Book Spotlight: A Short Guide to Gospel Generosity by Nathan W. Harris

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Benjamin Kreps:

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Mark Prater podcast where our aim is to connect our global family of Sovereign Grace churches with our Executive Director. Mark, you are, as anybody who watches or reads the podcast knows, a reader. And every good leader is a reader, in my opinion. Always seeking to learn and grow, especially in a category like one of our shaping virtues—which are entailments of the gospel that we embrace together in Sovereign Grace and really show us how the gospel creates a culture of grace shaped by the gospel. One of those shaping virtues is generosity, and you've been reading a new helpful resource that you want to recommend to us.

Mark Prater:

I have just finished one. And generosity is a topic I'm trying to study regularly, not only for my own benefit so that Jill and I could be more generous in our giving. But just to find ways to even stir generosity in our family of churches. So there's a couple that I want to mention in this podcast. The first one is a book I just finished reading a few weeks ago. It's called A Short Guide to Gospel Generosity: Giving as an Act of Grace, and it is written by Nathan Harris. Nathan Harris is the Vice President of Advancement at Grace College and Seminary in Winona Lake, Indiana. Which by the way, we have a Sovereign Grace Church in Winona Lake, Indiana.

Benjamin Kreps:

Shout out Mark Goodwin.

Mark Prater:

Shout out to Mark Goodwin, the senior pastor. Yep, Christ Covenant Church is there. But I really benefited from this book, enjoyed this book. It's a short read, so much so that I'm now taking my Faith and Work group through it at Covenant Fellowship Church just to help try to stir generosity among people in their vocations who go and make money and now can have a gospel center perspective in terms of what they are to do with their money. So, I found this book really helpful overall.

Let me just say, he gets the gospel right. It is theologically sound, and he addresses issues that I think are really, really helpful. He starts book, I think in a helpful way, even in a thought-provoking way. Obviously he talks about the world and the materialistic world that we live in and how that can just affect us as Christians in terms of how we view money. He's got this couple of sentences in the very first chapter, “Our focus has become purely on accumulating and displaying our wealth instead of stewarding and giving what we have. Money is now a means to happiness and not a means for radical generosity.” So a challenging sentence there. He not only talks about the effect of the culture, but even the effect of the Christian culture can actually have a dampening effect upon generosity.

And he said something I never thought about before. He said Christian stewardship, which should be taught, and he's all for teaching Christian stewardship, if not understood rightly, will actually put a damper on generosity. So obviously he wants Christian stewardship to be taught in churches. We are to live in a way that we try to stay out of debt as much as possible. We are to save our money so we can provide for our families and have a good contingency fund. But at what point do we stop saving and start giving is really what he's challenging there. And he says this, I think it's very good, “We tend to trust in our ability to save and not the sufficiency of God to provide. Ultimately in fear of losing our newfound financial peace, we ignore the Christians call to give. We are told to save, save, save, but the gospel calls us to give, give, give.”

And I thought, “Oh, that's a wonderful observation and really well said.” So he kind of sets up sort of the issues a bit in the first chapter, and then he just goes on to define gospel generosity. It's a basic, simple definition. This is what he says, “Gospel generosity is simply giving that is rooted in the saving work of Jesus Christ. It is the Christian's joyful awareness of what Christ has done for them and how they are privileged to participate in proclaiming that work through giving and advancing the gospel.” And an appropriate quote to read. We're recording this on Maundy Thursday. This podcast episode will be released the day after Easter. When you receive this podcast, we will have reflected upon the death of Jesus Christ and then rejoiced in his resurrection on Easter Sunday as we just did. And generosity is our joyful response to that. And that's gospel generosity.

He dedicated a whole chapter to the Old Testament and the Old Testament tithe, in particular, because he wanted to first of all say, “You've got to understand that rightly.” There were actually three Old Testament tithes. There was the Levitical tithe, the festival tithe, and the compassion tithe, sort of a benevolence tithe. And if you add all of those up, the people of God at that time, were giving 23.3% away. So, it's not just limited to the 10%. They're actually giving over double that in the Old Testament. But he goes on to say, makes the case, that the Old Testament tithe is not a requirement. Does the New Testament command Christians to tithe? Absolutely not. He's very, very clear about that because Jesus has come to fulfill the law. He's fulfilled that law. And so therefore, generosity now is not based on an Old Testament law, but rather on the grace that we have in Jesus Christ. And grace giving actually is intended to stir more generosity, even beyond the 23.3% that the Israelites were giving away. So it's just a very compelling way to think about the Old Testament tithe and New Testament grace motivated giving.

One other thing that I hadn't really thought about before—there's so much more I could say about the book. He talks about fidelity, which is an interesting choice of word and what he means, in part, by that is our fidelity to following Christ overall. But that would include in our giving. So, he says this, “Those with fidelity to Christ call to follow him don't grieve over giving but see it as an opportunity to be generous and aid those in need. We can give all that we have because all that we need isn't following Jesus.” So just really well said. Love the fidelity term that he used there. So this is a book I would recommend. We're having great discussion about it right now in my Faith and Work group study that we're doing. And that's the first one that I wanted to recommend to our pastors and every member of Sovereign Grace Churches. I think you would benefit from that book.

Benjamin Kreps:

Wonderful. Well, I'm definitely picking that up. And I mean even just this title and the subtitle as you shared that with us, it really isn't jargon when the gospel touches down meaningfully in the life of a church, one of the effects, some of the fruit of that is generosity. You think about Paul and second Corinthians encouraging the church in Corinth to give. He's doing it by reminding them that there was one who was infinitely rich, in eternity past who made himself poor so that we, through his poverty could become rich—that which we celebrate this Easter, this holy week. And in light of the gospel, how can we not be generous givers? And you have the Macedonian Church that help us understand it's not about having lots of money. They're begging to give even though they're dirt poor. And so, the gospel really is the lens through which we understand our lives together in the church and personally, when it comes to giving.

The reality is that sometimes pastors can be reluctant to talk about giving because it can feel like salesman-ish or something like that. When the truth is, pastors, we have a wonderful opportunity to actually help our folks understand the gospel in a deeper way so that generosity is the fruit of that understanding, the application of the gospel. And so a resource like this, I think can be very helpful to pastors and to those who are members of our churches as we consider this topic. And furthermore, you mentioned something at the State of the Union late last year. And I just saw the Pastors Conference registration email went out and I jumped on that immediately looking forward. It’s not that far away. But at the last one, you talked about Journey of Generosity retreats, and that's piqued my interest and certainly I think piqued the interest of others. But actually there have been some of these retreats that are going on and you wanted to talk to us about a tool to help us in our churches to grow in our understanding application of the gospel when it comes to giving.

Mark Prater:

Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's why I wanted to mention this resource again. I did mention, as you said, Ben, in my State of the Union, Generous Giving is a ministry that has put together Journey of Generosity retreats. There's videos that you watch and sort of a workbook that you go through just for the purpose of stirring generosity. And there are members of my church at Covenant Fellowship, Bob and Val Wright, who are trained facilitators to do JoGs, as they call them--Journey of Generosity retreats. And the whole purpose of them is to just simply stir generosity. The facilitators are trained by generous giving, not to tell people where to give their money. They're simply to stir generosity. And something I'm wanting to cultivate more of in Sovereign Grace is that virtue that you mentioned at the beginning of our podcast, Ben, that one of generosity. May that mark our churches even more and for the purpose of giving to advancing the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And Bob and Val have done these for a number of years now, done some in our church, but they've been happening since the State of the Union. He's done a JoG in Charleston, South Carolina with people from Mike Seaver’s Church. I believe there was a couple from the Knoxville Church as well. Then after my State of the Union, Eric Turbedsky, the West regional leader and senior pastor of Sovereign Grace Church Orange, contacted me and said, “How do I contact Bob about getting a Journey of Generosity retreat scheduled because I want to take my entire region through it.” So just a few weeks ago, Bob and Val were out there in the west at I think their West Regional meeting or regional assembly meeting, and the pastors in that region went through that retreat and they loved it. And then the next day he had gathered a number of church members from the churches in Southern California, Sovereign Grace churches there, and then Bob and Val took them through it.

So what you're seeing is this growing interest in this topic of generosity and you're seeing it have an effect because not only has he done one in Charleston, he's done one out west. He also did one in Roseburg, Oregon, Dave York and Dave Quila had him in. I was recently interacting with them, or I heard through Bob, I can't remember which, just how generosity was definitely stirred in their church after they did a JoG there. So this is just a reminder to our pastors. Let's stir a culture of generosity and Sovereign Grace. This is simply one tool and one resource that can be helpful. And Bob and I are actually talking about how we can deploy him effectively more strategically in doing these because he can't get everywhere. It's really helping other people be facilitators of these retreats. But if you're interested, if you're a Sovereign Grace pastor and you're interested, let me know and I'll get you in touch with Bob and we'll kind of go from there. Because I mentioned that in my State of the Union, those retreats have been happening and we're seeing the effect of generosity in each of those places where those retreats were done.

Benjamin Kreps:

That sounds like an excellent resource. We were talking about this, of course, preparing to record the podcast. I went on generousgiving.org and on that website there's some information about Journey of Generosity retreats as guys are looking to check this kind of stuff out. Definitely talk to Mark about it if you're interested in doing that sort of retreat. I am in our church. We've talked about this before, but there's a lot of Sovereign Grace Churches that have been experiencing growth. And oftentimes that can bring good folks, but that are not well taught, don't have much a robust church experience. And so, something like this could be a really helpful tool to really equip and teach in the church when it comes to this vital area of generosity as you've been talking about throughout the podcast. So, thank you, Mark, for the resource and the recommendation. Definitely be checking out the Journey of Generosity retreats and thank you all for checking out the podcast. We'll see you here next week, Lord willing. Bye for now.