On Money, Generosity, and Lordship
What does it really mean to let God be Lord of every area of our lives? Jesus understood the power money holds over human hearts. Of the roughly 38 parables he told, nearly half touched on finances in some way. That is not a coincidence. Jesus was not trying to fill a sermon series. He was diagnosing something real, something that runs deep in every human soul, and offering a way out.
The truth is, Jesus talked about money more than almost any other subject. Nearly half of his recorded parables touch on finances, wealth, or possessions. That is not a coincidence. Jesus understood something that we often resist acknowledging: money is not just an economic issue. It is a heart issue. It is a lordship issue. And until we allow our faith to speak into our finances, our discipleship will always have a ceiling.
The Two Masters Problem
In Matthew 6, Jesus makes a statement that is as confronting today as it was two thousand years ago. He describes how a person cannot serve both God and money simultaneously. One will always take precedence over the other. Whatever receives the most of your attention, your trust, your anxiety, and your decision-making energy is, functionally, your lord.
This is not about whether you have a lot of money or a little. Greed, as Jesus makes clear in Luke 12, is not measured by the size of your bank account but by how tightly you hold what you have. He tells the parable of a wealthy man who, after a bumper harvest, decides to tear down his barns and build bigger ones so he can store everything and take life easy. God calls him a fool, not because he was successful, but because he had made his wealth his security, his identity, and his future. He had become rich in possessions but poor toward God.
The question Jesus puts to each of us is simple and uncomfortable: where is your treasure? Because wherever your treasure is, that is where your heart will follow.
The Eye That Sees Clearly
Tucked inside that same passage in Matthew 6 is a curious reference to the eye being the lamp of the body. In ancient Jewish culture, a "good eye" was an idiom for generosity, while an "evil eye" described someone stingy and self-focused. Jesus is making the point that how we see and relate to money shapes our entire spiritual vision. A generous person lives with clarity and light. A person gripped by greed or anxiety about wealth lives in a kind of inner darkness, unable to see clearly what truly matters.
This is why financial generosity is not just a practical matter. It is a spiritual one. When we loosen our grip on money, something opens up inside us. Our vision clears. We begin to see people, needs, and opportunities that we were previously too inward-focused to notice.
The Radical Generosity of the Early Church
The earliest followers of Jesus did not treat generosity as optional or occasional. In Acts 2, 3, and 4, we see a community so marked by giving that people sold houses and land to ensure that no one among them was in need. The goal was breathtakingly simple: that everyone would have enough, that no one would be left lacking, and that the mission of the church would be fully resourced.
This was not coercion. It was transformation. When the Holy Spirit fills a community, one of the first and most visible signs is an open hand. A Spirit-filled church is not a stingy church. It is radically, joyfully, sometimes scandalously generous.
Paul captures this beautifully in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, where he points to a poor Macedonian church that prepared a generous offering out of their lack, not because they were required to, but because they had encountered grace and could not help but respond. Paul calls giving itself an act of grace. Not an obligation. Not a transaction. An act of grace.
The Zacchaeus Moment
There is a story in Luke 19 that quietly says everything. Zacchaeus was a tax collector, despised by his community for growing wealthy at their expense. Jesus, to the shock of everyone watching, goes to his house for a meal. We are not told what was said at that table. But something happened in the presence of Jesus that shattered Zacchaeus from the inside out.
He stands up and announces that he will give half of everything he owns to the poor, and repay anyone he has cheated four times over. Jesus responds by declaring that salvation has come to that house.
Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say that Zacchaeus earned salvation by giving his money away. But he does say that salvation arrived, and its arrival was inseparable from a radical reordering of possessions. Generosity does not earn salvation. But it does prove it. When grace truly lands on a life, the grip loosens. What was held tightly begins to be held openly.
Starting Where You Are
The concept of the tithe, giving the first ten percent of income, has been debated endlessly. But the deeper principle beneath it is older and more fundamental than any percentage. It is the principle of firstfruits: giving God your best and your first, not your leftover, not your surplus, not what remains after everything else has been accounted for. Do our bank accounts reflect the lordship to Christ in our lives and the value we place on the mission of His church?
The tithe is not a tax. It is a spiritual discipline designed to dethrone greed from the center of our lives. It is a regular, rhythmic declaration that God is first, that money is a tool and not a master, and that we are stewards of what we have been entrusted with rather than owners of what we have earned.
For those not yet giving regularly, the invitation is simply to start. Not perfectly, not at a specific percentage, but intentionally. Make generosity a rhythm rather than a reaction. The miracle, more often than not, is found in consistency over time.
More Than Money
Ultimately, this is not really about money at all. It is about freedom. It is about the quiet, daily choice to serve one master rather than two. It is about opening our hands and discovering that a life of generosity is not one of loss, but of extraordinary, unexpected abundance.
When generosity becomes our joy, something shifts. We find ourselves more willing to give our time, our energy, our attention, and our love. The loosening of the grip on money tends to loosen the grip on everything else. And in that open-handed posture, we find that we are finally free.
This article was taken from a message preached at C3 London by Ps Phil Hubbard.