Generosity Is Putting Feeling Into Action

2 Corinthians 8:12

"For if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted

according to that a man hath, and not

according to that he hath not." 

       
         Paul's heart was toward organizing the Church of Jerusalem. This was the Mother Church but she was poor, and it was Paul's desire that all the Gentiles' Churches should remember and help that Church which was their mother in the faith. So he reminds the Corinthians of their duty and urges them to generosity. 
        He tells them how generous the Macedonian Churches had been. They were poor and in trouble but they gave all they had, far more than anyone could have expected. At the Jewish Feast of Purim there is a regulation which says that, however poor a man is, he must find someone poorer than himself and give him a gift. It is not always those who are most wealthy who are most generous; often those who have least to give are the most ready to give. As the common saying has it, "It is the poor who help the poor," because they know what poverty is like.
        The sacrifice of Jesus did not begin on the Cross. It did not even begin with his birth. It began in heaven, when he laid his glory to the side and consented to come to earth. The challenge to the Christian is, "With that tremendous example of generosity before you, how can you hold back?"    
        My Friends, we must put fine feeling into fine action. But a feeling which remains only a feeling, a pity which remains a pity, remains only of the heart, a fine desire that never turns into a fine deed, is a sad and frustrated thing. The tragedy of life so often is, not that we have no high impulses, but that we fail to turn them into actions. Life has a strange way of evening things up. Far more often than not we find that it is measured to us with the same measure as we measure to others. Life has a way of repaying bounty with bounty, and the sparing spirit with the sparing spirit. If men were only true to their own highest standards, if we all lived always at our best, what a difference it would make! 
        Amen!!

Reading: ( 2 Cor. 8:1-15)

May God Bless You 

And Your Families

Minister Robert A. Lail Sr.

The Cross Life Ministry