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Devotional

What Giving Becomes

Paul says something here that every honest church leader has felt and very few have said this plainly.

He’s telling them that his interest in their generosity isn’t about what it does for him. It’s about what it does for them. Paul wants their account to grow, which is banking language, and he’s saying that giving deposits something into the giver.

That reverses the way most of us instinctively think about generosity. We tend to see giving as subtraction, as money leaving. Paul describes it as an increase, and it isn’t a promise of financial return, because Paul himself gave everything away and died poor. It’s a claim that something real accumulates when you release what you were holding.

Then verse 18 shifts the image entirely, and this is where the passage becomes beautiful. They are a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God.

Follow what happens there. The Philippians sent money to Paul, and Paul says God received worship. Their gift went through Epaphroditus to a prison cell in Rome, and somewhere along the way it became an offering on an altar. That isn’t a metaphor Paul is stretching. He genuinely means that their generosity ascended to God as an act of worship.

So there are two things happening in every gift, and neither one is visible. Something is credited to the giver, and something rises to God. The only part anyone can see is a number moving from one place to another.

That should change how it feels to give. Most of us give with a slight sense of loss even when we’re glad to do it, because the transaction looks like subtraction on a screen.

Paul is telling us that what looks like subtraction on earth is registering as worship in heaven, and that it’s being credited to you rather than merely spent. Nothing about the number on the screen tells you any of that. That’s why generosity has always required faith rather than arithmetic.