#Generosity Archives - IdentityInWholeness

Janet and I were at a local restaurant recently. The waiter wasn’t complaining, but it’d been a really lousy Sunday. He was struggling with some things in his personal life, his customers had been grouchy, and he really needed the money he didn’t get it in tips that day. It was his worst shift ever.

It’s well-known in the restaurant business that the Sunday after-church crowd is the stingiest and most demanding crowd of the week. Ask any waiter or waitress you know. These are largely Christians going out after church, still dressed in their Sunday best. We are the most demanding customers and the worst tippers.

This breaks my heart. We give a false testimony of the Kingdom of God when we act like this. We should be the most generous people on the planet, not the stingiest. We should be the most easy-going customers, not the most demanding. Servers should be fighting for the Sunday afternoon shift instead of dreading it.

After the waiter took our order and left the table, Janet and I decided we wanted to make his day. We wanted to bless him. We wanted to turn his day around and make it his best shift ever. So after our $30 meal, we left him a $100 tip. And it hurt financially. I can’t afford to be doing that all the time. But it felt really good because we obeyed the Holy Spirit.

The next time we went in that restaurant, he ran over to our table. He shared his life with us and we had his ear. We told him about the hope Jesus wants to bring to his life. That was $100 well spent.

We’ve actually done this twice. The other time the waiter chased us out into the parking lot to let us know we made a mistake. When we told him it wasn’t a mistake, he was blown away. That was really fun. That waiter also had had a really depressing shift, and we were his last patrons of the evening, and we really made his day.

I’m not patting ourselves on the back here. But I am consciously trying to be more generous with my tipping as a general rule. As royalty, as sons and daughters of the King of kings and the Lord of lords, who has infinite resources, shouldn’t we be the most generous people on the planet?

A standard tip is 18%. I’ve typically tipped 20%, not because I’m being generous, but because 20% is easier to calculate. I can calculate 10% in my head, just shift the decimal point, and then double it for 20%. Easy. And I feel good about myself because it’s more than 18%. The Holy Spirit has shown me recently that it’s all been about my convenience and feeling good about myself, not about blessing the server. So I’m upping my standard tip to 30% to overtly bless the server. Honestly, it hurts. But being more like Jesus is worth it.

What about when you get lousy service and they don’t deserve it? Tip them more. You’ve got the awesome opportunity to demonstrate the unconditional love of God. Think about it. Which is more likely to portray Jesus in a good light:

Option A: When our service is really lousy, make a point and a political statement by leaving a 1 penny tip. (Confession time: I’m not proud of it, but I’ve actually done this. I justified it by thinking if they don’t know something’s wrong, they can’t correct it. So I was really serving them by holding them accountable. Boy, they were sure lucky to have me as a patron that night! Not! Who did I think I was fooling? It may have been myself, but it sure wasn’t the Holy Spirit.)

Option B: Saying to them, “I can tell you’ve had a rough night tonight, so we left you a little extra, because God is for you and wants to bless you.” And then leaving them a lot extra.

Flip it around. Think of the equivalent situation on your job. You screw up. How do you want your employer and co-workers to respond to you? Which one of us doesn’t want something similar to Option B? Then we need to be Option B to the rest of the world. That’s being salt and light.

Generosity is a trademark of the Kingdom of God. It’s the easiest form of evangelism. You don’t have to knock on doors, just leave big tips. If we can bless people into the Kingdom of God, can you think of a better use for money? I can’t.

Bringing someone into the Kingdom is giving Jesus the reward for his suffering. Whoa! That’s a mind blow. So we’re using a temporal resource and reaping an eternal reward. Talk about return on investment!

The opposite of generosity is hoarding. Hoarding comes from a scarcity mindset. “There’s not enough to go around, so I need to protect what I have!” But the Kingdom mindset is one of abundance. We have plenty to share, even if we can’t see it all yet. We know our God will make more. Look what Jesus did with the loaves and fishes, feeding thousands with a small boy’s lunch. This is such an important concept all 4 gospels cover it (Matthew 14, Mark 16, Luke 9, and John 6).

We problem is, when we get saved, we bring our worldly scarcity mindset with us into the Kingdom. Actually, it’s not a problem, it’s natural. We all do it. It’s so ingrained in us we take it for granted and don’t even realize there’s another way to live. The problem is when we hang on to that mindset and refuse to be teachable. That’s a problem. The trick is to replace the scarcity mindset with an abundance mindset.

The best way is just start giving. As both spiritual and physical beings, what we do with our body affects our spirit. So it’s ok to start being generous even if our heart’s not in it yet. One of two things will happen:

Our heart will follow along shortly once we get the hang of it and start to experience the abundance of God’s provision when we’re generous. It’s fun to try and out-give God. It’s a game that’s really awesome to lose!
God will reveal our wounding. Maybe that scarcity mindset is rooted in something deeper. Maybe we have foundational lies God wants to deal with. Maybe we internally believe lies we don’t even know are there but are blocking the abundance of the Kingdom of God in our lives. God wants to heal those areas by replacing the lies with his truth.

The cool thing is, generosity is a way we can overtly practice and show our Christianity without offending anyone! Believe me, even the most hardened atheist won’t be offended if you give him money. When we’re generous, it gets people’s attention, because we’re doing something they can’t. And we’re joyful about it! Radical giving is actually really fun. We’re showing people something outside their normal paradigm and it rocks their world.

What are some practical ways we can be generous? Here’s some ideas I’ve experienced.

Leave big tips. However much you normally tip, up it by 10% for 30 days and see what happens. Who’s up for the 30-Day Tip Challenge?
The car ahead of me paid my toll once on the interstate (before EZ Pass). It was only 75 cents, but it felt really good! After that, I often paid the toll for several cars behind me.
A local Christian radio station in our area frequently has a campaign where they encourage people in the drive-through lane at fast-food places to pay the bill of the car behind them. Brilliant!
A church I was at did free car washes. People were blown away. “Why are you doing this?” they would ask. “Just to bless you.” That’s it. No tract, no hype, no hard-sell. A lot of people came to our church through that, and we weren’t even trying. It hurt giving up a Saturday, but it was fun because the Holy Spirit loved it.

I’m sure you can think of many other practical ways to be generous. Post them in the comments! And please share this post on social media if you think it would help someone else.

Jesus compared the Kingdom of God to the wind: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8) His point was that, just like the wind, you can’t physically see the Kingdom of God, but you can see its effects. You can see the marks of where it’s been. I believe generosity is one of the key marks of the Kingdom of God.

As Christians, we should be the most generous people on the planet.

As Americans, as a country, we probably are. I don’t have exact figures (or any figures) in front of me, but I know our government, which is becoming less and less Christian all the time, still gives away billions of dollars in foreign aid every year. America is one of the most, if not the most, generous countries on the planet. This is the mark of a country that was founded on Kingdom of God principles.

And it’s not just the government. Some of the most effective aid organizations in the world were founded by and are run by American private citizens. Crisis Response International (my personal favorite), Not for Sale, Mercy Ships, Goodwill, The United Way, just to name a few, are amazingly effective charitable organizations providing help across the world where it’s needed most. They provide dollars, medical supplies and services, food, rescue, and labor for rebuilding after disasters (not to mention the Gospel). They have their roots in the Kingdom of God and their generosity is making lasting impacts around the world.

That’s great, but what about the rest of us? Can we be generous right here at home, every day?

I think we can. For example, waiters and waitresses should be fighting to work Sunday afternoons, when the Christians come for lunch after church. We should be the biggest tippers on the planet. (If you’re in the restaurant industry, please leave a comment about whether this is so or not.) A standard tip is 18%. I tip at least 20%, honestly because the math is easier, not because I’m being generous. I compute 10% in my head by moving the bill’s decimal point, double it, and round up. I’m working on tipping 30%, because I want to be generous. It’s hard though, because it gets expensive. Generosity is sacrificial, that’s why it marks the presence of the Kingdom of God.

Janet and I recently experienced an amazing weekend of generosity. We went to a writer’s conference, Tribe Conference 2017, in Franklin, TN, just south of Nashville, that exemplified this concept. Tribe Writers is a program founded and run by best-selling author Jeff Goins that teaches creatives how to get their message out there (and make a living at it) in this amazing new digital renaissance we’re living in. This was the first time Janet and I attended the annual conference.

What an amazing experience! I’ve been to lots of professional and personal conferences, and I can honestly say Tribe Conference 2017 was the most generous conference I have ever been to.

Every single speaker (and breakout session leader) gave away something of value. Not just run-of-the-will lead-magnets that you expect to give away, but premium products either free or at significant discounts. Some made exclusive content just for the conference attendees on hidden pages on their websites. Their generosity was really overwhelming.

Mr. Goins brought a young writer, Natalie Brenner, on the stage to tell the story of getting her book, This Undeserved Life, published. It’s her story about how God shows up in the middle of grief. Her book gives Christians permission to grieve, which is really important because unfortunately I know stories when the church has not.

The book just recently came out, and she’d sold a few hundred copies. Mr. Goins asked everyone there to buy her book, on the spot, which practically all of us did (Janet and I bought two). He doubled her book sales in 60 seconds, and put her on track to becoming a best-selling author. It was definitely a class act. He didn’t have to do that. She certainly didn’t expect it and was floored. It was a blessing to watch the effects of unexpected generosity.

(Yes, the link he gave us to buy the book was an affiliate link, meaning he got a small commission. But those proceeds were used to buy Natalie’s book for anyone in the room who couldn’t afford it, so he funneled it back into book sales for her.)

This was not a Christian conference. It was about writing, marketing, and platform building. But the generosity of the team, the speakers, Mr. Goins himself, and the attendees during the conference was unbelievable. Everyone, speakers and attendees, would stop to give you personal help on wherever you were stuck—the technology, the writing, whatever. Although not overtly Christian, it was obvious that many are Christians, because their generosity overflowed. The mark of the Kingdom of God.

Disclaimer: Janet and I are in the Tribe Writers Pro program, a mastermind group that has helped us significantly in building our platform. However, none of the links in this post are affiliate links. We’re getting no monetary value from telling you about Tribe 2017. It’s just our most recent example of seeing unexpected generosity in action. It was really an amazing experience seeing Kingdom of God principles play out in the marketplace.

The big take-away here is this. Their over-the-top generosity made us want to go again next year. We were proud to be part of such a giving community. Everyone wants to hang out with generous people. Generosity makes the gospel attractive. People may argue with your theology, but they can’t argue with the help or the undeserved kindness you’ve given them. It’s why Jesus said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35)

Generosity is love with skin on it.

What about you? Have you benefitted from extreme generosity? Have you given it? How can we be generous in the everyday stuff? Tell us the story in the comments or shoot us an email. And please share on social media if you think this post would bless someone else.