates you. And it's not why He redeems you. He creates and He redeems out of the overflowing abundance of who He is, His glory and His goodness. He is boundless in His generosity. We'll sing about this in just a moment in Psalm 146, that He is the God who gives food to the hungry. He helps the fatherless and the widow. Generosity is among the very attributes of God's essence. And so we do not worship a hoarding God, but a God whose liberality is without comparison. And you must understand, you must understand that Christian generosity inhabits the atmosphere of the gospel of this God. The Father's mercy to you in his Son has given back to you the privilege once more of what it means to look like your Father in heaven in his benevolent magnificence. This too is a part of the way in which you've been enriched by the poverty of Christ, and how Jesus takes squeezing, wrenching, grasping, clutching, scraping, covetous old sinners, and he refashions them. He refashions them into those who live with this joyful open-handedness that resembles our Father who is in heaven. Be generous, for God the Son impoverished himself to enrich you by his grace. Let's pray. Lord, we confess we struggle with these things. We struggle to trust you, to prize you, and therefore we struggle with being stingy, clinging to what we have. And we thank you, Lord, that in your mercy you have not left us there, that you're busy changing us, renovating us so that in Christ we might imitate him and use all that we have as a leverage that we can be generous to others and give ourselves not only to them but to you. And so we ask, Lord, that by your grace you would more and more cause us to live in an open-handed way. We ask these things in Jesus' name, amen.