The Generosity of God

       God is not a miser. He is not a penny-pincher. He doesn’t love to withhold good things. He is not a hoarder.        

        He is a showerer. He loves to send rich blessings upon the world. He is a God of giving, whose fullness is so abundant that it overflows in generosity and bounty toward others. He is a God who delights to give. 

How often do we think of God as a God of taking? We think of him as a God of burdens and hardship, as a God who takes all that is good. He is the God of the first half of Job, who takes away camels, sheep, children and lands, and he never repays. He is the God of the cross, not of the resurrection. He brings Joseph into his dungeon but never exalts him. He is the God of the wilderness and never of Canaan. If the first thought or feeling that enters your heart when you think of God is one of back-breaking labor in order to squeak out some benefit from his Scroogelike hands, then you have yet to come to know (or to fully know) the God of grace revealed in Christ Jesus.

In fact, if you think of God as fundamentally withholding, you will never serve him as he calls you to. It is not those who feel legalistic obligation in order to earn some repayment who serve God best and most fully. Rather, it is those who see that everything they’ve ever received is a gift from God’s hands. It is those who see God as giver, as gracious, as bountiful and abundant and full. We will never outgive God, and only this realization will catapult us to enormous acts of giving. 

For several years, I read some sections of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke with trepidation. I felt like Jesus’ radical calls to generosity were a manifestation of God’s delight in taking. It felt like Christ loved to burden us with heavy burdens, hard to bear. He told the rich young ruler to sell all and come after him, and isn’t that just like him to be so demanding. After all, he loves to deprive us of good, I felt. 

But one night as I sat reading in Luke, this deep-seated uneasiness was radically overthrown. Listen to Luke 12:32-34:

    32 Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. 33 Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Look at verse 32. God gives his children the kingdom, and he doesn’t do it grudgingly. It is his good pleasure to do so! It makes him happy to give us the kingdom. He gives us such an immense, incomparable gift at the price of his own Son’s death, and he doesn’t do it reluctantly, but with happiness! We will never be able to outgive this God. He gives us the kingdom through the cross of his own Son, and it’s hard for us to give up the better slice of cake at the birthday party.

And it’s with this realization that we are enabled to do verse 33: sell our possessions and give to the needy. Our God delights in giving us the kingdom, which is impending, coming at any moment. Christ could rend the clouds this afternoon and give his children the kingdom forever at the blink of an eye. This is our coming inheritance. It’s where we’re headed. It’s what we will receive from the hand of our all-gracious God. It is certain and sure, bought by the blood of Jesus Christ. Therefore, it is a small thing for us to give away what we have for the sake of the needy.

Don’t you see? Our greatest acts of giving are only possible in the shadow of the cross and in the light of the coming kingdom! God has given up his Son at the cross, and he will give us eternal life with him forever. Our greatest generosity is never more than a glimmer, a spark from the blazing fire of God’s generosity toward us. His generosity toward us is what grounds and enables our generosity toward others. God does not delight in taking from his children. He “delights in the welfare of his servants” (Ps. 35:27). Until the gift of Christ and his cross, and the coming gift of the eternal, unassailable kingdom, sink down into our very bones; until we see God as the God of incomparable generosity; until we see that he delights to give, our giving will always be slow-hearted, self-pitying, proud and self-exalting. We will always hate it, and we will always be impressed by it. We will be as sparing as the god we see in our mind’s eye. We need our view of God to be aggrandized, to see him as the God of boundless giving, or we will always be miserly. Perhaps it’s fair to say that our true, heartfelt generosity will only ever be as big as the God we see.