on the walk

I got to preach this week. As always it was a great honor and I was glad to be able to preach through one of my favorite texts: 2 Corinthians 8 and 9.

In my final edit to get my sermon down to the right length, I had to remove an illustration that was important to me personally, so I thought I might share it in this forum. (As an aside, that final task of removing good material to focus a sermon and bring it to an appropriate length is my least favorite part of sermon writing.) It was valuable to me but ultimately it was not essential to the sermon.

Before I do that however, I want to draw your attention to a post that recently went up. Due to technical difficulties, gripping talk - four did not make it up at the right time. It is up now if you want to go back and check it out.

Now on to my illustration.

In the second point of the message, I concluded that the generous life is deliriously joyful. I said that I hoped that everyone had seen this truth lived out in someone and had experienced it more themselves. I gave an example of experiencing this truth for myself (it was rhetorically necessary because it established the context of the delirious joy: not my money, used for the maximum good, for people I love). I did not have time to talk about a person in my life who embodied this reality for me.

Had the time been available, I would have talked about my grandfather Jim Magness, or as I knew him, Pop. Pop died when I was ten and he lived his whole life in Harford County Maryland, while I had lived in Idaho and Georgia. Consequently I did not know him very well, but amid all the scattered memories, I came away with one distinct impression. He knew the joy of giving and he wanted to experience it whenever possible. He was blessed by God and he knew and he used those blessings as an opportunity to be generous on every occasion.

Certainly as his grandson I experienced his generosity whenever we were together. Whether at Christmas or down at the ocean, he always struck me as an endless source of giving. And I felt that for him to give in that way was a great joy. He was one of those people who would sneak away from the table to pay for a meal. He simply delighted in sharing with others.

I have one of his Bibles now. It is filled with notes. In fact I think that his hand-written marginal notes are collectively one of the best study Bibles I have ever owned. It has become the Bible that I carry and use for both devotional reading and personal study. I love having access not only to a beautiful and fine Bible but also his thoughts and notes and reflections. Some sections are circled with a note beside that reads, “Research this.” That is a a good word to have in your Bible. More often he has notes that can be paraphrased, “Do this.” That is an even better word. I feel like I am still the recipient of his generosity.
The Bible was given to him by my grandmother (who still worships at Mountain, where I am on staff and where my grandfather was an elder for many years) just a few months before I was born. Most pages, including the inside covers, are filled with notes and references, but on the presentation page there is only one verse. Above their names and the date of presentation is written 2 Cor 9:8.

And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that you may always have enough of everything and may abound in every good work.

Now perhaps I know why he was who he was. He was a man who researched the word, and did the word, and in the front of his Bible he highlighted the reality that he was greatly blessed for the purpose of blessing others.

on the walk

-Ethan

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