Well, what I know about every single one of you is that you want to be generous. Is that true? – [Congregation] Yeah. – Every single one of you, you really wanna make a difference in the lives of people. You don’t want to live small; you don’t want to hold back.
Something inside of you wants to honor God, wants to make a difference, wants to be generous. In fact, if you ask most people, “Hey, are you generous?” Almost everybody would say, “Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I’m generous. I mean, I’m not greedy, right? I’m not selfish. I know some people that are, but that’s not me. I mean, I opened the door for someone coming into church today.
Of course, I’m generous, right? I give, and I’d love to give more whenever I can, and I will give more whenever I have more. Right now, I gotta pay the bills, and I gotta buy coffee, and I gotta survive Christmas, and then the credit cards that come in later on. But yeah, sure. I’m generous. I give what I can, and I’d like to give more.
” And what’s interesting when you think about generosity is most people think that they’re generous because they give. Every now and then, we give something. But giving and being generous, those are actually two different things. Giving and being generous, they’re not the same thing. What’s the difference? Well, giving is an action, but generosity is a mindset. There’s a difference.
You see, giving is something that you might do in the moment, but generosity is an identity. It’s who you are and who you’re becoming. And what’s crazy about the world that we live in, and if you’re honest, you’d probably admit this, that most people, especially in my country, most Americans, don’t feel rich, but we really are.
And most of us would say that we’re generous, but we may not be. I’m sorry to be so straightforward today, but we gotta call it what it is. According to Giving USA’s annual report… I’ll give you a statistic. In 2023, the average American gave just 1.9% of their total income to charity. Less than 2%. Not exactly winning any Academy Awards for generosity.
And unfortunately, that’s the good news. The bad news, according to 2023 IRS stats, that if your income was higher, if you made over $100,000 a year, the average percentage that you gave was actually lower than those people who made less. What’s crazy is that most of us, we don’t really feel rich and blessed, but we really are. And most of us think that we’re generous, but we’re really not.
Why? Because generosity doesn’t start with money. It starts with our mindset. It’s not something that you do occasionally. It’s the way that you live, the way that you think, and the way that you make a difference in the lives of people consistently.
So what I wanna do today is I want to just stretch your faith a little bit, and I’m gonna give you three different generosity mindsets, and we’re gonna ask God to help us to grow in our generosity. So let’s look at three different mindsets. The first one would be, when you give spontaneously, there are those who would be spontaneous in their generosity. There would be those who would be strategic in generosity.
