Generosity is a quality that is honored and respected by almost everyone regardless of personal ideology. Hearts are warmed by the person who gives up their seat for an elderly person. We smile at the one in the grocery line who offers to pick up the rest of the bill for someone. Generosity is a universal language of kindness.

Paul asked the Gentile churches he had founded to provide an offering for their struggling brothers and sisters in Jerusalem. Drought, famine, and persecution had caused extreme hardship to the Christian believers there. It’s important to remember that the greatest divide in the early church was between the Gentile and Jewish believers. Yet, Paul gathered a great deal of money from the Gentile believers to help the Jerusalem church. 

Paul told the Gentile believers, “You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God.” Paul knew that their generosity would honor God and indicate to the Jerusalem Christians that these Gentile believers were filled by the same Holy Spirit they knew. 

Paul taught them that their service was more than supplying help to meet the needs of the saints in Jerusalem; they would also produce thanksgiving to God. 

Generosity, done wisely, honors the giver and their God who leads and blesses their gift.

Paul was warned not to take the large offering from the largely Gentile churches of Asia

Minor to Jerusalem. He was an enemy of the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, and people

feared he would be harmed. Paul chose to go anyway, and his desire to be generous led to his arrest, conviction, and eventually a ship headed for Rome. 

Did his generosity produce thanksgiving? It was under house arrest in Rome that Paul wrote Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. Those letters have been read and studied by the Christian church since that time. Wisdom is offering our gratitude to God. Paul would say, “Wisdom is living a generous life that God will enrich in every way.”