Generosity, Part 4: Giving Sets Us Free (Matt. 6:19-34)

Generosity, Part 4: Giving Sets Us Free

November 16, 2025

Matthew 6:19-34

By Pastor Mike Conner

***

There is a story in the Hebrew Bible that tells of God liberating the Israelites from slavery

in Egypt. It’s known as the exodus. Having heard the agony of the people, God sent a prophet,

Moses, and his brother Aaron to confront Pharaoh and demand the emancipation of the slaves.

But Pharaoh refused. God then afflicted Egypt with a series of plagues – frogs and flies, boils

and hailstones – culminating in the drowning of Pharoah’s army of chariots in the Red Sea. For

the Israelites, God split the sea; they passed through walls of water along dry, if squelchy,

ground.

It was a miracle, their freedom. It was beyond comprehension. It elicited great joy: “Then

the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out

after her with tambourines and with dancing. And Miriam sang to them, ‘Sing to the LORD, for he

has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea’” (Exod 15:20-21 NRSV).

Rapturous celebration. Victory song. The Israelites had cried out in pain, and God had

done something about it. They had seen no future for themselves or for their children, but God

gave them a future. They had witnessed divine intervention after divine intervention. Salvation

was tangible to them. Rattle of tambourines. Mud from an exposed sea bottom stuck on their

shoes. They were well on their way to the Promised Land.

We might expect this great event, this exodus, to produce a people of unshakeable faith,

of stalwart trust. But in the following verses we see this instead: “The whole congregation of the

Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, ‘If

only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and

ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly

with hunger’” (Exod 16:2-3 NRSV, emphases added).

They leave the sea edge and enter the desert and begin to complain. They complain

because they are hungry. ‘What good is our freedom from slavery if we’re now just going to die

of starvation?’ they ask Moses. Instead of trusting that the God who had who had toppled a

kingdom on their behalf would do something as fundamental as provide them with food and

water, the people grumbled. In an instant, their trust was gone.

And this reveals something fundamental about human nature. We struggle to trust. To

trust that there will be enough. To trust that God will come through for us and meet our needs.

That God will be faithful in the big things and the small things. That God will show up for us

today just as God did yesterday. We are vulnerable, because we are creatures with these

inescapable needs. And this very vulnerability can lead us to trust, or it can lead us to worry.

God sows the seed of his word among us, in our hearts. “As for what was sown among

thorns,” says Jesus, “this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world, and the lure

of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing” (Matt 13:22 NRSV). It doesn’t matter how

many miracles lie in our past; every day we have to choose to trust in a God who, as Jesus puts

it, “already knows all your needs” (Matt 6:33 NLT) and “will certainly care for you” (Matt 6:30

NLT).

Jesus of Nazareth is fully God and fully human. God the Son united himself with our

human nature, and therefore with our human needs, like hunger. God the Son came in order to

liberate us from the inside out, and his divine Life endured moments that encapsulated the most

harrowing experiences of human life. Moments of suffering, testing, and temptation; of betrayal,

deprivation, and injustice.

Jesus lived his human life without sin. Perfectly vulnerable, he was perfectly dependent

on God the Father. He redeemed each step of human journey, and now empowers us, through the

gift of his Spirit, to relate to God with greater and greater trust. This is what the first theologians

called “recapitulation,” the summing up of our human experiences in the life of Jesus, so that he

might give us a fresh start and a fresh foundation as we encounter each one.

When we hear Jesus say to us, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what

you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear,” we have to

remember that he first taught them how to pray: “You kingdom come. Your will be done, on

earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread” (Matt 6:10-11 NRSV). And we also

have to remember that Jesus taught this prayer only after passing through his own 40-day period

of hunger and temptation in the wilderness of Judea. Satan had tempted Jesus to give up on God

and to make bread for himself. But Jesus, though weakened, refused to take matters into his own

hands. He endured this deprivation, taking our fundamental anxiety about our daily needs into

his redeemed life, and only then begins to teach us about prayer and worry.

He’s not asking us to be invulnerable superheroes. He’s asking us to experience our

vulnerability in him, and to rid ourselves of worry by crying out to God every day for daily

bread.

We can’t begin to take Jesus’ teaching on worry to heart if we aren’t praying to God every day

for what we need and leaning into Jesus’ own redemptive dependence.

Jesus relives Israel’s story, bears our universal human weaknesses. Jesus overcomes the

anxiety of the wilderness. He trust the God of daily bread. And he gives the gift of that victory to

us: “He will certainly care for you” (Matt 6:30 NLT), Jesus says of God. “[Y]our heavenly

Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live

righteously, and he will give you everything you need” (Matt 6:33 NLT).

One of the arenas of life where anxiety afflicts many of us greatly is our finances. Money

represents so many things to us: stability, safety, success, worthiness, independence, opportunity,

and more. These are values especially susceptible to worry.

This has certainly been true in my life, though not so much as a child. I was well

provided for and my parents were people of sufficient means. But in my adult life, as I’ve

accumulated debt for the sake of my education; as I bounced around for several years from bad,

expensive rental to bad, expensive rental; as I’ve started a family of my own and taken

responsibility for meeting the needs of others, worry over money has grown. To this day, as an

adult, I’ve never not lived paycheck to paycheck. And I’ve wanted to be free of it, because I have

experienced how, when worry over money infuses my daily life, it negatively colors my

relationships and my ministry.

So as we look ahead to Stewardship Sunday next week, I want to take a moment now and

share some of my story about the difference that giving to the Church has made for me – and for

me and Sus together.

For the four-and-a-half years that I was a pastor in North Carolina, I never once wrote a

check to the local church. I was working ¾-time at four small churches and freshly aware of the

debt I had gone into to pursue my call to ministry. I resisted – for many reasons that seem hollow

to me now – being mutually entangled in the material life of these communities.

Why would I give to a church that’s going to turn around and write me a paycheck? Why

would I give to a church that isn’t providing me with health insurance, housing, or help with

student loan payments? Why would I give to churches that are dying, not thriving? A wall went

up, as you can see, between me and my congregations. This was a way I could keep my distance.

It created an us versus them thing. As time went on, I liked that feeling less and less.

Sus and I got married in 2019. During the COVID years, we experienced changes in

housing, in jobs, in our family. We moved out here for me to double-down on my vocation; we

had kids; we shifted from being chronic renters to buying a house. We’ve always talked about

money openly and frequently, and for years we’ve used and stuck to a monthly budgeting app.

But even so, there was a baseline feeling of anxiety that permeated most of our conversations.

Mortgage, child care bills, student loans, oh my! Not unique to us of course, but something we

were facing for the first time. As time went on, we liked that baseline feeling of anxiety less and

less.

We also were experiencing a growing desire for integrity. As I said, we had moved out to

Idaho – a radical decision for us – to give ourselves over to a life of ministry. And our calling

had directly impacted where we were living, how we were spending our time, how we were

raising our family, what we were engaging with socially and politically. We started to realize

that the call had its claim on most every aspect of our lives in a direct way except our finances.

Why would we hold back our money from it?

I’m a person who likes to understand the meaning – the why – of things before I actually

do them. It’s a defense mechanism. I’ll read the book and then do the thing. But I’ve lived with

Jesus long enough to know that that’s just not how it works with him. He asks me to follow him,

which means both that he’s making a way for me and that I can’t get out in front of him. There’s

both security and surrender there; the security of his presence, the surrender of being able to

determine things for myself in advance.

I’ve known forever that Christians give to their local faith community. I used to watch

my parents do it when I was very, very young, sitting in the pews of Woodstown Presbyterian

Church in southern New Jersey. I knew that giving to the faith community is attested in the pages

of the New Testament and rooted in the giving practices of the ancient Hebrews. I knew the

language of tithing, and I expected other Christians to be doing it in the places where I served. I

knew that giving 10%, while not a direct biblical mandate, has been named by wise Christians

over the centuries as a liberating practice.

I knew these things from the outside, not from the inside. And I finally realized, in my

own heart and in my conversations with Sus, that I wanted to see for myself the difference that

giving to the Church would make for us. For me, that meant breaking down the wall of distance

between me and you, not holding this part of my life back from you. It meant trusting God to

subdue our anxiety.

So we decided to try it. In 2023, we started at around 2% with the intention to increase

our giving by a percentage point each year. In 2024 we increased to somewhere between 3% and

4%. For 2025, having developed the habit, we felt called to move to 10%. For us, that has meant

giving $700 each month this year. That amount feels like a sacrifice to us. But it also, as the

wisdom of the tradition and the teachings of Christ promised us, has led to some liberation.

I feel more deeply a part of the community – more deeply connected to you. I feel more

viscerally a part of our vision, our ministry priorities, our day-to-day needs.

At home, Sus and I feel less anxious. Paradoxically, by letting go of a portion of our

income, some air has been let into our financial conversations. There’s freedom to think about

our resources more communally. It’s not just mine and hers. It’s mine and hers and God’s. It’s

mine and hers and God’s and the people of God’s.

I’m not telling you this story to be prescriptive. And I’m not only confessing that, yes, I

your pastor have really struggled with something as foundational as giving.

More than that, I’m telling you this because I want you to know it’s okay to feel confused

or grumbly or outright resistance to giving, and that Jesus will meet you in your desire to

overcome that resistance. His prayers for daily bead, his victory over self-sufficiency in the

wilderness of hunger, will hold you and help you.

And I want you to know that blessing the community of God will bless you. I don’t know

how, but I know that it will. And I know because I’ve learned the hard way that none of us will

know how those blessings will transform our lives until we’ve tried the practice. Seek first the

kingdom, Jesus says. And everything else will follow. If you want to try pledging and tithing for

the first time, or if you want to see what it’s like to deepen those practices that you’ve already

established, I’m here to support you – not as an expert, but as a companion.

The Apostle Paul once wrote, “[W]ork out your own salvation with fear and trembling;

for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure”

(Phil 2:12-13 NRSV). God wants to set us free, and only God can set us truly free – which is

freedom for love, for an openness and mutuality and graciousness in every aspect of our lives.

Each step we take into this freedom is prepared and empowered by God. But we do need

to take each step. We are called into the awesome task of collaborating with God on our stories,

of working out the salvation, the salvos, the healing and wholeness that God intends for us.

Giving is one way that we do that. At least, it has been for me – though I’ve come to it

later than I like to admit. Perhaps it has been, or will be, for you, too.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.