And this is exactly what Scripture teaches. In 1 Timothy 6, Paul tells Timothy to command the rich “to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share.”32 This, Paul says, is the key to being free from the deadly nature of wealth and possessions. Give. Give generously, abundantly, and sacrificially. Give not because your stuff is bad. Give because Christ is in you. Give because your heart has been captured by a Savior who has produced in you “overflowing joy,” welling up in “rich generosity.”33
This is the kind of freedom the disciples were familiar with. After Jesus’ conversation with the rich young man, Peter turned to Jesus and exclaimed, “We have left everything to follow you!”34 In great contrast to the rich man who walked away from Jesus feeling sad, here was a disciple free from slavery to money and stuff, free from earthly security and worldly comforts.
I have seen that freedom in the faith family I lead. After one Sunday in our church when we were studying the story of the rich young man in Mark 10, I received the following e-mail from one of our members:
My wife and I went home, emptied all our clothes onto the bed, got several bags of canned goods and all the baby clothes our son has grown out of in addition to the toys he doesn’t play with anymore. I took several hundred dollars cash that I was saving to upgrade the front lawn and drove over to the projects downtown and prayed. I prayed for the people I didn’t know who were about to receive what I had too much of.
In the first house was a man of thirty who had a baby and needed some work clothes. Perfect. I had my clothes to give him and the baby toys and clothes. He needed money for groceries, so I gave him $100.
The next house had three boys all under the age of twelve, so I gave them our TV, VCR, and two video game consoles. Their mother needed some groceries, so I gave her $100.
The next house had a couple who needed some clothing for the wife and money for a car payment, so I gave her my wife’s clothes and $100.
We prayed with each family and told them we came with God. I got such a rush from this that we got home and got more things together to give away. My wife and I are now consistently serving at the homeless center downtown, and I’m going to start teaching art and graphics at the homeless learning center.
Many might question this guy’s actions, and some might even criticize him for being too sporadic, but what if this is a simple illustration of the freedom found in obedience? I’m not saying this is how obedience will look in each person’s life, but think what would happen if such radical abandonment marked each of our lives.
Listen to this e-mail from Lisa, a woman in our faith family:
For months I’ve been listening to the Word and banging my head against the wall, trying to reconcile my life with what the gospel demands. I’ve been trying to find some comfortable alternative between my life now and the radical idea of selling everything I own and leaving the comfortable life to take the gospel to the world. But I’ve realized there is no comfortable alternative. Risking it all is the only option.
So I’m selling my stuff on the Internet and trying to pay off my debt so that I can give as much as possible. In order to pay off that debt, I really am going to have to sell almost everything I have except the shirt on my back (and maybe a spare!).
I can’t wait to see what happens from here. I’m totally unprepared, totally inadequate, totally scared. But I’m ready. Bring it on.
Again, this may seem extreme to some, but the reality is that Lisa’s actions correspond far more with Jesus’ words in Mark 10 than with the actions of those who sit back and do nothing.
The freedom to give radically has played out in many other ways in our church.
After studying God’s care for orphans in James 1:27, we decided to contact the Department of Human Resources and take responsibility for making sure they had enough families to care for the needy children in our county. They needed 150 families, and within two weeks 160 families from our church signed up for foster care and adoption. Today, all across our faith family, men and women are freeing up space in their homes for foster children, while others are spending their savings and investment accounts on adopting children from Birmingham and around the world.
Small groups of all ages across the church have begun sacrificing luxuries for everything from building wells in impoverished communities to buying chickens for starving villages. One Sunday I came back from a city in Indonesia where an earthquake had destroyed thousands of homes. It cost approximately $400 to rebuild a home, so that Sunday, in our response to the Word, I invited people to build homes in Indonesia. People began writing checks and bringing money to the front, and by the end of the day, the church had collected more than $100,000. People who did not have money gave other possessions. One woman gave a wedding ring, saying, “My husband and I do not have much money right now, but I can give this so that a couple in Indonesia can have a home.” In the days to come, we worked together with churches in Indonesia to build hundreds of homes while proclaiming the gospel throughout a predominantly Muslim community.
Last month we were studying James 2:14–17 and considering our brothers and sisters around the world who are “without clothes and daily food.” In light of the struggling economy, we had been working to conserve money in our budget. As a result we had a surplus of more than $500,000 that we were saving for a rainy day.
Through his Word, God began turning our eyes toward our brothers and sisters in India, a country that is home to 41 percent of the world’s poor. Many children there do not live to age five, so we looked for an avenue through which we could serve them. We learned that for about $25,000, we could provide food and water, medical care and education to moms and their babies in a particular village for one year. We found twenty-one churches in impoverished villages all across India, and we started thinking about which ones we might be able to serve. That’s when we stepped back and realized, “If there are twenty-one churches in villages that we can connect with, and in each one we can serve starving children and their families for about $25,000, that comes to a total of $525,000. Meanwhile, God has given us more than $500,000.”
That led to an exciting decision. We said, “Let’s take them all.” Two weeks later our church stood and said, “We want to give away all this money for the glory of Christ among our impoverished brothers and sisters.”
Please don’t misunderstand. The beauty in all these pictures is not just providing for the physical needs of the poor. As we take children into our homes, as our small groups give away their luxuries, and as we go from Birmingham to India and everywhere in between, we are doing it all with the gospel. We are discovering the joy of a radical gospel inside of us that produces radical fruit outside of us. And as we meet needs on earth, we are proclaiming a gospel that transforms lives for eternity. The point is not simply to meet a temporary need or change a startling statistic; the point is to exalt the glory of Christ as we express the gospel of Christ through the radical generosity of our lives.