Sometimes the world feels small. Everywhere we go, things feel crowded and cramped. We know vastly more about the world and what’s happening in it than we did a generation ago. In fact, sometimes we know what’s happening on the far side of the world than we do with our own neighbors. Sometimes we know more about the former than we do about what’s happening in our own house. We want space. We want to be able to stretch and spread our wings and live to our full potential. King Solomon offers us a way to do that. As we begin our new teaching series, How Big Is Your World, let’s talk about the key to living in as big a world as possible.

Living in a Big World

How big is your world? When we lived in Colorado, we made several trips to the top of Pike’s Peak. It was always a beautiful drive on the way up there, and the view was stunning. There was one picture I took on the way up that is still framed and sitting in my office that really captures the experience for me. Standing at the top of the mountain in the early fall, there is an uneven sea of green stretching out in front of you. Punctuating the green landscape in the background are pops of brilliant yellow where the Aspen trees are at the peak of their color change. There is also a clear, mountain lake in the distance, beautifully reflecting the crystal blue sky. From the picture itself, it looks like it was taken from the top of the world. I can tell you that standing there the sense was even more humbling. I remember feeling tiny in a huge world. 

The reality is even more pressing than that. The area at the top of Pike’s Peak comprises probably two acres. Maybe three. Not so big. Pike’s Peak National Forest in which the mountain resides covers 1,106,604 acres. That’s a lot bigger. To give you some perspective, that’s about the size of the whole state of Delaware, and twice the size of Rhode Island. Depending on what you’re doing with it, an acre can be a lot of land to manage. A million acres is huge. One person in the face of a million acres seems awfully small. 

But things are still even more extreme than that. That 1,106,604 acres of Pike’s Peak National Forest is only 3 one-hundred-thousandths of the total acreage of the planet. In other words, planet Earth is 36,724,240,000 acres. That’s really, really big. Let’s put that into perspective. An average person when sitting down takes up about five square feet of space. That 1,106,604 acres translates to 48,203,670,240 square feet. Divide that by five to make sure people have room to sit down, and you have 9,640,734,048. In case you’re not up on the latest global population figures, that’s enough room for everybody on the planet to sit down with enough room for almost another billion and a half people to squeeze in with us! Are you with me? The whole planet’s population would fit into a single national forest which takes up only a small fraction of a moderately-sized state. Now, I’ll grant you, that would probably feel rather cramped. But we’d fit. And, again, that’s only 3 one-hundred-thousandths of the total planet. And, yes, I know that about 26 billion acres of the planet is ocean and uninhabitable, but still, we live in a big place. 

Let me make you feel even more insignificant (aren’t you glad you came this morning for this?). As big as the earth is, it’s not so large compared to some other planets in our solar system. You could fit almost 60 Earths in the planet Neptune, the next largest of the bunch. But that’s nothing. You could fit 763 in Saturn, and a whopping 1,321 in Jupiter. Jupiter is actually so big that the famous Great Red Spot alone is more than double the size of our whole planet. Imagine how long the average plane ride would take on a planet that big. There probably wouldn’t be any wars because it would take too long to move an army big enough to do any damage. Of course, Jupiter’s gravity is so strong that we’d all be pancake people like Flat Stanley, which would probably cut down on crime as well, but that’s for another time. 

In spite of all of this, have you ever felt like the world is really small? Have you ever had one of those small world experiences? I remember the day soon after I had gotten settled in at college when I was sitting in my dorm, working on some homework, and there came a knock at my door. I opened it to find two girls who I had never seen in my life standing there. I was just starting to wonder exactly what I was in for, when one of them introduced the pair: “Hi. We’re Lindsey and Tarrah. Are you Jonathan? We’re your cousins!” As it turns out, Lindsey’s great-grandma, and Tarrah’s and my grandmas were all sisters. I knew the grandmas all pretty well, but I had never met my cousins. They had only recently met each other in spite of having gone to the same high school. And this only happened because another family member discovered they had sent graduation announcements to some of the same people. Then, through the grapevine, they both discovered that the three of us had all happened to attend the same college, three hours away from home. Small world! 

It seems to me that we have uncovered a paradox here today. On the one hand, the world is enormous relative to you and me. There is more than enough space for everybody on the planet to have some serious elbow room. Fears of the place getting overcrowded are entirely unjustified and have been proven wrong sociologically, demographically, and anthropologically many times over. And yet, there are nonetheless times when we feel cramped; like the world is closing in on us. In fact, I dare say that we feel like that more often than we don’t. And as the world continues to shrink in feeling as technology brings further and further reaches of the globe into the palm of our hand, there will be a growing hunger for space; a growing hunger to feel once again like the world really is as big as all the geological statistics tell us it is. 

All of this has led to increasingly over-the-top efforts to expand our ever-shrinking world by distancing ourselves from society or simply other people whose very constancy suggests they are perhaps not working like we expect. People are pushing further and further out into the frontiers of the world in order to feel like they live in a big, open world, and yet they must continuously push further because they never seem to be able to find the object of their searching. It’s almost like their world has shrunk down to just them and thus no matter how far from other people they get, their world isn’t going to feel any bigger because a universe that doesn’t extend beyond the end of our arms is going to feel crowded no matter where it is located. Have you ever known somebody whose world was limited to just them? Have you ever found yourself in such a place? 

It sure seems like it would be nice to go back to the big world of a century or so ago when our comparatively abysmal lack of knowledge about how the world works left much to be explored. But we can’t. We won’t. Honestly, we don’t really want to. The volume of information out there about the world will be accessible at an even faster pace. We will continue to find points of commonality with people who are not only located in different places from us, but who are in fact generally very different from us. The world is going to continue to shrink in this sense whether we like it or not. 

But what if I told you there was a way to keep your world big that has nothing to do with where you live, what kind of conveniences you are able to enjoy from the comfort of your living room, or how much you even know about the world? What if I told you that in spite of how small the world seems to be getting, you can still live in a universe that stretches beyond your fingertips, beyond the walls of your den, beyond the edge of your property, on out into the farthest reaches of space? Would you want to know how to have it? This morning, we are embarking on a new series called, “How Big Is Your World?” For the next few weeks, we are going to look at how to live in as big a world as possible regardless of what our current circumstances may seem to allow. How big is your world? Is it big enough to suit your fancy, or would you prefer to live in something entirely more spacious? How big is your world? How big do you want it to be? If there was a way to keep it spacious and open in spite of what was going on around you, would you want to know it? 

I submit to you this morning that there is, and I’d like to tell you about it. For help here, we are going to turn to a pretty reliable source: The wisest guy who ever lived besides Jesus. Solomon was the third king of Israel, and the second king in the line of David. He was pretty much a superlative guy in every category. If you think you’re good at something or know something pretty well, Solomon didn’t just know more about it, he knew the most about it. He had more money than you’ll ever have. He was smarter than you’ll ever be. He was better looking than you’ve ever been. He was better with women than you are. He was also wiser than you’ll ever be. Thankfully, he wrote down a lot of his wisdom in order to be able to share it with us. Most of these sayings take the form of proverbial wisdom, and are gathered in a collection of proverbial wisdom called Proverbs. 

The proverbs are basically sayings that describe what wisdom is or how the world should work, all things being equal. Now, all things are not equal, and the world often does not work like Solomon describes in Proverbs, but that’s not a fault of the proverbs themselves. It’s a fault of sin’s keeping the world from working like it should. That being said, adjusting our lives and lifestyles to take into account the wisdom of Proverbs is a pretty wise idea. If you want to enjoy as peaceful and pleasant a life as possible, the proverbs are a good place to start. And thankfully, there are proverbs on almost everything. 

I was studying my way through Solomon’s collection as part of my devotional time, and I came across a verse that reached out and slapped me in the face. Have you ever had that happen? In any event, when I read this verse, I thought, “That’s so true!” Immediately, I knew I was going to have to preach on this idea at some point because it was just too powerful to keep to myself. This little wise saying is found in Proverbs 11:24. Now, normally, I use the CSB translation to preach from, but The Message translation puts this verse in terms that ring on the pitch we need to hear this morning. Check this out with me: “The world of the generous gets larger and larger; the world of the stingy gets smaller and smaller.” 

“Whoa there! Hold on, Preacher. Here I was, tracking with you, thinking you were going to tell me how to live in a big world, and you’ve made a sneaky pivot to talking about money. This was all just some clever ploy to guilt me into giving more. I’m already giving all I can, so you can just take your hand out of my wallet, and start preaching about Jesus or something again.” And hey, I understand that reaction. When preachers start talking about money—especially in the context of a building season—people start getting nervous.The church must be hurting. The pastor just wants a bigger salary. Why can’t they get by on what they already have? Somebody must not be managing the money very well. The reactions flow on and on. But let me clear a couple of things up right out of the gate here, and then we’ll talk about what Solomon was saying. 

First, the church is doing just fine financially. Our bills are paid. We’re living within our means. Yes, we’re getting into a building season, and that’s going to stretch us more than we have been collectively stretched in a long time, but God is the one doing the stretching. He is going to provide for us through the generosity of His people. Rest assured: This is not going to be a sermon about giving more. Second, and more importantly, I don’t want something from you this morning. I want something for you. Let me draw that sentiment out just a bit: God doesn’t want something from you. God doesn’t need your money. As we’ll look at next week, everything is His anyway. Instead, God wants something for you. And what He wants for you is for you to live fully up to the potential with which He created you when you are tapped into His power. But because that’s a lot of potential given the scope of His power, you’re going to need as big a world as possible to achieve it with Him. Anything that helps to expand your world, then, is a good idea to embrace, because you’re going to need the space. 

With all that said, look with me a bit more closely at the wisdom of what Solomon wrote here. “The world of the generous gets larger and larger.” In order to understand what Solomon means here, we need to understand what being generous means. A quick dictionary search on Google turns up this definition: “Showing a readiness to give more of something, as money or time, than is strictly necessary or expected.” Among included synonyms are, “openhanded,” “free-handed,” “bountiful,” “unselfish,” and “ungrudging.” That’s actually pretty helpful, but what did the folks who contributed to the Scriptures think about when they were thinking about generosity? Well, in Hebrew, one of the main words that gets associated with the concept of generosity is the word barach, which is more literally the word for blessing. The idea is that in being generous with someone else, we are being a blessing to them. 

In the Greek, there are a couple of relevant words. The first is aplotes which literally means “singleness.” When Paul talks about being generous givers in 2 Corinthians 8, this is the word he uses. The connotation here leans in the direction of people who give without ulterior motives. They are singleminded givers. They give to glorify God and expand His kingdom and that’s it. The other word is eulogia which is, of course, where we get our word “eulogy.” This word contains the idea of doing good for someone else. Paul uses this word in the same context in 2 Corinthians, but later, in chapter 9. The sense we get from all of this is that generosity is a lifestyle in which we live intentionally for the benefit of the people around us in order to bless them from out of our abundance and with no more motive than to see God glorified by the things that we do with His stuff. 

Well, now that I’ve mentioned it, that passage in 2 Corinthians is actually really instructive for where we’re going. Listen to what Paul writes to the Corinthian believers about the results of being generous in 2 Corinthians 9:10: “Now the one who provides seed for the sower and bread for food will also provide and multiply your seed and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way for all generosity, which produces thanksgiving to God through us. For the ministry of this service is not only supplying the needs of the saints but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God. Because of the proof provided by this ministry, they will glorify God for your obedient confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity in sharing with them and with everyone. And as they pray on your behalf, they will have deep affection for you because of the surpassing grace of God in you.” 

Do you see what Paul is describing here? The generosity of the Corinthian believers was intended to meet the physical needs of fellow believers in Jerusalem who were struggling to get by. But as Paul points out, the results of the generosity didn’t stop there. Instead, once planted, they grew and expanded. The people whose needs were met praised God. So now, instead of one group of people glorifying God by using the stuff He provided to help someone else, thus demonstrating their trust in Him to provide more when they needed it, there are two groups praising God. Their world has doubled in size. 

It gets better still. When Paul notes that the believers in Jerusalem now long for and pray for the Corinthian group, the world has grown larger still as they have adopted a spirit of returning the favor. Guess what the best way for them to return the favor will be? By paying it forward to still others. Thus, the world of the Corinthian believers which originally included just them has grown by their generosity to include not only the Jerusalem group, but also any further groups who they support. And, given Paul’s promise that God intends to increase the harvest of their righteousness, the great likelihood is that they will do this same sort of thing for other groups of people, thus expanding the scope of their world even further. This is not merely a world growing by multiples, but by exponents! Indeed, generosity expands our world. 

Actually, Paul’s illustration at the beginning of this little passage using gardening and sowing seeds as a metaphor rings with sparkling clarity in light of the more literal rendering of Proverbs 11:24. Listen to this from the CSB now: “One person gives freely, yet gains more; another withholds what is right, only to become poor.” The Hebrew word for “gives freely” is the word pezer which literally means “to scatter seed.” The idea here is that being generous is like scattering seed. When you plant a field, the more seed you put down, the bigger your harvest is going to be. The seeds all cost you something, but the return far outweighs the cost, and you end up with more than when you started. Generosity expands our world.

Well, when you practice generosity, what’s happening is that you are sowing seeds. You are sowing Gospel seeds. You are planting the seeds of your world. Now, it may not look like much at first, but neither does your garden when you first plant it. But give it some time. Eventually the seeds are going to take root and begin to expand. And as they grow, so will your world. The more generous you are, the bigger your world will become. Generosity expands our world. It increases our borders beyond us out to encompass every person who is affected by our generosity. There is literally no end to how big our world can become when we live like this. Generosity expands our world. 

When you take the things God has given you—time, talents, and treasure—and use them for the benefit of others, giving out more than is expected in order to bless with no strings attached as an expression of your trust in God to provide more as you need it to bless still others, your world is going to grow beyond what you think is possible. Generosity expands our world. 

The opposite of this, of course, is to live with a small world. When we take the blessings God gives us, regardless of the form they happen to take, and treat them as if they are purely for our consumption, we shrink our world down to just us. There are no connections to anyone else. We are living essentially for ourselves. There is not even a meaningful connection to God. We may give lip service to Him, but the evidence of our lifestyle reveals what we really believe. We become what one author calls “Christian atheists.” We can and probably will run hither and yon to find ways to feel like our world is big, but that sense of universal claustrophobia is not going to go away. 

This actually becomes a vicious cycle wherein we begin frantically collecting more and more stuff, holding tightly to what we do have, in order to give ourselves the opportunities we think we need to feel like we live in a big world. The feelings don’t play out (because that’s not how to live in a big world), and so we collect even more, and hold even more tightly to what we do have. All the while, the world continues collapsing down around us. In another one of the books Solomon contributed to in the Scriptures (Ecclesiastes), he tells us that he knows this is true from experience. He had all the money, time, opportunity, and experience in the world, and yet as long as it was all focused on him, his world continued to shrink. 

We desire to live in a big world. The way to do this was recognized almost 3,000 years ago by the wisest man who ever lived. If you want to live in a big world, the way forward is clear: Be generous. Generosity expands our world. This doesn’t mean just giving money—although it certainly doesn’t preclude that—but rather adopting an entire lifestyle that looks to use what we have for the benefit of others to the glory of God. But if we’re honest, most of us have more trouble being generous with our money than with anything else, so that’s worthy of some special attention. In the next few weeks, we are going to explore this idea in a lot more detail. If you want to enjoy a big world, you won’t want to miss it. 

So then, how big is your world? If you want to enjoy the biggest world possible, you won’t want to miss a single part of this series. How big is your world? How big do you want it to be? You were made to live in a huge world. If you want it, generosity is the way to go. Generosity expands our world.