{"id":5415,"date":"2012-11-03T18:06:00","date_gmt":"2012-11-03T18:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=5415"},"modified":"2026-10-02T01:35:56","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T01:35:56","slug":"selfless-followers-of-a-self-centered-god-or-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=5415","title":{"rendered":"Selfless Followers of a Self-Centered God or…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Self-centered followers of a selfless God?I\u00a0have been\u00a0working on a sermon the last few days.\u00a0 I get the opportunity to preach tomorrow morning at Shiloh Community Church in Franklin, Indiana.\u00a0 The pastor gave me the option of preaching a favorite sermon – one that I’ve done before, but I really don’t like to approach preaching that way (not that there’s anything wrong with it). So it took me a long time to settle on a passage to preach.Several leadings eventually caused me to land on 2 Corinthians 9:6-15.\u00a0 I tried to avoid this passage, because it sounds just like the sort of thing you would\u00a0EXPECT a missionary to preach on – it’s Paul urging the Corinthian church to ready the financial gift they had promised to share with the poor.\u00a0 And it has the familiar passage about “he who sows sparingly, reaps sparingly” and “he who sows bountifully, reaps bountifully”. One of the things I enjoy about preaching (and one of the reasons I don’t tend to repeat sermons even in different locations) is that in studying and meditating on the preaching passage (if I do it right), I learn something new\u00a0OR God crystallizes some right idea that has been floating aimlessly in my mind.\u00a0 (My WORST sermons are the ones where I have some aspect of spirituality “figured out” ahead of time and cherry-pick a Scripture passage to fit it and then knock the congregation over the head with it.)So I am looking and looking at Paul’s line about sowing and reaping and it smacks so much of the prosperity gospel that I can hardly stomach it and yet I am trying hard to see it as the respectable self-motivation that even the more conservative commentaries acknowledge and I’m still not comfortable with it.\u00a0 Then it hits me.\u00a0 I am reading this with 21st century American Christian eyes.\u00a0 And I’m betting the Corinthian church was quite different from the American church.\u00a0 Paul was not writing to a group of Christians who\u00a0had grown accustomed to\u00a0keeping a tight grip on their own wealth and who expected a\u00a0solid, tangible\u00a0return on every investment.\u00a0 It’s clear from the rest of the letter that Paul was addressing a group of sold out Christians whose first priority is God’s will and not their own.\u00a0If we read Paul’s words with Corinthian eyes, it changes things.Elsewhere in the New Testament, when\u00a0we see references to sowing seeds and harvesting fields,\u00a0we know those are\u00a0symbolic for spreading the gospel among people and seeing some come to\u00a0faith in Christ.\u00a0 And Paul is asking the Corinthians in chapter 9\u00a0to give\u00a0financially to spread the gospel and he assumes, since they are God-centered followers of Christ, that the\u00a0bountiful harvest of souls will be a motivator for them!This interpretation then makes sense of the\u00a0next few verses.\u00a0 For instance, verse 8 says, “And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.”\u00a0 Notice, the\u00a0promise is that the Corinthians (and we) will have “enough” and the reason that they (and we) will have enough is\u00a0to enable\u00a0“sharing” in\u00a0“every good work”. \u00a0Sounds like God’s top priority isn’t our comfort and financial well-being as believers but rather the spreading of His kingdom!\u00a0 Now THAT sounds right to my ears and heart.\u00a0 Look at verse 10: “He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness.”\u00a0 Like “sowing” and “harvesting”, “bread” shows up elsewhere in the New Testament.\u00a0 In the Lord’s prayer, bread represents the tangible provisions sufficient for our daily needs.\u00a0 God gives the seed and the bread.\u00a0 The bread is for eating; the seed is for sowing.\u00a0 So in the midst of these lightbulbs going off, I arrived this morning at this passage in David Platt’s book Radical Together<\/em>:”We are to be selfless followers of a self-centered God.\u00a0 But the problem is that we often reverse this in the church.\u00a0 We become self-centered followers of a selfless God.\u00a0 We organize our churches as if God exists to meet our needs, cater to our comforts, and appeal to our preferences.\u00a0 Discussions in the church more often revolve around what we want than what he wills.\u00a0 Almost unknowingly, the church becomes a means of self-entertainment and a monument to self-sufficiency.\u00a0 But something wonderful happens when we apply radical obedience to Christ in the regular practice of the church.\u00a0 All of a sudden, we find ourselves engulfed in a community that finds deep and abiding pleasure in denial of self and dependence on God.” That’ll preach!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Self-centered followers of a selfless God?I\u00a0have been\u00a0working on a sermon the last few days.\u00a0 I get the opportunity to preach tomorrow morning at Shiloh Community Church in Franklin, Indiana.\u00a0 The pastor gave me the option of preaching a favorite sermon – one that I’ve done before, but I really don’t like to approach preaching that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5415"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5416,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5415\/revisions\/5416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}