I think a lot of people think that it would be easy to be generous if they had a lot of money. We can even convince ourselves that "when" we have a lot of money "then" we'll be generous. But I don't think that's usually true.
Statistics tell us that some of the least generous among us are some of the wealthiest. Why? Because the more you have the more you try to hold on to.
Generosity isn't born out of wealth, it's born out of a heart that trusts God. When we trust God for our provision, when we trust God with our lives, when we trust God to care for us, then we can truly live open-handed with our lives. After all, He's the one who gave us what we have in the first place and He's the one who promises to meet our needs.
In the Bible we read the story of a woman who had only a couple pennies. But she gave what she had. Jesus said she was more generous than anyone else that day. She probably gave the least amount, dollar-wise, of everyone present. But Jesus said she was the most generous. Why? Because she was trusting God with everything & living completely open-handed.
Generosity isn't born out of wealth. For our family we experienced that first hand. Years ago, before we had kids, we decided to make a move from Washington state to Chicago. I was wanting to go back to graduate school, and was accepted at a school on the north shore of Chicago. School was a full-time job. 17 credit hours, 300-500 pages of reading a week, 50+ hours of study and classes. Jennifer got a job at the university as an administrative assistant to put me through school. Her salary was $18,000 a year. I worked a few extra hours in the library and made about $3,000 a year. God provided a free place for us to live (crazy, God story) in a church apartment where I cleaned the church during the week. So, we made $21,000 a year, and school was going to cost around $11,000 a year. That was a problem.
Things were incredibly tight for us. And it created a dillema. Jen and I grew up in the Church. From the time we were both old enough to make any money we were taught to always give a tithe (the FIRST 10%). So when we got married, we just naturally did that too. But now we had NOTHING. I couldn't figure out how we were going to tithe $2,100 a year to our local church. On top of that we had a Compassion Child which was about another $300 a year or so.
I began to carry on a conversation with myself. I tried convincing myself, God, Jennifer that maybe we should just "tithe" to ourselves during graduate school after all I was going to school to be a pastor. It WAS ministry. After school, once I had a job that paid more we would go back to tithing and I would even give beyond that. I also KNEW that we couldn't keep our Compassion Child. There was just no way. Plus that was above and beyond our tithing anyway.
Then I felt like God spoke to me. As I sat in our little, God-provided apartment, with a decent amount of clothes, and a refrigerator of food, studying for the graduate school classes I was starting to take, it felt like God told me: "Really? You aren't going to care for this child? The one who needs sponsorship to have an education? That needs someone to sponsor them so they can have food and some clothes?"
We got it. We weren't sure how we were going to do it, but we made a commitment to continue to bring our 10% back to God and to continue to sponsor our child all throughout graduate school.
A week later I stopped by my mailbox, picked up the mail and started going through it. I saw a letter from my grandpa. Inside was a check for $10,000. That had NEVER happened every before - not anywhere close to something like that! And we got another check the next year. And the next. We walked out of graduate school with no loans. Amazing!
Would my grandpa have given those checks even if we had quit giving? Probably. I don't know. But, I have no doubt that the timing was straight from God. We've had too many things through the years happen that way - "coincidentally" being lost in the mail, or showing up the day we needed it, or the day or week after a decision has been made.
Those years were some of our leanest financially. But a growing generosity was born in those lean times as we trusted God to be our provider, and strived to live open-handed even as we did so with some fear in our hearts.
The funny thing is, the more we've been able to live generously, the less and less fear we have. Instead we have more and more faith as we've seen God provide and meet our needs and let us be a part of what He's doing in the world.
What can you do to take a step of generosity, to put God first in your finances this Thanksgiving and Christmas season?