𝘾𝙃𝙍𝙄𝙎𝙏'𝙎 𝙅𝙊𝙐𝙍𝙉𝘼𝙇 ━ 𝖈𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖎𝖆𝖓𝖎𝖙𝖞.

CHAPTER 5 - GENEROSITY

Imagine your friend invites you to a party. You arrive, there's lots of people, decorations, food, and drinks, there is enough for everyone. When you are hosted by someone that generous, you do not have to worry about your needs. You can just enjoy yourself and focus on the people around you. 

This is the picture of the world that we find in our Bible. Creation is an expression of God's generous love. He is the host and humans are His guests in a world full of opportunity and abundance. We are called to keep the party going, to spread His goodness. This is a beautiful picture, but it is not the way people experience the world. 

Rather, we found a world of scarcity and of struggle, not abundance, and Jesus grew up in that kind of world. Under military occupation, people loosing their lands or families to debt and poverty, and yet He would say these kinds of things: "Look at the Birds, they don't store up food for themselves, yet they have enough, or consider the wildflowers, they are beautiful and abundant, and they don't stress out about their existence, and you all should live that way too." 

But, surely Jesus knew that things do not always work out. Sometimes, there really is not enough, Jesus did experience poverty first-hand. But He viewed the world through the story of the Hebrew Scriptures, which claimed that our scarcity problem isn't caused by a lack of resources, rather the problem is our mindset that God cannot be trusted. 

Maybe God is holding out to me. Maybe there is not enough, and maybe I need to take matters into my own hands. Once we're deceived into that kind of mindset of scarcity, we can justify the impulse to take care of me and mine before anyone else. That leads to envy, violence, anger and a world where it seems like there is not enough. 

But God wants humans to experience His generosity. So, He chooses one people, the family of Abraham. He promises to give them the abundance that He wants for everybody else, God will provide what they need. All they have to do is to trust His generosity. Through them, the whole world will see how generous the host really is, but that's not what happens. Abraham's descendants, the Israelites enter a land of abundance, and they promptly forget the host who gave it to them. 

They act like it's all theirs, and like there's not enough, it leads to war and Israel's half-destruction. God doesn't give up. What He does is surprising. He gives another gift. This gift is different! What God gives is Himself. In Jesus, the host Himself comes to join on in the spoiled party. 

And notice, Jesus lives with the conviction that there is enough, and that our generous Host can be trusted. His mindset of abundance allowed Him to live sacrificially and generously even towards His enemies. Jesus called His followers to trust in God's abundance, like Him. That is why He said things like, "Sell your possessions and give to the poor," or, "Do not worry about your life." 

He is inviting us to live by a different story. One that is built on trust in God's goodness and love. But living generously does not mean life is going to go well. Look at Jesus, He was betrayed by His friends and suffered. This was no surprise to Jesus. He knew the people would take advantage of His generosity. In fact, it was His plan. Jesus know we are all hopelessly deceived by this lie that there is not enough. 

That lie needs to be defeated, and so that is what Jesus was doing when He gave us the gift of His life. Jesus's death was the ultimate expression of God's generous love. God's love can turn death into life, and scarcity back into abundance. Or, as the Apostle Paul put it, "You know the gift of our Lord Jesus, the Messiah, that even though He was rich, for your sake He became poor so that you, through His poverty, might become rich." 

And Jesus called His followers to live like the real party has begun. Yes, He calls this the Kingdom Of God. Our invitation is yet another gift, the personal presence of God's own spirit that can teach us how to trust the generosity of the host just like Jesus did. And when you believe there is enough, you start seeing opportunities for generosity everywhere. With our time, money, and our attention. 

One of the most important ways that we can experience the abundance of God's new creation is sharing with others because of our trust that God is the generous host. 

sources taken from: 
the bible project