If you want to lose your joy while giving, follow these seven way-too-easy steps:
1. Respond to every need as if it is your personal responsibility to meet it.
Here is a spiritual principle: The need is not the call. The call is the call. If you want to lose your joy while giving, then respond as if the need is the call. And of course, there are more needs than any one person can ever possibly fill so pretty quickly, you’ll be overwhelmed and you’ll get bitter. This is a great way to lose your joy.
2. Let yourself believe you’re the only one who cares.
I call this the Elijah Principle. Maybe you remember that story in 1 Kings of the time when Elijah ends up on top of a mountain talking to God and he gets a little whiny. He says, “Everyone else has abandoned you, God, and I’m the only one left.” We’ve all felt that way. When you’re the only one taking out the trash, or doing everyone else’s job, it can feel lonely. Discouragement can give you tunnel vision. But God told Elijah, “Son, there are 7,000 people down in the valley waiting for you. You’re not alone. You’re just not tuned in.”
The truth is, God chooses to work through us but it won’t all fall apart if we somehow can’t keep up. There are others working, too, and God’s plan will unfold. That’s a given. But if you want to lose your joy, get yourself some tunnel vision and decide no one else cares quite as much as you do. That’ll do it.
3. Make guilt your driving motivation for giving.
This is a great way to suck the joy out of the room! When you make guilt your driving motivation, the enemy gets a two-fer. He corrupts an act of worship while reinforcing an unhealthy thought pattern.
But here’s a fact: You cannot be in two places at the same time. That’s both a physical reality and a spiritual principle. The same frustration we have when we try to do squeeze too many things into our calendars is the frustration we feel when we are in one place internally and another place externally. John Townsend and Henry Cloud talk about this in their book, Boundaries. They talk about the internal yes and the external yes. It is the battle between our commitments and our feelings. When the internals don’t match the externals, the Holy Spirit has no room to move. If you’re spiritually frustrated in your giving, maybe this is a question for you: Do your internals match your externals? Because folks, you can not be in two places at the same time.
4. Close your heart toward every need except your own.
The other end of that spectrum, of course, is being so self-protective that we ignore every other need except our own. In that case, our giving becomes self-focused and while that seems like it would make us happy, it actually has the opposite effect. Being self-focused only draws more attention to our deficits. So then, we start trying to fix and control, and that leads to #5 …
5. Have an agenda behind your giving.
If you want to suck the joy out of giving, give with strings attached. Decide you’ll only give if it makes you feel good, or fills a personal need, or if your name can be on it, or if it gets used in a very specific way. That’s a surefire way to generate frustration and choke out joy.
6. Have no personal strategy or vision for giving.
When we give as a reaction instead of a reasoned and prayerful response, we find ourselves full of regret or even bitterness after the fact. Remember: Kingdom giving is always about “call,” and not just about “can.”
7. Don’t ever pray about it.
Wanna lose not just your joy but the whole point of giving as an act of worship? Then give for the emotional rush, or give because of an emotional appeal or because someone makes you feel guilty or because someone has manipulated you. But for goodness’ sake, don’t give because you’ve prayed about it and sought the counsel of the One Person in the universe you can confidently say is smarter than you.
That’s how to lose your joy while you’re giving. If, however, you’d like to cultivate joy rather than kill it when you give, then Paul has some good advice for us: Holy Spirit living leads to Holy Spirit spending. Let the Spirit invest in your life, then invest your life into the Kingdom. Find things that make you grateful (like your salvation, for instance) and give from that place.
If you want to experience joy, get yourself a good theology of giving. At the end of the day, it isn’t about funding ministry, paying the bills or getting credit. It isn’t even about helping you sleep at night. It is about following Jesus and according to the our scriptures, healthy, committed disciples will be compelled to give … joyfully.
