Best Stuff I've Read on How to Be Generous

The other day I came across the blog post, The Generosity Matrix, by J D Greer and it was one of the best things I've read about how Christians should deal with being generous with their money and possessions. He gives six principles that need to be held together in tension in order to view and use our money and possessions as God would want us. I would encourage you to check it out.

Here are the six principles he talked about:

1. God gives excess to some so that they can share with those who have less.
2. Jesus’ radical generosity toward us should be to us a model and a motivation for radical generosity with others.
3. The Holy Spirit must guide us as to which sacrifices we are to make.
4. God delights in our enjoyment of His material gifts and gives us richly all things to enjoy.
5. We are not to trust in riches and not to define our lives by the abundance of our possessions.
6. Wealth building is wise.

After going through the six principles he finishes by answering two questions: 

1. So what is the conclusion? 
2. How much should we give?

So go check it out to find out what J D has to say. Here is a quote from the post that I really liked:

God never made us responsible for the Great Commission; we are responsible to obey King Jesus as He goes about to accomplish the Great Commission.

Often when we talk about the needs of the world and our responsibility in light of them, we talk as if God is depending on us or in desperate need of our resources in order to accomplish His mission.  Quite simply, He is not.  Our God spoke the worlds into existence and is the God who can create everything out of nothing.  God does not lack anything for the accomplishing of His mission. He doesn’t, strictly speaking, need anything from us. It is God’s responsibility, not ours, to resource the great commission. In fact, Jesus reinforced this to His Apostles when He gave them the Great Commission. After instructing them about carrying the Gospel to the whole world, He told them to go and wait, doing “nothing” until He came on them in power. The lesson was clear: accomplishing this task is not something you can do, it is something I must do through you.

Our responsibility, as creatures and servants, is to give ourselves to God and to yield ourselves to Him for use in the accomplishment of His purpose. We don’t try to accomplish His purposes for Him, we depend on Him to accomplish His purpose through us.