April 6, 2011
Daniel Headrick Generosity Testimony from First Baptist Church, Knoxville on Vimeo.
Reflecting on giving to the Church has been diffiult for me because I have not really been generous. A second difficulty is that talking about tithing is not natural for me. I grew up in a Christian tradition where the concept of tithing was largely a thing that we whispered about as children, but was never spoken about out loud. As kids, we always assumed that things just worked themselves out.
But things do not just work themselves out all of the time. Some people think they do, and like to quote the gospels where Jesus once said to his disciples; “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear.” I do not read this as requiring us to sit passively by when others are in need. Jesus’ life, after all, is a series of stories about self-sacrifice for others in need, culminating in the ultimate act of generosity by God: Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection.
This Church and this community of believers has meant so much to us from the moment we first came by for a visit. At First Baptist, I have met so many of you who have welcomed me, my wife Jenney, and our children Mary Frances and Joseph, into your lives with so much grace and kindness.
Since joining the Church I was baptized and we dedicated our son Joseph just last month. His dedication was, among other things, a public commitment to God and to this Church that Jenney and I would raise Joseph up in the Christian tradition.
And now I want to make another kind of commitment to you. Last year I appeared before you and told you that our family was committing to giving more financially to this Church.I want to renew that commitment to you this morning, and talk to you about some of the reasons why. My renewed commitment to giving more financially is not based on all of the material things that I have in my life. Rather, I base it on the spiritual changes in our lives that we have recently experienced. I do believe that I was rescued from a great darkness, a darkness that threatened to overpower me, until God allowed me to believe in him again.And I credit much of this transformation to God’s presence in the people of this Church. Let me explain: I spent my twenties in a cycle of belief and unbelief, grappling with the historical truth of Christianity, with the problem of evil (I did not solve it, in case you are wondering), and with my own past. Each time that I began to believe again, I would find some reason to disbelieve. The reasons for disbelieving soon began to overwhelm me, so that my whole spiritual life was a tension between a will to believe, and all of the reasons not to. All of the reasons not to believe, by the way, could not answer the question of why I felt convicted by sin, or why I felt hope in the eternal at times. I spoke ridiculous words about Christianity and about Jesus during that time. I adopted every historical critical method of tearing out the text of the Bible until there was nothing left to read in the Bible. And yet, would you believe me if I told you I was seeking Jesus through that whole time? Nobody spends that much time looking for answers unless they are earnestly seeking the truth of the matter. It was finally through relationship that I was able to see the presence of God in my life.First, in relationship with my wife, who continually urged me to find a church where we could rediscover a lost relationship with God again. Second, in relationship with this Church, which I believe has not only encouraged me through times of darkness but held me accountable. And now, I am a Baptist, which still amazes me. I might have had some words against the Baptists during that time in my life I was just talking about. I hope you will forgive me. I have embraced something I once rejected. There is room at the table, after all, for a sinner like me who repudiated God, and then learned in humility to return to Him. After joining the Church, I was baptized. Baptism was not, as I had secretly hoped, an automatic transformation into a life where sin would be very hard to commit. After the baptism, I knew that I was somehow different. I was initiated into the Christian life, but I still lack all of those marks of love that Paul spoke of in 1 Corinthians 13: there are times in my life when I am often impatient and unkind; I envy and boast; I do dishonor others and am self-seeking; I am easily angered. And yet, I am trying every day to push that sin away because I have a hope that springs from being redeemed. So it is with this backdrop of my salvation story that I feel so grateful this morning for First Baptist. I have not been generous to you, and yet you were generous to me. I was not generous to God, and yet God was generous to me. I am amazed by how generous our Church is. Think about what First Baptist does locally, nationally, and internationally to feed the hungry, how we reach out to those with destroyed homes to rebuild those homes, how we build schools for people in Croatia, and our work abroad to show Jesus to the world. Without financial giving, these wonderful acts of generosity will never be realized. We all know the Church has obligations it must repay, and we all know the Church has to have money to do God’s work in this world. We have to name these obligations and responsibilities and take care of them. We cannot whisper about it and just assume that things will work out for themselves, like I did when I was a little boy. I know that you will join me in making financial contributions to First Baptist to honor those obligations as soon as possible. Here is a suggestion if you want to jumpstart your giving to the Church. My wife and I use a computer program to track our finances. It can generate all kinds of charts and pie graphs. I like the pie graph because I can always understand a food metaphor. Some of you will have another system, but whatever way you keep up with your money, if you look at it long enough you can come up with a way of determining what percentage of your overall spending is made up of tithing. The easiest way to do this is to look at the Charitable Contributions Report for the year 2010 that the Church sent out recently. This form is for income tax deduction purposes, and it tells you exactly how much you tithed last year. I looked at that figure, and then I looked at my pie graph, and I thought about all of the things I had accumulated for myself during the year. All of the magazine subscriptions, the goofy things that I bought on Ebay that I don’t even use, my electronic gadgetry which threatens to take over the house. I know that we can take that figure the Church reports each year and make it larger. I know that we are not doing enough. If you are in a position where you can give more, I hope you will join me in committing to that goal. There is no magic number. But we could all benefit by a little self-reflection.
