2 Corinthians – Chapter Nine IV

by Ed Urzi

“Therefore I thought it necessary to exhort the brethren to go to you ahead of time, and prepare your generous gift beforehand, which you had previously promised, that it may be ready as a matter of generosity and not as a grudging obligation” (2 Corinthians 9:5).

Trust, but verify” is a proverb that former U.S. President Ronald Reagan often cited as he engaged in international negotiations. In just three words, that maxim expressed a fundamental sense of goodwill but also established the need to ensure that each side made good on its commitments.

In a similar manner, Paul the Apostle employed a “trust, but verify” approach with the members of the Corinthian church to help ensure they followed through on their promised financial support for the churches of Judea.

The “verify” portion of that approach involved sending a delegation to make the necessary arrangements for this offering in advance. But that decision also provided a secondary benefit as well, for it also served to discourage the members of the congregation from making future promises they could not (or didn’t intend) to keep. We can illustrate the wisdom of this approach by way of the following anecdote…

“When 67-year-old carpenter Russell Herman died in 1994, his will included a staggering set of bequests. Included in his plan for distribution was more than two billion dollars for the City of East St. Louis, another billion and a half for the State of Illinois, two and a half billion for the national forest system, and to top off the list, Herman left six trillion dollars to the government to help pay off the national debt.

That sounds amazingly generous, but there was a small problem—Herman’s only asset when he died was a 1983 Oldsmobile. He made grand pronouncements, but there was no real generosity involved. His promises were meaningless because there was nothing to back them up.” (1)

With this in mind, we can say that the Corinthians’ commitment to support the struggling churches of Judea was certainly admirable, But much like the carpenter who promised to bestow a multitude of assets that didn’t exist, their promise to help was essentially meaningless unless they were prepared to act upon it.

Nevertheless, Paul clearly wanted the Corinthians to do the right thing for the right reason and not because he coerced them into doing something they really didn’t want to do. That represented the difference between “a matter of generosityand a “grudging obligation.”

(1) Ministry127.com, Giving Away What Wasn’t His http://ministry127.com/resources/illustration/giving-away-what-wasn-t-his