Living in God’s big world requires us to be generous. But what does that actually look like? Today, as we continue our series, How Big Is Your World?, we are talking about the secret to living as big as we possibly can. The key here is found in a practice that often seems like little more than a religious exercise, but has the potential to be much, much more than that if we get it right. Read on to find out what it is and how to do it.

Big Living

When I was in high school, I was in the marching band. Now, at some schools, the marching band is where all the band nerds hang out, and everybody else pretty much ignores them because they’re all really weird. At my school this was kind of the case, but not entirely. I say “not entirely” because there were 250 of us, and 250 people out of a total school population of around 2,000 is pretty hard to ignore. There were band nerds everywhere. I mean, everywhere. We came from every class and group in the school too. There were jocks, cheerleaders, traditional nerds, Goth kids, pretty kids, Christians, atheists, math nerds, the weird scholar’s bowl kids (I was one of those too), drama kids, choir kids, debaters, rednecks, preppy kids, the kids who didn’t really fit into a single category because they tended to be all over the place, and so on and so forth. The band was really the melting pot of the school, and we all got along pretty well. It didn’t hurt that my sophomore year we went to Hawaii. Things got pretty popular after that. 

Anyway, I wasn’t just in the marching band. I was a drummer. Drummers are like the weird kids at the weird kids’ convention. We were our own subset of odd within the larger odd subset that was the band. Part of the reason for this is that drummers tend to be cliquish. We hung out together more than with the other members of the band. We met at odd times to practice over and above normal band rehearsals. We had our own camp in the summers a full month before regular band camp. I could go on, but I’ll either start to bore you or scare you, so let me get to the point. 

This drum camp was always one of the highlights of the year for me. It was good to get playing again after taking a month or so off. We boned up on old skills, and worked on our chops—that’s drummer lingo for the muscles and playing skills necessary to cut it as a drummer. Working on our chops was always fun…but not really at any other time of the year. The reason for this is that building chops means doing a whole lot of repetitive playing designed to build strength and endurance. It was building muscle memory. We’d get in there and play the same exercise 5,000 times. In the choir room. With no ear protection for anyone. But I can hear just fine; just ask my wife. 

Now, if you knew you were going to play something like that 5,000 times, you wouldn’t do it. But drum techs are sneaky. They tell you to play something 10 times, and then have you do it just “one more time” for the next 4,990 reps. Now, on the one hand, all this repetition does its job—I can still remember most of the exercises we played. Eventually, though, the repetitiveness starts to get old. You get tired of playing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and…you get it. You’re ready to move on to new and different things. The familiarity breeds contempt. 

This idea actually applies in a number of different areas of life. Take work for instance. In the beginning, a new job comes with a sense of excitement. There’s a build-up of anticipation as we look forward to embarking on something new. But after a while, we get used to it all, and it degrades from a thrilling new venture to…just a job. It goes from the opportunity to make an impact to the frustrating means to the necessary end of receiving a paycheck. Familiarity breeds contempt. Or how about driving? Most teenagers are itching to drive by the time they reach 16. All throughout the learning process they are constantly begging their parents to let them drive. When they finally get their license, they never want to stay home…unless, of course, they have to pay for their own gas. Driving on somebody else’s dime is always more exciting. 

But over time, driving becomes just another chore, especially the drive to work if you have a long one. It’s the same thing day in and day out. The same trees, the same bumps, the same houses, the same traffic, the same construction. Same, same, same! We start looking for things to break up the monotony—new routes, faster speeds, books on Audible, new podcasts, and so on. In college I made the three hour drive back and forth from campus so many times that I started reading books or magazines or doing crossword puzzles on the drive just to keep myself awake and engaged…you probably shouldn’t share that with anyone. 

There’s one more place this happens: Worship. What happens within these four walls each Sunday morning can become incredibly routine. It can become something we do because it’s what we do…even if you don’t really want to do it. The routines of worship themselves can fall prey to the contempt of familiarity. We stand and sit at about the same times every week. We sing out of the same hymnal. We sing many of the same songs. There’s always a sermon. It’s always long. There’s always some prayers. And a children’s sermon. You get the picture. In a church setting like this one, if you’re the kind of person who needs to have things changed every now and then just for the sake of changing them, this all probably drives you a little crazy. Eventually, it’s really tempting to start looking for ways to either break up the monotony or else to check out. If you have young kids, you start looking over their shoulder at the activity page they got in Sunday school. People in the middle with smart phones are either checking their email or the latest standings or playing a game, or something like that. Eventually, we learn that church is boring. You may still do it because you’re supposed to, but that doesn’t mean you enjoy it. When worship becomes just a routine, our hearts start to check out.

You know, this is actually a phenomenon that has been going on for a long time. It’s been happening for at least 2,400 years. Way back before Jesus was on anybody’s radar, but after their time of exile in Babylon, the people of Israel were deep into a routine of worship. Their worship didn’t look very much like ours in most respects, but it did in one: It was always the same thing. Same sacrifices. Same purification rites. Same gathering in the Temple. Same, same, same. Now, they kept at it because they had learned well during the exile that you didn’t slack off on worship. Even if you didn’t want to go, you went, because that’s what God expected, and you didn’t want to make God angry. You wouldn’t like God when He’s angry. No, the people were faithful about showing up for worship physically, but as the contempt of familiarity grew, they found themselves checking out spiritually. They talked a mean game, but it was mostly just that: talk. And all the while, their world was shrinking. It grew smaller and smaller until it didn’t extend very far out beyond the end of their fingertips. 

Now, the people then were harboring a lot of thoughts about God that weren’t correct, but they were right about one thing: you don’t mess with worship. Worship is all about acknowledging God for who He is (along with celebrating and participating in that), and if you acknowledge the wrong gods—something the people knew their ancestors had spent a lot of years doing—there are going to be consequences. God’s picky about the whole worship thing because with our worship we reveal what we really think about Him. More than that, we reveal the god we are actually worshiping. The problem for the people of Israel was that they had picked up a belief somewhere along the way that it was the physical things of worship—the things prone to familiarity—that mattered most to God. As a result, they were really good about following through on the physical, the ritual, but they weren’t connecting much with the spiritual and, again, their world was shrinking because of it. 

This morning finds us in the third part of our series, How Big Is Your World? In the first couple of weeks, we discovered together that living in a big world requires us to be generous. Generosity expands our world to include everyone impacted by it. Then, last week, we found that the reason generosity expands our world is that God is the real owner of everything. We are only rich in the second way—we are only rich vicariously through God. If we don’t handle “our” wealth in line with how He handles it, we’ll lose it. But if we follow His lead toward generosity, He will be even more generous with us, letting us enjoy more and more of what belongs to Him. This morning, I want to look with you specifically at one way we can help ourselves to not lose track of who the real owner of everything we might naturally declare to be ours is. We are going to find this by looking at a warning delivered to a group of people who had forgotten. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way with me to the very last document in the Old Testament, Malachi. We are going to focus in on some verses near the end of the prophet’s message, but in order to make the most sense out of those, let me run down the rest of the message for you right quick. 

Malachi was the very last prophet God sent to the people of Israel before John the Baptist started announcing Jesus’ arrival. After Malachi is a period Biblical historians sometimes call “the Silent Years” because there was no word from God…for 400 years. Nobody heard so much as a peep for about the same amount of time Europeans have been in the New World. Malachi wrote to the people about 100 years after they had returned to the land from exile. They had rebuilt their lives, and had returned to the worship of the Lord in the Temple, but while the people were showing up for worship, their hearts just weren’t in it like before. And, this wasn’t merely a problem in the pews. The problem went straight on up to the podium. The people’s hearts weren’t in it because the priests’ weren’t either. They were offering God sacrifices that were junk. The God they professed to be worshiping was the glorious creator of the universe, and yet they were willing to give Him a sick or lame animal as a sacrifice. 

Think of it like this: if Billy Graham was still alive and was coming over for dinner, would you serve him leftovers? No, you’d break out the china and whip up your very best dishes. So, why did these priests think it was okay to offer God—significantly more worthy of honor than Billy Graham—junk? Simply put: Because they didn’t think He was that important. More specifically, they thought that the real honor was in the action, not in the spirit behind it. And, with the leaders thinking like this, the people soon followed them right in line. They’d promise the moon—as if God could be fooled by grand gestures of fidelity—and deliver a dud. As a result, God called them out in Malachi 1:14: “‘The deceiver is cursed who has an acceptable male in his flock and makes a vow but sacrifices a defective animal to the Lord. ‘For I am great King,’ says the Lord of Armies, ‘and my name will be feared among the nations.’” 

The thing is, though, while we think a kind of spiritual neglect like this can be left at church and won’t really have an impact on the rest of our lives…we’re wrong. In the next part of the warning, Malachi outlines how the people’s spiritual infidelity amid a grand show of faithfulness was coming home to roost. Their unfaithfulness to their covenant with Him was playing itself out at home in an unfaithfulness to the covenants made between husbands and wives. Faithfulness at home requires a foundation to be sustained. That foundation is faithfulness to God. Apart from that, our home, our world will eventually crumble. I think the current state of our own culture bears witness to this pretty well. And, when our world crumbles, the remainder is smaller than it was before.

In any event, what’s going on here is actually a cycle. Familiarity breeds contempt at church which leads to problems back at home, which, in turn, hamstrings our ability to engage well back at church. The contempt causes us to get slack in our devotion, which hurts our ability to be devoted to things outside church, causing us to focus more on restoring them without realizing that we’re trying to fix the frame without addressing the foundation. Eventually, the walls start to cave in, and our world gets smaller. We, like Israel, fall to thinking the rituals are what matter most, when God really wants our hearts. 

In the end, we’re saved by the fact that God is consistent with His character even when we’re not. He says as much to the people of Israel through His prophet Malachi. Look with me here starting at Malachi 3:6: “‘Because I, the Lord, have not changed, you descendants of Jacob have not been destroyed. Since the days of your fathers, you have turned from my statutes; you have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you.’ says the Lord of Armies.” 

This is God’s saying, “Look, you people have never gotten this right. Your fathers blew it. Their fathers blew it. Their fathers blew it. It goes right on back up the chain. It’s a good thing I’m patient, kind, loving, merciful, forgiving, and really want to have a relationship with you or else I’d just wipe you out. As it stands, return to me. Live in my big world once again. Get off this crazy cycle.” You see, the thing about a crazy cycle is that you really can jump off at any point. You just put the brakes on, hope off, and start a healthier new pattern. This is exactly what God calls them to do here. Their problems started back with the contempt of familiarity in worship. They continued at home with their families breaking apart. Here, we’re on down the chain of collateral a few clicks. 

The problem here is that their soured attitude toward worship in general, compounded by their jaded vision from home problems, has brought them to the place where they aren’t even really going through the motions of worship very well anymore. When God calls them to return to him, to live once again in His big world, the very rational response on their part is: “How? We are so far down this road! How do we get back on the right track?” The answer? Pick a motion, and start going through it again, not halfheartedly, but with everything you’ve got. Okay, but which motion? Well, how about the one that tangibly connects what happens within these four walls with what happens on the outside? How about the motion that can remind us most clearly that God is someone worthy of our honor and trust and faithfulness? How about giving? 

Look at how God spells this out to them starting here in v. 8: “‘Will a man rob God? Yet you are robbing me!’ ‘How do we rob you?’ you ask.” Let me pause here just a minute. Have you ever had somebody rightly accuse you of doing something wrong, but of which you were either not aware or didn’t consider to be wrong until they said something? How did you respond? Maybe something like this went? You did this! How did I do that? God says: “You’ve been robbing me!” The people respond, “How?!?” God makes the charge explicit: “By not making the payments of the tenth and the contributions. You are suffering under a curse, yet you—the whole nation—are still robbing me.”

Think about this with me for a second. God accuses the people of robbing Him by not giving to Him. Really? That’s quite a charge. I mean, we certainly don’t think in those terms very often today. We think more in terms of God’s robbing us by calling us to give from what we’ve worked hard to earn in the first place. Why, for God to talk like this seems like He thinks He owns everything, and that we’re taking what belongs to Him…oh wait. Right. Last week’s message. He does own everything. He doesn’t have to share any of it with us. That He does is entirely an act of grace. When we give back to Him, we are giving what already belongs to Him. This is ultimately about Him, but in the short term, it’s more about us. It’s about us, because in the act of giving to God what belongs to Him in the first place, we are reminded that it does in fact belong to Him and not us. This has a couple of different results. First, it keeps in our mind who God is. He is the creator and owner of everything. Not us. Second, giving like this is an act of trust in God. We give what we think we need, leaving us less than we think we need, all the while trusting Him to make what we see as less than enough, more than enough. 

With this in mind, look at the solution God proposes to the people: “‘Bring the full tenth into the storehouse so that there may be food in my house. Test me in this way,’ says the Lord of Armies. ‘See if I will not open the floodgates of heaven and pour out a blessing for you without measure. I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it will not ruin the produce of your land and your vine in your field will not fail to produce fruit,’ says the Lord of Armies. ‘Then all the nations will consider you fortunate, for you will be a delightful land,’ says the Lord of Armies.” 

Do you see what’s happening here? God’s solution to the problem of robbing Him, which was itself merely a symptom of the crazy cycle they had been on, is for the people to start giving. Not a half-hearted giving commiserate with the kind of sacrifices they’d been offering, but rather a full-bodied giving that went over and above what they considered reasonable or even possible. The result of this, God promises, will be abundant blessing. This is a new cycle to replace the old one. This is a cycle of blessing. This new cycle works like this: the people step out and give abundantly, trusting God to be consistent with His character. God responds with blessings of various kinds, thereby affirming and building the peoples’ nascent trust. The people respond in turn by stepping out in trust again, but with even more boldness than the last time. God responds to this, and the cycle continues. 

Incidentally, there’s a word to describe this trust in God to act in a manner consistent with His revealed character: Faith. When we give, we are building faith. When our faith gets bigger, what happens is that we are coming to a deeper and fuller understanding of who God is. Well, given the nature of who God is, a deeper understanding of Him is always going to lead to worship. And not the going-through-the-motions, contemptuous-by-familiarity kind of worship that had gotten them into this problem in the first place, but a real, deep, heartfelt worship that never grows old no matter what the external circumstances of that worship happen to be. The more we worship like this, the stronger our faith will grow. More specifically, the more we display this trust in God by giving with sacrificial generosity, the stronger our faith will grow, and the more and better we will worship. The bigger our giving, the bigger our trust, the bigger our worship. This kind of worship is the fruit of a return to Him. And, when we return to Him, He will return to us. We will get to enjoy the blessings of His presence. Our world will be defined by His, which is much, much larger than ours. Putting a point on all of this, if we want to live in as big a world as possible, we need to give as generously as we can. The more generous we are, the bigger our world will be. Living big means giving big. Living big means giving big. 

If you want a break from the monotonous, repetitive world you live in on a daily basis, this is one great way to do that. Start giving. And, if you already give, give more. Give not because we need your money. Give to see God’s work done and wait and watch for how He is going to meet your needs in spite of the financial loss you take. As you do, watch how your world gets bigger and bigger. Living big means giving big. 

Now, the prophet uses the word “tenth” or “tithe” here, but that meant something different to Israel than it does us. They never just gave a flat 10% of their income. Their expected gifts ran as much as 33% of their income depending on the year. Also, while the word tithe is mentioned in the New Testament, through the lens of Christ, what followers of Jesus are expected to practice is sacrificial giving. Sacrificial giving involves giving to the point of sacrifice. It’s kind of in the name. A sacrifice is by definition costly. It hurts at least a little. It should make us a bit uncomfortable. But this discomfort lasts only for a moment as the discomfort is replaced quickly by confidence that the God who owns everything will meet our needs, whatever they happen to be. He will invite us to live in His big world. Living big means giving big. 

As for how to actually practice sacrificial giving, here are three tips: First, make it a priority. Our act of giving should come before anything else. If we wait for the leftovers, there won’t ever be any. To tell you the truth, if we don’t give first, we’re not actually placing much, if any, trust in God. We’re saying that we’ll trust Him once something else gets taken care of first. That would put us right on par with the Israelites receiving Malachi’s message. Second, pick a percentage. While Jesus followers need not be limited to 10% in their thinking (because for some, 10% is no sacrifice at all), it is a good idea to pick a percentage and not worry about the actual amount of the gift. Amounts can grow static and stale. They can grow familiar and become objects of contempt. I have to give God this amount. Percentages, though, are dynamic and change based on circumstances. Finally, once you choose a percentage, progressively increase it. Giving like this is a kind of muscle. Faith expressed like this is a muscle. If you want to grow a muscle, doing the same workout every single day won’t cut it. You stick with something until it doesn’t hurt anymore, and then you do more. Without this increase, workouts eventually get boring and unproductive. Endless reps of the same thing breed familiarity, and familiarity breeds contempt. On the other hand, living big means giving big. If you find yourself this morning on a crazy cycle with a shrinking world, put on the breaks. Start a new cycle of life that will expand your world: Start giving and give like crazy. If that’s here—you can commit above and beyond your normal giving to our building project, for instance—great, but wherever it is, give. Living big means giving big. 

This idea doesn’t seem to make sense at first thought. The world thinks it’s crazy, and will gladly tell you as much. But talk to someone who has put it into practice. The blessings that come from this mindset and approach to big living are hard to quantify because God isn’t limited in terms of how He extends those to us. But oh the stories. Stories of God’s miraculous provision. Stories of internal joy and contentment. Stories of impacting the lives of others. The kingdom of God always runs on ideas that are counterintuitive to how the world operates. What could be more counterintuitive that the key to living in as big a world as possible is to take actions that will seemingly make your world smaller? Yet living big means giving big. The question you need to ask yourself, then, is this: just how big do you want to live? God is inviting you into the full scope of His big world. If that’s something that interests you, giving big is one surefire path to take. Living big means giving big. Come back next week for part four of our journey, and we will talk about one reason getting all of this right matters so much.