Matt Chandler - The Generosity of God

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. John chapter three—uh, we’ll start in verse 16. I am going to—uh, move around a bit this morning, not up here 'cause that’s a given, but rather—uh, in the text. This will be our primary text, but we will—uh, move around to other parts of the Bible. If you’re a guest with us this morning, there should be a hardback black one around you if you don’t have a Bible. If you don’t own one, this is our gift to you; feel free—uh, to take that with you. So last week we started—uh, this series «Grace Made Visible.» It’ll be six weeks long—uh, and we pulled that phrase «Grace Made Visible» from Jonathan Edwards’s «Religious Affections.» One of the points Edwards made in «Religious Affections» is that when people experience the grace of God—not just an intellectual ascent of «I can define grace,» but rather when—they are at their worst and they realize that Christ died for them. When they—uh, finally understand, not in their minds, but in their—what I’ve just called their guts—the goodness and grace of God, it transforms them in such a way that grace is made visible, or that we can see that God has done a work in a person’s life. So we wanted to be very careful with that—to make sure we don’t put—um, some sort of checklist Christianity on the lives of people, because that’s not going to work in regards to freedom and joy, the things that Christ has died to bring us. Instead, we looked at Isaiah chapter 58—uh, last week. We literally just walked line by line through Isaiah 58, and we distilled it down into simply this: that grace is made visible when the people of God live with an open-handed understanding of all that they have and all that they are. They see themselves not as owners of anything, but rather as stewards of all that God has given. So—we just said really grace is made visible when the people of God are generous people. I always know when you talk about generosity, people get a bit nervous. All right, so let me just clarify early on: this is not leading to a giving campaign. It’s not leading—uh, into—uh, me—um, building another building; none of that is going on here. There’s no ulterior motive other than—um, the freedom that is found in Christ for you. The more generous the soul, the happier the soul, and all that will unpack in the weeks to come. But what I wanted us to focus on today—uh, was really just the generosity of God and the generosity of the Godhead: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit—how generous our God is. But before that, I I wanted to talk about Bill Gates. For the last seven years, God bless him, Bill Gates has not been at the top of the Forbes list of the richest man in the world, yet he has this year reclaimed that title. Bill Gates—uh, is worth 72.7 billion. So let me give you some statistics about Bill Gates—and and just hear these are statistics. If you know what Mark Twain said about statistics, you can file them away; if you don’t know what he said, I certainly cannot quote him here. And so I’m guessing by your laughter that some of you do know what Twain said about statistics. Let’s go through some of these: At 72.7 billion, Bill Gates as an individual is the 37th wealthiest country on Earth. Just him. That means there are hundreds of countries that have fewer resources than just Bill. That’s what I call him: Bill, at 72.7 billion—at a 6% rate, every second of his day is worth $114.7, which literally makes it not worth his time to pick up a coat off the ground. A coat’s a $100 bill—uh, off the ground, and he should leave it alone for one of us, right? Why would you? You just wasted $300 picking it up when you could have gained $100? And so, from here, Bill Gates is 57 years old this year. So if we assume that he will live to be 90, we’ll give him another 33 years, he has to spend $6 million a day to exhaust his wealth, and that’s making no more. That’s no rate of return on the billions he has; if the economy collapses, and he’s not making any more money—yet, he would still need to spend 6 million a day. I would like to try, but I have no idea how you do it. I mean, would you like a shot at it? Yeah, but I don’t quite know how you’re buying planes every day. I mean, I don’t quite know what’s happening there. Now a couple of other ones that I thought were astonishing: If Bill Gates, at 72.7 billion, gave everyone on Earth $10 tomorrow, he would still be worth $2.26 billion. That’s unbelievable! I almost got angry reading this: if he gave everyone 10 bucks, he still has 2 billion—not 2 million, 2 billion. All right? So in regards to just his wealth, if we compile all of us who are going to be at the Village this weekend, at all our camps, and we compile all that we will ever make in our lifetimes—he’s still snickering at us, right?