Rich Enough to Give: A Sermon on Stewardship and Mission

If you had asked the church in Corinth what this passage was about, most of them would have said: money. Paul was writing to encourage them to finish a collection — an offering for the suffering believers in Judea. A fundraising appeal, in other words.

But watch what Paul actually does with the appeal. He doesn't reach for a budget line or a guilt trip. He reaches for the gospel itself. He takes their eyes off their wallets and puts them on Calvary. Because before stewardship is ever about money, it's about the heart of God — and before mission is ever about activity, it's about the self-giving love of Jesus Christ.

That's what we're going to look at this morning: not a technique for giving, but the truth that makes giving possible at all.

Paul opens chapter 8 by pointing to an unlikely example: the churches of Macedonia. He doesn't describe wealthy believers giving out of their surplus. He describes people in “deep poverty” whose joy “overflowed in a wealth of generosity” (v. 1–2). They gave, Paul says, not because they had much, but because grace had touched them.

That should unsettle any of us who quietly believe generosity is something we'll get around to once we have more. The Macedonians prove that giving was never really about the size of the account. It was about the condition of the heart.

But Paul doesn't stop there. As beautiful as the Macedonians' example is, he says, it's only a reflection — a shadow cast by something far greater. So in verse 9, he turns from the example to the source.

“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9).

This single verse carries us from the glory of heaven to the sacrifice of a cross. He was rich. Before Bethlehem, before a manger, before a single human eye ever saw Him, Christ shared the glory of the Father. In John 17:5, Jesus prays, “Glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.” This is not a rags-to-riches story. It begins in unimaginable wealth — the wealth of eternal majesty, shared with the Father from before time began.

Yet He became poor. Paul says Christ did not stop being God when He came to us. He didn't trade His divinity for humanity. He laid aside the visible privileges of heaven's glory and entered His own creation as a servant. Philippians 2 says He was equal with God, and yet emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant. Luke 9:58 shows us what that emptying looked like in the flesh: “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.” The Creator of the universe, without a place to sleep.

And it was “for your sakes.” This is the phrase that changes everything. His poverty was never accidental, and it was never merely admirable — it was redemptive. He didn't become poor and hope something good might come of it. He became poor on purpose, so that we might receive life.

As Paul writes elsewhere, God “made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). This is the Great Exchange, and it sits at the center of everything we call the gospel:

He took our sin, that we might receive His righteousness. He entered our sorrow, that we might inherit His joy. He embraced our death, that we might share His eternal life.

He became poor, that we — bankrupt sinners with nothing to offer — might become rich. Not rich the way the world measures riches, but rich in grace, rich in forgiveness, rich in the promise of everlasting life. In Christ, the poorest sinner becomes an heir of heaven itself.

Here is Paul's real point, and it's not really about an offering for Judea at all: all Christian stewardship must be grounded in Christ's self-giving love, or it isn't really Christian stewardship.

Notice what Paul does not say. He doesn't say, “You should give because the need is great” — though it was. He doesn't say, “You should give because it's your duty” — though in a sense it was. He says, in effect: look at Jesus, and see what giving looks like when it comes from love.

That's why generosity produced by pressure or guilt will always run dry. But generosity that flows out of a heart that has actually seen Calvary becomes, in Paul's language, an act of grace responding to grace.

This is where stewardship and mission stop being two separate topics and become one. Biblical stewardship isn't just about managing what we have — it's the faithful use of everything God has entrusted to us: our time, our strength, our influence, our means. And mission is simply the direction all of that stewardship is meant to flow — toward the salvation of others and the glory of God. Paul calls believers, in 1 Corinthians 4:1, “stewards of the mysteries of God.” We are caretakers of something that was never ours to begin with. And a caretaker who has truly seen the Owner's love stops asking, “How little can I get away with giving?” and starts asking, “Lord, how can all that I am serve You?”