1 Corinthians 16

1 Corinthians 16:2

THE LAW OF 1 Corinthians 16:2, or the science of antiquities, has enriched our age not a little. From ruined and buried cities, out of artificial mounds, away from the recesses of catacombs and up from the dark comers of cloister and cathedral, students of the past have digged and brought many an article of wealth. Some of those finds were rich in their intrinsic value, as gold, diamonds or other jewels; some more valuable than even ruby or sapphire because age has added antique price to the trifling toy; and yet other discoveries increased the world’s wealth yet more because they added new pages or volumes to the written history, and flashed a long-needed light across the passages in dispute. But all jewels are not buried in the bowels of the earth. Many lie on the surface, sparkling to the sunshine, or else are only hid by some thin coat of dust which might be cleared away with a single breath of the fortunate finder. Neither indeed, are all the jewels of knowledge either in use as ornaments of many minds or hid away beneath some heaps of rubbish.

Many of them lie on the very surface of learning and have only been walked over, galloped past, because men so poorly appreciate the value of every nugget from the fertile mine of God’s Word. I am fully persuaded that had the followers of Christ known the intrinsic worth of this text from the day when Paul let this jewel drop before their eyes, and had they seized it at once and begun to wear it as the badge of their promise to Him whose Spirit inspired the Word, the wicked world would have acknowledged Christ as Lord ere this, and Heaven would now be singing the paean of His triumph over all.

The one thing which has held the millennium back more than all things else, has been the anti-missionary spirit in the “body” of the missionary Christ. We hear now of anti-missionary Baptists, and we might think that no other denomination was ever disturbed by their presence. But so far from the truth is such a thought, that the informed well know that only a hundred years have passed since the Catholic and Protestant world, waging an ecclesiastical warfare about the letter of truth, had each forgotten and despised the Master’s great commission: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations”.It is our pride today that when at last God, wearied with the slothfulness of pretended Christians, thought to send a prophet to prepare the way for the coming of His Son into heathen lands, He found among those of my own denominational faith a servant to whom He could commit the work. Every evangelical sect of our times has risen up at last to laud and revere the name of William Carey, the Baptist preacher who, in 1792, lifted up a voice and wielded a pen which stirred the universal Christian hearts to a sense of neglect, in that the world had been left so long without the light of God’s Word, or even a whisper of His matchless grace and love. The text of this morning stands as the natural and needed complement of the great commission. Christ said to His servants, “Go”; and in this text He speaks to us again and says, “Send.” We are not ignorant of the occasion of their needs.

Paul was not raising funds to liquidate some debt —not asking money to build a parsonage or church, not even pleading for his own salary, but in behalf of the poor of another city. This is the one place in the New Testament where we find full directions as to missionary offering.

I want you to think about this first, as a lesson on giving.THE METHOD IS THE BETTER VERSUS THE BAD The text urges that each member of the church lay by a certain part of his income every week, in proportion as God has prospered him. The Apostle inveighs against their leaving that collection until he comes to preach and take up the offering. If Paul had not been inspired at all, I think we can see reasons why his notion ought to be adopted by every church and made the basis of their method in giving.The appeal is made to principle and not to passion. There are some men who are marvels in their ability at money-raising. I listened one evening to Sam Jones as he stood in the Warren Memorial Presbyterian church of Louisville, and with eloquence, urgence and wit, wrung from his audience something over four thousand dollars for the Holcomb mission. I went away willing to vote him a genius in collecting benevolences; but there is a difference as wide as the sea between getting money as that was gotten and doing what a brother minister of mine calls “Farming the Benevolences.” Jones’ method may prosperously, and I think, justly, be employed by one who comes before an audience gathered for the appointed purpose of giving, and who expects never to face that same company again.

He has no time to “farm benevolences” in the sense of educating the people into some greater degree of liberality. The single hour holds in its short arms his one and only opportunity to reach and stir the laggard spirits into the needed grace of giving, and if eloquence can move the soul, or wit can prick the conscience, I believe that it is all right for a man to employ either or both.

But who does not know that such a method has in itself the elements of its own defeat, if often attempted? The dwellers by the sea will tell you that every tide rolling landward till the high-water mark is reached has its counter current that, setting in presently, will drag that wave seaward again until the beach is bare and scorched by the summer sun or chilled with winter’s blast. So it is with the tide of human feelings, and he who makes any important work depend on the passion of the hour will learn ere long his exceedingly great, if not, indeed, his fatal, mistake. One trouble, every teacher of Divine Truth experiences, is the difficulty of getting people to believe that religion has in it something more than momentary emotion. Ask a man if he is converted, and he answers, “I don’t feel as I think I ought.” “But do you love the Lord?” “I hardly know! I don’t feel just right about it!” “Have you repented of your sins?” “I am not certain I have, for I don’t feel as I would like to feel!” The same curious idea has long dominated men’s offerings to God. “Will you pay to the Lord a tenth or more of all money and wealth that He gives into your hand?” “Well, I will wait and see how I feel at the time!” The Apostle in our text declares that to be the one thing that we should not do, and I am persuaded he is right about it, for I could count today churches by the score who went on the plan against which Paul wrote this text, and you needn’t pardon the phrase, for it best expresses my meaning: “They are today too dead to skin.” I found one such a few years ago in its expiring breath and hastened to flay it by persuading the little band to write a will, bequeathing their building to the work of the Indiana State Missions.

I believe that “feelings” have a place in religious life, and the soul who is not swayed by them is as dull and lifeless as a tideless sea; but as the ocean feels ever the throb of its rolling waves yet holds them in bounds with its beach and supports their immeasurable weight by the strength of its basin of stone, so down beneath all the passions that ought to surge through the soul let principle be found upholding all, and fidelity to the truth of God determining the very point up to which passion shall roll. I congratulate every church which has some principle at the basis of its financial life, as this church certainly has.

I would like to bring the Apostle’s counsel to every church of the land which has not adopted it, and leave it with this question: “Can you do better than adopt the plan of God?” I think I know how Paul felt when he wrote our text to the church at Corinth. He saw in them so many features that were Christian indeed, he wished the more to see them prove their love to Christ by their liberality to the needy. It was to that people he afterward wrote another letter, in which he urged this grace again, saying: “Therefore as ye abound in every thing, in faith, and utterance, and knowledge, and in all diligence, and in your love to us, see that ye abound in this grace also” (2 Corinthians 8:7).The method of our text is the one of voluntary giving. It seems to me that only the gift of freewill is urged in the Scriptures. I find no warrant for the practice of coercion in matters of benevolence. That ecclesiastical potentate who holds his fellows over a blazing purgatory to extract their offerings is abusing, not using, his office and serves his own will rather than obeys the Word of God.

I think Paul found a want of liberality the greatest defect in the Corinthian church, and yet he does not upbraid or scold or severely reprove them. He went about the work in love, and by argument he convinced, by repeated reference to the subject he educated, and by putting before them the noble example of others he excited a spirit of emulation.

It was in his Second Letter to them that he called upon them to take notice of the gifts of the churches in Macedonia, who, despite a succession of afflictions, and in the face of deep poverty had abounded in liberality (2 Corinthians 8:1-2). I sometimes think that nothing would spur us to best endeavor so much as a knowledge of what others are doing. We well know how poor are the Chinese on our western coasts. They are the hated, and often the persecuted, in the region of the Golden Gate, and yet one of our missionary leaflets records this to the everlasting honor of their religion when once they are converted to Christ: “The Chinese Baptist church of Portland, Oregon, has 82 members, of whom only 45 are resident. Yet they contributed six hundred dollars to foreign missions last year.” If Paul was writing today, I think he would refer to that feeble folk and say to others who had not done what they ought: “Behold the little church of Chinese Baptists. I can say of them as I once said of the early disciples in Macedonia: ‘For to their power, * * they were willing of themselves’ ” (2 Corinthians 8:3).

That spirit of willingness is so refreshing when we find it in the heart. Beecher once said, “Some men give so that yon are angry every time you ask them to contribute.

They give so that their gold and silver shoots you like a bullet. Other persons give with such beauty that you remember it as long as you live, and you say, ‘It is a pleasure to go to such men,’ There are some Christians who give as springs do, whether you go to them or not. They are always full, and your part is merely to put your dish under the overflowing stream.” I can understand that “the liberal soul shall be made fat”. I know “God loveth a cheerful giver”, because even men must always love him. I looked on the plainest appearing, almost shabbily dressed old man the other day, and heard a woman speaking of him say, “He is wealthy and one of the most liberal of men. There is not a church of orthodox views, nor a charity rightly conducted in this city but he is stockholder therein.” Blessed investment! The man who makes it has shares in the building and loan of the New Jerusalem and will find his stock in houses “not made with hands”.As I look into my text, asking, What may I next learn from thee, the words get themselves a voice and answer, Find in us,THE LAW OF A PERFECT “Let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him”. You have heard it said, “There is no rule but has its exceptions.” I think I find one in our text. The rich and the poor, the old and the young, the honorable and humble alike are included in Paul’s all-comprehensive law of liberality. There may be those who have nothing to give from, ’tis true, but they are not an exception to this rule, which says, “as he may prosper”. Let no man conclude, however, that because he is too indolent to earn anything, he is exempt under the provision of our text. The Lord, in the parable, to whom the servant came with pitiful mouth about keeping his talent laid away in a napkin, did not excuse the sloth nor allow the indolence to go unpunished.

Look out into that darkness whither he was turned and be cured of thy sin of slothfulness once for all.Nor, indeed, can it be made to appear that the industrious poor are exempt. Under the Jewish economy, he who was not rich enough to bring a bullock might offer a lamb; and if too poor for that, then turtle doves, and when they were not had, an ephah of flour; but not a word about those who could offer nothing at all.

The history of Elijah’s visit to the widow at Zarepta well illustrates what God may ask of the half starving, intending to fulfil his promise: “Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over”. That widow thought she was too poor to give, and so, indeed, she seemed to be, but who can perish while obeying God? What a misfortune it would have been for her to have exercised the financial wisdom that so many modern believers dispense in allopathic doses: “Look out for number one.” I think when God finds that spirit strutting itself, he easily plucks the peacock feathers by letting it “look out” without His aid for just a few days. A fortnight is time enough to wreck a Rockefeller’s estate when God is asked to withdraw His stock from the business. So, if you have only a little and cannot afford to lose it, take God in as partner and do not be afraid to invest in His Name. It is a glorious thing to do benevolences of the Peter Cooper sort—to found great institutes of learning and religion; a splendid thing to hand out thousands to many colleges and millions to great schools of art, philosophy, science and religion as Mr.

Rockefeller has done. But the expensive offering that Mary brought for Christ’s anointing; the sweet spices of Nicodemus and Joseph; the elegant tomb opened for His final rest by the rich Arimathean, never received such honorable mention from the Son of God as did the offering of the widow, who cast into the treasury her two mites—all she had.

The reason is evident. They gave less than she in proportion to ability, which is the measure of responsibility.God never intended to convert the world to righteousness and the service of His Son through the magnanimity of the rich of earth. If he had, Jairus and Zacchaeus and Joseph and Nicodemus would have given the important names to that first roll of the Nazarene’s friends. Peter, James and John, poor fishermen, would have been written at the bottom of the list, had they appeared at all. We often flatter ourselves into the notion that if we were as rich as some neighbor or brother, the needy-world would certainly feel the healing touch of our benevolence. There is just one way to prove to ourselves and the world the truth of that better thought.

That is the way the poor widow employed. Give out of your poverty to the Lord.I am especially glad, and I have no doubt you are, that we have no immensely wealthy members upon whose broad, liberal shoulders the whole burden of benevolence can be laid, nor behind whose narrow and stingy souls smaller men may seek to hide.

I have absolute faith in the future of that church where is enough of poverty and Spirit of God. It has all the necessary elements for success at home and the sending of blessings abroad.