Not Grudgingly, or of Necessity

There is a verse about giving that gets quoted constantly and almost always with the last clause only.

God loveth a cheerful giver.

And what that usually means, in the room where it is being said, is: do not be sour about this. Which is not what Paul is doing. He is not asking anybody to manage their facial expression while they hand something over.

Read the whole sentence.

Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver.

He rules out two things by name, and they are the two most common reasons anybody gives anything.

Grudgingly. That is giving with resentment, because it feels expected and refusing would be worse.

Of necessity. That is the word for pressure, compulsion, a thing done because it had to be.

And in front of both of those he puts the alternative: as he purposeth in his own heart. Which means a decision. Made by that person. In advance.

The alternative is a decision, not a feeling

Read the whole verse, because the first clause is the one that changes things.

Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver. (2 Corinthians 9:7, King James Version)

As he purposeth in his heart.

That is deliberate language. Purposed means settled beforehand, decided, resolved. It is the opposite of reacting in a moment, and it is the opposite of doing something because everybody in a room is watching.

And here is what that means practically, and it is more freeing than most people expect. The cure for grudging giving is not a better attitude. It is an actual decision.

A person cannot feel their way into cheerfulness about something they never chose. They can only get there by choosing it, and a lot of giving has never once been chosen. It just started, and then continued, and nobody ever revisited it.

You are able to decide this rather than endure it, and cheerfulness has never once been something a person could manufacture on the spot. That is not me relaxing a standard. 2 Corinthians 9:7 puts the purposing before the giving in the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that settling in a person's own heart rather than in a room.

Paul refused to use pressure and said so

I want to point at the context, because Paul is doing in the chapter exactly what he is telling them.

He is collecting for the poor believers in Jerusalem. This is a real fundraising effort and he is genuinely asking. And in the chapter before, he says this: I speak not by commandment.

And then in this chapter he says he is sending men ahead so that the gift would be ready as a matter of bounty and not as of covetousness, which means he did not want to show up and put anybody on the spot.

He deliberately removed the moment of pressure. He sent people early so the decision would be made in private, before anybody was standing in front of a crowd.

That is an apostle who could have commanded, saying out loud that he would not.

You are not under commandment here, and God has never once wanted an amount extracted out of anybody. 2 Corinthians 8:8 says I speak not by commandment, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a person freely, which is the only kind of moving He has ever wanted.

The verse before it is the one everybody worries about

I have to handle the sowing verse, because it sits right above this one and it is the reason many people flinch at this chapter.

He that soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly, and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully.

That verse has been used to extract money from people who did not have it, by making an amount into a lever, and if that has been done to you I am sorry and it was wrong.

Here is what I will say about it honestly. Paul is writing to people about a collection for famine relief and he is using an agricultural picture that his readers understood, and he immediately follows it with the sentence that governs the whole thing: as he purposeth in his own heart, not of necessity.

He puts the freedom clause directly after the sowing clause. Whatever the first one means, it cannot mean anything that overrides the second one, because the same man wrote both in the same paragraph.

I am not going to build a promise of return on it and I am not going to preach it as a lever. Nothing on this site ever will.

You are not being leveraged, and no verse has ever once been meant as a mechanism for getting money out of you. 2 Corinthians 9:7 sits directly under the sowing verse and governs it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who protects a person from a passage being used against them.

Cheerful is the fruit, not the entry requirement

One last thing about the order of that sentence, because it matters for the person who is tired.

He does not say be cheerful and then give. He says purpose in your heart, give that, and cheerfulness is what God loves in it.

The cheerfulness comes out of the deciding. A person who has actually chosen something, at an amount they settled themselves, in advance, tends to feel very differently about it than a person who is meeting an expectation somebody else set.

So if the giving has gone sour, the problem is usually upstream. Somewhere back there, something was never decided, and it has been running on obligation since.

You are able to go back and decide it properly, and a thing that was never chosen has never once been able to feel like a gift. 2 Corinthians 9:7 puts purposing first and cheerfulness last, and the Spirit of God is the one who resets something a person has been carrying by default.