24. Jesus on money teaches us that love and generosity flow from being amazed by grace

This is the 24^th post as I attempt to visit everything (pretty much!) Jesus said about money in the gospels over 2 weeks. In order to do this I will be putting up around two posts each day. This is coinciding with a 2-week preaching series that we are going through at Community Church Putney- Jesus On Money.

‘When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.

When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.”

…Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”’ (Extract from Luke 7:36-50)

This is an act of great generosity: generous in its display of deep love and thankfulness, in the courage that it took, and in the cost of the act - the perfume, not doubt, being of great value to her.

This act is recorded in order to provoke all of us in our hearts. Have we ‘fallen from our first love’? Are we amazed at Jesus and His forgiveness? Is our worship and generosity from a heart, like John Newton who wrote,

‘Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.’

To become and stay like this woman, to retain a heart that is amazed by grace, it’s imperative that we constantly remember God’s grace in Christ to save sinners like us; as C. J. Mahaney has written,

‘We constantly have a tendency to stop remembering the cross, and to start depending on legalism and self-effort. The danger is relentless.  So I urge you every day to “preach the gospel to yourself,” as Jerry Jerry Bridges calls it in his book The Discipline of Grace. Doing so, he say, means “you continually face up to your own sinfulness and then flee to Jesus through faith in His shed blood and righteous life…And the inevitable result of preaching the gospel to yourself will be a pronounced joy, an infectious joy, a constant joy. Like nothing else, the gospel creates joy; it’s both the source and object of our joy.’

 Let’s make it our ambition to keep an amazed, generous heart; let’s make it our goal to be like John Newton, on his death bed saying these words,

“My memory is nearly gone but I remember two things: That I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great Saviour!”

Take a moment to ask God to search you: How is your heart? Is your generosity toward God the overflow of thankfulness, do you remain amazed by grace?