Giving (What's in it for me?)

After a little bit of a post-Easter break, I thought I'd put a few posts up about Christian giving...

On our local radio station there's currently a charity auction, where you bid for stuff and the money goes to a local kids' charity. One of the things to bid for is two Take That tickets (no, I haven't taken out another mortgage to bid - yet!) The basic selling point of the auction is that you can give some money to charity AND get something for yourself.

A lot of charity is like that these days - it suggests that we're unwilling to give money away unless there's something in it for us (in which case it's not really giving money at all). It's similar with Comic Relief, isn't it? We'd never ring that number and pledge money unless we had tuned in to watch Ricky Gervais, Jonathan Ross, Little Britain and all the others do funny stuff. We're happy to give to charity - if there's something in it for us too.

That's quite different from the Bible's view of giving. One place Christian giving is dealt with in detail is 2 Corinthians 8:1-9:15; here's one verse from it:

'This service (ie giving) that you perform is not only supplying the needs of God's people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God' (9:12).

Two things to say - firstly, Christians should give money away in order, first and foremost, to help other Christians who are less fortunate than us. Secondly, and this is very different to the 'charity auction' way of doing things, Christians should be generous so that more thanks will go to God. Christians give not to get thanks for themselves, but so that God would get thanks.

After all, if you have some money, it's God who gave it to you - and he gave it to you so that you could help Christians who need help (that's what 8:13-15 is saying). So when you give that money to poorer Christians, it's God (who gave you the money in the first place) who gets the thanks, rather than you.

As Christians when the collection plate comes round at church, or a Christian charity asks for money, our first thought should never be 'What's in it for me?', but 'What's in it for God?' Giving money helps people; and giving money brings thanks to God; and that will surely be enough for us to long to give our money to those in the worldwide church who need it.